Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Among this medley of masters (I never discovered how or why they were chosen), my father was heavily represented. There were framed originals of his Christmas cards, which became an institution among his artist friends; he would spend months, sketching, designing, selecting special papers for them and coloring them, individually, by hand. There were framed originals of his bookplate designs (as a bookplate artist, my father had an international reputation and the elaborate plate he made for me while I was still in diapers is well known). There were also many of his imaginary landscapes—piles of Oriental minarets with the sun flashing from their golden bulbs (my father pasted on gold paper for that effect) and somber vistas of cypresses in whose purple shadows barelv discernible human figures merged mysteriously.

  For the yearning of my father’s mind was for far horizons in time and space—a yearning, which, in a very different way, my mother shared with him, just as she shared his enthusiasm for Omar Khayyam. The gorgeous East held my father’s spirit very much in fee. He was always sketching the Bosporus waterside (in fancy) or describing the Oriental restaurants he frequented in New York, one of which (he once took me there as a great treat) was run by a Hindu woman named Miss Little Bird and boasted a snake charmer with a basket of cobras. Around the house, in those early days, my father sometimes wore a flowing linen samurai robe on which was stenciled a magnificent Japanese dragon that harmonized with the mood of the ferocious Japanese masks and wind-bells, the Chinese lanterns, parasols, and the Hindu elephant god, Ganassa, that stood on his desk. There were five illustrated editions of the Arabian Nights in my father’s room, and both Scheherazade and Omar Khayyam were to play an important part in our lives, as I shall presently describe.

  But the subtle spirit that informed our culture, and the only point of intellectual unity that I can detect in it, was pre-Raphaelitism. Either at Drexel Institute, where he had studied art in Philadelphia, or later, my father fell under the spell of the serpentine neck, the elegant anemia and flowing robes, the flight from the actual and ugly into the arabesque and the exotic. I suspect that my father’s artistic sense came to birth in that brief spasm of the dying 19th century, and there it rested. He never outgrew it. It was the names of the pre-Raphaelites, and others oddly associated with them, that I first heard as a child, in awed conversations between my parents or with my father’s artist friends, who occasionally visited us in those days: Rossetti and his sister, Holman Hunt, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Botticelli (whom Pater had helped to revive), Whistler, William Morris, Hokusai, Du Maurier and his Trilby. I memorized the exciting names as naturally as a boy memorizes a bird call and with no more understanding of what they meant.

  Even my mother would sometimes suddenly announce that:The blesséd damozel leaned out

  From the gold bar of heaven,

  or ask dramatically:What is he doing, the great god Pan,

  Down in the reeds by the river?

  I early learned to be extremely proud of the fact that my father was an artist and that ours was a “cultured” home, though as I had scarcely seen any other at that time, I supposed that the rest were much like ours. I had no way of knowing that there is a difference between the words “art” and “arty,” that it is the difference between reality and unreality, and that our home was arty.

  As a child, I could scarcely have surmised from anything I saw or heard that, in the world around me, realities were taking shape that would affect my whole life—that a new economic form had appeared (the trust) which would provide the logic of all totalitarian organization; that the great war, which would first reveal that the world was in mortal crisis, was less than a decade away; that in Russia (nobody ever mentioned Russia), the 1905 revolution had brought to life a new political form—the soviet—and, at its head, a new political figure—Leon Trotsky. Nor would I have understood what he meant if I had heard his warning that anybody who wanted to lead a peaceful life had picked the wrong century to be born in.

  VII

  My parents believed that children should also be taken to the theater, and as early as possible. My brother wailed when he was left home and I went off to see Peter Pan. But my early exposure to Sir James M. Barrie was not a success. The pirates terrified me and so did the crocodile (or whatever it was) with the ticking clock inside it. Maude Adams’ flittings and dartings about the stage left me only a little less uneasy. At last, my howls became so shameless that I had to be taken home in disgrace.

  It was a blow to my parents. They discussed the episode with the uneasiness born of an awful suspicion that they had given birth to a cultural defective. But they persevered. Cautiously, my father conditioned me by taking me to a number of adult plays, which were in general less hair-raising than plays for children. I had no idea what they were about and have forgotten what they were. Then, with grave misgivings, and many warnings that I was to behave myself, they tried me out on another “child’s play.”

  It was Maeterlinck’s Bluebird. I was gripped in silence from the start. I had only the vaguest idea why the children, Tyl Tyl and Mytyl, had to go to such lengths to find a bird that was at home all the time. But two scenes I never afterward forgot. One was the land of the dead, which rose with a sizzling rush out of the flower-grown graveyard. Grandfather and grandmother Tyl were sleeping beside their cottage. I somehow grasped the idea that the dead wake from their sleep only when a living person thinks of them, and that they do not wake often. That thought I stowed carefully away to reflect on later.

  The other scene that impressed me was the land of the unborn children. One side of the stage was space from which came a deep, resonant humming. “That,” my mother whispered to me, “is the mothers, singing to the babies that are coming to them.” On the other side of the stage was a landing platform, where Father Time was shooing into a little boat the unborn children that were going down to earth. Each child hugged a box that contained the deed that he would do during his life. At the back of the platform were two great doors. One child was almost in the boat, when he broke away from Father Time and ran back through the doors. Father Time scolded him.

  That puzzled me and afterwards I questioned my mother about it: “Why did the little boy run back?” She glanced at me with that look of amused pride with which we glance at our children when we think they are asking something too old for their age. “Why,” she said, “he had forgotten his crime. He had to go back to get the box with the crime that he would commit on earth.”

  VIII

  In winter, my mother dressed my brother and me in blue serge jackets and knee breeches, Eton collars and floppy red or blue bow ties. In summer, we wore V-neck sailor suits with a whistle on a braided cord, or little white linen Norfolk jackets and knee breeches. These struck the authentic middle-class note, and, as might be inferred from such attire, we were in close touch with Little Lord Fauntleroy and were cover-to-cover readers of St. Nicholas magazine, which was read to us long before we could read.

  My parents took St. Nicholas for us just as they took the New York Evening Sun for themselves, though we were forbidden to read the Sun or any other newspaper. We were especially forbidden to read the comics—a rule that I carried over to my own children until Little Abner proved too strong for me. St. Nicholas was intended to be the formative literature of my childhood. Certainly, my brother and I wore out our files. Yet, for me at least, the magazine’s chief charm was exotic; it dealt with people and a way of life completely different from anything I saw around me. Of the scores of stories I read in it, the one that made the strongest impression on me was Rackety Packety House (like Little Lord Fauntleroy, another of Mrs. Burnett’s fancies). In it a family of wooden dolls (if I remember rightly) lived a genteel life in a shabby house. It impressed me because their doggedly cheerful existence in tattered surroundings seemed to me to bear a faintly distressing resemblance to our own.

  We had in the house a French book on child etiquette with the charming color illustrations of Maurice Boutet de Monvel. (When his
son, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, also a painter, was killed in an Air France crash in the Azores, about the time of the second Hiss trial, his name meant little to most Americans, but it brought back my childhood to me.) This book my mother would translate for us, and so my brother and I learned in the most painless way that nice little boys do not yank off the tablecloth and all the dishes when they do not like their supper, or scratch their heads with a fork at table. In later days, Colonel Bykov sometimes complimented me on my table manners, which he considered an asset in an underground Communist.

  But for me my mother had in mind a sterner code than Boutet de Monvel’s. She did so thorough a job of impressing it on me that, even as a Communist, I was never quite able to shake off its rigors. She began by explaining to me that a gentleman, or, as she would say, “a man of breeding,” is known not so much by what he does as by what he will not do. First and foremost, he never imputes a base motive to anyone else. If someone is rude to him, he assumes that the rudeness is unintentional. If he knows that it is intentional, he acts as if it were not. He never insulted anyone himself except by intention. He never met anger with anger. He never patronized anyone because he never assumed that he knew more than anyone else or that uneducated people are unintelligent. He never corrected (or smiled at) other people’s slips. “Always,” my mother would say, “allow other people the luxury of being mistaken. They will find out for themselves soon enough. If they don’t, they are the kind of people in whom it does not matter.”

  Never, under any circumstances, did a man of breeding eat in public in front of people who were not eating (to this day, I have to be pretty famished before I will order a sandwich in a day coach). There were many similar don’ts. But there were three things, which if all else failed, a man of breeding never did. He never discussed food (which is vulgar). He never discussed money (which is even more vulgar). He never discussed religion (which is the most vulgar of all). For it is equally impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God, my mother pointed out, and the subject is not one that could possibly interest intelligent people. “Nobody,” she said, “is more vulgar than an atheist, except the people who try to force religion on one.”

  I have always been extremely grateful to my mother for impressing upon me these rules, which, in the main, when toned down and adjusted to life, I hold to be sound. But in the circumstances, there was almost nothing (except the artistic altitude at which we lived) better calculated to unfit me for the simple realism of the Lynbrook grammar-school yard, into which I was about to be thrust with results startling to it and stunning to me.

  IX

  “And what is your name?” the first-grade teacher asked me in my turn. She was taking the class pupil by pupil to get acquainted.

  “Vivian,” I said.

  There was a sudden silence in the room, and all eyes swiveled toward me in astonishment. The teacher mastered her own start by asking: “What did you say?”

  “Vivian,” I repeated.

  A ripple of laughter swept the other children, like a shower of rain that you hear coming before it reaches you, and hear passing on after it has drenched you. The teacher tapped her desk lightly with a piece of chalk, struggled to restrain her own laughter, failed and joined in frankly with the children.

  “Vivian,” she repeated, like an editorial comment. Then she hurried on to the child behind me, who was happily named Jack. It had begun—the torment of the name that was to last for some ten years, until I dreaded to have anyone ask me what my name was. I was seven. It was my first day at school.

  Next, the teacher tried sorting us out according to our fathers’ occupations. Again, she went around the class, child by child. One girl’s father was a butcher. One boy’s father was a tailor. Another’s was a shoemaker. There were children of plumbers, carpenters, farmers, bakers, clerks. One boy said: “My father is dead.” “What does your mother do?” the teacher asked pleasantly. “Washing,” he blurted. His clothes were all too tight for him. When he moved, it looked as if they would split at the seams.

  There were several Italian boys in the class and one ferociously beautiful Italian girl. They did not speak English very well. The question reached the first Italian boy: “What does your father do?” He stared at his desk. The teacher repeated the question. He glanced up with a sheepish grin. “Junk,” he said with fierce shame. Most of the Italians were the children of junkmen.

  “And what does your father do?” the teacher asked me.

  “He is a painter,” I said.

  “Does he paint houses or barns?” she asked helpfully.

  I was confused. “He paints pictures,” I said. “He is an artist.”

  “An artist?” she said, but decided to drop that one quickly. Again, all the eyes in the room swung to me, but this time not with amusement, with the distrust of one species for another.

  On the blackboard was a chalk drawing of a cat with arched back and swollen tail. Opposite was the letter F. Below, was an apple drawn in colored chalk. Opposite was the sentence: “It is an apple.” The teacher now informed us that the letter F is the sound made by an angry cat. We made this noise in chorus. After that, we chorused: “It is an apple.” In time, we went through the alphabet in that way—“oo” is the noise of an owl, S is the sound of a snake. It proved to be an unforgettable method. But since I knew my letters before I went to school, it did not take me long to learn, “It is an apple.” I found time to study my classmates. They were the first children I had ever met close at hand or in the mass. They were just as surprising to me as I was to them. Most of them were Ameriicans of English or Irish stock. But, in addition to the Italians, there were Germans, a German Pole, several Jews, two Danes, a Swede and a Greek who rejoiced in the name of Constantinopoulis. Some of them were the children of fairly recent immigrants.

  One of my classmates fascinated me, as he did most of the boys. Most of the little girls looked steadily away from him. He was much bigger and older than the rest of us with a huge head and enormous hands. He wore baggy, dirty clothes and smelled foully. He was an idiot. If he caught your eye, he would fix it with a challenging leer that hovered over his pasty face while his enormous hands made obscene gestures. Soon most of the boys could imitate him. I did not understand what was implied, but I knew that it was somehow sickening. He had been in first grade several years before I arrived and remained there several years after I moved on.

  He came of an inbred family that lived in shacks beyond the woods in a settlement with the terrifying name of “Tigertown.” Most people avoided it. But my father once took me there to sketch, and what I remember of Tigertown is that around the patched and pitiful shacks, the moist, low-lying ground was covered with acres of white violets.

  To get to school, I had to cross a main road and the railroad tracks. This my mother would not let me do alone. She arranged with the undertaker’s daughter to take me to school and bring me back. But this girl’s class let out one hour later than mine, so that I had to wait in the schoolyard for her.

  On my first day at school, I watched my class swarm home while I waited at the gate with that feeling of being left that even older people dislike. Presently, I became aware that three of my classmates, boys, were still in the yard. One of them was sucking on a lollypop. They were in a huddle near the school house. They were whispering and, from time to time, they cast a furtive glance at me. Then I saw the boy take the lollypop out of his mouth and hold it down. As I watched with great interest, they formed a little circle, and, with giggling and some pushing to keep their aim true, all three of them wet on the lollypop.

  Soon a fourth boy, for whom they had evidently been waiting, came out of the school. They welcomed him and crowded around him. Their faces were masks of earnest and innocent friendliness.

  There was not a single telltale tone or expression. Then the boy with the lollypop offered it to the newcomer. He smiled, a little taken aback by the generous gesture, but he accepted the lollypop. They watched him with birdlike intent
ness while he held it in his hand. As he put it to his mouth, they burst into shrieks of derision, doubled up with laughter, slapped their knees and whooped around him like Indians. I felt that I was going to be sick.

  I think it was at that point that I developed a deep distrust of the human race. It was not only the filthy act that disgusted me. Something else shocked me much more deeply: the thought that inspired the act, its absolutely unmotivated malice, and the complete boyish guilelessness of the faces watching their victim. From that moment I hated school and everything about it. I was always expecting somebody to offer me a lollypop in one form or another.

  “What did you learn at school today?” my mother asked brightly when I was once more among the Goblin Market prints, the bookplates and the landscapes.

  “To make a noise like an angry cat,” I said, “and ‘It is an apple.’”

  It is only fair to point out that the character of Long Island has changed greatly since those days. Lynbrook is now in effect a thriving suburb of New York. Its grammar school is thoroughly up to date. Even when I went there, the rudiments of knowledge were taught simply and thoroughly. I was given a grounding that served me well throughout life.

  X

  I ran away from my first fight. In those days I did not know that courage is the indispensable virtue. Life had not yet taught me that, without courage, kindness and compassion remain merely fatuous postures.