[In the following review, Sobran praises the erudition, positive tone, and diversity of the subject matter of Ghosts on the Roof.]

The price of believing Alger Hiss has been to cut oneself off from Whittaker Chambers. It has never been a mere question of choosing which of two contradictory stories to accept. Siding with Hiss has always meant diminishing his accuser—reducing Chambers to something he most certainly wasn't: not only a liar, but a bore; a man with nothing to say, whose eloquence was nothing but fantastic loquacity.

In Ghosts on the Roof, we finally meet Chambers alone, without the shadow of the Hiss case, though its foreshadowing is here and there inescapable. The book is a collection of Chambers's magazine articles, written over a span of thirty years, from his early fiction in New Masses to his final ruminations for National Review. Most of these pieces belong to the Forties, the years between his defection from Communism and the controversy that ended his career as a journalist. His real career, in fact, lasted only the decade during which he wrote for Time, Life, and American Mercury.

It looks now like a brief intermission from the apocalyptic struggle that consumed him before and after. Here are thoughtful essays on Joyce, Santayana, Kafka, and Charles Beard, light pieces on travel books and movies (Ninotchka, The Grapes of Wrath). His famous NR review of Atlas Shrugged—a “somewhat ferro-concrete fairy tale”—is included.

But the war years and the dark peace that followed found him addressing portentous topics that in all their variety pointed in the general direction of Witness: the atomic bomb, Satan, Toynbee's philosophy of history, Reinhold Niebuhr's theology, the papacy, Stilwell in China, Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason, and—from several angles—Communism. Henry Luce knew talent when he saw it, and in Chambers he had a writer who combined depth of mind with an elegant popular touch. As Terry Teachout tells us in his introduction, Luce treasured Chambers enough to support him against the constant fury of Time's sizable pro-Communist contingent in those days.

Chambers didn't just share Luce's unfashionable anti-Communism; he saw Communism as Burke saw the French Revolution, with a sort of horrified appreciation of its power, its evil, and its seductive appeal, far beyond anything its ordinary detractors were capable of realizing. Chambers also shared Luce's faith in what used to be called the Common Man; he thought it was possible to write intelligently about serious things without writing “down” to his readers. His brisk 17-paragraph account of how Einstein's physics displaced Newton's is a tour de force of expository writing. So are his unpretentious summaries of A Study of History and Finnegans Wake. He seems not to be oversimplifying for readers but explaining something, with maximum concision, to his own satisfaction.

These articles disclose a mind that was ready for anything, eager for challenges; never so committed in advance that it could be put on the defensive, not even by a scholarly apologia for the Soviet Union. It's hard to imagine that mind doing several years' servitude to a party line; and that he became the victim of a party line later—one to which not only Communists but nearly all respectable liberals gave fealty—was an exquisite punishment for the sins of his youth. His unsigned articles for Time reached millions; fame put him behind a cordon sanitaire.

Eventually even Luce deserted him. After creating a new special-projects niche for him, Teachout informs us, “Luce lost his nerve and told T. S. Matthews to withdraw the offer.” Chambers wrote bitterly to Matthews: “Our enemies can never do these things to us. Only our friends can drive the knife quite through our vitals.” Later Chambers and Luce were reconciled, but Chambers had taken the wound. Like so many shocks, it came as no surprise in principle, for, as he'd written in 1947, “the first traitor was the first man.”

But Chambers's famous gloom is not much in evidence in this book. The general tone is one of steady, mild good humor—never optimistic, to be sure, but more often wry than solemn. Knowing all the harm “new ideas” could do, Chambers was hospitable to them anyway, because in the modern world there is no turning back, and because he simply found them fascinating. He could be drawn into any subject, and he had the gift of drawing the reader in with him.

Apart from the short fiction of his Communist period, these articles still draw you in, even when they deal with people and ideas that time has forgotten. For my money the biggest treat is his review of John T. Flynn's As We Go Marching, a book whose warning against indigenous fascism isn't exactly “still timely,” maybe, but is nevertheless, like everything else Flynn wrote, a model of a certain style of conservative thought that deserves better than its present obscurity. Chambers seizes on what is still timely: Flynn's analysis of the typical degeneration of democracy into a jungle of organized interests to which the state gladly caters, at the expense of personal freedoms.

The review pleases as an encounter between two free minds that managed to find each other. It's also a cheering reminder that, for a few years, Chambers was permitted to be the writer he was meant to be. In its way, this book of fragments rounds out the record of a shattered life.