Max Bedacht had somehow convinced himself that I was the son of Robert W. Chambers, the novelist. No doubt, the same surname and the fact that we both wrote (though for somewhat different markets) made kinship seem self-evident to him. When the novelist died, shortly after I came to know Bedacht, he congratulated me on coming into a fat legacy, which I believe he thought was about to be swept into the party’s till. When I tried to undeceive him, his disappointment was so great that at first he insisted that I was covering up, and I had some trouble convincing him that Robert W. Chambers and Whittaker Chambers were really unrelated.
For Bedacht had the thrifty, bookkeeping mind. He was a little man, a Swiss, who had once been a barber, and, later on, a taxidermist. When I knew him better, the Communist Party’s secret link with the Soviet Military Intelligence would sometimes pause at the show windows of stuffed animal shops and complain about the uncraftsmanly mounting and especially the unrealistic way the glass eyes were done.
The day he first commanded me to his office, he was not cordial. He looked like a shopkeeper who has been caught by a late customer just at closing time and is trying to hide behind his glasses. He also looked a little like Heinrich Himmler. (Like Himmler before he became chief of the Gestapo, Bedacht, after his expulsion from the party in the 40’s, became a chicken farmer.) About both brief, tidy men there was a disturbing quality of secret power mantling insignificance—what might be called the ominousness of nonentity, which is peculiar to the terrible little figures of our time.
“What are you doing now, Comrade Chambers?” Bedacht asked me. I said that I was editing the New Masses. “You were out of the party for a while, weren’t you?” he asked. I said that I had been out of the party. “For some reason,” he said, as if he strongly disapproved of the whole business, “they want you to go into one of the party’s ‘special institutions.”’ Bedacht always used that expression in referring to any of the Communist underground apparatuses. But it was a term new to me.
I asked what he meant. “It is a ‘special institution,’” he repeated. As I still looked blank, he added: “They want you to do underground work.”
I asked: “What does underground work mean?” “I don’t know,” he said. “They will tell you.” I saw that, even if he did know, Bedacht would not tell me.
I asked if it meant that I would have to leave the New Masses. He said that I would and that I would also have to leave the open Communist Party. I pointed out that I had just returned to the party and had just begun to edit the New Masses. If I dropped out of sight, there would be a lot of gossip. “I told them that,” said Bedacht.
I said that I must have some time to think it over. Bedacht looked annoyed (I now know that he was under pressure from the underground to hurry). “You can have until tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he warned me not to mention our conversation to anyone but my wife. I left him.
In our time, a thousand similar conversations must have taken place under just such unarresting auspices. Every man to whom such a summons has come must have found it deeply unsettling. Just the implication of undefined power lurking behind a figure like Bedacht and suddenly giving him ambiguous meaning, is disturbing. The terms “special institution” and “underground” could only mean secret, possibly dangerous party work. They could only mean that, somewhere beside the open Communist Party, there existed a concealed party which functioned so smoothly that in seven years as a Communist I had not suspected it. At that time, I thought of the underground as an underground of the American Communist Party.
As a Communist, I felt a quiet elation at the knowledge that there was one efficient party organization and that it had selected me to work with it. There was also a little electric jab in the thought. In the nature of its work, such an organization could not pick its personnel at random. Therefore, for some time, it must have been watching me. Unknown to me, eyes must have been observing me. For the first time, I did something involuntary that would soon cease to be involuntary, and would become a technique —I glanced back to see if anybody were following me.
It was clear that, reaching out, from where I could not tell, something completely unforeseeable had happened to me, which could only mean a turning point in my life. But my life was no longer only my life. It was also my wife’s life. I had intended to spend that night in New York. Instead, I took the train home to discuss the new challenge with her.
II
Home was then a wild lonely farm, six miles from Glen Gardner, in Hunterdon County, in western New Jersey. My wife and I had moved there early in the cold spring of 1932. The move was more like a flight than a move. It was the first outcropping of a need that was to die down, but never again to die out of my life, and was finally to dominate it—my need to live close to the land as I had when a boy.
During my years in the open Communist Party, I had little by little put the countryside out of my mind. The intellectual change that I had to make in becoming a Communist had required all of my effort. My hours at the Daily Worker had taken most of my time. Communism is a faith of the cities, and can look upon the countryside only to organize, that is to say, to destroy it. And while simply to enter a city is for me always a little like entering a grave, in those years I forced myself to live in New York and learned to shut my mind and my eyes against it because to open either to it filled me with dislike and disgust. As a Communist, that is to say, a man dedicated to directing history, I had no choice. For it is clear that the history of the 20th century will be determined by the cities, not by the countryside.
But in my two years outside the Communist Party, my old need for the land asserted itself. In the spring of 1932, that craving seized me like an infection which I could not throw off, and which made me physically ill. The slum in which we lived became unendurable to me—not just because it was a slum. Every other part of the city affected me in the same way. I felt that life was not worth living if it had to be lived away from the land.
At that point, two friends, two left-wing intellectuals, who owned a farm near Glen Gardner, proposed that my wife and I should go out and remodel their barn as a house, where we could then live rent-free.
The barn had not been used for years. It was weathered, window-less, drafty, but its frame was solid. It stood between a dirt road, where few cars passed, and a little brook, which could not be seen under its ferns. Behind rose a densely wooded mountainside. My wife and I had almost no money. We did not care. We set to work to lay floors out of old lumber and to raise walls of field stone. In our spare time we planted gardens. Few periods of our life have been so happy. All around us, in the earliest spring, the benzoin bushes put out their little yellow flowers on bare branches and filled the air with searching sweetness. Behind us, the brook gurgled, and all day the thrushes filled the mountainside with their flutings.
Sometimes, at sundown, we would walk to the edge of a hill from which we could see out across a valley, its farms and a village. One evening we reached the rim of the lookout, and the village with its white-spired church lay toylike and sun-touched below us. It had rained. The air was a pure ocean. Suddenly, there floated up to us through it from far below, the voices of hundreds of robins chanting together. The sound, floating in the air, seemed to have no connection with the earth, so that we stood silently side by side, listening to it, until the sun set and even the height where we stood grew dark. My wife and I do not often talk about such things, but each of us knew that it was one of the peaks of our life together, when we understood how deeply we needed each other because we understood how deeply we loved the same things. Recently, I was describing the farm at Glen Gardner to my children, and when that moment came back to me I stopped and smiled unconsciously. “I know what you are thinking about,” said my wife who was watching me, “you are remembering the robins in the valley.”
Glen Gardner was too far from New York for me to commute every day, and commutation was too expensive. During the New Masses week, I usually stayed at the Jacob Burcks’ or the Int
rators’, for, after the fashion of Communist friends, we all shared our lodgings, our food, our money, and even our clothes. This weekly separation was hard on both of us, especially on my wife. But she spent the days in endless activity and one of the joys of homecoming was to see how much she had accomplished in the barn and the gardens while I was gone. For fifteen dollars, we had bought an old Ford with which we sometimes drove to and from the station at Glen Gardner. Much of the time it did not work. Then I would take the short cut across the mountain and walk the six miles to the station. This walk appalled our friends. But like our other hardships, we regarded it as something that a Communist takes in his stride.
My wife used to walk part of the way with me. The short cut ran through a great apple orchard that in April was heavy with bloom and humming with bees. Sometimes, as we climbed through the woods, deer, that we had not seen until they broke before us, would swim across fallen trees, and blend with the shadows and the stillness. Halfway up the mountain, my wife would sit down on a tree trunk while I climbed higher, turning to look back at her until she was out of sight—a lonely little figure in the silence (the partings were the worst).
It was to this sanctuary I hurried after my talk with Max Bedacht. I told my wife what had happened. She listened without interrupting. Then, like me, she asked what underground work meant. I said that I did not know exactly, but that it must be secret and important party work. She sat so silent that I glanced at her and saw that her face was quivering and that she was trying not to cry. I took her hand.
“I do not want to stand in the way of anything that you think is right and that you must do,” she said through her tears. “But, dear heart, don’t do it.”
“Why not?” I asked. “It is the most responsible work the party can offer me. I am a revolutionist.”
“I don’t know,” she said sobbing, “I don’t know why not. You must do what you think is right. But I am afraid. Please, dear heart, don’t do it.” I cannot stand my wife’s tears. I promised not to go into the underground.
III
I did not say no to Comrade Bedacht at once. I simply urged again that my recent return to the party, and the fact that I had edited only two issues of the New Masses, would cause talk if I disappeared. Impatiently, Bedacht brushed aside my objections as something that had already been settled.
Then I said: “I am sorry, but I have decided not to do it.” “You have no choice,” said the little man. He meant, of course, that I was under the discipline of the party and that, if I did not go into the underground, I would go out of the party. “In fact,” he added, “in a few minutes I am going to take you to someone from the ‘special institution.’”
We waited. Now and again, Bedacht glanced at his watch. Evidently, he had a prearranged appointment with the man he was taking me to and was giving him time to arrive. Then we left Communist headquarters (I for the last time). We walked to Union Square and down a subway entrance. Under Union Square, the tunnels that connect the B.M.T. and the East Side subways form a small catacomb. “You know the man you are going to meet,” Bedacht said. But he would not tell me who the man was. In a tunnel we came upon a loitering figure who stood staring at the ground. He glanced up, as we approached, and smiled. It was John Sherman whom I had last seen crying in the Daily Worker office.
Bedacht introduced him formally as if we were strangers. “This is Don,” he said. To Don he added: “If you have no more jobs for me, I‘ll leave you.” Sherman and I walked quickly in the opposite direction to that Bedacht had taken, and presently strolled through the West Side. Sherman was almost kittenish, as if he had played a particularly good joke on life. Clearly, he felt that, in drawing me into the underground, he was rescuing me from the open Communist Party toward which, since his expulsion, he felt personally vindictive. He brushed off all my questions as to where he had been since I last saw him (later I was to learn that he had been in touch with the underground in 1929, and had been absorbed by it as soon as he was expelled). “You’re in the underground now,” said Sherman exultantly, “where I ask questions, but don’t answer them, and you answer questions, but don’t ask them.”
He asked me if I was married and, when I told him that I was, said: Good. He asked me if I had any children and, when I said no, said: Very good. Then he told me that at seven o’clock that night, I must meet him on the uptown subway platform at 116th Street —the subway stop of Columbia University. “Where are you going now?” he asked as we parted. I said that I was going to the New Masses. “Do you have to?” he asked. I said that I had to. “It had better be the last time,” he said. “In our work, you will never go near the New Masses. You will never have anything to do with party people again. If you do, we will know it. You’re a respectable bourgeois now.”
IV
I left the New Masses office about six o’clock to keep my uptown appointment with Sherman. I walked to the 14th Street subway station, glancing behind me, in my new way, to see if I were being watched. I could not see anybody. But, as I waited on the subway platform, a hand dropped on my shoulder. It was Sherman, who had come up behind me. “How did you know I would be here?” I asked. He smiled knowingly and did not answer.
At 96th Street, we had to change trains. I started to get up as the train drew into the station. Sherman gripped my arm and pulled me down. “Always stay seated,” he said, “until everybody else is leaving the car. Always be the last one off.”
We did not go to 116th Street. Instead, we got off at 110th Street, sauntered up Broadway and wove our way over to Riverside Drive near Grant’s Tomb. On the downtown side of the Drive, a big black car was parked. A big man—a Russian, I would soon learn —sat at the wheel. Sherman opened the rear door and told me to get in. Then he sat in the front seat beside the driver, who did not turn to greet or look at me. He and Sherman discussed matters which I have forgotten and which, in any case, I did not understand. We drove down Riverside Drive.
Presently, the Russian looked at me in the mirror. He was young, perhaps in his thirties, with a round, firm, commanding face and a trick of opening his eyes wide to express surprise or emphasis. He was very well-dressed and wore an expensive fedora hat. (I was hatless, tieless, and had on a khaki shirt and slacks.) Sherman addressed the driver with the slight deference natural in speaking to a superior and called him Otto or Carl—I have forgotten which. I was later to know of him also as Herbert. All these names were underground pseudonyms. Herbert was, as Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, who will appear later on in this narrative, would afterwards tell me, a tank officer in the Leningrad military district of the Red Army.
I no longer remember the order of the conversation that followed. It was held in a slightly bantering tone and consisted of questions, which Herbert asked and which I answered. I had the impression that he already knew most of the answers and asked the questions as a matter of form, and perhaps to see if my answers would differ from what he knew.
He asked me when I had joined the Communist Party, why I had left it, if I was a Lovestoneite and the circumstances of my return to the party. (Both Sherman and Herbert treated. this grave subject as if they viewed it from a height from which political differences in the American Communist Party were like the games of children. ) Herbert asked about my work at the New Masses. He asked me if I knew the nature of the apparatus (the first time I had met that party word for organization ) with which I was in contact. He seemed very much amused when I said that I did not. He did not offer to tell me what its nature was. He asked me if I was married and if my wife was a party member. He did not seem at all disturbed that she was not. But the fact that we lived in the country made him frown. In an aside to Sherman, he said that I must at once find a suitable place to live in New York City.
He warned me that henceforth I must absolutely separate myself from all contacts with Communists and the Communist Party, and live as much as possible like a respectable bourgeois. I saw him glance at my tieless shirt and slacks. In another aside to Sherman, he said some
thing about getting me properly dressed while both laughed at the careless costumes of Communists in the open party. He said that the apparatus would give me $100 a month to live on, that Sherman would pay me, be my boss and that I was to obey him unfailingly. I have forgotten in what words Herbert gave me to understand that discipline in the underground was strict and that disobedience brought stiff penalties. It scarcely mattered, for his voice, manner and presence suggested secret and seemingly limitless power.
Then Herbert said to Sherman, “We will have to give him a new name.” To me he said: “I think we will call you Bob. You look like Bob to me.” He repeated solemnly that I was never to return to the New Masses or any Communist office. “That is a military command,” he said stiffly and his eyes flew open in their peculiar way.
We had reached Broadway in the upper 40’S. Sherman arranged with me the time and place when I would next meet him. Then Herbert asked me to get out of the car and he and Sherman drove off together.
I walked about the streets, still watching to see if I were followed, brooding on that strange meeting and my gentle wife, sobbing: “Dear heart, don’t do it.” A force greater than myself had picked me up and was disposing of me—a force that, in the end, it would all but cost me my life to break away from, and may yet cost my life, for there is more than one way of killing a man, and the story, begun that night, is not ended.
V
When I met and shook hands with Sherman a day or so later, he left in the palm of my hand a roll of bills. “Why?” I asked him. He said: “For clothes. In our work, you can’t go around the way you used to on the Daily Worker.” Without question he was right. Yet there was something ugly in the fact and in the gesture. The fact violated the asceticism (or puritanism), the denial of the values of the world as it is, that lies close to the heart of Communism, as of all great faiths. The gesture violated something else. Several years’ later, Sherman would say to me: “Always give money to a new man. It obligates him to you.” Then I realized that it was the fact that Sherman had been waiting for me with the money rolled up in his hand that had made the calculated gesture ugly. He had given me fifty dollars. With that I outfitted myself.
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