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Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist who was a member of a Communist spy ring from 1923 until the mid-1930s, was the model for a major character in The Middle of the Journey, a novel published in 1947 by the distinguished literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-75).
In The Middle of the Journey, John Laskell, a young man recovering from a serious illness, leaves New York for a recuperative vacation in the Connecticut countryside, near his married friends Arthur and Nancy Croom. The visit culminates in a tragic accident whose consequences intensify ideological confrontations between Laskell, the Crooms and Gifford Maxim, the ex-Communist in fear of his life, who exposes the shallowness of the Crooms' flirtation with Marxism. More challenging is the conflict between Laskell's liberal humanism and Maxim's newly acquired religious conservatism, reminiscent of the famous exchanges between Leo Naptha and Settembrini in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). In this debate Trilling's antipathy for Maxim's ideas are clear, but he does full justice to the power and cogency of Maxim's argument.
As a historical novel, The Middle of the Journey represents an acutely perceptive attempt, in the author's words, "to draw out some of the moral and intellectual implications of the powerful attraction to communism felt by a considerable part of the American intellectual class during the Thirties and Forties." As a psychological novel, it offers a penetrating account of a man's attempt to come to terms with the fact of death. It is a measure of the novel's significant achievement that it merges the historical and the psychological elements seamlessly.
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