[In the following essay, Abbott contrasts Witness and Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, contending that “both these autobiographies fail from the standpoint of political theory.”]

Consider the testimony of these two witnesses before the House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee.

“Almost exactly nine years ago—that is, two days after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact—I went to Washington and reported to the authorities what I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists. For years, international Communism, of which the United States Communist Party is an integral part, had been in a state of undeclared war with this Republic. With the Hitler-Stalin pact that war reached a new stage. I regarded my action in going to the Government as a simple act of war, like the shooting of an armed enemy in combat.

“At that moment in history, I was one of the few men on this side of the battle who could perform this service. I had joined the Communist Party in 1924. No one recruited me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, Western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something. In the writings of Karl Marx, I thought that I had found the explanation of the historical and economic causes [of the crisis]. In the writings of Lenin, I thought I had found the answer to the question: what to do?

“In 1937, I repudiated Marx's doctrines and Lenin's tactics. Experience and the record had convinced me that Communism is a form of totalitarianism, that its triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul. I resolved to break with the Communist Party at whatever risk to my life or other tragedy to myself or my family. Yet, so strong is the hold which the insidious evil of Communism secures upon its disciples, that I could still say to someone at that time: ‘I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism. …

“For a year I lived in hiding, sleeping by day and watching through the night with gun or revolver within easy reach. That was what underground Communism could do to one man in the peaceful United States in the year 1938.

“I had sound reasons for supposing that the Communists might try to kill me. For a number of years, I had myself served in the underground, chiefly in Washington, D.C. The heart of my report to the United States Government consisted of a description of the apparatus to which I was attached. It was an underground organization of the United States Communist Party developed, to the best of my knowledge, by Harold Ware, one of the sons of the Communist leader known as Mother Bloor. I knew it at its top level, a group of seven or so men, from among whom in later years certain members of Miss Bentley's organization were apparently recruited. The head of the underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. Later, John Abt became the leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger Hiss, who, as a member of the State Department, later organized the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco and the United States side of the Yalta Conference.

“The purpose of this group at that time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the Communist infiltration of the American Government. But espionage was certainly one of its eventual objectives. Let no one be surprised at this statement. Disloyalty is a matter of principle with every member of the Communist Party. The Communist Party exists for the specific purpose of overthrowing the Government, at the opportune time, by any and all means; and each of its members, by the fact that he is a member, is dedicated to this purpose.

“It is ten years since I broke away from the Communist Party. During that decade, I have sought to live an industrious and God fearing life. At the same time, I have fought Communism constantly by act and written word. I am proud to appear before this Committee. The publicity, inseparable from such testimony, has darkened and no doubt will continue to darken my effort to integrate myself in the community of free men. But that is a small price to pay if my testimony helps to make Americans recognize at last that they are at grips with a secret, sinister and enormously powerful force whose tireless purpose is their enslavement.

“At the same time, I should like, thus publicly, to call upon all ex-Communists who have not yet disclosed themselves, and all men within the Communist Party whose better instincts have not yet been corrupted and crushed by it, to aid in the struggle while there is still time.”¹

.....

“I am most willing to answer all questions about myself. I have nothing to hide from your Committee and there is nothing in my life of which I am ashamed. I have been advised by counsel that under the Fifth Amendment I have a constitutional privilege to decline to answer any questions about my political opinions, activities and associations, on the grounds of self-incrimination. I do not wish to claim this privilege. I am ready and willing to testify before the representatives of our Government as to my own opinions and my own actions, regardless of any risks or consequences to myself.

“But I am advised by counsel that if I answer the Committee's questions about myself, I must also answer questions about other people and that if I refuse to do so, I can be cited for contempt. My counsel tells me that if I answer questions about myself, I will have waived my rights under the Fifth Amendment and could be forced legally to answer questions about others. This is very difficult for a layman to understand. But there is one principle that I do understand: I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive. I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form and if I had ever seen any I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities. But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

“I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country, and so on. In general, I respected these ideals of Christian honor and did as well with them as I knew how. It is my belief that you will agree with these simple rules of human decency and will not expect me to violate the good American tradition from which they spring. I would, therefore, like to come before you and speak of myself.

“I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you anything you wish to know about my views or actions if your Committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the Committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the Fifth Amendment at the hearing.”²

The first statement was made by Whittaker Chambers in 1948, the second by Lillian Hellman in 1952. Chambers was an informer, what was called a “friendly witness.” Hellman refused to testify. Chambers's testimony became known as “The Case,” Hellman's as the “Great Refusal.” Chambers and Hellman became heroes and villains of the American Left and Right. Their autobiographies are attempts to justify these two acts of witness, to tell the truth about “a whole generation on trial” (Chambers), to tell the truth about “this sad, comic, miserable time in our history” (Hellman). Was Chambers a psychotic liar? Was Hellman a clever fellow traveler? Was Chambers a man of courage who bore witness to the Communist conspiracy? Was Hellman a woman of “guts” in a generation that “swallowed any nonsense that was repeated often enough”?³ What were the consequences of these testimonies? Did Chambers give the West one last chance “to write the next several chapters of history”?⁴ Did Hellman prophesy the war in Vietnam and Watergate?

Above all else, Chamber's Witness and Hellman's Scoundrel Time involve questions of political judgment. Political theory is generally thought to revolve around the formulation of concepts like justice and freedom. But in a sense political theory is not simply a body of knowledge about “perennial questions” and “contested concepts.” The “great theories of politics” are tools to help us make political judgments. For Chambers, Marxism summoned mankind “to turn its vision into practical reality.” Chambers, of course, found communism to be a false guide. He had asked, “What if we were wrong?” The Communist finally hears “screams”: “They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests … from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of Lubianka, from the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton.” Chambers concluded that twenty years of judgments had been wrong, that he must bear witness to how he “committed the characteristic crimes of my century.”⁵ For Hellman the Communists were “people who wanted to make a better world.” They may have “justified murder, prison camps, torture” but they were “honest and thoughtful men.” She would not clear herself “by jumping on people in trouble.” Hellman offered a different kind of witness, a witness against “scoundrels,” “spitballing whatever and whoever came into view.”⁶

Which judgment was correct? Which witness ought we to follow? For me, Chambers was, on the whole, right and Hellman, on the whole, wrong. But the more fundamental question that these autobiographies raise is “How does one make political judgments?” There is much to be learned about this question in both Witness and Scoundrel Time. Yet curiously, both these autobiographies fail from the standpoint of political theory, despite the fact that all the complexity of political judgment (one's own motivations and those of others, the consequences of actions taken and not taken) is examined by both Chambers and Hellman.

Let me use as the starting point in my examination of this failure two reviews, one by Irving Howe and another by Nathan Glazer. Howe declares his own judgment at the outset of the essay: “That Whittaker Chambers told the truth and Alger Hiss did not, seems to me highly probable.” What did it matter that Hiss was a pleasant fellow and Chambers an overwrought one, when “at stake was the commitment of those popular-front liberals who had persisted in treating Stalinism as an accepted part of ‘the Left’?” But Witness troubles Howe. He is amazed that as a work of ideas it should be so “ragged and patchy.” “In a work of over 800 pages there is hardly a sustained passage of, say, five thousand words devoted to a serious development of thought, everything breaks down into a sermon, reminiscence, self-mortification, and self-justification.” That Stalinism is an evil Howe takes as self-evident. What appalls him is that “nowhere in his 800 pages does Chambers attempt sustained definition or description, nowhere does he bound the shape of the evil.” Howe's is a serious charge, especially since Chambers regards his witness to be against “terrible,” “evil” men. The source of the failure of Witness for Howe lies in Chambers's rejection, not of communism, but of the entire Enlightenment. Everyone is guilty, at least since the eighteenth century: “Voltaire, Jefferson, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin; not equally evil, but all, apparently, ‘indifferent to God.’”⁷ Chambers has no social theory, only a Manichean demonology.

Glazer's own political judgments are that Hiss was guilty, that communism was a more serious threat to liberty than Huac. Naturally, Hellman's autobiography angers him. But Glazer raises a point independent of this reaction. He complains that Hellman insists that the Communists she knew were not the enemy. But there was Czechoslovakia and the Gulag and at home the intractability of Communist organizers in Naacp chapters and in Cio locals. On these and other questions Hellman was silent; “she is remarkably coy now.”⁸

Both of these reviews suggest that in Witness and Scoundrel Time there is a gap between the political judgment exercised and defended and the theoretical explanation of these acts of witness. Chambers is able to portray his conversion from Communist functionary to anti-Communist informer in great detail. Every action he undertakes—from his attendance at his first cell meeting, to his acceptance of an underground assignment, to his decision to leave the Party, to his meeting with Berle, to his testimony before Huac, to his lie before a grand jury, to his decision to accuse Hiss of espionage and to turn over the “pumpkin papers”—is subjected to careful, even minute analysis. But, as Howe notes, Chambers sees not only his own life in terms wildly apocalyptic but the last three centuries of Western civilization as well. It is not enough for Chambers to say that the Hiss case was more than a contest between two men or even between New Deal liberals and conservatives or even the “two faiths” of communism and Christianity. The case was a battle between Good and Evil. Evil itelf was “not something that can be condescended to, waved aside or smiled away.” It was not an “uninvited guest” but rather it lay “coiled in foro interno at home with good within ourselves.”⁹ Tocqueville's complaint that Americans as theorists jumped in one huge step from personal observation to cosmic speculation is given another elaboration by Chambers. Chambers leaps from existential to Manichean philosophy, and the flight is so swift and soaring that he rests at a cosmic level for but a second. Personal sin becomes a “tragedy of history” which becomes a battle of faiths only to swiftly become once again a problem for the human heart. Social and political theory cannot compete with a soul that leaps to heaven and falls back again. Chambers could have been an American DeMaistre or Dostoyevski, but his angst is too great to even consider an American version of the hangman or Grand Inquisitor. He suffers too much for himself to assume these roles. Chambers was not crazy, as so many of his opponents insist, but the central problem that his political judgment raises is not the construction of a political theory (Christocentric or otherwise) but the construction of his own self.

Chambers's preoccupations really remain personal ones. The same is true for Hellman's although in a very different way. For Hellman the crimes of Stalinism are remote. They are not distanced by a reactionary cosmology that justifies the acts of witness but by a different kind of fixation on personal experience. “About foreign gunmen I know only what I have read, but the American radicals I met were not violent men.”¹⁰ She thought that Dashiell Hammett probably joined the Party as an act of redemption for his past in the Pinkerton agency. That is a good enough reason for her. In fact, all the Communists she knew—and refused to testify about—were simply ordinary people. Communism is for her almost a personal eccentricity. Here were some “silly” or “stubborn” or “boring” people, some were even “genuine nuts,” who never really did any harm. Her characterizations of the Communist party border on how one might describe vegetarian activists. If Scoundrel Time can be said to have any political theory at all, it is a self-consciously personalist theory, as Manichean as Chambers's in its own way. There are those gentle creatures who in their own complicated ways “seemed to me people who wanted a better world” and there were the “McCarthy boys,” the “cheap badies,” the scoundrels. Political theory is political judgment is personal loyalty. E. M. Forster had once said that if he were faced with the choice of loyalty to a friend or loyalty to his country he hoped he would have the courage to choose the former.¹¹ But Forster's statement has no meaning to Hellman. Countries and institutions, even movements, have no meaning; there is no conflict of loyalties. Hers is only a world peopled by “rebels” and “scoundrels.” If she and the Communist party had made “mistakes,” so what? That they had kept their own personal witness was their own business and no excuse for the “disgraceful conduct of intellectuals no matter how much they disagreed.”¹²

Chambers and Hellman then offer two styles of political judgment. There is a distinct moral system in each, but the moralities upon which their acts of witness are based are not the stuff from which a full account of politics can be made, despite the fact that both Whittaker Chambers and Lillian Hellman possess a great deal of political knowledge. The best way to appreciate this problem is to look in detail at their respective moralities in order to see precisely how they affect not only their judgment but their inability to learn from their acts of witness in a theoretical sense. Chambers's model we can call a “Saul/Paul” morality after the first conversion. Hellman's we can call a “tough-guy” morality. Apologies are due to Hellman. I do not suggest that she was so hypnotized by Hammett that she assumed the role of the private dick. But it is she who reflects a particular morality that represents an accommodation of sorts with American life.

“WHAT I HAD BEEN FELL FROM ME LIKE RAGS …”

Saul had been stricken blind on the road to Damascus. A voice said to him: “I have appeared to you for a purpose: to appoint you my servant and witness, to testify both to what you have seen and to what you shall yet see of me” (Acts 26:16). Thus began the Great Conversion, the first ministry of the Christian Church, the witness of the Gospels to the Gentiles—all led by a former persecutor of the new religion. Paul suffered. He was stoned and left for dead in Lystra, beaten with rods in Philippi, driven out of Berea, imprisoned in Rome. His churches were divided by factions and heresies, his flocks subject to constant backsliding and misinterpretation of the Gospels. Yet through it all, Paul kept his witness, offering an eschatological vision of the Kingdom of God. There is but one Church; the Jews have the Law as their guide, for the Gentiles “their conscience is called as witness.” All would be held accountable when “God judges the secrets of human hearts.”

The Great Conversion is the model for all conversions. At its center there is a tremendous personality change. Saul/Paul is an account of a persecutor of Christianity and its first minister, of a Jew and a universal man, of a backwater colonial and a world traveler. But the Pauline conversion has its special lessons. Paul's suffering is, of course, a mirror of Christ's agony, but more generally the Pauline witness emphasizes self-sacrifice, withstanding ridicule, the almost constant threat of death. There is a description of the beauty of a life touched by grace in Romans but even here Paul dwells upon the pain: “the whole universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth.” Paul's witness is above all an act of teaching. He must teach the Gentiles faith without the Law and the Jews faith in addition to the Law. The consequences for rejecting the teachings are awful. Without God people are left to “their own depraved reason.” They will break “all rules of conduct”: “They are filled with every kind of injustice, mischief, rapacity, and malice; they are one mass of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and malevolence; whisperers and scandal-mongers, hateful to God, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent new kinds of mischief, they show no loyalty to parents, no conscience, no fidelity to their plighted word; they are without natural affection and without pity” (Rom. 1:29-31). But when “God's just judgment will be revealed,” every man “will pay for what he has done.”

On these principles—conversion, living martyrdom, teaching, and eschatological vision—Whittaker Chambers conceived his life. All of these elements appear at the opening of Witness. Chambers imagines that someday his children will ask, “What was my father?”

I will give you an answer: I was a witness. I do not mean a witness for the Government or against Alger Hiss and the others. Nor do I mean the short, squat, solitary figure, trudging through the impersonal halls of public buildings to testify before Congressional committees, grand juries, loyalty boards, courts of law. A man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a witness for something. A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.¹³

It is this kind of language that drove Chambers's opponents so wild that they accused him of psychosis. When he said that he suffered more than those whom he accused, they saw mental imbalance. When he timed his revelations like a long agony, they saw revenge. When he declared himself a representative of one of two faiths locked in a death struggle, they saw political opportunism. And most of all when as Carl he testified to a great friendship with Alger Hiss, they saw a liar. No other figure in American history has been subject to more disbelief in regard to conversion than Whittaker Chambers. Even Huac was slow to believe him. But these doubts, these denials only served to heighten Chambers's conception of his own witness.

Did Chambers consciously attempt to live his life as a Pauline figure? Certainly not before 1939 and perhaps not fully so until he set out to write his autobiography. Even before the acts of witness, however, there are objective signs of a personality awaiting grace. Change of name is a common outward sign of transformation. Chambers adopted well over a dozen names, many of them before his career in the Communist party. Born Vivian Chambers, he used the name Charles Adams when he left home, Charles Whittaker when he returned, and Whittaker Chambers when he registered at Columbia. George Crosley was the name by which Hiss said he knew Chambers and became part of the eventual dichotomy that characterized his conversion.

The famous Commodore Hotel confrontation was for a generation the incident that linked Crosley/Chambers and Hiss. Chambers clearly saw the dramatics of the moment as well. For here was the ghost of Crosley, the old personality, appearing to accuse Hiss. Hiss had asked Chambers to speak, then read aloud, then he examined his teeth. Very reluctantly he admitted that his accuser was indeed a man he had known over ten years ago as George Crosley. Of course, for him the identification of Crosley was simply the admission that he had befriended a “deadbeat.” Chambers, however, saw the “horrible” confrontation in very different terms. He had expected that the meeting would be like an “interrupted conversation, to be taken up where it was dropped.” Instead he saw Hiss not just as a “memory and a name” but as a “trapped man.” Hiss was trapped by the converted Chambers and Chambers insists that throughout the session he had hoped that Hiss too would disclose the truth about his past. That, of course, was not to happen. Hiss insisted on “acting.” When he cross-examined Chambers and seemed puzzled by the inconsistencies in Chambers's responses (yes, he spent time at the apartment on Twenty-ninth street; no, he did not sublet an apartment on Twenty-ninth street), the full force of the witness of the life of the “old” Chambers appeared. “How do you reconcile these responses?” Hiss asked. “Very easily, Alger,” replied Chambers. “I was a Communist and you were a Communist.”¹⁴

It was the meeting at the Hotel Commodore that so dramatically began Chambers's witness. But the conversion had occurred much earlier. It began less on the model of Paul's experience at Damascus than in the subtleties of the Puritan tradition of conversion. Chambers was a doting father. His infant daughter was “the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life.” Chambers's eye “came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear—those intricate, delicate, perfect ears.” There is a real beauty in the memory invoked of this experience. As is generally the case, the reasoning that follows is stilted in comparison:

The thought passed through my mind: “No, those ears were not created by chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.” The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.

Later Chambers learns to pray. He joins the Quaker church of his grandmother. He studies the Quaker conception of witness and concludes the original Quaker witnesses were so important, not because “it is desirable that the world should be convinced by them” but because the Quaker makes “his own person a living testimony against the world.”¹⁵ Chambers takes to plain dress, avoids gossip, gives up swearing and heavy drinking. He becomes an informal confessor for blocked and troubled writers at Time.

These acts of personal religiosity all occur before Chambers decides to undertake his witness against Hiss and communism. But Chambers was a man twice saved and it is important to an understanding of his political thought to appreciate his first conversion. The confession, particularly the confession as a work of political art, is most vulnerable to self-deception in its depiction of a life before conversion. Sometimes personal sins are exaggerated to illustrate the impact of the conversion to come. Every judgment, every act is hopelessly mistaken. The confessor tries to tell us about two completely different beings in the life told. Curiously, Chambers's account is very far removed from the problem of the convert's treatment of his or her earlier life. The story of the religious conversion we have just discussed is real enough. And there are plenty of rogues in the Communist party. There are some finely drawn portraits of Colonel Bykov's cowardice, of Hiss (“He was as American as ham and eggs …”), of Scott Nearing (“women always flocked around him”). But throughout all of these twelve years, Chambers's memories are highly rational ones. The spy activities seem almost biographical. Chambers could have written them in the third person. The work that so influenced his entrance into the Communist party was Lenin's A Soviet At Work, an account of a day in the life of a local soviet. “The reek of life was on it. This was not theory or statistics. This was socialism in practice. This was the thing in itself. This was how it worked.”¹⁶ Few of the Communists in his first cell hold any interest for Chambers. He is remarkably indifferent to Marxist theory. The factional disputes do not interest him. He sides with neither the Lovestonites nor the Forster-Browder group. The purges of the Lovestonites and later the Trotskyists bring no reaction. He attends the Nearing study group but finds the discussions “extremely dull and rambling” and never writes up his research on the Hungarian revolution that was to be part of the group's book. Through a Party oversight Chambers was never assigned to a unit and he was delighted with his good fortune. Party meetings were “unbearable.” When he was to leave the Party the book that helped him to do so was Tchernavin's I Speak for the Silent, an eyewitness account of the Soviet labor camps. As a Communist, then, Chambers was not motivated by the rigor and vision of Marxist theory. Nor was he very taken with the commitment of his comrades. In truth I think Chambers did not like people in general, but the Party members he remembers are an ordinary lot, not too bright, not very courageous as individuals, not especially evil for that matter. Chambers doesn't really like practical politics, even Communist party style. Elizabeth Bentley conveyed the thrill and danger of underground work.¹⁷ Chambers always described his activities with the Ware group in bureaucratic terms: “I came to Washington as a Communist functionary. …”

How then can one understand Chambers's twelve years as a Communist from the first trips around New York City as a collector for the Worker to the clandestine meetings with the Soviet secret police? The answer to this question, the key to an understanding of Chambers's judgments on politics and his second conversion, is that a sense of personal self-sacrifice is the only basis for the justification of action. Chambers saw his uniqueness in the fact that “he was a witness to the two great faiths of our time.” But what did Chambers witness? The message of the autobiography is a message of the loss of a personal faith and the gaining of another. Most of all, it is a message of the suffering entailed in following each. When Chambers was asked by a juror, “What does it mean to be a Communist?” he replied by telling of three of his revolutionary heroes. One, a Polish Communist named Djerjinsky, who had been head of the Tcheka and organizer of the Red Terror, was captured and jailed in Warsaw. He was “ascetic, highly sensitive and intelligent” (characteristics Chambers often used to describe himself and Hiss). Djerjinsky insisted upon being given the job of cleaning latrines on the grounds that it was the “most developed member of any community” who must take upon himself the lowliest tasks as an example for the others. “This is one thing it meant to be a Communist.” Another was a Communist named Eugen Levine who had been captured when the Bavarian Soviet Republic was crushed. When he was told that his sentence was death, Levine replied, “We Communists are always under the sentence of death.” “That,” said Chambers, “is another thing that it meant to be a Communist.” The third example haunted Chambers throughout his life. It is the story of a pre-Communist revolutionist named Kalyaev who had been exiled to Siberia because of his part in an assassination attempt on a tsarist minister. When his fellow prisoners were flogged, Kalyaev “sought some way to protest this outrage to the world.” He drenched himself in kerosene and set himself on fire. “That also is what it meant to be a Communist” and here Chambers adds, “that also is what it means to be a witness.”¹⁸

When Chambers temporarily left the Party for two years he wrote four short stories that were so successful that they caught the attention of Moscow and prepared the way for his reentry into the Party. Each was a story of self-sacrifice. Chambers had wanted to write “not political polemics, which few people ever wanted to read, but stories that anybody might want to read—stories in which the correct conduct of the Communist would be shown in action and without political comment.” The stories are moral guides, “stories of four basic commitments—in suffering, under discipline, in defeat, in death.” By far the most dramatic and most prescient in view of Chambers's later conversion is an account of a Christ-like figure who is about to be shot. It was reported through the eyes of a “cynical fellow prisoner” (not unlike Barrabas) who, “only when the execution was over, sensed that he had been touched by something new in his experience—the moral force of men who were prepared to die for what they believed.”¹⁹

After Chambers's second conversion, the theme of sacrifice is redefined as Pauline living martyrdom although the suffering is directed inward. His new heroes are Dostoyevski, Karl Barth, and Kierkegaard. Each represents a conservative theology that is quite different from the Arminian and social gospel trends in American religion. But even more important, each offers an intensely existentialist conception of God, one that emphasizes a personal qualitative leap in religious faith to a God who is in Barth's words, ganz anders (“wholly different”). Chambers insisted that the “plain men” of the grand jury of the Southern District of New York knew “exactly what I was talking about” when he paraphrased these men.

During this period Chambers wrote an essay on Reinhold Niebuhr for Time. In Witness he announces that it was “at that time my most personal statement about religious faith:”

Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit—the paradoxic sadness of “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief” and the paradoxic triumph of Tertullian's “Credo quia impossible” (I believe because it is impossible). Religiously, its logic, human beyond rationality, is the expression of a need epitomized in the paradox of Solon weeping for his dead son. “Why do you weep,” asked a friend, “since it cannot help?” Said Solon: “That is why I weep—because it cannot help.”

This, says Chambers, is the answer to anyone who “seeks to know what the mind, the mood and character of Whittaker Chambers was like on the eve of the Hiss Case.” He remembers appreciatively Niebuhr's comment on the article, quoting his brother: “Only a man who has deeply suffered could have written it.”²⁰

Chambers's stories of martyrdom, those both before and after his second conversion, were to become the basis for his own actions. He writes: “In the end, the only memorable stories, like the only memorable experiences, are religious and moral. … If my story is worth telling, it is because I rejected in turn each of the characteristic endings of our time—the revolutionary ending and the success ending. I chose a third ending.” The years with Time are described in the autobiography as “the tranquil years.” The designation, I suppose, is a relative one because the angst described above hardly appears to suggest peace of mind. There was the farm, of course. Chambers described his work there as an act of witness. But even the life of the cosmopolitan bourgeois becomes an ending not taken, as he denies it to himself: “By deliberately choosing his life of hardship and immense satisfaction, we say in effect: The modern world has nothing better than this to give us. Its vision of comfort without effort, pleasure without the pain of creation, life sterilized against even the thought of death, rationalized so that every intrusion of mystery is felt as a betrayal of the mind. Life mechanized and standardized—that is not for us.”²¹

Under subpoena by Huac, Chambers concludes that the “time of the witness of words was over and the time of acts had begun. … Acts were also required of a man if there was something in him that enabled him to act.”²² Again and again throughout the case, Chambers would push himself to what he saw as the necessary conclusion to this “witness of acts.” When he considered destroying the microfilm he asked whether he should bear a witness of justice against Hiss or a witness of mercy. He went to the woods to pray and the image of Kalyaev appeared from the “depths of memory.” In one sense, of course, he rejects the model of the Russian revolutionary's martyrdom. He must not destroy the film; he must be a “living witness.” But in Chambers's mind he had also followed Kalyaev's example, for the witness “would only mean my destruction by slower means.” That was to be Chambers's life ending, “that was my penalty.”

The flaw in Chambers's judgment and the inability to present a more complete account of politics lay not in his belief that he saw God everywhere (even the contention that the appointment of Thomas Murphy as government prosecutor “pleased God”). The flaw did not in itself even lie with the self-centered character of Chambers's world. That a preoccupation with self-sacrifice can lead to a complicated kind of selfishness is certainly demonstrated by Chambers. What, above all, is the negative lesson of Witness is that judgments cannot be justified as simple acts of faith whether one's faith is in the Party or in God. Chambers, the critic of the naivete of American liberalism, presents us with his own kind of political hyperindividualism. It is certainly true that an enemy of the Enlightenment can find few institutions with which to ally. If the belief that man's rationality is divine is a heresy of American Protestantism, then where does an American Dostoyevski turn? Every major institution in America is a product of the Enlightenment. Chambers as conservative is left only with his personal faith. Was Huac to be America's agency of redemption, a collection of Grand Inquisitors? Certainly its opponents drew pictures of this sort. For Chambers, however, Huac was simply a collection of politicians with average intelligence and shrewdness. There are a few scattered populist references to the intuitive capacities of the people, mostly jurors. Most of all, however, one feels in Witness a strong implication that American society itself is corrupt at its core, that the corruption is deeper than the “revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking of the New Deal,” that America and the Soviet Union are on the same side as nations “indifferent to God,” that the insistence of the American people that the dispute between Hiss and Chambers was a “personal grudge” on both sides was evidence of willful disregard for national salvation.

Chambers was not the first conservative, nor will he be the last, to experience estrangement from American society. Chambers's acts of witness only exacerbated the alienation, for he knew that he was an informer: “Men shrink from that word and what it stands for as something lurking and poisonous.” In what is surely one of the most moving and perceptive passages in Witness, Chambers outlines the moral costs of the decision to inform on others. The informer “uses his special knowledge to destroy others.” It is the “special information” he has to give “because he knows those others' faces, voices and lives, because he once lived within their confidence, in a shared faith, trusted by them as one of themselves, accepting their friendship, feeling their pleasures and griefs, sitting in their houses, eating at their tables, accepting their kindness, knowing their wives and children” that makes him so useful to the state. The police protect him but now “he is their creature.” “When they whistle, he fetches a soiled bone of information.” “The informer is a slave. He is no longer a man. He is free only to the degree in which he knows what he is doing and why he must do it.” Still, he must deal with his captors, “men of many orders of intelligence, of many motives of self-interest or malice, men sometimes infiltrated or tainted by the enemy, in an immensely complex pattern of politics and history.”²³ To be effective, the informer must exercise the “shrewdest judgment.”

Chambers's sketch of the informer is one of a man alone. He has broken a basic moral law, “an honorable and valid one,” which enjoins men to keep confidences among intimates. Chambers had betrayed a friend, but for him this betrayal was the penalty he must pay for his complicity in “the crimes of politics and history.” The only real freedom he felt that remained to him as he traveled on a road that “is always night” was his own political judgment. But the basis for judgment was so restricted by the act of witness itself that Chambers had only to rely upon his own sense of self-sacrifice and faith. These were not totally insignificant braces. He could certainly be shrewd (his opponents knew this well) but shrewdness is only a limited aspect of judgment. For the most part he saw himself as the “fat man” who was hated by the Left, used by the Right, and treated as part of a “sporting event” by the citizenry as a whole. Chambers was the archetypal outsider. His model may have been Paul, but, I think, he could never quite reject the contention that he resembled Cain more. That is why Chambers, unlike Paul, could not build a Church in America.

Paul suffered, but through his witness he taught the West to accept Christianity. The teachings of Chambers leave no legacy. There is suffering all right, and there is a witness and even an apocalyptic vision, but Chambers offers communion without a church. In his later writings the same enormous swings reappear. Cold Friday is a stilted collection of Chambers, the witness, whose own revelations predict the inevitable destruction of both superpowers. The series of letters to William Buckley shows the other side of Chambers: “Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up basic principles. And of course that results in a dance along a precipice.”²⁴ Here is Chambers, the informer, the man whose special knowledge makes him a captive who can only “maneuver.” He did judge correctly but never with certainty could he answer his own question, “Who appointed me judge?” More than anything else, Chambers wanted to be a witness “for something,” but he could never tell us what it was.

“LIFE HAD CHANGED AND THERE WERE MANY PEOPLE WHO DID NOT CALL ME”

Lillian Hellman's witness appears very different from Whittaker Chambers's. Hellman was a woman who, at considerable personal risk, “refused to cut [her] conscience to fit this year's fashions.” The image she offers, and the one that is accepted by her admirers, is of a person who made a political judgment based upon a simple morality: “I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor, to be loyal to my country, and so on.” The listing of these “homely things” is great theater. Hellman, Broadway playwright, Hollywood screenwriter, and world traveler, did not forget the lessons of McGuffey's Reader. She indignantly reminds the Huac committeemen, small-town Americans all, of what are “the simple rules of human decency” derived from the “good American tradition.” In fact, Hellman's own childhood owed more to Tennessee Williams than to Booth Tarkington. Her mother's rich family had ripped off poor blacks and the beloved aunts mentioned in all her memoirs are frequently portrayed as victims of small-town morality. There is, nonetheless, an element of truthfulness in Hellman's devotion to a homely American morality, even if in terms different from those offered before Huac. In Scoundrel Time she saw herself (and the Communists) in the tradition of southern eccentrics. When Dashiell Hammett warned her that the punishment for radical beliefs was jail, she insisted that her dissent was a simple exercise of her “inherited rights” as an American. In fact, most of the indictments of Scoundrel Time are directed against the financially comfortable American intelligentsia who were too complacent to make simple moral judgments. In fact even nativist explanations are offered: “The children of timid immigrants are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hard-working; and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at all costs.”²⁵ Most convincing of all in terms of the veracity of Hellman's persona as a woman acting upon simple American moral precepts and exercising inherited rights is her intense feeling of betrayal and anger. “In every civilized country people have always come forward to defend those in political trouble.” But few helped her on Hammett. She had believed that “the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe.” But this was not so. When after the publication of Scoundrel Time, a woman she met at a party chided her by saying, “You must learn to be more tolerant,” Hellman's anger assumed volcanic proportions. Scoundrel Time was too restrained. Now she would really take her moral stand: “I never want again to watch people turn into liars and cowards and others into frightened, silent collaborators. And to hell with the fancy reasons they give for what they did.”²⁶

But what so angers Hellman's opponents is not her refusal to cut her conscience to fit fashion; what drives her detractors to frenzy (much in the same way as Chambers's critics are angered) is their belief that Hellman was not a woman of independent judgment at all. She had not come forward when American Trotskyites had been persecuted under the Smith Act. She had not criticized the monumental crimes of Stalin. She had not publicly opposed the Communist take-over of the Henry Wallace campaign. In short, she had not helped people in political trouble. The woman of conscience who had exercised political judgment is regarded as a hypocrite. In truth, Hellman's defense against this charge is weak. She contended that she did take “too long to see what was going on in the Soviet Union.” But the confession is immediately retracted as she attacks “anti-Communist writers and intellectuals”: “I do not believe that we did our country any harm. And I think they did.”²⁷ Leaving aside how forthright opposition from the Left might have saved some individuals from the Gulag, one still must ask important questions. Had the positive relish with which the Communist party supported persecution of a small splinter group not provided conditions for McCarthyism? Had the failure to criticize the Soviet Union actually discredited the entire American Left for a generation? Even these concerns do not reach the core of Hellman's failure in political judgment, for she had not simply made simple errors of judgment on selected political issues. For years she had forfeited her political judgment. If that much-abused term, “fellow traveler,” has any objective meaning, it fits the political career of Lillian Hellman. She states that despite overtures from Earl Browder and V. J. Jerome she never joined the Party. “In any case,” she continues, “whether I signed a Party card or didn't was of little importance to me.” She defended the Moscow trials. She attacked Dewey's Commission of Inquiry. She attacked a relief committee for Finns during the Soviet invasion. Where, her critics justly ask, was her conscience during last year's fashions?²⁸

I think that in her own mind Hellman was totally innocent of the charge of hypocrisy, that she thought that she had always exercised her political judgment, certainly not flawlessly but without guile and deceit. That she felt this way despite the overwhelmingly powerful charges of her critics can only be explained by her adoption of an ethical system that she herself never fully understood. Can one live by a “simple,” “homely” morality and the Party line? Hellman did, but the costs were high. They make her witness much more complicated than either she or her critics thought.

There is no conversion experience at the center of Hellman's memoirs, but there is in her narratives a set of remembrances that speaks to the conversion experience. It constitutes what can be called an anti-conversion ethic or perhaps, more accurately, a “dry conversion.” In Scoundrel Time her Huac experience is expressed in these terms. Her life had changed: “My belief in liberalism was mostly gone. I think I have substituted for it something private called, for want of something that is more accurate, decency.” The American intelligentsia failed to provide leadership; it has “written no words of new theory in a country that cries out for belief. …” There were other “penalties” as well: her income falls from $140,000 to $10,000 as a result of the blacklist, she must sell her farm (“corrupt and unjust men made me sell the only place that was ever right for me”); she must write screen plays for B movie directors at only a fraction of her market value; she has passport problems and believes that she has been harassed by the Cia; she has an affair with a “bastard” (recalling it as a punishment self-inflicted). Hellman's account has all the features of a conversion experience. She undergoes momentous, traumatic psychological change in a brief period of time. Her past life appears mistaken and misunderstood. But the new personality that emerges is not like Thoreau's metaphor of the cocoon and the butterfly. In fact it is quite the opposite. Her account is of a loss of faith, a disintegration of old beliefs without a corresponding emergence of new ones.²⁹

But what the convert reveals he/she also hides. Scoundrel Time still maintains the myth of a woman upholding the homely principles of the “good American tradition.” Here, she writes, are the consequences suffered from the exercise of “inherited rights”—loss of friends, livelihood and, most of all, belief in the reliability of friends. She has, of course, “recovered”: “I tell myself that was then, and there is now, and the years between then and now, and the then and now are one.”³⁰ But Hellman suffered and, unlike Paul, her witness is only a witness to scoundrels and cowards. But the “dry” conversion, the loss of faith, has already occurred at another level long before her “punishment” by scoundrels. In fact, it is the earlier outlook that accounts for her peculiar approach to politics and determines the kind of witness she offers as well as her reaction to the scoundrels.

The autobiographical form is an ideal structure for the exposition of Hellman's moral theory. All of her narratives are composed of moral portraits. This format is an ideal didactic device; we learn about Hellman from the models she sketches; we are also taught by Hellman about right and wrong by the moral lessons these lives offer. Thus she is able to avoid what can often become insufferable for the reader of autobiography. The seemingly endless alternation between self-deprecation and self-justification that one finds in Chambers, the moralist, is softened by the indirect character of Hellman's teaching. But what does Hellman teach?

The now famous Julia is a woman who paid for her moral convictions with her life. Julia, daughter of a wealthy family, is Hellman's childhood friend. The two continue to correspond after Julia goes to Vienna to study medicine. Julia's letters warn of the dangers of Nazism but, although Hellman is concerned, she is busy writing The Children's Hour and drinking with Hammett and their friends. Hellman knows that Julia “had become, maybe always was, a Socialist” and that she now lived in a one-room apartment in a slum district in Vienna, “sharing her great fortune with whoever needed it.” But Hellman is shocked to learn that Julia has been injured in a battle between workers and Fascist troops. Bewildered, she sees Julia in a hospital in Vienna. In 1937 she is approached by a member of the resistance and asked to smuggle money into Germany. Hellman is naturally terribly frightened but she undertakes the mission and again briefly meets Julia in Berlin. The scene is powerfully recalled: the already distraught Hellman cries at Julia's physical condition, Julia quietly urges calm and explains her cause. Later Hellman learns that Julia has been killed. She goes to London to make funeral arrangements, but is never able to keep her last promise to her friend. She is not able to find Julia's infant daughter. Throughout all these years, Hellman is enraged by the cruel indifference of Julia's family. She contrasts Julia's life (and death) to her other friends. The Fitzgeralds, Dorothy Parker, the Murphys had only played at radicalism, choosing instead to live their lives based only on “style.” They were unknowingly bought off by the rich. Others, like Hellman and Julia's mutual friends, Ann-Marie and Sammy, have sunk to a level of decadence only the rich can reach. There is boasting of incest and the malevolent accusation of lesbianism against Hellman and Julia.

Bethe is another of Hellman's heroes. She is Hellman's cousin, a German immigrant who is deserted by her husband and who later lives with an Italian gangster. Bethe's lover is killed and parts of his body are found buried in the garden behind their apartment. Bethe is a counterpart to Julia. She is an uneducated woman who is never able to grasp English. She is a woman of physical passions. The central scene of the portrait takes place in an Italian restaurant. Bethe had invited the young Lillian for lunch. Bethe sees her lover across the room: I “found her staring at the man, her lips compressed as if to hold the mouth from doing something else, her shoulders rigid against the chair.” Hellman realizes that she was “seeing what I had never seen before. …” But Bethe pays for sexual desire as Julia paid for her radicalism. She is rejected by Hellman's family. She lives a life of danger and poverty. Like Julia, she is a teacher to Hellman. “Do not sadden, Liebchen,” she assures the young Lillian. “No longer am I a German. No longer the Bowmans. Now I am a woman and woman does not need help.” Bethe dies in a shack hidden in a Louisiana swamp.³¹

There are many other moral portraits all designed to illustrate lessons to be derived from the ambiguities of life; there is Uncle Willy, Hellman's first love, who flouts middle-class convention as a swashbuckling entrepreneur. Willy directs a Latin American company which hires mercenaries to keep “the peons quiet.” But Hellman is more disturbed by her Aunt Lil's pretenses, although she is a morphine addict and has had a string of lovers. Hellman now knows that it was childish romanticism to think that money earned from a bank was different from money earned from international speculation. Nevertheless, she is tempted to accept Uncle Willy's invitation to go adventuring in South America. There are Hellman's two aunts, Jenny and Hannah, unmarried women slighted by society, who suffer the indignity of running a boarding house and devote their lives to their brother. There is wildly eccentric, enigmatic Arthur W. A. Cowan who talks like a reactionary but quietly gives huge sums of money to radical causes.

But the most compelling portrait of all is that of Dashiell Hammett, Hellman's central moral teacher. Hammett was Hellman's lover. On Hellman's admission, both had innumerable affairs, both drank far too much, both squandered their money, both quarreled a great deal. Nonetheless, it is the moral lessons that Hammett taught that form the core of Hellman's remembrances. For Hellman, Hammett was the most “interesting man” she had ever met. She admired his presence before other people, his reading habits, his physique, his writing craft. Most of all, she admired his morality: his decision to join the Communist party; his decision to refuse to cooperate with the government despite the penalty of a jail sentence; his unwillingness to ask friends for help after he had been blacklisted; his decision to join the army when he was forty-five. In an addendum to her elegy to Hammett in Unfinished Woman, Hellman reports a conversation that suggests the nature of her admiration of Hammett as moral teacher:

One night … I said, “Did you read Kant when you were young?”

“When I could stand him. Why?”

“Is that where you got a lie is ‘an annihilation of dignity’?”

He laughed. “I don't think so. I just think lies are boring.”³²

Hammett had a moral code; he may not have lied. But neither Hammett nor Hellman was a Kantian. There are some similarities, of course. Both rejected the calculation of consequences as the basis of morality. Both rejected prudence as an acceptable basis for action. But the similarities end there and the key to the difference is Hammett's answer to the morality of truth-telling: “I just think lies are boring.” Hellman's repeated questions about morality all receive a standard reply from Hammett which says in effect, “my decisions cannot form the basis for any objective form of generalization; to even discuss my motivations is a futile enterprise.” Hellman nevertheless keeps asking. But all she receives in return is a joke, exasperation, and finally an admonition to stop the queries. All of the Hammett-Hellman conversations have a staccato quality about them. When Hellman tells Hammett that Abe Fortas suggested that it was time for someone to take a “moral position,” Hammett, “halfway through dinner … pushed the plate away and said, ‘that's shit. Plain liberal shit.’” When Hellman asks Hammett about his commitment to communism, he replies, “Now please don't let's ever argue about it again because we're doing each other harm.” Hellman is never sure if Hammett is a Party member.³³

This kind of moral silence characterizes their personal relationship. Hellman is on the verge of a nervous breakdown over concerns about her sexual attractiveness. She is obsessed with the belief that she “smells” and confesses to Hammett her neurosis: “I think I smell and so you wouldn't like me.” Hammett replies: “And you're crying. Go to sleep now and tell me about it when you're ready.” No further discussion takes place. Hellman leaves for a trip and sleeps with a stranger in order to test her fears. Years later, after Hellman refused Hammett's drunken advances, he never sleeps with her again. No discussion is permitted. Hellman concludes in her memoirs that Hammett did not believe in the words “right” and “wrong,” but that he “had formed a set of principles … by which he stood in eccentric isolation.” This is just what Hellman “needed”:

His rules were not my rules, but sometimes mine met his and we agreed, although that mattered less to me than Hammett's refusal to deviate from his, whatever the dangers or the temptations. For many people that would not be much to find: for me, even when I disagreed, it came at a time when I was going under.³⁴

Garry Wills, in his introduction to Scoundrel Time, perceptively compares Hellman to Hammett's Nora Charles. She is “one tough lady.” Hellman did indeed adopt a “tough-guy” morality. But Wills's belief that the tough guy is a person “armed with no ideological weapons, just with a personal code, with undefended decency” is as much a myth as Hellman's justification for refusing to testify on the basis of “good American tradition.”³⁵ Wills argues for a distinction between the ideologue and the radical. The latter does not possess the cold hatred derived from a commitment to a philosophy (ironically, Chambers is Wills's example) but rather acts on the basis of a personal code. The radical hates only “vicious and harmful people.” How then can Hellman, the “radical,” so consistently support the “ideologues” of the Communist party? Hellman's answer to this would have been immensely instructive, but of course she can give no answer, save for the confession of personal “mistakes,” just as Hammett could not tell Hellman why he joined the Party.

The tough-guy morality is a defective morality and this explains why Hellman's own witness is so unsatisfactory. Her moral portraits all reveal a focus upon moral decision as the center of life. But although these decisions always exhibit acts of courage (Julia's antifascism, Bethe's selection of a gangster as a lover, Hammett's refusal), all of them deemphasize the justification for the actions taken. Often Hellman has us believe that the right course is so obvious that no justification is necessary. Who would not be an anti-Fascist? Who would not be devoted to one's lover? Who would not keep the confidences of friends? Moral philosophy, on Hellman's view, is for cowards, for those who must explain why they failed to do right. But the underlying reason for the absence of justification in the lives of Hellman's mentors is that there are no standards of right. Morality is a ruse to excuse cowardice, to hide hypocrisy, to justify ambition. The world of the tough guy is a corrupt society in which nearly everyone is beyond redemption. Morality is a trick, a game for the predators, a trap for the sap. Without hope of change the tough guy adopts a code of personal honor. A loss of faith in the social order forces the tough guy to approach the world only as a set of personal relationships. The tough guy does have a set of rules that governs his behavior, and it may include telling the truth or helping others, but he decides when to apply the rules and how. Thus Sam Spade has an affair with his partner's wife but later concludes that he must avenge his partner's death. The latter is not an act of redemption for the former. The two actions are unrelated. He doesn't have to fully explain his actions because no one deserves an explanation. They're all scoundrels anyway.

Albert Camus saw the implications of the tough-guy morality and concluded that its defects lay not in its existential character but rather in its total abandonment of hope. The tough guy refuses to linger to examine motivation. Instead his is a world seen only from the outside, a world of “wretched automatons in a machine-ridden universe.”³⁶ Camus contends that the tough-guy novelist ultimately renders a “heart-rending but sterile protest” because by abandoning hope he abandons the very idea of rebellion.

The tough guy then is not the radical that Wills describes. He may attach himself to the causes of the Left but his commitment rests only upon a decision that his personal honor requires a set of actions. He may appear to base his decision on personal relationships, but his is a debased conception of persons. He cannot really know them except as occasions for the exercise of his personal honor. As the holder of a tough-guy morality Hellman was able to summon the courage to resist the scoundrels of Huac. But as a tough guy she was also able to follow the Party line without ever fully seeing the chain of her actions. Two more of Hellman's portraits can help make this point. One is an account of V. J. Jerome, Communist party theoretician, the other Frank Costello, gangster. Jerome and several other Communist officials were in the same jail as Hammett. Hammett and Jerome had been playing ping-pong with a convicted murderer. Jerome questions a call. When Hammett suggests not to expect honesty from criminals, Jerome insists upon the “socialist necessity” to reform all men. A moment later the inmate cheats again and Jerome directly accuses him. The inmate charges Jerome with a knife in hand. Hammett is able to intervene and promises an apology from Jerome. But the Communist official refuses to retract his charge: “I do not wish to apologize. You should be ashamed of yourself for cheating a jailed comrade. …”³⁷ Hammett is able to avoid violence by offering packs of cigarettes as reparations for the insult.

Frank Costello was introduced to Hellman by a nightclub comic. The two began to have dinner together at least once a month. Conversation was quite limited. Hellman recalls speaking only a few minutes and not again for a half hour. One evening Hellman complained about her difficulties in collecting money for the Spanish republicans trapped on the International Bridge from Spain to France. Costello reached into his pocket and handed Hellman $5,000. He had said, “Friends of yours are friends of mine.” When Hellman tried to explain the civil war and fascism, Costello interrupted her: “None of that, please. Don't tell me about it. I don't get mixed up in politics and when you hand over the money, you forget my name, kid.”³⁸

Neither Jerome nor Costello were tough guys. Both lived lives “outside of society” but both in their own ways were organization men. But their gestures did appeal to Hellman's own tough-guy morality. Jerome had risked his life for principle. The principle was applied absurdly. The context called for prudence (as Hammett had indeed exercised). But the fact that Jerome's behavior was “silly” is proof to Hellman that the communists were not “dangerous.” It was also proof that those who had left the Party were overreacting when the “faithful” used “extraordinary language” to attack them. “Only literary people can confuse shouts of ‘renegade’ or ‘traitor’ with the damage of a gun or a bomb.” In her line of reasoning Hellman admired Jerome because his action was so reckless and so inappropriate. The Communists were for Hellman practitioners of the old-fashioned American homely principles she understood. Just as Jerome had acted so quirkily before the murderer, the Party had misapplied their principles in its imitation of the Russians. The American Communists had embraced Russian theory and practice “with the enthusiasm of a lover whose mistress cannot complain because she speaks few words of the language.”³⁹ But Costello was a dangerous man. Part of the reason Hellman went to dinner with him was because she hoped that she might hear some “small piece of information about a murder.” But what forms Hellman's moral judgment is always an appreciation of a gesture in itself. Costello could just as easily have given money to Franco. The complete absence of political judgment on his part is what Hellman finds so attractive. That someone gave $5,000 to a cause of which he had no knowledge is an admirable moral act. Where Costello's money came from, protection rackets, prostitution, drug dealing, is a question Hellman is simply not interested in pursuing, just as she was unwilling to consider the question of Stalinism. In a world peopled by scoundrels and badies, the gestures of Jerome and Costello complete the possibilities for moral life. When Hellman finds a book for Costello he attempts to give her $500 for her trouble. Hellman refuses. Costello thinks for a moment and concludes, “I guess I wouldn't take it, either, but then you and I are a lot alike.”⁴⁰ There is a categorical imperative in that statement, but it is a tough guy's Kantianism, implemented on whim and subject only to personal interpretation.

The fascination with the gesture as a moral act reveals a paradox in the tough-guy morality. Robert Edelbaum has described the tough guy in “daemonic” terms.⁴¹ He/she is an individual free of memory, free of convention, free of attachments to the social order. As such, the tough guy is free of the kinds of temptations that afflict the rest of us. The tough guy is not afraid of death, is free from the lures of money (Julia, Uncle Harry, and Hammett all are unconcerned about money) and romance. This estrangement from society is the source of the tough guy's power. In the detective novel it is a power to solve mysteries. The tough guy is so immune to the temptations of ordinary life that he can “see through” people. Only one free from the temptations of money, power, and romance can see how they drive others. Thus Julia can see the dangers of fascism because she has forfeited her inheritance. Bethe needs no help because she is no longer a German or a Bowman. Hammett does not need anyone's friendship. “As you came toward Hammett to shake his hand, you wanted him to approve of you because he had reserves so deep that we know we cannot hope to touch him with jokes or favors.”⁴² Even prison guards called him “Sir.”

It was the kind of power that Hellman thought she exercised over the Committee and it was its absence that in Hellman's mind led so many others to fail to act. These timid comfortable people were too tied to status or money to judge. When Elia Kazan tries to explain why he will testify Hellman doesn't understand until he blurts out, “It's OK for you to do what you want, I guess. You've probably spent whatever you've earned.”⁴³

But the same perspective that permits the tough guy to “see” the motivations of others severely restricts his ability to create social bonds. Hellman can only understand others as types, the scoundrels, the timid, and the comfortable. Those who are free like she is she can only understand at moments of moral gesture. Camus had said that the tough guy observes the world behind a pane of glass. Only in her last memoir, Maybe, does Hellman consider the consequences of the tough-guy morality. Maybe is Hellman's only real confessional. It does have all the elements of the detective story: incest, murder, drugs, insanity, betrayal. The role of the tough guy in this genre of fiction is to uncover instances of corruption beneath the facade of social order. In Pentimento and Scoundrel Time Hellman had been able to summon up her power to draw moral portraits and witness against the scoundrels, but in Maybe she is a lost person. The central memory that Hellman attempts to capture is of Sarah. She meets Sarah sporadically throughout her account but she is unable to draw her usual moral portrait, perhaps because in a sense it is Sarah whom Camus would have seen as the tough guy, as a symbol of a despairing world. Sarah is truly a person without memory and without hope. “It's not a question of life or people with Sarah. She has no interest in tomorrow because she has no interest in yesterday. It comes down to hours.”⁴⁴ Sarah has a child by Carter Cameron (later Hellman's lover as well) but she insists upon naming him Som for “son of many.” Sarah's aimless promiscuity is only part of the consequence of her estrangement from others. She is a pathological liar. She masquerades at various points in the narrative as German and then Italian royalty. Sarah is involved in a shooting incident, and apparently she dies ignominiously in Italy.

There are elements in this biography of Sarah that suggest Hellman's conventional moral didactics. Sarah is indeed a free spirit; she simply ignores rather than flouts social convention and of course she must pay a price for her freedom. She is divorced, loses custody of her child, is rejected by the “respectable” rich, and roams through Europe. Hellman can never quite find the kind of moral certainty at Sarah's core that she has discovered in her other portraits. She cannot quite even present a picture of Sarah as a “good” scoundrel like Uncle Willy. The search for the real Sarah becomes the quest of this memoir. The attempt to “remember” Sarah in some moral sense takes major significance because Sarah's life (as well as Hellman can reconstruct it) bears striking parallels to her own. Both women are moderately promiscuous (at least compared to the men in their lives). In fact they share two of the same lovers. One of them is responsible for Hellman's nervous breakdown. Alex had told Hellman that she “smelled.” Hellman becomes obsessed with the belief that she has a “strange but interesting odor.” She takes four baths a day and queries anyone who will listen (no one does) about her smells. Hammett tells her that Freud had said that one cannot remember a smell. A befuddled farmer is even quizzed after he casually notes that he likes the smell of a barn.

Hellman is temporarily relieved when Sarah tells her that Alex had also complained about her in the same way. It may not be too presumptuous to suggest that Hellman's concern about her “smell,” now shared with Sarah, is a reflection of Hellman's suspicion about her own moral integrity. Both women travel with gangsters and when Hellman hears of a shooting scandal involving Sarah she hires a researcher to provide her details. Later Sarah gives Hellman a version of the incident. For Hellman her racketeer lover must have been “very handsome and interesting.” Sarah had testified that the shooting was in self-defense. Was this a moral gesture worth remembering? Was it a lie as an act of love? Was Sarah another Bethe, this time a society girl who willingly moves into the world of gangsters? Hellman asks her own gangster. Frank Costello checks the information Hellman gives him and finds that Sarah's lover was a “third-rate runner” in his seventies. Costello concludes, “And I ain't no authority on what society girls think is handsome, but he was five feet six maybe, had a slashed nose and his face was all over slashed from prison fights he'd been in all his life.”⁴⁵

Hellman is never able to completely demystify Sarah because neither she nor Sarah is able to remember individuals and events except in hazy and jumbled ways. When Sarah tells a story it always lacks coherence. Because Sarah has no reasons for her actions, memory of a “vulgar” raincoat is mixed with witnessing a murder. All of Hellman's memories of Sarah have this surreal quality. She can never quite remember when she first met Sarah; Sarah cannot remember at all. Sometimes when she meets Sarah, she is not Sarah but Signora Pinelli or Melaniess. Sometimes Hellman cannot recognize Sarah and sometimes Sarah cannot recognize Hellman. Attempts to verify incidents through third parties meet with the same kind of confusion. Reflecting on memories of Sarah, Hellman begins to question whether she had told the truth in her other memoirs: “I tried very hard for the truth. I did try, but I don't know much of what really happened and never tried to find out. In addition to the ordinary deceptions that you and others make in life, time itself makes time fuzzy and meshes truth with half truth. But I can't seem to say it right. …”⁴⁶

Maybe, a memoir about puzzles and mysteries, itself ends on a puzzling note. Hellman, the tough guy with the freedom and hence the power to see through others ends her narrative without solving the mystery. She learns that Sarah is not dead, that her death was a ruse to collect insurance. The woman cast out from society for her eccentricities had not died in poverty. A few months later Hellman goes for a midnight swim at Martha's Vineyard: “The water was the right temperature, everything was better; there was even the possibility that there could be some answer to the future and that it wouldn't be as bad as I thought.” But this moment of contentment is brief. Hellman finds that she cannot see the shore. She remembers that “frightened” is not the right word to describe her feelings: “Something else was happening to me: I was collapsing in a way that had never happened before.” Hellman manages somehow to swim ashore. She races from the beach, cuts herself on a rugosa bush, and staggers back to her cottage. After falling asleep, she awakens, having lost track of time. “I was in the kind of temper that has no name because it is not temper but was some monumental despair that makes crazy people kill cats or stifle crying babies.” She telegrams Cameron, Sarah's exhusband and her own exlover. The message says: “There are missing parts everyplace and everywhere and they are not my business unless they touch me. But when they touch me, I do not wish them to be black. My instinct repeat instinct repeat instinct repeat instinct is that yours are black. Lillian.”⁴⁷

The closing of Maybe manages to stay within the boundaries of the tough-guy morality. Hellman's crisis is resolved by an act of will that requires no explanation. The outside world is one of moral chaos “(there are missing parts everyplace and everywhere”) but she does not have to solve these puzzles or even discover moral gestures in others to make a judgment. Hellman need only rely upon instinct. Yet barely beneath this final defense of the tough guy is a realization of its consequences. Sarah is the tough guy without the capacity or the inclination for moral judgment. Her estrangement from society is so complete that she does not even lash out in bursts of moral judgment. She is vaguely troubled by the murder and her complicity in it, but she is so cut off from human relationships that she cannot piece together its significance. The most she can manage is, “I've always thought that's the real wages of sin: you never get to know much.”⁴⁸ Hellman searches repeatedly and vainly for some moral aura around Sarah, but the more she looks, the more the mindless and despairing aspects of Sarah's rebellion come into focus. Hellman sees a Sarah in herself: the drug taking, the compulsive drinking, the unpleasant affairs, and, most of all, the almost complete absence of fellowship and community in her life. Hellman's despair turns inward in a moment of crisis; she was “collapsing in a way that had never happened before.” Maybe does end with a great effort at moral assessment, but the exposure of the underside of the tough-guy morality is too vivid, too sustained to be pushed aside, despite (or perhaps because of) the strength required for that final moral gesture.

In Scoundrel Time Hellman frequently complains about the inability of American intellectuals to remember their political judgments: “We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads.”⁴⁹ But the tough guy, as Camus said, is a person without memory. Hellman, the autobiographer and the radical, cannot really remember herself, at least in a moral sense. In a world of scoundrels and tough guys, respect is so occasional and intuitive that no history is possible. There are only missing parts every place and every where. How strange and how sad that Whittaker Chambers and Lillian Hellman, the two great opposing witnesses of our age, should fail so completely in presenting a theory of their acts of witness.

Notes

1. Cited in Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York, 1952), pp. 540-42.

2. Cited in Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston, 1976), pp. 97-98.

3. The case for Hellman as an American “heroine” is taken up by Garry Wills in his introduction to Scoundrel Time and in Doris V. Falk's Lillian Hellman (New York, 1978). Also see Murray Kempton, “Witnesses,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 1976, pp. 22-25. Kempton, who praises Hellman as “someone who knew how to act when there was nothing harder on earth than knowing how to act,” also admits that he would not want Hellman “overmuch as a comrade”: “She is too vain about judgmental qualities that seem to me by no means her best ones; she is a bit of a bully; and she is inclined to be a hanging judge of the motives of those whose opinions differ from her own” (p. 25). Caustically critical accounts also abound: William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who is the Ugliest of Them All?” National Review, January 21, 1977; Sidney Hook, “Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time,” Encounter, February 1977; William L. O'Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals (New York, 1982), pp. 358-66.

4. Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New York, 1968), p. 62; Allen Weinstein (Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case) contends that most commentators tended to see Hiss and Chambers in “iconic” terms. The most passionate, and theoretically ingenious critique of Chambers as a witness is Meyer Zelig's psychobiography, Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss (New York, 1967). But Zelig's analysis of events in Chambers's life history, based largely on Witness, which leads him to a diagnosis of paranoia, are paralleled in Hiss's life as well. Also see Benjamin Jowitt, The Strange Case of Alger Hiss (New York, 1953) and John Cabot Smith, Alger Hiss: The True Story (New York, 1976) for defenses of Hiss. Hiss's own autobiography is notable only in being the most unreflective memoir in the English language (The Court of Public Opinion [New York, 1957]). Sympathetic statements of Chambers include: William Buckley's collection of Chambers's correspondence, Odyssey of a Friend (New York, 1970); Arthur Koestler, “The Complex Issue of the Ex-Communist,” New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1952; and Lionel Trilling, “Wittaker Chambers and ‘The Middle of the Journey,’” New York Review of Books, April 17, 1975.

5. Chambers, Witness, pp. 14, 449.

6. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, pp. 89, 94, 39.

7. Irving Howe, “God, Man and Stalin,” in Celebrations and Attacks (New York, 1979), pp. 80, 81, 83.

8. Nathan Glazer, “An Answer to Lillian Hellman,” Commentary, June 1976, p. 37.

9. Chambers, Witness, p. 798.

10. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 94.

11. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London, 1951), p. 68.

12. Hellman, Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston, 1979), p. 726. Hellman added a brief closing commentary to Scoundrel Time for this edition.

13. Chambers, Witness, p. 5.

14. Ibid., p. 611. Hiss contends that only at this point did he recognize Chambers as the Crosley he had known (Court of Public Opinion, p. 90).

15. Chambers, Witness, pp. 16, 489.

16. Ibid., pp. 194-95.

17. Elizabeth Bentley, Out of Bondage (New York, 1951). In fact, it was Bentley's testimony that had created such a sensation in the media. Chambers had been called before Huac to confirm some details of what papers had called the story of the “Red Spy Queen.”

18. Chambers, Witness, p. 6.

19. Ibid., pp. 261, 262-63.

20. Ibid., p. 507.

21. Ibid., pp. 450, 517. Hellman also treats her farm as a retreat from both politics and the dissipation of cosmopolitan life.

22. Ibid., p. 524.

23. Ibid., pp. 453, 454, 456.

24. Cited in John B. Judis, “The Two Faces of Whittaker Chambers,” New Republic, April 16, 1984, p. 29.

25. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 43.

26. Hellman, Scoundrel Time in Three, p. 726.

27. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 162.

28. O'Neill, A Better World, p. 360; Hook, “Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time,” p. 91.

29. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, pp. 118, 132.

30. Ibid., p. 163.

31. Hellman, Pentimento in Three, p. 327.

32. Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three, p. 303.

33. Ibid., p. 284. In Scoundrel Time, Hellman suggests that Hammett's commitment to the Party originated from the Frank Little lynching incident. Was Hammett's radicalism an act of atonement for his activities as a Pinkerton guard for the Anaconda Company? He had been offered (and declined) $5,000 to assassinate Little (p. 50).

34. Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three, p. 304.

35. Garry Wills, “Introduction,” Scoundrel Time, pp. 32-33.

36. Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York, 1956), p. 266.

37. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 96.

38. Lillian Hellman, Maybe (Boston, 1980), p. 74.

39. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, pp. 96, 94.

40. Hellman, Maybe, p. 71.

41. Robert Edelbaum, “The Poetics of the Private Eye,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale, 1968), pp. 80-81.

42. Hellman, Unfinished Woman, in Three, p. 291.

43. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 70.

44. Hellman, Maybe, p. 15.

45. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

46. Ibid., pp. 50-51. The inability to remember and the inability to express this quasi-amnesia is based in part on Hellman's own reticence to comprehend the motivations of others. This frustration is repeatedly noted in Maybe (pp. 1, 13, 64, 88).

47. Ibid., pp. 100, 101.

48. Ibid., p. 62. Hellman is quoting Sarah.

49. Hellman, Scoundrel Time, p. 159. Here, in the most overtly political of her memoirs, Hellman complains that in American culture remembering is considered “neurotic” (p. 159).