Time Editor: Political Innocent

I was also very curious to know more about Tom Matthews himself. As a Fortune and Life man. I had never worked with him or under him —though I once filled in as a book reviewer for him on Time in the middle nineteen thirties when he took a leave of absence. I was certainly more aware of him than he was of me, for some of his close associates—Calvin Fixx, Robert Cantwell, Whittaker Chambers—were my particular friends, and they often talked about him in my presence. Knowing him through the eyes of those who have claimed his friendship, I expected to discover—well, just what? Certainly Matthews would be the one to tell about the genesis of some of the good literary things that appeared in Time when Whit Chambers was writing about Arnold Toynbee. the singing of Marian Anderson, and the imaginary visit of the ghost of Czar Nicholas to the Yalta rooftops when Stalin was about to seduce Roosevelt into recognizing all the old Romanoff aspirations to Russian expansion.

Well, what have we to find in Name and Address? Reading the first part of the book and a couple of chapters on love and alcohol that are tucked in as a sort of appendix, one is in the presence of astonishingly sensitive confession. When Tom Matthews is tracing his long and often uncomfortable relations with his father (the Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey), his mother (a Procter heiress who felt apologetic about living on Procter and Gamble soap money), and his friends and acquaintances at four upper-class schools and two universities (Princeton and Oxford), he is one of the most honest and inquisitive self-analyzers that has ever put pen to paper. But the second half of the book, which has mainly to do with Matthews’ experience with the New Republic and Time, is a self-portrait of a man moving like a zombie through an environment which offers him nothing but bafflement.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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I was also very curious to know more about Tom Matthews himself. As a Fortune and Life man. I had never worked with him or under him —though I once filled in as a book reviewer for him on Time in the middle nineteen thirties when he took a leave of absence. I was certainly more aware of him than he was of me, for some of his close associates—Calvin Fixx, Robert Cantwell, Whittaker Chambers—were my particular friends, and they often talked about him in my presence. Knowing him through the eyes of those who have claimed his friendship, I expected to discover—well, just what? Certainly Matthews would be the one to tell about the genesis of some of the good literary things that appeared in Time when Whit Chambers was writing about Arnold Toynbee. the singing of Marian Anderson, and the imaginary visit of the ghost of Czar Nicholas to the Yalta rooftops when Stalin was about to seduce Roosevelt into recognizing all the old Romanoff aspirations to Russian expansion.

Well, what have we to find in Name and Address? Reading the first part of the book and a couple of chapters on love and alcohol that are tucked in as a sort of appendix, one is in the presence of astonishingly sensitive confession. When Tom Matthews is tracing his long and often uncomfortable relations with his father (the Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey), his mother (a Procter heiress who felt apologetic about living on Procter and Gamble soap money), and his friends and acquaintances at four upper-class schools and two universities (Princeton and Oxford), he is one of the most honest and inquisitive self-analyzers that has ever put pen to paper. But the second half of the book, which has mainly to do with Matthews’ experience with the New Republic and Time, is a self-portrait of a man moving like a zombie through an environment which offers him nothing but bafflement.