James Chapin
Wilentz, Sean
THE NAME James Chapin may not be familiar to many Dissent readers. He didn't write a great deal for the magazine. Until the last year or so of his life—when he turned out superb political analysis...
...James's grandfather, the great literary critic Kenneth Burke, had moved there in the 1920s...
...I felt as if I'd started to make it...
...Which is what James really devoted his life to doing: opening the eyes of anyone lucky enough to come his way...
...James, the eldest boy, was always James, and he was different...
...They were all lanky...
...I remember reading his marginalia in those volumes of Toynbee and H.G...
...Judging by the scrawl, he must have been a teenager when he wrote it...
...He held a tutorial with the world, which filtered out through this magazine and others, and through his friends and listeners, into political talk and action all around the country...
...And he was the family reader, scholar, and historian...
...But through the din, James, though ten years older than I, became my best friend, my mentor, and my idol...
...No matter...
...Huey Long, I guessed, and he smiled, gleamed a little, and sweetly snapped, "That's right...
...and my siblings and I would spend at least a couple of weeks each summer at their place in northern New Jersey...
...Amid an extraordinary clan of writers and musicians, it was as if one person had been blessed with a clan's worth of brains in thinking about politics, government, and history...
...But it wasn't all books or history talk that connected James to others...
...I still don't know as much as he did then...
...It was also games of "Risk" and "Diplomacy" that stretched on for days, and horsing around at the family's weed-bottomed lake, and talking politics, endlessly...
...For one thing, he was deaf in one ear, something that he would joke about: the son of a great American musical family who couldn't quite hear right...
...I will never forget one lunchtime when, apropos of nothing, he asked me across the table: "So, who WAS the closest thing to a successful fascist in American history...
...What impressed me most was his refusal to be doctrinaire, his openness to sharp ideas no matter where on the political spectrum they came from...
...For the many who knew him at Dissent—and at every level of political life in Washington and New York—James was one of the most brilliant and provocative thinkers we have ever met...
...Wells and others—"Nonsense," "Not so," "Get your dates right," and "Interesting"—and thinking, I want to know that much about all this some clay...
...Jim Chapin is his father, a well-known drummer, who from time to time concertizes with James's brothers, Tom and Steve, performing songs written by the best known Chapin of all, the late Harry Chapin...
...and there would assemble an even larger pandemonium of kin and friends: anthropologists, labor organizers, filmmakers, sculptors, mathematicians, and geniuses with many portfolios...
...I grew up across a stone wall from his family in Brooklyn Heights...
...Since I was lucky to have known him all my life, he was and will forever be "James...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 107...
...and each of K.B.'s three daughters and their families had a house...
...He died (from a heart attack) much too young, and for those of us who knew and loved him, it is devastating...
...When he was around, he gave the greatest running tutorial imaginable...
...he was stout...
...Until the last year or so of his life—when he turned out superb political analysis for an unlikely outlet, United Press International— he didn't publish much anywhere...
...When he wasn't around, I would hole up with his old history books...
...And he was also one of the kindest and most decent of men...
...Most people knew him as "Jim...
...An unabashed left-liberal, he could find political intelligence in the likes of Barry Goldwater, which may have said more about him than about Goldwater, but was eye-opening all the same...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
