On one side of the alley lived Mrs. Papyros, her husband and her sister. Mrs. Papyros drank whenever she could afford to. She was sometimes reeking by midday, and by nightfall she was roaring. Sometimes, she would erupt into the upper house, and, at the top of her lungs, proclaim the vices and professions of her tenants. Some of her charges were imaginary; many were all too real. All were shocking.
Her husband was a Greek. He pushed a little peanut stand about the streets. He was quiet, well-behaved, and I almost never saw him. Her sister I never saw. To me, she was only a dry cough, somewhere in the dark downstairs room. She was dying of tuberculosis, near the open window, to which rose the mists that sometimes floated over the little stream, rippling along the alley.
On the other side of the alley lived a heavy-set man, with a completely bald head and pouchy eyes that gave him an expression of wrinkled watchfulness, like a buzzard’s. He was always very polite and neatly dressed, which made him seem a little out of place. He seldom went out except at night. On one of the few occasions that I ever talked to him, he told me that he was a retired secret service agent.
Next to me, on the gallery, lived an impoverished widow, whom I never heard called anything but Alice. She was plump and very pleasant, and very kind to me in an unobtrusive way. Once in a while, she would ask me in and give me a cup of coffee. She never offered me anything else, and I understood that even the cup of coffee was, for her poverty, munificent generosity. Alice had a shelf of books, perhaps from better days. One day, I borrowed a volume of Shakespeare from her. Except for The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, which had been ruined for me at school, I had never read any Shakespeare. I opened by chance to Antony and Cleopatra, expecting not to like it. I read it most of the day, lying on my filthy bed, stunned by the opulence of violence and of language. Then, I first read the line: “I have immortal longings in me.” In that slum, I found Shakespeare.
On the third floor lived Ben Santi and One-Eyed Annie. They used to ask me up sometimes, together with Jules Radon. Often they received us in bed, and I could not help observing that, stripped of Shakespeare’s splendor, their grotesque passion was the raw stuff of Antony and Cleopatra. They were quite shameless, so that sometimes I left the room quickly on one excuse or another. Their laughter would float downstairs after me. It was not mean or mocking, but indolent and a little wistful, as if to say that innocence is indeed a worthy thing, but, in the world as it is, such a burden.
One-Eyed Annie was as ugly a woman as I have ever seen. Ben doted on her. Whenever she was out of the house, he would prowl around restlessly, always in his undershirt. His shoulders were massive and he was tattooed like a head hunter. He walked noiselessly and he had a caressing softness of voice and an extreme gentleness of gesture that seemed less natural than the result of some conscious constraint that had settled into a habit. If I had known more about the world, I would have placed Ben Santi more quickly. He was a pimp.
Sometimes he would drift down to my room and ply me with the wisdom of the deep slums—a jungle theory of individualism, in which a man was merely a phallic symbol, as strong as his power to attract women, or pull a knife or a gun on the rest of life which was his natural prey. Ben liked to talk to me because I never interrupted him. It seemed to me at last that behind Ben Santi’s compulsion to talk was a deep fear, a foreknowledge, like a touch of frost, that the powers he worshipped cannot last long, and that when they failed, he would be dead, although he must go on living.
Once I stood with Ben Santi, just at twilight, in a third-floor dormer and we looked out across the jumbled roofs of the Old Quarter. I did not know just why we were waiting there. Then a steamboat whistled on the Mississippi River. “Annie’s comin’ home,” Ben said with sudden brightness and I realized that it was she we were waiting for in the dusk. “That’s the steamer Sidney comin’ in,” said Ben. The steamer Sidney was an excursion boat. “Every day, I send Annie to hustle on the steamer Sidney. And I’m tellin you, boy, when Annie gets home I’m goin’ to beat the livin’ hell out of her.” “What for?” I asked. I saw from his eyes that he considered me hopeless. “For hustlin’,” he said fiercely and walked away.
Jules Radon did not live in the house, but he spent a good part of his days there. He sometimes came in very early in the morning and slept on the bare floors. Like me, he wore a uniform. He had seen service in France. He was all but nondescript, except that his chin was a flat plane from his lip to his chin point. Like Ben Santi, he had a catlike walk. I never knew just how he lived, and he never told me, though I made several guesses. But I knew that, like me, he seldom had enough to eat.
From him I learned what kindness there was in the lower depths. My money had run so low that I now made a loaf of bread last for two days, instead of one. The diet began to tell. I was tired and weak, and sometimes in the great heat I found it too much trouble to get up or move around. I felt trapped too. Early one evening, as I lay with my face to the wall, I heard the shutters of my door open. Jules Radon said: “Let’s go eat.” I was too listless to turn and look at him. I said: “Thanks, I’ve eaten.” I felt him stand there a moment, looking down at me. Then, without saying anything, he went out. When I finally turned over, I found that he had left a fifty-cent piece on my bed.
I had written to my mother several times from New Orleans, concealing my condition. Now it was clear that I must do one of two things: I must try to beat my way back north or I’ must ask my family to send me money to return with. I did not feel up to jumping freights or riding rods, especially in the South. I wrote for money.
My father wired me the price of a ticket to New York and a few dollars more.
XXXII
In New York, I missed my mother and brother who had waited for the train from the South in the Pennsylvania Station. By chance, I overtook them outside. For a moment, they did not recognize the gaunt youth in the uniform.
My father, when we met, had the good sense to ask me nothing at all. He was gracious. He seemed to recognize that something had happened. I felt a warmth toward him, as of son to father, that I had not felt before. Two things were quickly agreed: I was to enter college the following fall (1920); meanwhile, he was to get me a job at once at the Frank Seaman Company, the New York advertising firm, where he was manager of the art department.
The day he was to take me to Frank Seaman’s, we rode together on the train to New York, as usual, in complete silence. As we neared the City, my father leaned over and said that it might be embarrassing for him if I worked at Frank Seaman’s as his son. People might talk about favoritism. The new warmth I felt for him froze. I knew that my father’s real reason was not talk about favoritism. That was nonsense. I knew that he was afraid that I might not do a good job. But since he wanted it that way, I said that I would take my grandfather’s name: Charles Whittaker.
Under that name, I went to work and soon earned myself a couple of raises. I had the difficult task of dealing all day with my father without seeming to know him. He did not make this any easier by holding occasional unguarded conversations with me in the halls, conversations that were quickly noticed. Rumors spread. Soon the story was out. Everybody knew that I was Jay Chambers’ son, and a very curious situation it must have seemed.
Incidentally, those were the days when E. B. White was seeing my father, and that curious situation is perhaps one reason why he never heard my father mention my name—as White hastened to inform the world in The New Yorker, soon after the Hiss Case broke.
XXXIII
In the fall of 1920, I entered Williams College. A room was assigned to me and my furniture had been shipped. But one or two days on that beautiful and expensive campus told me that Williams was not the place for me, that my parents could never stand the costs of that little Harvard. I saw that I had a quick and difficult decision to make. I took a night train for New York. The next morning, before going home, I entered Columbia University. There I could live at home and all expenses would be less. Since I lacked certain requir
ements for entrance, I took a general intelligence test and passed without difficulty. I also used the occasion to rid myself at last of the name, Vivian. In its place, I took my mother’s family name: Whittaker.
I remained at Columbia until my junior year. When I entered, I was a conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, entirely by my own choice, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion. I had published in a campus literary magazine an atheist playlet, of which the Hiss defense was to make large use twenty-six years later. The same year, I went to Europe and saw Germany in the manic throes of defeat. I returned to Columbia, this time paying my own way. In 1925, I voluntarily withdrew for the express purpose of joining the Communist Party. For I had come to believe that the world we live in was dying, that only surgery could now save the wreckage of mankind, and that the Communist Party was history’s surgeon.
At Columbia, like all freshmen, I was at once assigned a faculty adviser. In my case, he was Mark Van Doren, then a young instructor in the English department. Like all really first-rate teachers, Mark Van Doren’s personal influence on his students was great—in my case, powerful and long-lasting. We quickly passed to a first-name basis and developed a friendship of respect and common interests, which, no doubt, was stronger on my side than on his. Mark was not then a nationally known literary critic and poet. He was working on his first book of poems, Spring Thunder, of which he sent me a copy as soon as it was published. All problems of writing, but especially of poetry, touched him profoundly, and he brought to them incisive judgment, humor and exceptional common sense.
I soon began to bombard him with the poems I was writing, very bad poems, most of which he rejected out of hand, but with such understanding that he never left any wound, only a disappointment that I could not measure up to his standard, and a determination to do so.
Mark Van Doren (and certain of my fellow students) first developed in me the belief that writing poetry is not, as my mother and many other people supposed, a somewhat disreputable pursuit, but a way of life—one of the highest to which a man can be called. I thought that I was called. Mark Van Doren agreed with me, or led me to suppose so.
When I returned from Europe in 1923, I began to arrange my life so that I could devote most of my time to writing verse. I took a part-time job at the New York Public Library, where I worked at the desk in the newspaper room at night. The rest of my time was my own. I was living at home. I set about a definite poetic project. Its purpose was twofold. I wished to preserve through the medium of poetry the beautiful Long Island of my boyhood before it was destroyed forever by the advancing City. I wished to dramatize the continual defeat of the human spirit in our time, by itself and by the environment in which it finds itself. With my deep attachment to the earth I grew up on, the spread of the tentacular towns across it, felling the little woods, piping the shallow brooks through culverts, burying the little farms under rows of identical suburban houses, struck me an almost physical blow. Those sprawling developments, without character or form, destroying the beauty that had been for an ugliness that had no purpose but function and profit, seemed to epitomize all that I dreaded in the life around me. By defacing the one part of itself that had been intimately mine, it cut my roots and left me more than an alien, a man without soil, and, therefore, without nation. I called the book: Defeat in the Village. It was to be an autobiography of mood, but not of factual reality. Each of the poems in it bore some relationship of tone or feeling to the next poem, and all were intended to build up to a climax of despair. Few of the poems were autobiographical in any other sense. Few were based on real occurrences, though some were touched off by them. Many of them were inspired by places, and in the years when I was composing them, I took to wandering a great deal at night, especially around the little Long Island harbor of East Rockaway, where the tides of my childhood still exerted a strong pull, and the mists and the darkness blotted out the ugliness of the present and helped me to recall the Long Island of the past.
In time, I had written a fair-sized book. I submitted it to a national poetry contest where Defeat in the Village was just “nosed out” of first place (I was duly informed) by Chinese White, a book of poems by the wife of the Daily Worker cartoonist, William Cropper.
I concluded, after several years of trying, that I never could write poetry good enough to be worth writing. My natural development had, in fact, settled the matter for me. For as soon as I began to shake off the influence of authentic poets, I found myself writing prose. I used to think, sometimes, that those versifying years were a complete and stunning waste. But I came to see that I was mistaken. Those were the years of apprenticeship, during which, by trial and error, I was beginning to learn the difficult, humbling, exacting art of writing.
They were more. They were the years in which my mind first awakened to one of the languages of the soul. It filled me with a strange elation. I realized at last that I had been listening to it all my life without knowing what it was, and that its unheard logic blended in a consistent tone all that was most personal in my experience. I was like an adult who first learns to speak. Awkwardly, I fumbled, in my early manhood, to give expression to the strongest impression of my earliest childhood—the enfolding beauty of the external world. It was the flooding and ebbing tides, the sense of the ocean, beating on its beaches as on the edge of the world, or of its mists, folding the houses and streets of my childhood under silence, that I groped to express in verse. I remained a babbler, in part because I grasped the outward effects of that language, but not its inward principle. I continued to hear it in the highest moments of my life long before I recognized what voice spoke it to me.
XXXIV
When I first withdrew from Columbia College, I felt a renewed sense of life, and a great desire to go somewhere and do something entirely new. I spoke to Mark Van Doren about it. “Why don’t you go to Soviet Russia?” he asked. “The Russian Revolution is like Elizabethan England. All the walls are falling down. You should go and see it.” He suggested that I might go as a relief worker for the Friends Service Committee which was then administering Quaker relief in the Russian famine areas. He offered to write, recommending me to certain ”weighty Friends.”
The first Friend I saw was J. Barnard Walton, a pleasant, businesslike Quaker who was then, I believe, the head of the Service Committee. I stayed in Philadelphia several days, meeting other Friends and canvassing the possibilities of my going to the Soviet Union. A new and enormously tranquilizing spirit enveloped me. It emanated from those quiet presences whom I met, from the chaste Quaker rooms with their plain and fine proportions, or simply from the sound of the plain language, as voices asked me: “How is thee, Whittaker Chambers?” The 17th century form was still touched with the sweetness of the Middle Ages. This is my natural home, I thought. I wanted nothing so much as to remain in it.
Then the story of my atheist play reached Friends. There was a horrified reaction. I received one of those letters, such as only Quakers can write, which, in the most restrained language, said in effect: “You are outcast.”
It was an invisible turning point in my life. If, at that moment, one Friend had said: “Sit down with me and tell me, what have you in your heart,” this book need never have been written. As it was, it took me seventeen years to find my way, unaided, back to that peace.
1 thought of this incident when, later on, I translated from the German a number of little parables and stories about the Arj. The Arj was a Jewish religious leader, who, like Christ, used to walk about the hills of Palestine, teaching and talking with his disciples. One day, the Arj suddenly said: “Let us all go down to Jerusalem.” The disciples began to murmur. Some thought of their wives at home. Some thought of their suppers. They said that they would not go. They walked on in silence. Then one of the disciples asked: “Why did you want us to go down to Jerusalem?” The Arj answered sadly: “That was a moment in eternity. If, at that moment, we had all been
of one mind to go down to Jerusalem, the people would have been saved.”
At the time, I felt only a stinging sense of rejection. I asked myself bitterly: “Where in Christendom is the Christian?”
XXXV
One misty midnight, as I wandered home from one of my lonely ramblings around East Rockaway Harbor, I made out the figure of a woman, waiting for the trolley to Brooklyn. The tracks were two blocks from our house. When I came up to her, I saw that it was my grandmother Whittaker. “Grandma!” I said. I had not seen her for several years.
She smiled sweetly without answering, as if we had just parted or there was nothing strange in our meeting unexpectedly at that lonely place and hour. I supposed that she had been at our house during my absence (she had not).
“Aren’t you going to stay overnight with us?” I asked.
She raised her hand for quiet. “Ssshh,” she said, “he’s calling me.”
“Who is?” I asked. I listened and heard only night sounds. “Nobody is calling, Grandmother,” I said.
“Oh, yes, he is,” she said. “Listen. He’s saying: ‘Mary! Mary!’ Don’t you hear him?”
I realized that my grandmother Whittaker was insane.
XXXVI
My grandmother would not come home with me that night. I waited with her, and, with many misgivings, put her aboard the late trolley. I did not know what else to do. I told my mother what had happened and she told me a bit of family lore quite new to me. Grandmother Whittaker had been in love with the president of one of the big railroads. She understood that he meant to marry her. But they broke up. One day, she tried to see him at his office. He would not see her. After that, she told my mother, she had found detectives trailing her. My mother thought that the part about the visit and the detectives might be true, that the gentleman had taken that means to rid himself of my grandmother, and that the shock, remembered over the years, had unsettled her mind in old age. She hoped that it would pass. It did not, of course.
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