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."
