[In the following review, Raynolds discusses Witness as a piece of crime fiction, a work of political philosophy, and a testament to moral corruption.]

Witness is an impressive report on a representative crime of our day. The crime is treason. This particular instance, now known as the Chambers-Hiss Case, had a theatrical exposure; but the same sordid crime has been committed over and over again in the past thirty years in almost any country one could name. Whittaker Chambers, who spent thirteen years as an active Communist, seven years in the open Party and six more as an underground espionage agent in New York and Washington, reveals a moral rot in our political life, particularly among young, clever and effective appointees in public office. That many such men and women have engaged in treasonable activity in the name of communism has been attested by a series of confessions and some convictions. The reader of Witness is justified in believing that this crime has been repeated many times, and that more persons than Whittaker Chambers were involved in committing it.

The book also persuades me of the probability, without proving the actuality, that the same sort of moral rot persists and the same sort of treason is still being practiced at vital centers of our society.

After thirteen years of subversive and treasonable work, Chambers deserted the Communist conspiracy; a year or so later he partially but ineffectually testified against himself and his few familiars; then, almost ten years later, when subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he publicly informed against and helped to destroy the particular pocket of treason in which he had worked. This is an ugly story; but it is better that he confessed the crime and stopped the action than it would have been if he had protected himself by silence (or by suicide, which he attempted) and perhaps allowed the crime to continue.

Witness is also a dreary modern autobiography, eloquent and miserable, with many parallels in the modern novel of spiritual negation, from Madame Bovary to The Naked and the Dead. It is written from a center of pain, in that mood of German romanticism which favors morbid introspection and encourages a man to misconstrue himself as the protagonist of the human race. This mood of hate-breeding solitude is evident in the Communist Manifesto, in Nietzsche, in fascism, and in public men at least as far back as Caligula, whose power was exceeded only by his egotism, and who, in the midst of his cruelties, would often quote: “Let them hate me, so they but fear me.” There are characters of the same destructive hybris in Dostoevski's novels; but Witness is as if one of Dostoevski's characters—say Raskolnikov—had written his own life, or as if Kurtz, instead of Conrad, had told us the tale of The Heart of Darkness. The tragic religious insight of Dostoevski, the profound human integrity of Conrad are lacking. The story is impressive, but miserable and almost hopeless. It reveals again that those actions within a family which hurt its members generate an evil society.

Witness offers a political philosophy for our time. Having drenched himself in the slavish evil of communism and revolted from it, Chambers claims “every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience. … A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or communism. … History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died. …” He claims that ex-Communists are the best interpreters to waken us to the needed vision and faith, for only they know the real evil of communism. The evil of inordinate arrogance of soul—hybris—has been known for centuries; the evil of inordinate arrogance in government has been known for ages; many people have recognized the evil inherent in communism and have stood against it when it first offered its deceptive lure and before it revealed its brutal act. Chambers, however, is probably right in his claim that the social revolution of our time in our country drifts toward these evils. A powerful government is under compelling temptation to try to accomplish at once, by amoral fiat, good things which can only be accomplished by the slow process of moral growth. A series of amoral fiats, whatever their intention, will simply produce an amoral society.

Witness is a testament of pain; it is a man crying out from his ordeal for our compassion, our understanding and our belief. Chambers says, after a moment of religious experience: “I only knew that I had promised God my life, even, if it were His will, to the death. This is my ultimate witness.” It is, however, a sad witness, not rising to serenity or peace, but pausing at the end of the book in the exhaustion of pain. He finds that he and his wife have “the sense that we have lived our lives and the rest is a malingering.” Only malingering, nearly twenty years after they both had touched the nadir of evil when they agreed to her having an abortion so as not to hamper his Communist work. That last step, by her final choice and his submission, they did not take; but their way back was bitter and long.

Some people have tried to dismiss Chambers and his book with a clever epithet of aspersion from politics or religion or medicine. He protests too much the meaning of facts; but when he simply describes events, the facts are there. The grim bulk of his testimony to the operation of moral rot in our society still stands; and epithets of dismissal, though they may close the mind, do not remove the danger.

No man should be defamed for his spiritual suffering. But does this man, by his life or by his book, bear witness to a light for other men to live by?

For me, the answer is yes. We are learning that the wreckage of the human soul does not begin on the stage of history or on the altar of eternity; it begins at home in the intimate household of the family. The first, the closest, the most direct human relationships are those which try our souls before we act out our crimes, our follies and our goodness in the world. Here is a man who broke away from a warped childhood in a bitter family to walk in the ways of evil. Communism is an expression in action of the wish for suffering and death, and men become Communists in the solitude of hatred. This man, in his solitude of hatred and the wish for death, was touched by the human warmth of his wife and his children. He protests too much his love for them, when merely protesting; but when he is simply describing the things he watched his wife and his children do, there falls upon them and comes from them a light with which no writer could endow them unless he loved them. Whether by an intuition of charity, or by a reader's accretion of motes of light from the whole dark shadow of the book, I see the man turn about, cease destructive action, and offer his life—not against evil, not to an abstract God—but in pain, in public torment and in love to his wife and children who had reached him with their love. I see a lost man so far find himself that he undertook, first through ten years of protective labor and then through the ordeal of public self-exposure, to build honor, goodness and strength into the lives of the three people he loved. Actions such as this are the meaning of manhood. They are the beginning and the renewal of good society. Herein, like a kernel of light in a burden of darkness, shines his witness.