Whittaker Chambers

by Sam Tanenhaus

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Witness: Whittaker Chambers

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SOURCE: Cogley, John. “Witness: Whittaker Chambers.” Commonweal 56, no. 7 (23 May 1952): 176-77.

[In the following review, Cogley derides what he perceives as Chambers's overblown, messianic self-image in Witness.]

In the opening pages of Witness Whittaker Chambers writes,

It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live … Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. …


At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it is a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time—Communism and Freedom—came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly.

Someone, I think it was Arthur Koestler, has said that the final struggle for the world will be between Communists and ex-Communists, and it is in this vast context that Chambers sees the Hiss affair—rather as a prelude to Armageddon.

When he conceives of himself as an “ex-Communist” Chambers has a specific image in mind. There are ex-Communists and ex-Communists, and Whittaker Chambers numbers himself among those penitential few elected by Providence to bear the burden of the free world's guilt. It is almost a Christlike figure.

Not all who once carried a card or left the Party have lost the true Marxist faith, if only because most of them never really had the faith, however attentive they were to their devotions and duties, he believes. Among the thousands of Americans who passed in and out of the Party during the last two decades many were among the “spiritual vagrants” of our time, who prowl the movements in search of an intellectual night's lodging.

When Chambers speaks of an ex-Communist he means “a man who knew clearly why he became a Communist, who served Communism devotedly and knew why he served it, who broke with Communism unconditionally and knew why he broke with it.” There is only a handful of such men on earth—those who lived by the good in Communism and served the evil in it for the sake of the good, and then finally, with horror and heartbreak, came to realize that no man can serve two masters. “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” Such men have seen naked evil—they have had, as it were, a glimpse of the satanic vision.

Chambers does not go so far as to raise his classic “anti-Communist” to the mystical heights of the saint, but he does hold that for himself and the few others like him, it has been given to see that the choice is between “God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism,” and that the choice is inescapable. Once made, it may lead anywhere, even to the valley of the shadow of death. Yet there is nothing for a man to do but follow its harsh bidding.

It is the ex-Communist (in this drastic sense), not the voluble anti-Communist, the facile patrioteer, the frightened left-wing deserter or the reformed Marxist satisfying some dim need for self-purgation by Kleig-lighted confessions, who will be the fated, fatal ultimate witness—a witness not primarily against Communism or anything else, but a witness for something; as Chambers puts it, a witness “to God's grace and to the fortifying power of faith.”

This then is how Mr. Chambers sees himself—as the Witness, taking the word in all the rich classical context of theology, and it is the personal vision which dominates every page of his autobiography. Here, it seems to me, is the key to understanding this man, his behavior, his tribulations and sorrows, his sometimes maddening pretentiousness, his evident satisfaction with the final outcome of his personal ordeal, even his over-articulated compassion for Hiss.

It is even possible that Chambers' vision of himself may explain his literary style. The overblown ripeness of the prose may be only a hangover from his Time days, when Senior Editor Chambers perfected a style suited to the majestic conceits of that publication. Yet I rather suspect Chambers writes the way he does for the same reason that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth as he did: it would be unseemly to record so awesome a destiny in language less opulent.

Several times in the course of his narrative Chambers refers to himself as a pudgy little fellow, as round in girth and lacking in physical impressiveness as Father Christmas. He takes obvious satisfaction in the paradox of himself as a mild-mannered little man, a David, defying Goliath, “the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.” It is the self-vision which accounts, I think, for what often seems close to maudlin self-sympathy but is really self-wonder. When he talks about himself as Witness, it is as if the man were discussing a remote, heroic figure in Greek tragedy.

Perhaps it is because Whittaker Chambers has this persistent vision of himself, however deep it may be buried, that many Americans, especially those in the consciously liberal camp, have found in him an unsympathetic, unattractive figure. I think that in most cases his book will only reinforce the original distaste.

As was evident in the Hiss trials, many groups of Americans are emotionally lined up against the little man—and other groups which would like to lionize him because he is vigorously anti-Communist have been frustrated by his reticence. These latter, of course, were from the very beginning more anti-Hiss than pro-Chambers in the symbolic struggle, but the liberal groups were often less pro-Hiss than anti-Chambers. It is interesting to speculate on just why this was so. Much hinges, I think, on the nature of Chambers' personal testament. To accept him and his “witness” meant the acceptance of all that he was testifying against—the idea than one may avoid the choice between good and evil not only with regard to ends but also to means.

Moral relativism, pragmatism, raw secularism—all the timid forebears of the giant Marxism—stood before the bar with Hiss. It was not only a generation that was on trial, as Mr. Alistair Cooke put it; it was also the vision of good without God that has so long enticed the intellectual élite of the West.

To accept Chambers and his “witness” meant also the acceptance of all that he was witnessing for—the unyielding regality of the absolute, the tyranny of Evil or Good (take your choice: you can not serve two masters), the imperious claims of God Almighty and the ultimate dependence of what is only finite, however, noble, on His love and grace.

It is not, nor was it so during the trials, that people, even very good people, still cling to illusions about Russia and Communism. Even Henry Wallace is today willing to admit his blindness, if not his folly. What makes Chambers an affront is that the man, whatever his personal pretensions (and they are many and annoying in his book) has put the emphasis where it belongs—on the moral absolutism that Communism, because it sums up one of the two contemporary absolutes, has forced all of us to face.

In any case that is the underlying theme that gives lasting value to this account of Whittaker Chambers' sometimes stormy, sometimes bucolic life, his conversion to, and apostasy from, Communism, his silent years, and his lengthy, very personal account of the Hiss trials.

Some day perhaps Alger Hiss will write a book, an honest book, and it will fill out this history of the times to which Mr. Chambers has brought such burning, eloquent witness.

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