The tokens of hope and truth were not to be preserved, he seemed to be saying, in a journal of opinion, not to be preserved by writers or thinkers. Only by activists, and I was to know that he considered a publication—the right kind of publication—not a word, but a deed. In the final analysis it was action, not belletrism, that moved him most deeply.
And so in time I came to understand why in 1932 he resigned as editor of the Communist New Masses, where he had earned an international reputation as a writer, to go scurrying about the streets of Washington, Baltimore, and New York, carrying pocketfuls of negatives and secret phone numbers and invisible ink. “One of the great failures of Witness,” he wrote me, “is that there was no time or place to describe the influences, other than immediate historical influences, that brought me to Communism. I came to Communism ... above all under the influence of the Narodniki. They have been deliberately forgotten, but, in those days, Lenin urged us to revere the Narodniki—‘those who went with bomb or revolver against this or that individual monster.’ Unlike most Western Communists, who became Communists under the influence of the Social Democrats, I remained under the spiritual influence of the Narodniki long after I became a Marxist. In fact, I never threw it off. I never have. And, of course, it was that revolutionary quality [in me] that bemused Alger—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”
Activism. From the Narodniki to the Republican Party, in one defection.
But now he would stay on at his farm, and worry from his sickbed.
He had a great deal to worry about. His broken health and near penury enhanced an insubordinate restlessness. “I do not even have the capital to farm halfheartedly,” he wrote me, “and I cannot, as in the past, make good the capital by my own labor power. This inability to work is perhaps the greatest burr in my mind. It torments me since, among other disabilities, I have no talent for being a country gentleman.”
He reached the low point of his spirits as he sweated in philosophical bedrock, gathering his thoughts: “I have been splashing about in my private pool of ice water.” In another letter, “I have ceased to understand why I must go on living.” In still another, “The year was, for me, a long walk through the valley. No one but me will ever know how close I came to staying in it.”
Did he isolate the trouble? Yes. “It had to do with my inability to fix the meaning of the current period of existence in some communicable way. I knew the fault lay in me. So that, all the while I was trying to write, I was simply trying to grow.”
But the weeks went by. Eisenhower ran and was reelected. Nixon was safely vice president. Six months later Chambers wrote to say he was ready to sign up with National Review. Having made the decision, he was elated. After five years of isolation and introspection, he was like a painter who had recovered his eyesight. He felt the need to practice his art. How many things he wanted to write about, and immediately! Mushrooms, for one thing. Albert Camus. What a lot of things needed to be said instantly about The Myth of Sisyphus! Milovan Djilas’s New Class was just out, and most of the critics, he said, had missed the whole point.
But what he wrote about first was the farmers. He anticipated a gradual end to their independence. “Perhaps [in the future, the socialized farmer) will not be able ... to find or frame an answer [to why he lost his freedom]. Perhaps he will not need to. For perhaps the memory of those men and women [who fought socialism] will surprise him, as with an unfamiliar but arresting sound—the sound of spring-heads, long dried up and silent in a fierce drought, suddenly burst out and rushing freely to the sea. It may remind him of a continuity that outlives all lives, fears, perplexities, contriving, hopes, defeats; so that he is moved to reach down and touch again for strength, as if he were its first discoverer, the changeless thing—the undeluding, undenying earth.”
Chambers decided in the summer of 1958 to come up to New York every fortnight and spend two days in the office with his colleagues, writing editorials and features for the magazine. He would arrive on the train from Baltimore at noon and come directly to the editorial lunch, always out of breath, perspiring in his city clothes. He liked his little cubicle at National Review, which, five minutes after he entered it, smelled like a pipe-tobacco factory. He puffed away devotedly, grinding out memorable editorials and paragraphs.
Yet anyone meeting Chambers casually, without preconception, would judge him an amusing and easily amused man. The bottomless gravity seldom suggested itself. He was not merely a man of wit, but also a man of humor, and even of fun. Often, in his letters, even through his orotund gloom, the pixie would surface. (“Would that we could live in the world of the fauves,” he wrote me at Christmas, “where the planes are disjointed only on canvas, instead of a world where the wild beasts are real and the disjointures threaten to bury us.”)
On Tuesday nights we worked late, and four or five of us would go to dinner. By then he was physically exhausted. But he wanted to come with us, and we would eat at whatever restaurant, and he would talk hungrily (and eat hungrily), talk about everything that interested him, which was literally everything in this world, and not in this world. He talked often around a subject, swooping in to make a quick point, withdrawing, relaxing, laughing, listening—he listened superbly, though even as a listener he was a potent force.
The next morning, press day, he was at his desk at eight, and, for lunch, a sandwich. At five he was on the train back to Baltimore, where his wife would meet him. On reaching his farm he would drop on his bed from fatigue. Three months after coming to New York, he collapsed from another heart attack. But in the summer of 1959 he felt well enough to indulge a. dream, more particularly his gentle wife’s dream, to visit Europe. We drove them to the airport after a happy day. I noticed worriedly how heavily he perspired and how nervously his heavy thumbs shuffled through the bureaucratic paraphernalia of modern travel, as he dug up, in turn, passports, baggage tags, vaccination certificates, and airplane tickets. His plans were vague, but at the heart of them was a visit to his old friend, Arthur Koestler.
They were at Koestler’s eyrie in Austria for a week. “Alpach, where AK lives, is some four hundred meters higher into the hills than Innsbruck,” he wrote me. “So there we sat, and talked, not merely about the daily experiences of our lives. Each of the two men with us had tried to kill himself and failed; Greta Buber-Neumann was certainly the most hardy and astonishing of the three. Then we realized that, of our particular breed, the old activists, we are almost the only survivors....”
They went on to Rome (“In Rome, I had to ask Esther for the nitroglycerine. Since then, I’ve been living on the stuff...”). And then Venice (“I came back to Venice chiefly to rest. If it were not for my children, I should try to spend the rest of my life here ...”). Berlin (“I feel as though I had some kind of moral compulsion to go at this time ...”). Paris (“You will look up Malraux?” I wrote him—I remembered the gratitude Chambers felt on receiving a handwritten note from Malraux with his judgment of Witness: “You have not come back from hell with empty hands”).
But he took sick again and, abruptly, they flew back; again he was in bed. He wanted now to resign from National Review. It was partly that his poor health and his unconquerable perfectionism kept him from producing a flow of copy large enough to satisfy his conscience. Partly it was his Weltanschauung, which was constantly in motion. He resisted National Review’s schematic conservatism, even its schematic anti-Communism. “You ... stand within, or at any rate are elaborating, a political orthodoxy,” his letter explained. “I stand within no political orthodoxy.... I am at heart a counter-revolutionist. You mean to be conservative, and I know no one who seems to me to have a better right to the term. I am not a conservative. I am a man of the Right. I shall vote the straight Republican ticket for as long as I live.”
And, always looking within the Marxist world for amplification, he found it. “You see, I am an Orgbureau man. But if the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively pro
mote a program that means something to the masses of people—why somebody else will. Then there will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find at the back an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel....”
He had made up his mind to do something else. He enrolled at Western Maryland College as an undergraduate.
He had quit National Review; he had failed to complete the book that Random House had been expecting for six years. He did not want to sit at home, half crippled and denied the life he would, I think, have liked most to lead, the life of a dawn-to-dusk farmer. Whittaker Chambers was all Puritan about work. Idleness was incomprehensible to him. But there was another reason for going back to school. In Europe, Koestler had said to him sharply, “You cannot understand what is going on in the world unless you understand science deeply.” Very well, then, he would learn science.
He threw himself into his work. Science courses galore. For relaxation, Greek, Latin, and advanced French composition. Every morning he drove to school and sat among the farmers’ sons of western Maryland, taking notes, dissecting frogs, reciting Greek paradigms, working tangled problems in physics. Home, and immediately to the basement to do his homework. Everything else was put aside.
He signed up for the summer session but in the interstice between terms he drove north to see his daughter, Ellen. En route he spent a day with us on a hot afternoon. “How do you get on,” my wife asked, “with your fellow undergraduates?” “Fine,” he said, puffing on his pipe. In fact, we learned, he had an admirer. A young lady—aged about nineteen, he guessed—shared with him the allocated carcasses of small animals, which the two of them, in tandem, proceeded to disembowel. He had written to me about her. “For months while we worked together she addressed me not a word, and I was afraid my great age had frightened her. But last week she broke silence. She said breathlessly: ‘Mr. Chambers?’ ‘Yes,’ I answered her anxiously. ‘Tell me, what do you think of ”Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-dot Bikini”?’” He recalled the question now with laughter. He hadn’t, at the critical moment, any idea that the young lady was talking about a popular song, but he had improvised successfully until he could deduce what she was talking about, and then confided to his co-vivisectionist that it just happened that this was one of his very favorite songs. Her excitement was indescribable. From that moment on they chirped together as soul mates, pooling their knowledge of spleens and livers, kidneys and upper intestines.
I imagine that he was a very quiet student, giving his teachers no cause whatever for the uneasiness they might have expected to feel in the presence of so august a mind. During examination weeks he was in a constant state of high boil. He slaved for his grades and achieved them, even in the alien field of science; all A‘s, or A minuses; once, as I remember, a humiliating B plus. After the spring term his fatigue was total, overwhelming. “Weariness, Bill,” he wrote in the last letter I had from him, in the summer of 1961, “you cannot yet know literally what it means. I wish no time would come when you do know, but the balance of experience is against it. One day, long hence, you will know true weariness and will say: 'That was it.’ My own life of late has been full of such realizations.”
He learned science, and killed himself. Those were the two things, toward the end, for which he strived.
“Why on earth doesn’t your father answer the phone?” I asked his daughter, Ellen, in Connecticut on Saturday afternoon, the 8th of July. “Because,” she said with a laugh, shyly, “Poppa and the phone company are having a little tiff, and the phone is disconnected. They wanted him to trim one of his favorite trees to take the strain off the telephone line, and he put them off. So... they turned off the phone.” I wired him: WHEN YOU COME TO TERMS WITH THE PHONE COMPANY GIVE ME A RING. But he didn’t call. The following Tuesday when I walked into my office the phone was ringing. I took the call standing in front of my desk. It was John Chambers, his son. He gave me the news. A heart attack. The final heart attack. Cremation in total privacy. His mother was in the hospital. The news would go to the press later that afternoon. I mumbled the usual things, hung up the telephone, sat down, and wept.
He had written me once, “American men, who weep in droves in movie houses, over the woes of lovestruck shop girls, hold that weeping in men is unmanly. I have found most men in whom there was depth of experience, or capacity for compassion, singularly apt to tears. How can it be otherwise? One looks and sees: and it would be a kind of impotence to be incapable of, or to grudge, the comment of tears, even while you struggle against it. I am immune to soap opera. But I cannot listen for any length of time to the speaking voice of Kirsten Flagstad, for example, without being done in by that magnificence of tone that seems to speak from the center of sorrow, even from the center of the earth.”
For me, and others who knew him, his voice had been like Kirsten Flagstad’s, magnificent in tone, speaking to our time from the center of sorrow, from the center of the earth.
William F. Buckley Jr, founded National Review magazine in 1955. He is the author of more than forty books and is the editor of Whittaker Chambers’s Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley Jt., 1954-1961. For more than thirty years Buckley hosted the television show Firing Line, and his newspaper column, “On the Right,” is syndicated to more than three hundred newspapers. His most recent books are Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches and the novel Elvis in the Morning.
A MASTERPIECE AT FIFTY
by Robert D. Novak
The death of Alger Hiss at the age of ninety-two on November 15, 1996, provoked bizarre responses from people who should have known better.
ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, apparently drawing on an erroneous wire service dispatch, went on the air to assert that Russian president Boris Yeltsin had declared that secret KGB files confirmed Hiss never worked for the Soviets. Yeltsin had said no such thing.
Nine days later, Anthony Lake, the national security advisor whom President Bill Clinton would soon nominate to be CIA director, was asked whether Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy; Lake replied, “I don’t think it [the evidence] is conclusive.”
It is remarkable that, nearly half a century after Hiss’s conviction, well-informed and presumably prudent people could still harbor any doubts that Hiss, as a senior State Department official, had in fact been a secret agent of the Fourth Section of Soviet Military Intelligence. Yet Mr. Jennings and Mr. Lake represent many others who cannot fully accept the reality that Alger Hiss was lying and Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth.
The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have only strengthened this tendency. In his 1997 biography of Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus wrote, “What sets the Hiss case apart, then and now, was not its mystery but the passionate belief of so many that Hiss must be innocent no matter what the evidence.” Tanenhaus, no conservative, looked at the evidence and reached the inevitable conclusion of Hiss’s guilt.
Mr. Jennings and Mr. Lake implied that Chambers was a liar, branding his life and his character a lie. I would guess that neither of these gentlemen has read Witness. If that is the case, they have missed an enriching experience.
Early in 1953, as a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant on active duty in the U.S. Army awaiting combat assignment (it never came) to a war in Korea that my government showed no desire to win, I read the newly published Witness. It changed my worldview, my philosophical perceptions, and, without exaggeration, my life.
I am not alone. From time to time over the years, in after-dinner conversations with politicians on the campaign circuit, I have found a common bond with others—some a generation younger—who have been alarmed, entranced, and always inspired by Witness.
I have read Witn
ess in its entirety on four subsequent occasions, and I have dipped into the book many other times. On each occasion, I have come away with new insights. Increasingly, over the intervening decades, the questions and conflicts posed by Whittaker Chambers have been in my thoughts.
In 1987, the Washington Timer ran a profile of me in which I mentioned the profound impact that Chambers and Witness had had on me. The Times piece produced fraternal professions from like-minded readers of Witness and the kind invitation from Regnery Publishing to write the preface for a new edition of the book being prepared at that time. But the profile also demonstrated that the derision and contempt for Whittaker Chambers aroused by the Hiss case long ago had been replicated in a new generation. If Chambers imagined “derisive” readers asking how they could take him “seriously” after he revealed the impact Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables had made on his life, I did not have to imagine what derision would meet me. My colleagues in journalism snickered and sneered: “Chambers and Witness? Some hero! Some inspiration!”
At the time, I incorrectly thought that the residual contempt by some not yet born when Whittaker Chambers bore witness against Hiss did not stem from widespread lingering belief in Hiss’s innocence—at least not from anyone this side of The Nation. Witness had convinced me in 1953, and anybody professing a shred of rationality at long last should have been convinced by Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, published in 1978.
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