Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  The “nine inflections of the Russian noun” are of course a mistake, not a lie, but the mistake is, I think, a revealing one because—as with the New Hampshire story—there was a “need,” a motive, for it. In this case—and I suspect, often though not always elsewhere in Chambers’s writings and testimony—the pressure to distort is a rhetorical pressure. “All nine of the inflections of the Russian noun” gives just the reverberation Chambers needed at this point in his boomy incantation. “Nine” is good, both as sound and number. As sound it gives a solemn chime, sonorous corroboration of all those domes and minarets. As number it is mystic and appropriately large: ordinary languages do not have as many as nine inflections of the noun: the number, in its solemn excess, corresponds to the vastness of the Russian land, the ceremonious endurance of the Russian soul (“You too can write like Whittaker Chambers”). “All nine inflections of the Russian noun” is, in its context and to suckers for this kind of thing, impressive, even awesome. (“Fair makes your flesh creep, don’t it? Shows you what we’re up against!”) Six, on the other hand, will hardly do. “Six,” as sound, is miserable, thin and unhelpful; as number it is inadequate, too much like other languages, fails to evoke Slavonic mystery. As for “six” or (if you count the archaic vocative) “seven,” that is altogether out of the question; if one were to burden oneself to that degree with tedious accuracy one would have to give up rhetoric altogether.

  So Whittaker Chambers looked out and saw, flaring in imagination, a legendary vision: the Nine Inflections of the Russian Noun.

  On points of grammar it is always possible to get the facts; on historical episodes this is often less easy, and it was to history rather than to grammar that Chambers’ imagination usually drew him. He tells us in this same section—The Third Rome—which contained the Russian lesson, a blood-curdling story about Russian spies. He heard this story from a man whom he knew as “Herbert” or “Otto” or “Karl” and who was “in fact the tank commander of the Leningrad military district”; he does not explain why this man was spinning yarns in New York instead of commanding tanks around Leningrad; perhaps he was on a reconnaissance. On one of the two “conversations of length” he had with this person—one for each pseudonym and a half—he learned how Russian spies in Paris killed an old White Russian General, took the body to the Russian Embassy, dismembered it there, and dispatched “his head and hands” per diplomatic bag to the Kremlin, as proof that the old party had indeed passed away. I happened to have a thermometer in my mouth when I was reading this affecting narrative, and I noted that the point where my blood ran coldest was where I realized the dread implications, in the context, of the words “and hands.” The object of the unusually composed despatch was to convince the Kremlin that the general (whose name appropriately enough was Kutepov) was well and truly dead. In most Western diplomatic bags, in such circumstances, it is usually considered enough (as far as my own experience goes) to include the head; the effete unprofessional minds that rule our chancelleries are then apt to jump to the conclusion that the man concerned is dead. But the cold and crafty minds which are planning our destruction in the Kremlin are not satisfied with literally prima facie evidence. “This is his head all right,” they are to be thought of as saying, “but how do we know he is not still typing counter-revolutionary manifestos? The hands too, please. Both of them.” (Professor William Empson, with whom I have discussed this question, thinks the inclusion of the hands a sensible routine precaution, but points out that ambiguities would arise should the face not correspond to the fingerprints or should the hands not be a true pair.)

  One may think that those who believe Chambers’ gory tale show themselves considerably less exigent, in the matter of evidence, than the Kremlin is supposed to have been on this picturesque occasion.

  We have to remind ourselves at this point that Chambers has to be taken seriously—very seriously indeed. Largely on his testimony a respected public figure, who denied and still denies his charges, was sentenced to several years in prison—for, of all things, perjury. Well-known writers have taken Chambers at his own valuation; that is to say as a saint, who heard voices like Joan of Arc and was crucified like Christ. (I shall concede the validity of the latter comparison if I am present for his resurrection; in matters of evidence I incline to a Kremlin-like caution.) Miss Rebecca West sees in him “a Christian mystic of the pantheist school, a spiritual descendant of Eckhard and Boehme and Angelus Silesius. Mr. Arthur Koestler (according to the jacket of Cold Friday) thinks his act of “moral suicide” in the Hiss case was an atonement for the guilt of our generation. His former employers in Time see him as the publican in the parable, with Hiss cast of course for the pharisee; an analogy which would be a mite stronger if the publican had been smart enough to get the pharisee put in clink, and to write a best-seller about how he did it. In any case all concerned, beginning with Chambers, have spread a thick fog of religiosity over his person and actions.

  Everything hinges on our judgment of the nature of Chambers’ “witness.” What was the act of “moral suicide” remarked by Koestler? Surely not Chambers’ admission of his own past career as a traitor and spy. The admission (as distinct from the career) is generally regarded as creditable; and a public confession, if true, cannot possibly be thought of as “moral suicide.” Nor can his denunciation of his “friend”—if true, and patriotically motivated, as he claimed—be moral suicide. If he made his disclosures to save his country and the world from the clutches of “absolute evil”—which is what he says he thought communism was—then his act of denunciation, painful though it is supposed to have been, would have been clearly justified, brave and virtuous; no question of suicide.

  Matters, of course, were not as clear as that, and this is why God has to be called in, always a bad sign. The fact has to be accounted for, that this splendid and useful fellow Chambers indubitably and inescapably committed perjury. His most meritorious action in the eyes of his admirers was the production of the Baltimore Documents, with the charge that Hiss had given them to him: a charge of espionage. But Chambers had, up till then consistently denied, and denied under oath, that he and Hiss had been engaged in espionage. So, if he was not lying when he produced the documents, he must have been lying earlier. “But,” to adapt a phrase of the late Stalin’s: “we do not want him to have been lying when he produced the documents. No, comrades, we do not want that.” So he was lying earlier, perjuring himself earlier. No way out of it; the most sympathetic and anti-communist people, those who could at worst suspend judgment about other parts of his testimony, which looked on the bare evidence remarkably like perjury, had to insist that he did in fact commit perjury on the occasions when he swore Hiss had not been involved in espionage.

  Pity. How could this just man swear falsely? The answer suggested is: pity. The biggest set-piece in Witness asks us to believe that Chambers’ affection for Hiss was so compounded that, while he could bear to accuse his friend of traitorous conspiracy and subversion—“messing up policy,” to help Joe Stalin and scupper Uncle Sam—he just could not bring himself to accuse him of espionage, although that is what Hiss had really been at. Chambers felt so badly about this that when he was about to make the charge—with maximum publicity, and the pumpkin in the wings —he tried, he says, to commit suicide (like Scobie, the classic “pity-and-guilt” man), with the aid of a strange and inefficient contraption which he describes in his book. He survived to ram his new charge home and put Hiss in jail.

  There are those who find this story convincing and moving; these are good souls and will inherit the kingdom of Heaven; on earth they are a little lacking, intellectually speaking, and in point of information. Well-informed anti-communist intellectuals, people like Miss West, who are not mugs and do not want to be taken for mugs, cannot be seen to fall for this kind of thing, or for much of Chambers’ testimony. Miss West, in her Atlantic Monthly review (June 1952), refers, with cautious regret, to “the encouragement he gave his non-Communist opponents to beli
eve that he was a liar.” He gave this encouragement in the most effective possible way: to wit, by telling lies. Apart from the lie which his admirers have to admit and even insist on—“no espionage”—there are many contradictions in his testimony, for which by far the simplest and most probable explanation is that he was lying. Perhaps the most flagrant example is that of his original charge against Hiss’s brother, Donald Hiss, whom he said he knew as a Communist and from whom he said he collected Communist dues. Donald Hiss flatly denied that he had ever met Chambers, and no attempt at all was made to prove that he had; the thing was simply dropped. In his book Chambers, while not withdrawing the charge, coolly remarks that Donald Hiss’s answers to the charge were “forthright” and reflected badly on—Alger Hiss, who by comparison had seemed to hedge. Yet, if Donald Hiss was telling the truth—as seems to be recognized in the adjective “forthright” as well as in the dropping of the charge—it was Chambers who had been guilty of a most odious lie: a lie, also, by no means explicable by the excessively merciful disposition, brought in to account for the admitted act of perjury. About the Donald Hiss charges Lord Jowitt has written, in measured words:

  This, at any rate, seems clear, and must leave a most damaging impression of the truth of Chambers’ evidence as a whole: that the allegations were demonstrated, so far as human testimony can demonstrate, to be entirely without foundation. There was, as it seems to me, no scope for explaining away the discrepancies as mere differences of recollection.

  Similarly when Chambers made the charge—subsequently demonstrated to be altogether false—that Alger Hiss had swindled his stepson Timothy for the benefit of the Communist party, it can hardly be contended that this lie—again it cannot be just a legitimate mistake—is accounted for by his overflowing affection for his dear old friend.

  Chambers testified that Thayer Hobson (the boy’s father) was paying for his education, but the Hisses had told him, Chambers, that “they were diverting a large part of the money to the Communist party … and they took him out of a more expensive school and put him in a less expensive school for that purpose.” This was actually the reverse of the truth. Thayer Hobson has recalled that “When Timothy was transferred to a far more expensive school, he protested … and the Hisses paid the additional money out of their own pockets.” (Fred Cook, The Unfinished Story of Alger Hiss) “The accuser,” says Mr. Cook, “was the same man who was later to justify his own radical shifts of testimony by picturing himself as nobly protecting a former friend.”

  If we are to love and admire this particular anti-communist hero, divine aid is urgently necessary, and down it comes. “This is an act,” says Miss West, speaking of the admitted perjury, “which is explicable only by reference to the egotism of the mystic. In the light of that clue it is quite comprehensible. Without that clue, it is troubling and enigmatic.” Mysticism also covers, presumably, other “troubling and enigmatic” business, like the false charge against Donald Hiss and the false charge about Hiss’s stepson. It is a serviceable attribute, even in this world’s affairs. In the Hiss case the non-mystic was indicted for perjury, found guilty and sent to jail. The mystic, admittedly guilty of the same offence, was never even indicted. He was secure in the Cloud of Unknowing, safe in the bosom of the God of Dostoevsky and Graham Greene—a God who bears a marked resemblance to the Father of Lies.

  Much in the Hiss case remains puzzling, and anyone who says a word against Chambers is likely to be hit on the head with that Woodstock. The fact remains that it was Chambers’ testimony, plus the documents accepted as typed on the Woodstock, that convicted Hiss—the documents alone, whatever we may think of them, would not have sufficed. Yet it is clear to any rational person—exception made of temporary mystics like Miss West—that Chambers was an inveterate liar. He was, however, a successful one and in a patriotic cause, and this is why he is admired. “Your unlucky forgery,” wrote Charles Maurras about Colonel Henry—exposed as the framer of Dreyfus—“will be acclaimed as one of your finest deeds of war.” “Your lucky perjuries,” an American Maurras might aptly say of Chambers, “were your most effective prose.” All those who, while considering communism “absolute evil,” also believe in fighting it with its own weapons, are forced to concur. Chambers himself was one of these.

  When Richard Pigott—the key witness in the “Parnellism and Crime” case of the eighties—was first exposed as having committed perjury and forgery, the judge asked him incredulously whether he thought certain of his admitted acts compatible with the behaviour of an honourable man? He replied:

  “No, my lord; I have never claimed to be an honourable man.”

  The response has a certain bleak dignity, compared with the current style. In our day, a successor to Pigott replies: “I am something more than a mere ‘honourable man,’ my lord. I am a saint and mystic, engaged in a suicidal struggle against Absolute Evil. If you seem to trip me up in an odd lie here and there it is either because of some extreme, and pertinent, virtue of mine (like mercy) or because, at the time I was on the stand, I was in communion with God and didn’t pay attention to what I was saying.” And that, in the view of some respected commentators, would be the “clue” to the “troubling and enigmatic” business of perjury.

  I prefer Pigott.

  * Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday.

  VII

  THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

  CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF THE UNITED NATIONS

  The United Nations organization has now survived seventeen years, covering several periods of intense international strain, and great specific strains on the structure of the organization itself. It has survived; it has helped to avert threats to peace and above all, during the worst periods of the cold war and during actual periods of “hot war,” it has provided a permanent meeting-place for great powers which often seemed on the verge of hostilities, and which sometimes were actually engaged in indirect hostilities. Through all this time it has provided, both in the Security Council and, above all, in the General Assembly, a forum where bitterly conflicting opinions could be expressed—a verbal, taking the place of a material, warfare—while in the corridors, through the meetings of permanent representatives and others, and sometimes through the mediation of the Secretary-General, compromise solutions were worked out, aimed at preventing the battles from becoming material. It is true that the successes were often equivocal, and that the compromises had often a bitter taste. I shall come, in a moment, to look at these aspects of the matter. At this stage it is enough to say that the United Nations has achieved a life and an apparent volition of its own—or partly of its own—in a sense that the old League of Nations never knew; that it is universal—or almost universal—in a way that the old League never was, and that it is sensitive to the opinion of smaller countries in a way which, while somewhat more apparent than real, is yet real in a sense that would never even have occurred to the League. This last factor—the sensitivity of the United Nations to the opinions of the smaller, formerly subject, nations—reflects, and is reflected in, the attachment of these countries to the United Nations. It was Hammarskjöld who asserted, in September 1960, speaking of the smaller powers, that “the organization is, first of all, their organization.” This statement contained an element of exaggeration, but it did strike a most responsive note among the small nations, with hardly a single exception.

  This mutual attachment has become probably the most important single source of strength for the organization as such. The reason for this is that the great power systems strive, especially in Africa and Asia, for influence over the smaller powers—or to exclude the influence of their rivals, which usually amounts to the same thing—and since these smaller powers like to work through the United Nations, it becomes important for the great powers to be as active and exercise as much authority inside the United Nations as they can. Thus the basic factor in the political life of the United Nations is the triangle of pressures exerted by America and its allies, the Soviet Union and its all
ies, and the Afro-Asian countries. None of these can afford, as it were, to “let go” of the United Nations—as Germany and Italy did with the League—and none has power to expel any of the others, as the Western controllers of the League did with Russia. Thus the United Nations has become, as the League never did, a centre of intense, competitive, oblique diplomacy, combined with equally intense open propaganda.

  Whatever else may be said about it, the United Nations is an extremely lively organization and, as life is the condition of growth, all who count the growth of international institutions as a necessity for human survival must rejoice at the abundant signs of life on the shores of Turtle Bay. Not only is the United Nations lively now, but its continued life may be predicted with reasonable safety. An organization which has survived the bitterness and confusion of Palestine, Korea, Suez, Hungary and the Congo has demonstrated, among other things, its vital tenacity.

  I shall take it, then, as axiomatic that the United Nations—at the very least in its functions as an international forum and centre of mediation—is a necessary human institution and likely to survive as long as organized human society, however long that may be. If we take that for granted, we are enabled to set aside the argument of those who would stifle criticisms of the organization’s imperfections and its sometimes inflated pretensions, by alleging that such criticisms endanger the last, best hope of man. The United Nations, at seventeen, is by no means so fragile as those critics would suggest. On the contrary, it is quite a tough organization, served by some reasonably tough people and used, in varying ways, by tough, though mostly mildly spoken, representatives of various powers and especially of one power. No light we can shed on the organization’s actual ways of working is likely to bring it to an untimely end, or to prevent the fulfilment of the purposes which it was set up to serve. On the contrary, as, like most if not all human institutions, its practice has a pronounced tendency to deviate from its professions, it is in the common interest that such light should be shed. It is by the shedding of light that practice is most often encouraged to move up a little closer to profession. In any event, we shall be helping to diminish the area of optimistic illusion which at present has such an unhealthy grip over public opinion in international affairs.