By Arthur S. Mattson
Historian of the Village of Lynbrook
A TROUBLED EARLY LIFE
His father an artist, his mother a former actress, the family an altogether poor fit in Lynbrook became known as The French family. Whittaker Chambers was an intelligent, pudgy boy, called Vivian by his parents. He wore short pants in Lord Fauntleroy fashion long after his classmates had switched to long ones. He was often ridiculed at school. His family's desperate poverty forced him into the embarrassment of selling vegetables, chickens and eggs door to door.
The Chambers' Lynbrook neighbors spread rumors (unfortunately all too true) that Whittaker's demented grandmother, who lived with them, roamed the halls at night with a knife in her hand. His parents` awful marital problems, including his father's probable bisexuality, brought lengthy separations. As Chambers put it:
Compared to us, the life around us was orderly and happy. We were not happy. We were not a family. Our home was not a home. My father was not a father. My mother was not a mother ... That left me absolutely alone.
Chambers went to grammar school in Lynbrook's wooden schoolhouse on Union Avenue. He said of his Lynbrook education, I was given a grounding that served me well throughout my life. Still, he was never happy at Lynbrook's schools, finally transferring to nearby Rockville Centre High School, where he found academic successes in English and Language.
His social problems continued, however, with his classmates calling him Girlie and Stinky. Chambers got his revenge when he delivered the Class Prophecy at graduation in 1919. He foretold, among other things, a career in prostitution for one of his least favorite classmates.
Chambers, unable to form any real friendships during his boyhood, often wandered alone along the streams and meadows near his home. These peregrinations became for him a near religious experience. Chambers relates in his autobiography how, despite the absence of any religion in his home, upon encountering a breathtaking meadow of flowers and birds he exclaimed aloud, God. He called this incident one of his life's highest moments.
Joining the Lynbrook National Bank right after graduation, Chambers once again found he could not cope. A boring routine and continual quarrels with his co-workers led him to resign. He entered Columbia University, commuting daily from 228 Earle Avenue to the Manhattan campus by Long Island Railroad and subway. Chambers had tried to fit into Lynbrook's middleclass mold, but he would soon break away from it.
THE 1920's
As Chambers put it, When I entered [Columbia], I was a conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion. He took a job at the New York Public Library and began to explore Socialism and Communism.
One of his Lynbrook neighbors was a highly cultured woman who had introduced young Chambers to the literature, art, music and social ideas of Germany and France. In his early twenties he visited Europe, and saw the devastation left by World War I. His distress at seeing the virtual destruction of European civilization led to his joining a group of idealistic Columbia University students in becoming members of the Communist Party in 1925.
Still living in Lynbrook, Chambers became acutely aware also of the slow destruction of the country village he had grown up in:
When I returned from Europe in 1923 . . . I was living at home. I set about a definite poetic project. Its purpose was twofold. I wished to preserve through the medium of poetry the beautiful Long Island of my boyhood before it was destroyed forever by the advancing City. I wished to dramatize the continual defeat of the human spirit in our time, by itself and by the environment in which it finds itself.
With my deep attachment to the earth I grew up on, the spread of the tentacular towns across it, felling little woods, piping the shallow brooks through culverts, burying little farms under rows of suburban houses, struck me as an almost physical blow. Those sprawling developments, without character or form, destroying the beauty that had been for an ugliness that had no purpose but function and profit, seemed to epitomize all that I dreaded in the life around me. By defacing the one part of itself that had been intimately mine, it cut my roots and left me more than an alien, a man without soil, and, therefore, without nation.
Social life in Lynbrook had a limited appeal to young Whittaker. His description of the Prohibition Era and a 1922 Long Island speakeasy captures the scene while revealing Chambers to be more a keen observer than a participant:
I was still working at the New York Public Library. I took to going home directly after work. My brother would meet me at the Lynbrook station. . . Prohibition was in force, but clandestine bars were everywhere, and I sometimes stood beside the most substantial citizens. . . [E]venings began at a little store with the lower half of the show windows painted. Behind the store was a backroom. Here a mousey Greek served home-brewed wine. It was red, watery, sour, rasping and very heady. The backroom was dense with tobacco smoke, warm and cozy on cold nights.
His intellectual turmoil and the prevailing gloom at 228 Earle Avenue enveloped him. Like the downward spiral of a Greek tragedy, Chambers' life followed a dreadful course.
One night, his brother Richard did not meet him at the Lynbrook railroad station. Chambers found him dead, a suicide. Chambers came to believe that the same societal evils of vulgarity, stupidity, complacency, inhumanity, power and materialism a death of the spirit which caused millions to die in World War I also existed in the Long Island villages around him. He believed that this suffocating death of the spirit had killed his brother.
One snowy night at his brother's grave in Lynbrook's Sand Hole (Rockville) Cemetery, only a stone's throw from the house at 228 Earle Avenue, Chambers composed these lines:
Help me God (if there were God),
Before I die,
In my good time or under the hands of the police,
To make of myself one tiny cell, a bacterium,
To serve the organization of love as hate,
The union of the weak to kill the evil in power,
The outrage and the hope of the world.
This was a decisive moment in his life. He wrote, I now first became a Communist. I became irreconcilable.
Read Part III, Chambers relations with the Soviet Spy Network and subsequent break from the Communist party, in next week's Herald.
