Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Across the table from me was sitting John McManus, then Time’s very fluent radio writer, later an American Labor Party candidate for Governor of New York. He stared at me balefully. “I should think your favorite movie,” he said, “would be The Informer.” A mighty armor is our innocence. Guilelessly, I agreed. The picturization of the novel by the brother of my old Daily Worker colleague, Tom O’Flaherty, was in fact one of my favorite movies. It was several minutes before I suddenly realized what McManus meant.

  My tacit exclusion from writing Communist news at first exasperated me, for I saw no one around me (except the Communists, of course) who knew anything at all about the subject. But gradually I welcomed the ban. I began to see that the kind of sniping that I had been doing was shallow and largely profitless; anybody could do that. It seemed to me that I had a more important task to do, one that was peculiarly mine. It was not to attack Communism frontally. It was to clarify, on the basis of the news, the religious and moral position that made Communism evil. I had been trying to make a negative point. Now I had to state the positive position, and it was a much more formidable task than attack, for it meant explaining simply and readably for millions the reasons why the great secular faith of this age is wrong and the religious faith of the ages is right; why, in the words of the Song of Roland, the Christians are right and the heathen are wrong.

  This change in my mood and my work reflected a deepening within myself.

  XV

  One of Time’s top editors asked me one day what section of the magazine I would most like to write, if I had my choice. The implication was that, if possible, he would let me write it. I said: “Religion.” He shot me a terrified glance. “I wouldn’t dare,” he said. He was thinking of my Communist past. A year later, by Henry Luce’s personal order, I wrote the cover story on Pope Pius XII, and the Jesuits ordered several hundred copies of the essay to be used in their schools. I felt that I was beginning to carry out that command which I believed had been laid upon me in the hall at Mount Royal Terrace.

  Men may seek God alone. They must worship him in common. The words of Miguel de Unamuno also express my own conviction: “A miserere sung in a cathedral by a multitude tormented by destiny is equal to a philosophy.” The God it worships is what a nation is, and how he worships Him defines what a man is. I sought a congregation in which I could worship God as the expression of a common need. For I had not changed from secular to religious faith in order to tolerate a formless good will vaguely tinctured with rationalized theology and social uplift. I was not seeking ethics; I was seeking God. My need was to be a practicing Christian in the same sense that I had been a practicing Communist. I was seeking a community of worship in which a daily mysticism (for I hold that God cannot be known in any other way) would be disciplined and fortified by an orderly, and even practical, spirit and habit of life and the mind. Some instinctive sense of my need, abetted by a memory of a conversation with my grandmother Chambers, which I have written about earlier, drew me powerfully to the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers.

  Yet I hesitated. I hesitated because the Quaker rebuff to me in my youth, which I have also mentioned, lashing me at a moment of personal distress, and tender and naive submission to the Quaker spirit, had left an unhealing scar. But I hesitated even more because the traditional Quaker witness against war seemed to close the door of the meeting house against me, forever barring me from the peace within which it was my pathos to crave, but not my right to share. Friends refused to bear arms even in a righteous war because all war is, by its nature evil, and to bear arms even righteously can only perpetuate evil in the forms of hate and death. Few had reason to know better than I that the problem of evil is inseparable in our time from this century’s inevitable struggle against it in its political form of Communism. For that very reason, I above all, could not refuse to struggle against it by all means, including arms. With a pang, I concluded that, for me, the Quakers were the friends to whom I had no natural right, and their peaceful meeting houses, the homes which were not destined to be mine.

  But my need to be part of a community of worship was pressing. Chance threw me together at Time with Samuel Gardner Welles, who became my close friend and whose family became my friends. Welles was the son of a revered Episcopal clergyman and brother of a bishop. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Welles introduced me to the Reverend William Dudley Foulke Hughes, who instructed and baptised me, and presently assisted at my confirmation by the late Bishop Manning. My sponsors were Welles and my old friend Robert Cantwell, who had returned to the church just before me. After the ceremony, the Bishop, then an old man, frail, but with an imperious and reverend fierceness, drew me aside and pledged me to the struggle for faith against secularism and evil.

  Sunday is one of Time’s two busiest days. Church attendance is all but impossible. On week days, I used to attend vespers, traveling for that purpose up to the Cathedral of St. John. There was a solemnity in the service at the altar. There was a solemnity of another kind in the great spaces of the unfinished church, in which huddled the little group with which I worshipped—old people mostly, who seemed in that vast nave less like the bearers of those great tidings that had once stirred and transformed men’s souls than like the survivors of a spiritual catastrophe and an age that could not long survive them.

  When Welles was urging me to become an Episcopalian, I had warned him that I felt myself really to be a Quaker, and that only Friends’ witness against bearing arms in war kept me from becoming one of them. The need was stronger than I knew.. The silence of Quaker worship continued to reach out and draw me irresistibly to it.

  At that point, I opened the Journal of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. It was the first Quaker book that I had ever read. Three hundred years after it was written, Fox’s Journal is still less a book than a voice for those to whom it speaks. It was a voice that spoke peculiarly, as Quakers say, “to my condition.” It summoned me to a direct daily experience of God and told me that His revelation is continuous to those who seek to hear His voice in the silence of all distractions of this world. It summoned me to know the Inward Light, that of God within myself, as within all other men without exception. It enjoined on me a simplicity of the spirit whose first commandment is compassion, which is expressly commanded not to judge, and whose answer to the surging enmity of the world must be yea yea and nay nay “because more than this cometh of evil.” In short, it summoned me to the most difficult of vocations—to be a Christian as in the first century.

  The saints are invariably violent. They know what the age has forgotten in its pews—that the spirit, if it truly stirs, never brings peace, but always brings a sword. Submission to the spirit may bring peace. But the spirit itself, aroused in man or nation, is a blade that exists to divide the truth from untruth, the living from the dead, the conformist from the Christian. George Fox, the man of peace, was also a man of force. “The man in the leather breeches” was a man of the people, of sheep herding and muddy fields, of lonely footpaths and hilltop vigils, of gross despairs and uncouth righteousness, of serene inspirations and dogged sufferings, of bloody beatings and stinking prisons. I knew him as if we had spoken face to face. Few who call themselves Quakers have added anything to what he had to say to me, though I have sometimes thought that they might profitably listen for what he might have to say to them.

  In those days, the late Arthur Burke led a silent meeting on Wednesday nights at the 20th Street Meeting House in New York. I began to attend. The meetings were among the decisive experiences of my life. One in particular united the worshippers and what they worshipped in a stillness so intense that as, at its close, the spirit of the meeting seemed to ebb in great pulsations, Arthur Burke’s voice broke the vibrant silence. “This meeting,” he said, “has had a divine covering.”

  I was in fact, though not yet in name, a Quaker. An inward experience itself, beyond any power of the mind, had reached me. For what had happened to me, Robert Barclay has given t
he expression that all Quakers know because it is final for all who have suffered it: “Of which I myself, in a part, am a true witness; who not by strength of arguments or by a particular disquisition of each doctrine, and convincement of my understanding thereby, came to receive and bear witness to the Truth, but by being secretly reached by that life. For, when I came into the silent assemblies of God’s people, I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart; and, as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and the good raised up....”

  There was a little Quaker meeting—Pipe Creek Monthly Meeting of Friends—near Union Bridge, about twelve miles from where we were living in Maryland. One summer Sunday, when for some reason I was not working, I drove over to it with my little daughter. The meeting house stood, screened by trees and bushes, on a wind-swept hill. Beyond, lay the Maryland farms. Behind, lay the meeting’s burial ground. Within, my daughter and I sat in silence with a small group of Friends. The longest strand of spider web that I have ever seen looped from one wall of the meeting house to the other, and swayed gently in the breeze, for both doors were open, through which came the continual singing of birds in the burial ground behind. There is a beautiful 17th-century Quaker phrase: “in the silence of the creature.” In that silence, I gave thanks to God that I had come home.

  As we were driving back, I asked my daughter what she had been doing in the hour-long silence. “I was watching the spider web,” she said, suddenly laughing like an illumination. Then she asked me, curiously, what the others had been doing. “They were listening for the voice of God,” I said. “Did they hear it?” she asked, after considering the point for a while. “No,” I said, “I am afraid not that time.”

  XVI

  One night one of my close friends burst into my office at Time. He was holding a yellow tear-off that had just come over the teletype. “They have murdered the General,” he said. “Krivitsky has been killed.”

  Krivitsky’s body had been found in a room in a small Washington hotel a few blocks from the Capitol. He had a room permanently reserved at a large downtown hotel where he had always stayed when he was in Washington. He had never stayed at the small hotel before. Why had he gone there?

  He had been shot through the head and there was evidence that he had shot himself. At whose command? He had left a letter in which he gave his wife and children the unlikely advice that the Soviet Government and people were their best friends. Previously, he had warned them that, if he were found dead, never under any circumstances to believe that he had committed suicide. Who had forced my friend to write the letter? I remembered the saying: “Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a good natural death.”

  I had seen Walter Krivitsky in New York a few nights before he died. We had spent hours together, tramping the streets, taking circuitous routes and watching, as in the old underground days, to see if we were followed. I saw no sign of trackers. Much of our talk had been about religion. Like me, Krivitsky had become convinced that religious faith is a human necessity. But I sensed that with him that was a “position”—something that he had reasoned his way to, and not something that he had deeply felt. Nevertheless, he asked me if I would arrange for his instruction so that he could be baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. My letter, conveving his request, was in Father Hughes’s hands at the time Krivitsky was killed.

  Krivitsky also told me something else that night. A few days before, he had taken off the revolver that he usually carried and placed it in a bureau drawer. His seven-year-old son watched him. “Why do you put away the revolver?” he asked. “In America,” said Krivitsky, “nobody carries a revolver.” “Papa,” said the child, “carry the revolver.”

  XVII

  The news of Krivitsky’s death reached my wife through the newspapers before I could write to her. She and the children were spending the winter in a small, plain house in the plain and pleasant town of New Smyrna Beach, in Florida. She was overcome by panic and terror. She was unable to reach me at once at Time, and, knowing that I saw Krivitsky frequently, she was afraid that I also had been killed, or would be.

  She took the children out of school, bundled everything portable into the car, and, when she finally got through to me, was in South Carolina. On the telephone, I told her to go back, first, because, if there were any danger, and the attack on. Krivitsky was to be followed up by one on me, which I doubted, she and the children would be safer in Florida. Moreover, we were bound to help two others.

  The day after Krivitsky’s funeral, I met his widow and son during my lunch hour. I waited until just before train time to avoid observation. Then I hurried them aboard an Atlantic Coastline coach and sent them to join my family in New Smyrna Beach. The Krivitskys hid with us until spring. Then my wife drove them north.

  For a while, we all lived together in that little house near Westminster which Alger Hiss had once intended to buy. We were crowded and our mutual discomfort had a consequence very important for my family and me. My wife and I had been discussing the question of settling permanently on a farm. The congestion caused us to act more quickly than we should otherwise have done. We bought the farm near Westminster where we have lived for the last eleven years.

  But the Krivitskys did not remain with us long. Tonya Krivitsky, brave and independent, wanted to be on her own. The loneliness of our farm, and our secluded life, which we enjoyed, depressed her more sociable spirit. She and her son moved to a city, where she has ever since led an uncomplaining life of hard work, supporting herself and her son by the skill of her hands and the fortitude of her character.

  XVIII

  At last, I asked the Friends at Pipe Creek if my children might be admitted to the Meeting. I did not feel myself worthy of that fellowship. Instead, they proposed that my wife and I, together with the children, join the Meeting as a family.

  I hesitated. I asked myself if so great a blessing could be meant for me. It seemed to me that it was indeed meant to be so, and that I would be doing no wrong to respond to the summons, for though Friends, as a society, still maintain their ancient witness for peace and against war, it is the sense of modem Quakerism that, for the individual, the decision in wartime is a matter for his own conscience. As a family, we were united to the Meeting.

  Pipe Creek is an old and small Meeting. Some of the most peaceful hours of my life have been spent in the silence of its worship among its quiet and good Friends. In winter the meeting house is closed. Friends find it more convenient to worship in one another’s homes. The tone of the meeting is one of peace, rather than a groping or a soaring of the spirit. Never have I known in it anything approaching the experience of the meetings on 20th Street, though I have known a similar experience in our neighbor meeting at Menallen, in Pennsylvania.

  For that failure of the spirit, I look first of all into myself. I once heard a very old man complaining to our Friend, Eliza Rakestraw, that the meeting had been so dull that he fell asleep. “Thee brings thy meeting with thee, Henry,” she said gently.

  Others, I know, have felt what I have not. Sometimes, in one Quaker house, I have gone upstairs at the close of the meeting to speak with Martha Englar, where she sits, year in year out, beside her window. She is a fragile woman with the pale, transparent flesh of the very old and the very good. “Is that thee, David (my favorite name)?” she will ask as she hears me, in the doorway. “Come here so that I may touch thee. I cannot see thee.” She adds invariably, “I could not go downstairs. But I left my door open so that I could catch the vibrations of the meeting.”

  XIX

  “Return Home to Within,” wrote the 17th-century Quaker, Francis Howgill, “sweep your Houses all. The Goat is there, the little Leaven is there, the Grain of Mustard Seed you will see which the Kingdom of God is like... and there you will see your Teacher, not removed into a Corner, but present when you are upon your Beds and about your Labours, convincing, instructing, judging, and giving Peace to all that love and follow Him.”


  Most religious growth is slow, and so was mine. It was slow in the development of formal habits. (I have never developed satisfactory routines of worship.) I was slow in approaching the intellectual side of Christianity in which I am still a schoolboy. I tried to conform as closely as I could, without making myself singular, to the traditional habits of the sect I belonged to. I sought to discipline myself to say nothing unkind against any man and to curb gossip (an almost inhuman task in any human organization). I was surprised at how much I had been inadvertently guilty of in a day. I gave up swearing completely and I almost never drank even when heavy drinking was in swing. I did not believe in never drinking, for no one was ever able to tell me when drinking may not be as medicinal to the spirit as alcohol sometimes is to the body. I dressed as plainly as possible (my dark suit when I began to testify in the first Hiss trial was instantly a target for newsmen and I switched to grays because the darker suit had ceased to be a witness at that point and had become a provocation). Most Quakers have given up the witness of the “plain dress.” I meant to keep to a form of it suitably modified. I believed with Job Scott: “The flesh saith, there is little in dress; religion does not consist in apparel; there is little in language, there is little in paying tythes etc..... To which, I think, it may be safely added, there is little or nothing in people who plead as above hinted... ” For I hold, contrary to many Friends, that all the original Quaker witnesses were never more important, not because it is desirable that the world should be convinced by them, but that by means of them the Quaker should make his own person a living testimony against the world, should thereby protest mutely that those things which the modem world holds dear and indispensable are at the root of its despair.