A Life with the Printed Word
Chamberlain, John
BOOK REVIEWS A LIFE WITH THE PRINTED WORD John Chamberlain/Regnery Gateway/$ 12.95 George H. Nash One day in late 1955, an unassuming, middle-aged man appeared at the office of the fledgling...
...Such a life is ample subject indeed for an autobiography, and one can only be pleased that Chamberlain has written his...
...It was Stalin's method of liquidating the kulaks...
...And why had he never even reported this story in his dispatches...
...It is the memoir of a gentleman...
...This "typewriter repairman," it turned out, was National Review's lead book reviewer, John Chamberlain...
...the memoir of a gentleman...
...From the mid-1940s on, he has been a stalwart defender of entrepreneurial capitalism and an effective spokesman for the conservative movement...
...A New England Yankee who came of age in the 1920s, he shared his generation's artistic and civil liber-tarianism and its apolitical distrust of crusading fanaticism...
...It is a book filled with acute observations of people—of Henry Luce and Charles Lindbergh, Whittaker Chambers and Willi Schlamm, of journalists of the Center, Left, and Right...
...Later on he encountered Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson, whose God of the Machine "hit me like a ton of bricks" in 1943...
...How was it that this supporter of Norman Thomas in 1932 became a Reaganite a generation later...
...Chamberlain replied by citing Duranty as his source...
...In 1933, at the astonishingly young age of thirty, he rose to the eminence of daily book reviewer for the Times...
...Eventually Chamberlain came to believe that the truly significant economic story of the thirties was not that of New Deal intervention in the economy (which failed in any case to end the Depression...
...Freed from the environs of Greenwich Village, he began to explore a world that his literary and leftist friends never saw: the functioning world of capitalism, of free-market creativity...
...The most harrowing episode occurred when Walter Duranty, the Times's famed Moscow correspondent, "almost casually" remarked to Chamberlain one day that three million Russians had died in a deliberate, artificial famine...
...within three years, he was assistant editor of the Times's Sunday book review...
...He never lost these early attitudes...
...a country can only be happy and prosperous by keeping its politicians on a taut leash...
...In this age of self-advertisement, it is a pleasure to read a book by a distinguished journalist so unassuming that he could be mistaken for a typewriter repairman...
...Traveling around the country on assignments for Fortune, he encountered entrepreneurs who were every bit as capable and interesting as the literati he had left behind...
...And what an abundant life it has been...
...In 1926, fresh out of Yale, he became a cub reporter for the New York Times...
...Increasingly, Chamberlain's anticapitalist preconceptions dissolved...
...These qualities of calmness, solicitude, and self-effacement are abundantly reflected in John Chamberlain's newly published autobiography...
...Along the way, he raised three children and wrote several books (including two libertarian classics, The Enterprising Americans and The Roots of Capitalism...
...Chamberlain was aghast...
...After peering at a typewriter for a few moments, he proceeded to punch the keys...
...But the importance of A Life with the Printed Word transcends the particularities of a richly successful career...
...Chamberlain must surely be one of the best-read journalists of all time...
...It was they, not the politicians and regulators, who "saved the day for us in war and established the basis~for the huge post-war expansion...
...Still another factor nudging him from the Left was his experience with the Communists and their sympathizers...
...Indifferent to the early New Deal, he was drawn instead to the Brandeisian trust-busting philosophy of his friend Leon Henderson and to nonconformists of the Left like John Dos Passos (whose own intellectual odyssey rather strikingly resembles Chamberlain's...
...The more he examined the dynamic intricacies of the private sector, the stronger grew his commitment to voluntarism...
...One source of Chamberlain's evolution lay in his temperament...
...For the next decade, as a senior journalist for the Luce publications, Chamberlain had an extraordinary opportunity to study and write about the workings of American business...
...Chamberlain the literary critic, one senses, could never surrender his independence to anyone's party line...
...For more than half a century now, Chamberlain has been leading, as he puts it, "a life with the printed word...
...For the next four years, he turned out five book reviews a week (plus sundry other essays) and solidified his reputation (in one authority's words) as the "finest critic of his generation...
...In danger of losing his visa from the Soviet government, Duranty denied that he had ever said anything...
...In 1936, through his friend Archibald MacLeish, Chamberlain joined the staff of Fortune...
...All this and more Chamberlain recounts in these never-strident memoirs—a veritable travelogue through the ideological battlegrounds of half a century...
...the very act of confronting an endless variety of books for review shielded him from the certitudes of the cultural commissars...
...And so an independent man of the Left he might have remained, had it not been for one event that decisively set him on the road to the Right...
...In the fifties, he was a founding editor of the Freeman, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, and a valued contributor to National Review...
...How did a quasi-socialist of the thirties come to write the foreword to Hayek's Road to Serfdom in 1944...
...Coming to the office for his weekly assignment, he would quietly compose his review at the typewriter with seemingly effortless grace...
...Then, his work completed, he would silently slip out of the office—careful not to disturb his colleagues laboring at their own projects...
...How could Duranty be so callous about this gigantic horror...
...Business leaders, he discovered, were not necessarily Babbitts after all...
...After this ritual had repeated itself, once a week, for several months, a young National Review staffer grew indignant...
...Chamberlain retained some of his youthful skepticism of concentrated power...
...In the sixties, he became one of the most respected of conservative columnists...
...It is a book, too, that is singularly free from rancor...
...And, Chamberlain adds, "If I hadn't broken out of the tight little world of literary New York and gone to work for Harry Luce, I would never have seen what still eludes our Arthur Schlesingers and the others who write what passes for our 'history.' " The opportunity to observe American business, then, liberated Chamberlain from the Left...
...It was a revelation...
...Today, in his eightieth year, John Chamberlain continues indefatigably to expound the philosophy of "voluntarism" and free-market capitalism with the same robust reasonableness that has won him journalistic admirers for five decades...
...Duranty had also told Strunsky about the famine...
...But such expansiveness, one suspects, would be out of character for this soft-spoken New Englander...
...His antipolitical impulses likewise deepened...
...To those who have made his acquaintance, this remark will cause no surprise...
...The Communists, meanwhile, denounced Chamberlain with fury...
...Of all the autobiographies of ideological explorations," writes William F. Buckley in his introduction, "John Chamberlain's is surely the most soft-throated in the literature...
...Washington "does not originate much," he writes in these memoirs...
...What, in short, prevented Chamberlain from becoming (in his words) "just another New York liberal" in middle age...
...George H. Nash is author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945...
...Soon afterward, Chamberlain himself mentioned the murderous famine in one of his book reviews...
...The American economy was not "mature" and permanently stagnant...
...In the late thirties and forties, he occupied positions of influence at Fortune, Life, and Time under Henry Luce, with a professorship at Columbia's School of Journalism on the side...
...The sheer act of reading, one suspects, also helped to rescue Chamberlain from stultifying leftist conformity...
...Immediately the Communist journal New Masses demanded proof...
...Even in the politics-drenched thirties...
...At times one wishes that this compact autobiography were twice as long, that Chamberlain had favored us with even more impressions of his stellar array of acquaintances, and with more about himself...
...Back in the sixties, a Harvard professor mordantly observed that Academe is a place where men of principle outnumber men of honor...
...Forty-five minutes later, he departed...
...Now the fat was really in the fire...
...Without this in-house cor-roboration, Chamberlain would likely have been fired by the Times and his journalistic career perhaps destroyed...
...Reviewing a book a day for the Times, he discovered authors like Albert Jay Nock, the grandfather of libertarianism, and Max Eastman, who had been to Moscow and seen not the future but the truth...
...BOOK REVIEWS A LIFE WITH THE PRINTED WORD John Chamberlain/Regnery Gateway/$ 12.95 George H. Nash One day in late 1955, an unassuming, middle-aged man appeared at the office of the fledgling National Review, found an unoccupied chair, and sat down...
...to those who know him personally, he is a man of rare decency as well...
...After completing this volume one yearns for him to tell us more...
...On all his visits, she protested, the typewriter repairman had never examined her machine...
...A Life with the Printed Word is more than an illuminating trek through our times...
...The market system worked...
...Indeed, despite a career of journalistic advocacy, and an unfashionable journey from Left to Right, Chamberlain seems never to have made an enemy or lost a friend...
...It was the pioneering efforts of risk-taking entrepreneurs and technological innovators...
...For like so many other American conservative luminaries since 1945, Chamberlain in his youth was a man of the radical Left...
...The story of his intellectual journey from Left to Right is the principal subject of this absorbing memoir...
...Suddenly Chamberlain's reputation for veracity—and his job at the Times—were in peril...
...Instead, he became known in Party circles as a "dissident radical," suspect and unreliable because of his friendship with ex-Communist intellectuals...
...Fortunately, a fellow Times journalist, Simeon Strunsky, came forward in Chamberlain's defense...
...John Chamberlain is a man of principle...
...In fifty-seven years of journalism, he has known so many of the great...
...Although Chamberlain remained a man of the Left for most of the thirties, he was never a Communist...
...Reading, writing, observing, he had studied his way out of collectivism...
Vol. 16 • March 1983 • No. 3
