Chambers was brought to the party when it was well advanced. If he had any expectations to being welcomed back from underground to the upper world, he was soon disillusioned. Some of the guests, acknowledging that he was in danger, took the view that fates similar to the one he feared for himself had no doubt been visited upon some of his former comrades through his connivance, which was not to be lightly forgiven. Others, though disenchanted with Communist policy, were not yet willing to believe that the Communist ethic countenanced secrecy and violence; they judged the information they were given about Chambers’s danger to be a libelous fantasy and wanted no contact with the man who propagated it. After a few rebuffs, Chambers ceased to offer his hand in greeting and he did not stay at the party beyond the time that was needed to establish that he had been present at it.
In such thought as I may have given to Chambers over the next years, that Halloween party figured as the culmination and end of his career as a tragic comedian of radical politics. In this, of course, I was mistaken, but his terrible entry upon the historical stage in the Hiss case was not forced upon him until 1948, and through the intervening decade one might suppose that he had permanently forsaken the sordid sublimities of revolutionary politics and settled into the secure anti-climax of bourgeois respectability. In 1939 he had begun his successful association with Time. During the years which followed, I met him by chance on a few occasions; he had a hunted, fugitive look—how not?—but he was patently surviving, and as the years went by he achieved a degree of at least economic security and even a professional reputation of sorts with the apocalyptic pieties of his news-stories for Time and the sodden profundities of his cultural essays for Life. Except as these may have made me aware of him, he was scarcely in my purview—until suddenly he thrust himself, in the way I have described, into the story I was trying to tell. I understood him to have come—he, with all his absurdity!—for the purpose of representing the principle of reality.
At this distance in time the mentality of the Communist-oriented intelligentsia of the thirties and forties must strain the comprehension even of those who, having observed it at first hand, now look back upon it, let alone of those who learn about it from such historical accounts of it as have been written.[1] That mentality was presided over by an impassioned longing to believe. The ultimate object of this desire couldn’t fail to be disarming—what the fellow-traveling intellectuals were impelled to give their credence to was the ready feasibility of contriving a society in which reason and virtue would prevail. A proximate object of the will to believe was less abstract—a large segment of the progressive intellectual class was determined to credit the idea that in one country, Soviet Russia, a decisive step had been taken toward the establishment of just such a society. Among those people of whom this resolute belief was characteristic, any predication about the state of affairs in Russia commanded assent so long as it was of a “positive” nature, so long, that is, as it countenanced the expectation that the Communist Party, having actually instituted the reign of reason and virtue in one nation, would go forward to do likewise throughout the world.
Once the commitment to this belief had been made, no evidence might, or could, bring it into doubt. Whoever ventured to offer such evidence stood self-condemned as deficient in good will. And should it ever happen that reality did succeed in breaching the believer’s defenses against it, if ever it became unavoidable to acknowledge that the Communist Party, as it functioned in Russia, did things, or produced conditions, which by ordinary judgment were to be deplored and which could not be accounted for by either the state of experimentation or the state of siege in which the Soviet Union notoriously stood, then it was plain that ordinary human judgment was not adequate to the deplored situation whose moral justification must be revealed by some other agency, commonly “the dialectic.”
But there came a moment when reality did indeed breach the defenses that had been erected against it, and not even the dialectic itself could contain the terrible assault it made upon faith. In 1939 the Soviet Union made its pact with Nazi Germany. There had previously been circumstances—among them the Comintern’s refusal to form a united front with the Social Democrats in Germany, thus allowing Hitler to come to power; the Moscow purge trials; the mounting evidence that vast prison camps did exist in the Soviet Union—which had qualified the moral prestige of Stalinist Communism in one degree or another, yet never decisively. But now to that prestige a mortal blow seemed to have been given. After the Nazi–Soviet pact one might suppose that the Russia of Stalin could never again be the ground on which the hope of the future was based, that never again could it command the loyalty of men of good will.
Yet of course the grievous hurt was assuaged before two years had passed. In 1941 Hitler betrayed his pact with Stalin, the German armies marched against Russia and by this action restored Stalinist Communism to its sacred authority. Radical intellectuals, and those who did not claim that epithet but modestly spoke of themselves as liberal or progressive or even only democratic, would now once again be able to find their moral bearings and fare forward.
Not that things were just as they had been before. It could not be glad confident morning again, not quite. A considerable number of intellectuals who had once been proud to identify themselves by their sympathy with Communism now regarded it with cool reserve. Some even expressed antagonism to it, perhaps less to its theory than to the particularities of its conduct. And those who avowed their intention of rebutting this position did not venture to call themselves by a name any more positive and likely to stir the blood than that of anti-anti-Communists.
Yet that meeching phrase tells us how much authority Stalinist Communism still had for the intellectual class. Anti-anti-Communism was not quite so neutral a position as at first it might seem to have been: it said that although, for the moment at least, one need not be actually for Communism, one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it. In the face of everything that might seem to qualify its authority, Communism had become part of the fabric of the political life of many intellectuals.
In the context, political is probably the mandatory adjective though it might be wondered whether the Communist-oriented intellectuals of the late forties did have what is properly to be called a political life. It must sometimes seem that their only political purpose was to express their disgust with politics and make an end of it once and for all, that their whole concern was to do away with those defining elements of politics which are repugnant to reason and virtue, such as mere opinion, contingency, conflicts of interest and clashes of will and the compromises they lead to. Thus it was that the way would be cleared to usher in a social order in which rational authority would prevail. Such an order was what the existence of the Soviet Union promised, and although the promise must now be a tacit one, it was still in force.
So far as The Middle of the Journey had a polemical end in view, it was that of bringing to light the clandestine negation of the political life which Stalinist Communism had fostered among the intellectuals of the West. This negation was one aspect of an ever more imperious and bitter refusal to consent to the conditioned nature of human existence. In such confrontation of this tendency as my novel proposed to make, Chambers came to its aid with what he knew, from his experience, of the reality which lay behind the luminous words of the great promise.
It was considerably to the advantage of my book that Chambers brought to it, along with reality, a sizable amount of nonsense, of factitiousness of feeling and perception. He had a sensibility which was all too accessible to large solemnities and to the more facile paradoxes of spirituality, and a mind which, though certainly not without force, was but little trained to discrimination and all too easily seduced into equating portentous utterance with truth. If my novel did have a polemical end in view, it still was a novel and not a pamphlet, and as a novel I had certain intentions for it which were served by the decisive presence in it of a character to whom could be
applied the phrase I have used of Chambers, a tragic comedian. I had no doubt that my story was a serious one, but I nevertheless wanted it to move on light feet; I was confident that its considerations were momentous, but I wanted them to be represented by an interplay between gravity and levity. The frequency with which Chambers verged on the preposterous, the extent to which that segment of reality which he really did possess was implicated in his half-inauthentic profundities made him admirably suited to my purpose. If I try to recall what emotions controlled my making of Gifford Maxim out of the traits and qualities of Whittaker Chambers, I would speak first of respect and pity, both a little wry, then of intellectual and literary exasperation and amusement.
It was not as a tragic comedian that Chambers ended his days. The development of the Hiss case made it ever less possible to see him in any kind of comic light. The obloquy in which he lived forbade it. He had, of course, known obloquy for a long time, ever since his defection from Communism and the repudiation of the revolutionary position. Even gentle people might treat him with a censorious reserve which could be taken for physical revulsion. Such conduct he had met in part by isolating himself, in part by those histrionic devices which came so easily to him, making him sometimes formidable and sometimes absurd. But the obloquy that fell upon him with the Hiss case went far beyond what he had hitherto borne and there was no way in which he could meet it, he could only bear it, which he did until he died. The educated, progressive middle class, especially in its upper reaches, rallied to the cause and person of Alger Hiss, confident of his perfect innocence, deeply stirred by the pathos of what they never doubted was the injustice being visited upon him. By this same class Whittaker Chambers was regarded with loathing—the word is not too strong—as one who had resolved, for some perverse reason, to destroy a former friend.[2]
The outcome of the trial did nothing to alienate the sympathy of the progressive middle class from Hiss or to exculpate Chambers. Indeed, the hostility to Chambers grew the more intense when the verdict of Hiss’s guilt became a chief ground upon which the unprincipled junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, based his notorious anti-radical campaign.
So relentlessly was Chambers hated by people of high moral purpose that the news-letter of his college class, a kind of publication which characteristically is undeviating in its commitment to pious amenity, announced his death in 1961 in an article which surveyed in detail what it represented as his unmitigated villainy.
If anything was needed to assure that Chambers would be held in bitter and contemptuous memory by many people, it was that his destiny should have been linked with that of Richard Nixon. Especially because I write at the moment of Nixon’s downfall and disgrace, I must say a word about this connection. The two men came together through the investigation of Hiss which was undertaken by the Committee of the House of Representatives on Un-American Activities; Nixon, a member of the Committee, played a decisive part in bringing Hiss to trial. The dislike with which a large segment of the American public came to regard Nixon is often said to have begun as a response to his role in the Hiss case, and probably in the first instance it was he who suffered in esteem from the connection with Chambers. Eventually, however, that situation reversed itself—as the dislike of Nixon grew concomitantly with his prominence, it served to substantiate the odium in which Chambers stood. With the Watergate revelations, the old connection came again to the fore, its opprobrium much harsher than it had ever been, and as discredit overtook the President, partisans of Hiss’s innocence were encouraged to revive their own contention that Hiss had been the victim of Chambers and Nixon in conspiracy with each other.
The tendentious association of the two men does Chambers a grievous injustice. I would make this assertion with rather more confidence in its power to convince if it were not the case that there grew up between Chambers and Nixon a degree of personal relationship and that Chambers had at one period expressed his willingness to hope that Nixon had the potentiality of becoming a great conservative leader. The hope was never a forceful one and it did not long remain in such force as it had—a year before his death Chambers said that he and Nixon “have really nothing to say to each other.” The letters in which he speaks of Nixon—they are among those he wrote to William Buckley[3]—are scarcely inspiriting, not only because of the known nature and fate of the man he speculates about but also because it was impossible for Chambers to touch upon politics without falling into a bumble of religiose portentousness. But I think that no one who reads these letters will fail to perceive that the sad and exhausted man who wrote them had nothing in common morally, or, really, politically, with the man he was writing about. In Whittaker Chambers there was much to be faulted, but nothing I know of him has ever led me to doubt his magnanimous intention.
—LIONEL TRILLING
[1] The relation of the class of bourgeois intellectuals to the Communist movement will, I am certain, increasingly engage the attention of social and cultural historians, who can scarcely fail to see it as one of the most curious and significant phenomena of our epoch. In the existing historiography of the subject, the classical document is The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman (New York, Harper, 1949; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1950) which consists of the autobiographical narratives of their relation to Communism of six eminent cultural figures, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright (“The Initiates”), and André Gide, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender (“Worshippers From Afar”). The American situation is described in a series of volumes called Communism in American Life, edited by Clinton Rossiter (various publishers and dates), of which the most interesting are the two volumes by Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism (New York, Viking, 1957; London, Macmillan, 1957) and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, Viking, 1960; London, Macmillan, 1960), and Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). The most recent and in some respects the most compendious record of the relation of intellectuals to Communism and the one that takes fullest account of its sadly comic aspects is David Caute’s The Fellow Travellers (London and New York, Macmillan, 1972).
[2] A psychoanalyst, Dr. Meyer Zeligs, has undertaken to give scientific substantiation to this belief in Friendship and Fratricide (New York, Viking, 1967; London, André Deutsch, 1967), a voluminous study of the unconscious psychological processes of Chambers and Hiss and of the relations between the two men. In my opinion no other work does as much as this one to bring into question the viability of the infant discipline of psycho-history.
[3] See Odyssey of a Friend—Whittaker Chambers: Letters to William F. Buckley. Jr. 1954–1961, edited with notes by William F. Buckley, Jr. (New York, privately printed, 1969).
All the characters of this story are wholly imaginary and have no reference whatever to actual people.
TO DIANA
1
WHEN THE train reached Westport, Gifford Maxim gave not the slightest sign that he had come to his destination. He waited until the aisle was empty of all the other passengers who were getting off. Then he said suddenly, under his breath, “I get off now. I hope you’ll be feeling all well soon.”
He looked straight ahead as he said it, not turning his head to John Laskell. He laid his great hand for an instant on Laskell’s forearm and said, “I won’t forget this, John.” He said it with quiet certitude. It was the firm, convinced promise of the exile who knows that some day, in some way, he will come to power and then he will not forget the friends who helped him in his adversity.
Without another word or look, Maxim got up and left the car.
John Laskell saw him on the station platform. Maxim looked first to the right, then to the left. He turned abruptly to the left where the rank of taxis was. Laskell saw that he was making a point of not walking too fast, as if he feared that haste would attract attention. How full of moral charm that conspiratory caution of Maxim’s would once have seemed—how craven and sad it was now! Seeing Maxim exercise the foolish care that
was part of his delusion, Laskell was smitten with sorrow for this friend who believed that he did not exist, who was now on the way to make arrangements about acquiring an existence. It did not matter that Maxim’s fear was an absurd one. It was the measure of the world’s sickness that a man like Maxim should have such a delusion.
He saw Maxim get into a taxi and shut the door. As the taxi drove off, the train began to move. At these simultaneous movements of separation, he going his way, Maxim going his, Laskell felt a desperate loneliness. And he felt not only alone—he felt quite unsafe. Something untoward might happen. At first he did not know what that might be, and then a possibility occurred to him—suppose the car he was riding in were to be cut off at some junction. If any car were cut off, it should be the last one. Maxim had chosen the last car for them, and then the last seat in this last car, because he wanted—it was part of his delusion—to lessen the chance of being approached and attacked from behind.
Perhaps, Laskell thought, the conductor had announced that the car was to be cut off and he had not heard.
It was nonsense, of course. But when the conductor passed through the car to collect the Westport tickets, Laskell had to ask the question. No, the car would not be cut off, it went through to Hartford and beyond. Laskell was reassured not only by the answer but by the conductor’s friendliness and by his seeming to think that the question was a perfectly reasonable one. After all, cars were sometimes cut off.
Laskell’s vague uneasiness did not wholly vanish, but he was able to look at it now with some irony. A little irony was surely called for—the idea of traveling as “protection” for Gifford Maxim had so distressed him, yet now he had to see that Maxim’s company, forced on him as far as Westport, had been something very like a protection for himself. His illness had weakened him more than he had known if he could find any comfort at all in the presence of this new ruined Maxim, this probably treacherous man who had been disowned by his Party, and who had sat yesterday in Laskell’s room slandering the cause for which he had fought so long.
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