(Sometimes it was Blake.) Bellow protested that Wordsworth had nothing to do with writing journalism for Time, but Chambers adamantly pursued his English-lit line of questioning. Bellow familiar with Wordsworth? he asked. “Passing through hell, the suffering servant of God, he brooded from his high window in Rockefeller Center over downtown New York, stuffed with thoughts about the future of Christianity, the fate of the West, the spiritual struggle with satanic totalitarianism.” Chambers had done more damage as an editor, Bellow joked, than as a spy.Īt their interview–as Bellow often told the story, frequently altering the details–Chambers faced away from him, enthroned on a wing chair. “In his own person he had experienced history,” Bellow wrote of Chambers in one of his many unpublished manuscripts about these years, describing him as “a GPU agent turned Quaker” and a chain-smoking paranoid with rotten teeth. The house highbrow at Time, Chambers prided himself on his grasp of Western culture and was rumored to keep a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his drawer. He would have to see Whittaker Chambers, who edited the back-of-the-books pages on books and the arts. There was just one hurdle–a formality, Tasker assured him. It a gig that would mean a real windfall for the struggling author: ![]() The context is that Bellow has very nearly gotten a reporting job at Time magazine via Dana Tasker, an editor there. ![]() But do you know what happened when Saul Bellow met Whittaker Chambers?īellow’s biographer James Atlas provides the anecdote. ![]() You may have heard that Ayn Rand really disliked C.S.
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