Nine years is a large part of an adult man’s life to invest in any experience. It was time enough in which to accumulate a body of work faithfully and carefully done, and to develop habits of working and thinking, a way of life and of the mind, very difficult to dismiss when it was abruptly broken off. It was time enough, too, to form close working relationships, some of which developed into strong personal attachments for my colleagues, all the stronger because they were made at a time of life when men make friends slowly, judiciously and even reluctantly. These friends on all levels of the corporation never wavered in their loyalty to me—they knew me better than any other group of people in the world. If anything, they are closer to me today than in the past. I can write about them and about Time freely, without any imputation of self-serving, for I do not expect ever to work for Time again.
My debt and my gratitude to Time cannot be measured. At a critical moment, Time gave me back my life. It gave me my voice. It gave me sanctuary, professional respect, peace and time in which to mature my changed view of the world and man’s destiny, and mine, in it. I went to Time a fugitive; I left it a citizen. In my years with it, I became a Quaker and took my wife and children with me into the spiritual peace of the meeting. I returned to the land and undertook that second life, which was not only an experience in creative labor, but first and foremost a way of bringing up my children in close touch with the soil and hard work, and apart from what I consider the false standards and vitiating influence of the cities.
Time gave me more than time and peace in which to measure the meaning of my total defeat as a Communist. It made it possible for me to redress the journey of my whole life—and such a life and such a journey. It would be hard to tell how hard it was.
2
THE STORY OF A MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY
My brother lies in the cold earth,
A cold rain is overhead.
My brother lies in the cold earth,
A sheet of ice is over his head.
The cold earth holds him round;
A sheet of ice is over his face.
My brother has no more
The cold rain to face.
(Written in the Sand Hill graveyard,
the first winter of my brother’s death.)
I
I was born in Philadelphia, on April 1, 1901. When my father, Jay Chambers, who was then a young staff artist on the New York World, received the startling news, he crumpled the telegram and threw it into a waste basket. He did not believe it and he did not think that April Fool jokes were in good taste.
I was born in the house of my grandfather, James S. Chambers. I began to come into the world very early in the morning. Snow was falling and soon turned into a blizzard. From her high bed, my mother could look into the whitening world outside the window and see the cemetery across the street. She wondered if, in a day or two, she would be lying under the snow.
The doctor had not been told that I was arriving. He lived several miles away and my grandmother Chambers was waiting for my grandfather to return from his office so that he could go for the doctor. My grandfather, one of the crack political reporters of his day, was then with the Philadelphia Bulletin or the Record. He reached home, tired from a day’s editorial work, some time after one o’clock in the morning. He took one look at my mother, jumped on his bicycle and returned through the snow with the doctor. His prompt action probably saved my mother’s life.
Mine was a dry birth and I weighed twelve pounds and measured fourteen inches across the shoulders. I had to be taken with instruments. After this frightful delivery, Dr. Dunning sat for several hours beside my mother, holding together the edges of a torn artery. At one point, he thought that she was certainly dying and asked: “Are you afraid?” My mother said: “Doctor, the Power that brought me here will take me away again.” She said “Power” because she belonged to a generation of intellectuals for whom the word God was already a little embarrassing. But the calm with which she accepted the possibility of death was a quality that she transmitted to me; it is part of my heritage from my mother.
Other women seem to forget the sharpest agonies of childbirth. My mother overcame her memory sufficiently to bear a second son, my brother, Richard Godfrey. But my terrible birth was fixed indelibly in her mind. Throughout my boyhood and my youth, she repeated to me the circumstances of that ordeal until they were vivid to me. They made me acutely unhappy, and her repetition of them made me even unhappier (for it seemed to imply a reproach). But I never told her so.
My mother’s maiden name had been Whittaker and her parents called her Laha, explaining that it was a Malay word for “princess.”
However exalted it may have sounded in Sumatra, the unusual name caused my mother acute discomfort all her life. But she promptly contrived an even more distressing name for me. She named me Jay (for my father), Vivian (for the surname of the English branch of the family of one of her childhood schoolmates and lifelong friends). It would have been hard to go farther afield for a more unsuitable name As soon as I knew anything I knew that I loathed that name. I determined that as soon as I was able, I would take any other name in preference to it.
II
The world I first became aware of was not Philadelphia, but the south shore of Long Island. When I was two or three, my parents bought a big frame house (my mother still lives in it) in Lynbrook, about eighteen miles from New York City and seven miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Lynbrook was then a village of some two hundred souls. They were chiefly workingmen, shopkeepers, farmers and “baymen”—men who owned or worked oyster beds in the tidal creeks and salt marshes between the ocean and the firm land. The villagers regarded newcomers with great curiosity (and probably with aversion). Since my father was dark and an artist, and my mother had been an actress who was possessed of a soulful beauty uncommon anywhere, the village promptly summed them up by dubbing them “the French family.”
My first view of the world was largely vertical—the chair and table legs in our kitchen. I spent several years of my life on its floor, for, like most country people, then and now, we lived chiefly in the kitchen. In summer, we moved partly out of doors. But the kitchen remained the beachhead. Each of the other rooms in the house had its own stove. In winter, by an economy of fuel and labor, these stoves were kept banked when they were used at all. Since there was no central heat and no running water (a force pump raised the water), there were no pipes to freeze.
The kitchen was the only really warm room in the house. It was heated by a big, black, nickel-trimmed coal range in which the steady warmth could be seen as well as felt through the cracks of the draught doors and the glow beneath the grate. I have never overcome the feeling that central heat is a poor substitute for the parlor stove and the kitchen range.
The twilights of my early childhood, which gathered among the chair and table legs before they darkened the room at window level, were lifted by a daily ritual when the oil lamps were lit and shed that soft glow which is still my preferred light. My parents did not put in gas light until the First World War and electricity after it, though other houses had them.
Yet our old kitchen in Lynbrook was only the anteroom of my world. It was from its two back windows that I received the most intense of my earliest impressions—the enfolding beauty of the external world. Imagine a view, unimpeded by house or tree for as many miles as a child’s eye could gaze, in which there was almost nothing but a sea of goldenrod and a foam of the small, white, starlike asters called Michaelmas daisies. I would stand at the window for half an hour, staring out in a kind of breathless stupor. Sometimes, my brother Richard also stood at the window beside me. But he was not looking at the asters. He was looking out because I was looking out. He tagged after me everywhere to my great annoyance.
There was another view, almost as good, through the pickets of our front gate, which I was forbidden to open, for my parents feared that I might be run over by a horse and buggy (automobiles were still unknown in that village). The street in front of our ho
use was overarched by old silver maples, and farther up by elms. Like most of the other streets, it was of unpaved sand, and the wagons, by passing to the right or the left, had left here and there, in the middle of the street, tapering islands of turf, which in spring were starred with dandelions. Just beyond our house ran the Merrick Road, then Long Island’s great southern highway. It was paved with pegs and for a long time existed for me only as the slow clop clop of horses’ hooves, the creak of axles under heavy loads and the grind of wagon wheels on the hard surface. Near us, the Merrick Road was flanked by a double line of forty-year-old cherry trees which in spring became domes of whiteness whose fragrance reached our windows. People who drive down the Merrick Road today, through the incredible ugliness of its neon age, will wonder if I am not merely nostalgic. I am not.
In the first decade of this century, the south shore of Long Island was a landscape of unself-conscious, miniature beauty. Everything was small—little farms, little orchards, little unplanned villages, little white houses master-built in exquisite, functional proportions, little birch and swamp-maple woods following the course of little streams that slid silently over glinting sand. It was all saved from paltriness by the tremendous presence at its edge of the ocean, with its separating miles of salt marsh and sweeps of sky across which fleets of cloud rode continually to and from the sea.
Inland, too, the sea was always around us. Sometimes it came as fog, rolling in suddenly, heavy with the smell of tidal water, softly blotting out the houses and the streets. Sometimes it came as sound —the terrible sound of the surf pouring without pause on the beaches seven miles away. As a boy, I used to hear it while I tried to fall asleep. I would sit up in my bed to listen to it, on winter nights when the cold air brought it in clearly. I was frightened, for it seemed about to pound away the land. It was the sound of inhuman force—the first I knew.
The tides, too, moved through my earliest childhood conscious. ness. On Sundays, my father always went to sketch or paint in the open. When I was too small to walk, he used to take me with him in my carriage, packing his paint box at my feet. It was he who first introduced me to the tides which fascinated him. The immense silent flooding of the sea into the land filled me with wonder and anxiety. I remember distinctly the moment when I first realized that this secret power of the sea moved no farther away than the foot of our street, in the little tidal Mill River that flowed sluggishly through acres of cattails. It brought the sea home to me directly in its gentlest but most resistless form. It did more. It first carried my child’s mind beyond the horizon of the world. I can remember my father explaining to me more than once, when I was very small, that this regular rise and fall of the tides was in response to a pull from beyond our world in unimaginable space. My father did a good deal of quiet questing in unimaginable space. Years later, when I came to read Walt Whitman, through whose verse the same tides flood and the same surf pounds the same beaches, it was not like reading any other verse. It was as if, by plugging my ears, I were listening to my own blood pound. No land ever again has such power over him as that in which a man was once a child.
Next to the sea and skies, I loved the cedar trees. This, too, I caught from my father, for he spent endless sunny days sketching them. At that time, Long Island was dotted with cedars. The young trees were light green columns to the ground. The old, pyramidal trees were almost black. The young trees grew in groves. The old ones often stood alone, dominating a single field. They had the dignity that merely being very old confers. I did not think this as a child, but I sensed something of it. I listened carefully when my father once told me that the Indians had looked at the same cedar we were looking at. After that, I liked to stand under an old cedar and listen to the wind pour through it while I thought that those other shadowy people, about whom I began to wonder a good deal, had also stood there and listened to the same sound.
My father had many curious preoccupations which, at rare intervals, and by a kind of wrench, he would shyly disclose to me. Indians was one of them. It was from him that I caught that sense of living on Indian land that goes back into my earliest childhood. The past haunted my mind in the Indian. I sought eagerly for some print of those former feet.
One day, near a brook, when I was somewhat older, I came upon a stone knife. It was roughly chipped from one reddish brown stone. A bit of quartz embedded in the top had been rudely shaped into a little knob. When I first noticed it, I could not stoop to pick it up. I stood staring at it as if I had suddenly seen a snake —in fact, the long serpent of the past. I felt wildly excited. Some coppery hand had chipped the knife and dropped it and my finding of it carried my boy’s mind backward to a point where it was lost. I think that then, without at all realizing it, I first became conscious of history.
I never told anybody about the knife. I kept it to handle and to wonder at. In my mind it was connected with the cedars. Now, like the man who made it, I have lost it.
Two impressions sum up my earliest childhood world. I am lying in bed. I have been told sternly to go to sleep. I do not want to. Then I become conscious of an extreme silence which the fog always folds over the land. On the branches of the trees the mist has turned to moisture, and, as I listen to its irregular drip drip pause drip pause, I pass into the mist of sleep.
The other memory is of my brother. He is standing on our front porch, dressed in one of those shapeless wraps children used to be disfigured with. It is raining softly. I am in the house. He wants me to come out to him. I do not want to go. In a voice whose only reproach is a plaintiveness so gentle that it has sounded in the cells of my mind through all the years, he calls: “Bro (for brother), it’s mainin (raining), Bro.” He calls it over and over without ever raising his voice. He needs me because he knows what no child should know: that the soft rain is sad. I will not understand this knowledge in him until too late, when it has ended his life. And so I do not go out onto the porch.
III
Shortly before my parents moved to Long Island, my father fell victim to what people would later call “technological unemployment.” The news camera and the newsphoto began to replace the staff artist on the newspapers. Soon there were few such jobs as staff artist, and my father was no longer with the New York World. I used to hear conversations about the way a machine could take away a man’s job. They cut a tiny but definite groove in my mind. So did a certain clammy anxiety called “your father is looking for work.” With that uneasiness went something much more frightening that people were always mentioning in taut voices: “a panic.” Panics, I gradually learned, were what happened when the banks failed and nobody could get any money. This was brought home to me when the Knickerbocker Trust failed and grandmother Whittaker, who lived entirely on her income, found herself without it for a while.
I early learned that the root cause of panics was Democrats. I knew about “Democrats and hard times” long before I knew what a Democrat was. For my parents were Republicans the way an Englishman is for the king; it was not a matter that required any thought. Even my father, who never had the slightest interest in politics and never mentioned the subject, always went off dutifully to the polls when the party buggy called for him on election day, and voted the straight Republican ticket. In the 1912 election, though all the family were intense admirers of Theodore Roosevelt, and my grandfather Chambers considered himself his friend, both my father and grandfather voted for William Howard Taft against Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
I think my father viewed the news camera as a liberator. He disliked newspapers as much as his father loved them (in part, perhaps, for that reason). Without much jolting, he slipped into a field that suited him much better—book and magazine illustrating. Talk about unemployment faded and my father continued to make a very good salary almost without interruption for the rest of his life.
During most of those early years, he worked with a group of illustrators known as the D.D. (Decorative Designers). They were headed by Emma Lee Thayer who, long after the D.D. was forgott
en, made a reputation as a detective story writer. This group somehow impinged on the circle of Stanford White. When Harry Thaw shot him, our home was deliciously abuzz with the scandal for weeks.
My father was a short, mild man whom good eating presently made rather soft-looking. He had a taste for high sauces and cheeses, lobsters, oysters and hot curries, which my mother, who was a really remarkable cook, spent hours preparing for him. Actually, my father was a powerful man, even late in life, as I discovered in my one desperate fight with him. But he was almost wholly sedentary. Not once in our whole lives did he ever play with me. He was uncommunicative to the point of seeming mute. Occasionally, he took me to New York to his studio or the art museum. On the train we rode side by side in complete silence. In the studio, he would seat me in a comer and go silently to work. Hours later, we might go out for a silent supper. When he was sketching in the open, he would sit silently, almost motionless, for hours, rising only to squint one eye and hold up a finger to gauge perspective (a gesture that I came to detest). Once in a long while, he would utter one word: “Don’t”—when my brother and I were doing something that he did not like. This habit of silence, which was less like silence than an atrophy of ordinary feelings, made his rare disclosures, his thoughts about tides, trees and Indians, impressive and almost shocking.
My mother wanted me to call him Papa. But he insisted that my brother and I call him Jay—his given name. For years, that single, colorless syllable was like an insulation between us, as, no doubt, it was intended to be. For me, my father early invented a nickname —“Beadle”—which I found even more distressing than my given name. He never called me anything else, and he would utter the ugly word with four or five different intonations each of which was charged with quiet derision, aimed not at me, but at my mother. For this nickname, I presently came to see, was his revenge for her having named me Vivian. Thus, I was caught between them, as my brother and I were to be caught all our lives.
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