Whittaker Chambers

by Sam Tanenhaus

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A Dedicated Madness

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SOURCE: Cort, David. “A Dedicated Madness.” The Nation 210, no. 6 (16 February 1970): 185-86.

[In the following review of Odyssey of a Friend, Cort asserts that Chambers's letters expose a superficiality and intellectual narcissism.]

The ghost of the late Whittaker Chambers declines to rest in peace, and for very good reasons. He magnificently played a child's game of masquerade, and too many adults believed in him. Richard M. Nixon believed, and in ultimate consequence became the President of the United States. William Frank Buckley, Jr. of National Review still keeps a nonpareil faith and love and has brought out a whole book [Odyssey of a Friend] (first privately printed, now regularly published) of Chambers' letters to him from 1954 to 1961, when his correspondent became extinct.

Whittaker Chambers was not the name of the man, but just the most convenient of a dozen or so aliases. The name, if you care, was Jay Vivian Chambers. In this book of progressively less posturing letters to a friend one begins to detect that he never called anything by its right name, being deeply involved in an old secret game of pretenses and false faces. Since few people are accustomed to a world of deceits, Chambers' iridescent bluffs and impostures were a smash hit and encouraged him to higher effort.

An authentic persona rises out of these letters. Here is a man who glibly quotes Latin, German, Russian (his formal education was highly sketchy); cites books one has never heard of; makes “Boyg” a synonym for mirage (I give up); calls himself one of the Narodniki (an obsolete term that may denote the Serb assassins of 1914); affects to be part Dostoevski and part 19th-century English Duke (not the younger son, the Duke himself); and makes an appointment to meet at Renoir's “Girl With the Watering Can” at the National Gallery.

This continuous performance required considerable energy and self-discipline. From such an outpouring, one expects to find a human being, but (apart from brief attitudes as farmer, assassin, father, friend) there is nothing there. Behind the dubious literary feast, not of good bread but of indigestible delicatessen, is a disappearing act. The way to disappear is to produce boxes within boxes, that is, intellectual narcissism.

Some selections, lifted from the boxes:

Almost the only position of spiritual dignity left to men, therefore, is a kind of stoic silence.


But for the Socialist Apparat … they stand within an inch of closing the capitalist phase of history … and of rooting their power in the vast, fertilizing, dinosauric corpse.


If we should be so far gone in historical corruption as to outlaw the Bombs, gas, bacteria et al., the Communists will merely win over the slower haul.


Essences—a word I never permit myself to use.


Brilliant staff—no, brilliant is a Woolworth word … [then about the members of the staff] I shall lock away in Pandora's box any reservations I have about them … [the box immediately flies open] in one instance, a tinkling, a play of caprice … and in the other instance, I fear a tone-deafness … [very skilled, low-key assassination, especially since it is already locked in Pandora's box].


Briefly, I remain a dialectician.


Perhaps the great sin is to say: it will heal; it has healed; there is no wound [contradicting the earlier “stoic silence”].


[And now as if describing himself] No lunatic is more frightening, and perhaps more dangerous, than the one in whom a dedicated madness is largely masked by what we call normality.


I am saying that conservatism and capitalism are mutually exclusive manifestations. … I hold capitalism to be profoundly anti-conservative.

This last, incidentally, would destroy National Review.

Of course all his politics was a fantasy. The only reality behind it was that he hated Franklin D. Roosevelt and all his works. His mother, a welfare worker, was so sure the United States was about to collapse and vanish from the world that she took her retirement benefits in cash, rather than as a pension, at a considerable loss. The son accepted this apocalyptic vision, and the eschatological remained his specialty.

In his youth, I am certain, he aspired to an aristocratic panache which was beyond his daring. But in these letters he openly exhibits it to Buckley. He exhibits as well something contrary: his genius for flattering civility, here extended at such length to Buckley that one can tell he could not bear to keep it hidden. That genius is even better exemplified in an earlier communication to Henry R. Luce, reproduced in Meyer Zeligs' Friendship and Fratricide (not included, of course, in this book): “Your speech is a simple, authentic testimony of the spirit. … It is a voice with which I have seldom been privileged to hear you speak, and it moves me deeply. I may not intrude upon it. … It proceeds from the spirit, and the mode of the Christian spirit is simplicity. God bless you, Harry.” Reading this, poor Luce must have felt that he was in church.

The mode of the Chambers spirit was not simplicity. He was progressively an atheist, Episcopalian, Quaker, and finally attended the Catholic Church. These were all masquerades, but acted out to the end, to his wife and children, perhaps even to himself. The point is important. He was not an unconscious, instinctive fake. He knew he was a fake, but he was such a consummate actor, so dedicated to his art, that perhaps he was taken in by his own fakery.

His favorite quotation, used I think three times in these letters, is from Aeschylus: “We have come to the last path of the earth, in the Scythian country, in the untrodden solitude.” (Scythia was the ancients' name for what is now Russia, or rather, the Ukraine.) Chambers' deformed obsession with anti-communism received astonishingly wide-spread support, Left, Right and Center. He succeeded in making a comedy of intellectual thinking today. (This volume contains a foreword by Ralph de Toledano to prove the guilt of Alger Hiss. Experts—of which I am not one—inform me that this little masterpiece wildly misrepresents the trial evidence, to nobody's amazement. His could have been guilty, without in any way affecting the facts about Whittaker Chambers.)

Chambers' end in 1961 was supposedly by heart attack. The final letters in this book unintentionally, I hope, support the hypothesis that Chambers committed suicide. As his son's marriage approaches, the letters get briefer. Chambers writes that he told his son that so-and-so might be assassinated, and the son replied, “Nothing would delight him more.” The final letter, before the son's marriage, recites a list of noble suicides. Evidently he had transposed his destiny to the innocent son. He would have killed himself, I suppose, to rid the son of the guilt of Alger Hiss and of the vengeance that, in his paranoiac vision, was about to fall. By dying at that moment, one month after his son's marriage, he would secede from the House of Atreus. Superbly noble, romantic, clever, classic and nuts.

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