Rod Whitaker(1931-2005)

In the words of Edward Rochester to Jane Eyre - Whitaker's humble beginnings must have made him -- "tenacious of life." Born to an impoverished family, Whitaker was more Canadian than American since the family moved near Montreal, Canada anticipating a better life during his early years-apparently speaking only French until age nine. Most of his adolescence was spent back in upstate New York in Albany -- yet again a continued hard life. But young Whitaker had expectations and kept them hopeful with his love of reading and stories. During the Korean War he joined the Navy, working in intelligence. He moved to Seattle thereafter and worked at a laundry while going to the University of Washington on the GI Bill. He earned a bachelor degree in theater. While there he wrote and directed his own three-act play "Eve of the Bursting" as a thesis for his master degree and wrote another play - "Never Come Tuesday" (1960). Whitaker went on to earn a doctorate in communications and film at Northwestern University. Later he was awarded a Fullbright scholarship for study in England. His achievement stoked an elitist confidence in succeeding, but there was also an ironic rebel's need to swim against the floe if nothing but for the hell of it. He was a keen observer/assimulator and in that an evolving and efficient mimic of the edge of what the next decade of the 1960s would dub anti-Establishment. Movies and early TV playhouse reflected social tensions. There was Marlon Brando in black leather and on a motorcycle - and there was Whitaker in black leather and on a motorcycle - supposedly roaring into conservative Blair, Nebraska and Lutheran Dana College in the early 1950s to snap up a position as director of communications - and wearing this assumed persona during his years there. He might be a loner - playing the role of cultured drifter and closet idealist forged by his humble beginnings, but he was an elitist in all these roles. A rather shy psychological hedonist from different angles-he enjoyed playing at being different - and intellectually totalitarian in its validation. He was well on his way in the grooming of the alter ego that would evolve in novel and serious writing to provide fulfillment to the dreaming poor boy from Albany. In 1958 he married Diane T. Brandon, suitably a painter - and even more suitably the ceremony was in Greenwich Village in New York. They produced four children, and better academic opportunity emanated from elsewhere in the West-well, South. A larger school and better promise called from the University of Texas at Austin. Soon he was chairman of the Department of Radio, TV, and Film, having built a body of work in ideas and theory on film particularly. By the early 1970s he ready to start breaking away from conventional career. And though not conventional, it was in the potentially lucrative life of a novelist that Whitaker sought to achieve that end. It was a good time to venture forth in popular writing for someone like Whitaker. The historical novel and tell-all books about the hippy philosophy and tearing down society of the 1960s gave way to a hunger for wit and satire - and the more the better - even when it was rather naive or clumsy - maybe even silly. Through the mid-1960s to 1970 Whitaker wrote on film but must have decided on more lucrative applications for his ego. The spy and espionage genre had run its course, but Whitkaker found it right for his first novels. The first was supposed to be a cool and smart spoof on the genre, but The Eiger Sanction (1972) was also very much Whitaker's self-indulgent foray into alter ego fantasy. It would seem true to his two sides -- the two ironic faces -- Whitaker sought both fame and obscurity. One story is that his wife picked the pseudonym 'Trevanian' for him based on her fondness for English historian G. M. Trevelyan. It made a good European-sounding name just the same. And like women blood-and-thunder novelists whose heroes and heroines are bigger than life, Whitaker's Dr. Jonathan Hemlock (such a heavy-handed surname with others of similar double meaning in the book) is all that -- both a professor of art and a former counter-assassin-world-renowned mountaineer and lady-killer extraordinaire. Whitaker, the keen observer of humanity - and himself - moved the story along with more sassy sarcasm than wit-making it less a spoof and more the work of an eager novelist out to prove his powers as weaver of storyline - and it does move along with clever enough speed to thrill the avid 1970s reader - otherwise, it seems fairly dated. Crown Publishing did much to hype the initial gossip about the mysterious author as a European who was an accomplished mountain climber. Though he may have tried it, Whitaker had just read up on mountaineering and its history - probably and mostly British books - he did not know American climbing. The narrative about practice climbing in America betrayed his ignorance when he assumed British terms for climbing difficulty - "fifth and sixth grades" instead of the so-called Yosemite decimal system (in Amerrican climbing 'grades' refers to relative time taken to climb a particular route). He used Brit slang "pegs" and "snap links" for pitons and carabiners, respectively, and put these around the waist rather than slung via a sling over the shoulder. The story line climax on the Eiger borrowed something from the dramatic 1936 German attempt on the notorious North Face that ended with a deadly storm. It was also heavily influenced by the first direct route ascent in 1966 in which the leader of the Anglo-American team, John Harlin, fell to his death near the top. Amid the dropping of three dollar words here and there Whitaker's own attempts at adding biting social comment boiled in his own disgust with Yankee materialism - as voiced through his steely-eyed, disdainful hero-seem overly engineered and amateurish - particularly in a thinly disguised appearance of among other jet-setters flocking to the Swiss hamlet of Grindelwald to watch - Liz and Dick - the Burtons, of course. It really is too much. Universal bought the film rights and produced a film with a script thankfully devoid of social conscious chiefly steered by Warren Murphy. Whitaker labeled the film as "vapid". Nonetheless he received partial screen writing credit. And The Eiger Sanction (1975) was a hit for Clint Eastwood. The book was one of five written between 1972 to 1983, selling more than a million copies each. There was a Hemlock sequel, The Loo Sanction (1973), supposedly even more of a spoof and this time in England. Whitaker's oddball blend of reality and fiction went so far as to have the ever adroit Hemlock lecturing in London extempore on film - putting down film criticism devotees - but noting 'Whitaker' by name as one of the few genuine film theorist/critics to be had - talk about blowing one's own horn. Whitaker despaired that the critics did not see the clever farce and were less appreciative than the first time around. But it is not as engaging a book-though characteristic of his writing in general it showed his doubtless gift for descriptive phrasing. Nonetheless, the critics were still taken with Trevanian, joining a select public awaiting his next literary treat. Despite his antics of insisting his publisher not grant interviews or burden him with book tours, Whitaker remained something of a literary fad. One critic went so far - and Whitaker could not have said it better - to call him "the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe, and Chaucer." Well the fan club certainly thought so. Perhaps - inevitably - Whitaker's growing disappointment with the U.S. spurred on the decision to shake America from his heels and live in Europe. Both the politics and the culture prompted him to declare: "I could feel the growth of anti-intellectual fundamentalism of the kind we thought we'd killed off with the Dayton Monkey Trial." And dismissing the nation as possessed of "compassion fatigue", he moved to the French side of the Basque Pyrenees in a village called Garindein near Mauleon-Licharre. So ensconced, Whitaker continued to explore novel writing - and with insistent autobiographical undertones. He added a new pen name, Nicolas Seare, for his 1339 or So: Being an Apology for a Pedlar (1975), a so-called 'witty' medieval tale of love and courage; The Main (1976) was a police drama in a poor neighborhood of Montreal. Whitaker originally intended to publish under yet another pen name - this time, Jean-Paul Morin - but kept his Travanian moniker. His best-received work followed three years later with Shibumi (1979) still exploring the avenues of espionage with what was called a meta-spy novel. By now Whitaker's variety of book subjects and adaptive writing skill convinced some naive critics that "Trevanian" was in reality a general pen name for a group of writers working together - how very unimaginative - but no doubt something to make Whitaker bubble in triumph. Some critics decided that Trevanian was Robert Ludlum writing under a pen name. Whitaker would quip with non-decorum, "I don't even know who he is. I read Proust, but not much else written in the 20th century." In fact with this novel Whitaker finally granted an interview and revealed himself. Taking his time his next effort did not appear until 1983 with The Summer of Katya, a psychological horror story. In that same year and under Seare again came Rude Tales and Glorious, an irreligious re-telling of Arthurian tales. Is writing included several spurts of short stories. Along with the familiar Travanian label he used a pen name within the latter for two short stories - one Benat Le Cagot being noted as a French author and being translated by - who else - Travanian. This was the sort of smart playfulness his dedicated fans delighted in as so boldly innovative. But for fifteen years Whitaker denied them further entertainment and remained occupied elsewhere than writing. Then out came his exercise in writing a Western, Incident at Twenty-Mile in 1998, along with a interview granted Newsweek magazine in which he stated that he used Method-acting techniques to imagine himself as the author to provide the style he wanted. There followed in 2000 a collection of short stories called Hot Night in the City (2000). About that time he and his family lost the home in southern France due to fire, and Whitaker transplanted all to England, to the village of Dinder near the town of Wells in Somerset. Whitaker began developing health problems his remaining years, though he was still writing a few short stories, edited a mystery short story collection (Death Dance, 2002), and planning more novels. He completed his novel Crazyladies of Pearl Street (2005), very much reflecting the author's years in Albany, a coming-of-age story of Jean-Luc LaPointe, a boy surviving with his mother and sister in the slums of Albany, New York in the years proceeding and during World War II. Whitaker was having to use bottled oxygen as he attempted to finish his last novel Street of the Four Winds again as Trevanian. This was something of an epic of the old school about a Parisian artist caught in the 1848 revolution. The author labored at the historical research and writing but ran out of time, succumbing to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Having kept to his hard opinion of society in general - especially America - in an odd bit of patronizing tribute he rewarded his fans with this: "The Trevanian Buff is a strange and wonderful creature: an outsider, a natural elitist, not so much a cynic as an idealist mugged by reality, not just one of those who march to a different drummer, but the solo drummer in a parade of one."