[In the following essay, Tanenhaus surveys Chambers's literary and journalistic work.]

Within the space of a generation—that is, since 1964, when Cold Friday was published to tepid reviews—Whittaker Chambers has been all but forgotten as a writer. Those conversant with the Alger Hiss case know, of course, that from the 1920s through the 1950s Chambers was frequently—at times steadily—in print. But his most enduring utterance seems to be the testimony he gave before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948. Scholars of the Cold War seldom look beyond it to the ample personal record he left behind in his poetry, fiction, and journalism; few bother even with Witness, Cold Friday, and Odyssey of a Friend.¹ The work is there. It just doesn't seem important. Charitable verdicts usually go no further than Sidney Hook's late judgment, recorded in his autobiography Out of Step (1987), that had Chambers “escaped involvement in politics, he probably would have blossomed into a poet of stature.” This view—of Chambers as writer manqué—neatly fits the demonology of the Hiss case. But is it accurate?

It is indeed the case that Chambers abandoned a burgeoning literary career in 1932, when he slipped into the mousehole of the Communist underground and began a six-year term of espionage. It is also the case that not long after he resurfaced, in 1938, he joined the staff of Time—where he attained considerable influence as a writer and editor—and that, once the Hiss case ended, in 1950, he resumed his literary efforts, which he continued until his death in 1961. The problem is not, then, one of diligence. Is it one of talent? But he met with success as a poet, made a reputation as a translator, enjoyed instant celebrity as a short-story writer, and produced, in Witness, “one of the most significant autobiographies of the twentieth century” (said Hook) and a confession of “almost classical stature” (said Irving Howe). Nor, finally, was the problem one of seriousness. Chambers assayed grand issues and his sensibility was keyed to the moral crises of his era. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that he was uniquely serious—even in his most irresponsible phase. Many other American writers also served the revolutionary cause, but almost always as dilettantes who put little on the line and who consequently added almost nothing, despite their earnest efforts, to the literature of politics; in the radical Thirties political engagement meant, by and large, what it means today—signing petitions, attending rallies, joining committees, squabbling in the pages of journals. Not so for Chambers, who sojourned in the dark world of aliases, stolen documents, and orders sent from the Kremlin. It is commonly said that his motives were personal rather than political, that he embraced revolution not as a practical plan but as a species of romantic adventure. The same could be said of John Reed or, for that matter, of Trotsky. And Chambers's political role did not end with his thirteen years of radicalism. It was he, more than any other intellectual, who awakened the American public to the dangers of totalitarianism, and his anti-Communist doctrine, spelled out as early as 1945, shaped the worldview of many postwar conservatives, including that of Ronald Reagan, his long-time admirer.

The real problem is that our culture has no tradition of men who meaningfully reconcile the claims of politics and art, and on this count Chambers, whose career was a sustained attempt at just such a reconciliation, stands convicted of un-American activity. Indeed he possibly inherited less of the native literary tradition than any other American writer of his time. His heroes were Dante, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The book that opened his mind in childhood was Les Misérables. His favorite modern poet was Rilke, his favorite novelist Arthur Koestler (who reciprocated Chambers's esteem). A quick glance at his published letters shows how steeped he was in the political and literary legacy of Europe, a legacy enriched by writers who translated their interior struggles, especially political and spiritual struggles, into the universal language of fable and allegory. It was not a coincidence that during the controversy that surrounded Witness, his strongest support came from abroad. “You are one of those,” said one of his champions, André Malraux, “who did not return from Hell with empty hands.”

The Hell was Stalinism, and Chambers's Inferno remains the best account of it written in the United States. Yet this major book has long been shunned like bad magic—alien in tone, anomalous in form, dangerous in meaning. Even the acclaim that greeted it on its publication in 1952 was mixed with abhorrence. Chambers saw what he famously termed the “tragedy of history” as a test of faith and the Manichaean rhetoric he used to describe it, though acceptable to a later generation, placed him outside the charmed circle of enlightened opinion forty years ago. “The most remarkable thing about Witness,” wrote Irving Howe, “is that as a work of ideas it should be so raggedy and patchy. In all its 800 pages there is hardly a sustained passage of, say, 5,000 words devoted to a serious development of thought: everything breaks down into sermon, reminiscence, self-mortification, and self-justification.” Chambers's prose was equally queer. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in Saturday Review, praised its vividness but shuddered at its “un-Anglo-Saxon intensity.” In The New Republic, Merle Miller called Witness “sick.” This distaste found its definitive expression two decades later when Lionel Trilling remarked that after the 1920s “something went soft and ‘high’ in [Chambers's] tone and I was never again able to read him either in his radical or in his religiose conservative phase without a touch of queasiness.”² Just as certain lurid adjectives ritually cling to descriptions of Chambers's physical presence (drab, disheveled, soiled), so do their equivalents adhere to assessments of his prose style (apocalyptic, portentous, maudlin). In truth, Chambers's writing is rarely as overblown as people often suppose, and when he's carried away it's usually for a good reason. “Fear,” he wrote in Witness,

makes [ex-Communists] strident. They are like breathless men who have outrun the lava flow of a volcano and must shout down the smiles of villagers at its base who, regardless of their own peril, remember complacently that those who now try to warn them once offered their faith and their lives to the murderous mountain.

More than an explanation, this is a parable. And it is not surprising that so few critics acknowledge the parabolic essence of Witness, for to do so they must acknowledge, as well, the moral authority of a self-styled counter-revolutionary who repudiated one of the hallowed intellectual projects of his day—the attempt to extricate a viable liberalism from the wreckage of the Popular Front. Pundits find it easier to assail Chambers's arguments (“Faith in God or Faith in Man?”) than to wrestle with the implications of his narrative and its irrefutable message: “I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.” In 1952 it fell to Rebecca West to marvel, in The Atlantic, that Chambers the memoirist “makes the further discoveries about reality, pushing another half-inch below the surface, which writers hope to make when they write.” And it fell to West, who had herself “endured rough weather” in childhood, to point out how unwelcome certain “reminiscences are, and how likely to be greeted with impatient suggestions that they are exaggerated or are the figments of self-pity.”

Irving Howe, for instance, dismissed Chambers's reminiscences as “a needless act of masochism.” Needless, one wonders, for whom? Certainly not for anyone hoping to understand Chambers's passionate pilgrimage from hopelessness to belief. His family was the first Hell he knew. It “represented in miniature,” as he put it, the crisis of the middle class. And it made him a candidate for other Hells. If we blanch at times during the course of Chambers's confessions—if we want to avert our eyes from his domestic mises en scène—it is because their plausibility fills us with dread: the lunatic grandmother stabbing the air with scissors; the cold, thwarted father secretly building his tiny toy theater in a room barred to his wife and sons; the shopkeeper cruelly leaning over a countertop to sneer (at the young Chambers), “Your mother is a broken down stagecoach.” It was, as West said, “intricate and ambitious misery,” and Chambers dredged up every detail. Was he masochistic? Perhaps, but so was Proust, the author of another “sick” book, another prodigious feat of recollection. Chambers, after all, had come before the public as an official rememberer, a witness summoned against his will. No wonder he often brooded on the fate of another reluctant bearer of bad news:

I have, for years [he wrote William F. Buckley, Jr.], been fascinated by the Book of Jonah, and I said to a few at the time that that was the pattern of the Hiss Case. Therefore, in a sense, I fled to Tarshish with the dread words in my ears: “Go up unto Ninevah, that great city, etc.” But, when the tempest arose, and it became a question of myself or the crew, I had also to say: “Take me up and cast me into the sea, because it is for my sake that this trouble is come upon you.” … But, in the end, I did go unto Ninevah, and when nothing really happened … and others had eaten up the cucumber vine, and God had asked: “Do you well to be angry?” I answered and still answer: “I do well to be angry, even unto death.”

In his later years, Chambers lumped together all his early writing as the noxious by-product of a misspent youth. He was born in Philadelphia in 1901, and grew up in Lynbrook, Long Island, the elder son of a commercial artist and a sometime actress. At an early age he acquired an appetite for literature and exhibited a rare gift for languages; but when he graduated from high school, in 1919, he put off going to college and instead went on the road, intent on reaching Mexico. Four months later—after a stint of vagabondage and day labor—he was stranded in a New Orleans flophouse and had to wire home for money. He returned to Lynbrook, toiled briefly in the Manhattan ad agency where his father did layouts, and then enrolled at Columbia. Morningside Heights was an exceptionally lively place, with an undergraduate population that included World War I veterans and, unusual for the Ivy League in the Twenties, many products of the local public schools. Chambers fell in with a group of city boys, most of them Jews, most of them inflamed with intellectual aspirations: Mortimer J. Adler, Clifton Fadiman, Meyer Schapiro, Louis Zukofksy, and others. They initiated him into the charms of skeptical humanism, and he moved among them as a magnetic presence, often silent, sometimes oracular, prone to sudden outbursts of hilarity.

Like the others, Chambers joined Boar's Head, a kind of “Conversazione Society,” and tagged after Mark Van Doren, the “master of sunny influence,” as Chambers later called him. In 1920, Van Doren was twenty-six, an English Department rookie assigned as Chambers's adviser; in this capacity he steered the gifted freshman away from the reflexive Republicanism he had inherited from his parents (Chambers's themes were sprinkled with quotations from Calvin Coolidge) and also, Chambers wrote in Cold Friday, “infected me with the idea that the literary life is the best in the world and that to be a poet is among the highest callings known to man.” Better yet, Van Doren encouraged Chambers to believe “that I was to be a poet.” This belief was shared by others. “We were convinced he would leap into instant fame,” recalled Jacques Barzun, a younger Columbia man. Another, Lionel Trilling, allowed that “Chambers had a very considerable college prestige as a writer. This was deserved. My undergraduate admiration for his talent was recently confirmed when I went back to the poetry and prose he published in a student magazine in 1924-25. At that time he wrote with an elegant austerity.” The magazine was Morningside. Chambers made his debut in it as a sophomore with a story called “The Damn Fool,” a somewhat clotted narrative inspired by Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness.”³ Its hero, a young sailor flushed with idealism, ships to Russia and dies there in battle after leading a charge against the Bolsheviks. The plot alone is prophetic. But consider some clairvoyant remarks tossed off by secondary characters:

“He wasn't a Bolshevist. He was a Puritan, perhaps. That is radical, of course. He was an extermist.”

“What he did gives weakness a false appearance of glory. He wasn't glorious. How many weary miles did he tramp to escape himself.”

“Probably he could have been a writer if he hadn't been so interested, after all, in life.”

“The Damn Fool” contains the hard kernel of the sensibility that exfoliated thirty years later in Witness. Already we see Chambers's fascination with revolution, his flare for self-dramatization—tempered with self-appraisal—and his intuitive grasp of what his opponents are thinking. And there is that elegant austerity. Not quite twenty-one, Chambers writes disturbingly mature sentences, free of undergraduate artifice. Words for him are an instrument, and he puts them to the task of finding remedies for “the incurable sickness of the world.” The young Chambers is often represented as a nihilist. In fact, he was already embarked on the search for a sustaining faith. A quatrain from this time pointedly borrows the rhyme scheme of Tennyson's great elegy, “In Memoriam”:

And we on whom its shadow falls—
A sober and containing air—
Feel it as tired and late despair
Between enfolding iron walls.

From confession Chambers advanced to controversy. This was in 1922, a year of bold literary statements; Chambers read “The Waste Land” in The Dial. His own succès de scandale appeared that autumn in Morningside. He was now a junior, the magazine's editor in chief and the author of the lead piece in the November number, “A Play for Puppets.” In it Jesus arises from the tomb to refuse the burden of divinity. This blasphemy—perceived as a prank despite its earnest attempt to humanize Christ—became an issue during the Hiss trial. So did it in 1922, as Chambers suspected it might: he published it, in fact, under a pseudonym, “John Kelly.” Faculty members clamored for Chambers's expulsion, there was a fuss in the New York newspapers, and the offending author was summoned to the office of Dean Herbert E. Hawkes, a stern disciplinarian whose father had led a Union regiment in the Civil War. Chambers was ordered to retract his playlet and to collect all copies of the magazine. He demurred and was stripped of his editorship. But he was not expelled, as is often alleged. He quit Columbia of his own accord and announced the decision in a note he sent Hawkes in January 1923. The episode set the pattern for other, Jonah-like performances: Chambers learned early that unseemly utterances carry a price. This would be confirmed when he wrote “The Ghosts on the Roof” (1945), which outraged Time staffers with its dire warnings about Soviet expansionism, confirmed again when he testified before HUAC, and yet again when, in the pages of National Review, he defended Alger Hiss's right to a passport. Once an idea—atheism, in this early instance—took hold of Chambers, he had to state it loudly. Polite aestheticism could only mock, not raze, the enfolding iron walls. Many years later Chambers put the case this way: “the natural habit of Mark [Van Doren]'s mind (like that of many academic liberals) was to treat ideas as having an existence apart from life; their delight was in their multiplex play; ideas never implied acts. The natural habit of my mind was the exact opposite. Ideas as intellectual game scarcely interested me at all. For me, an idea was the starting point of an act.”

And writing was just such an act. Chambers's near expulsion proved to him that words could rock with seismic force. But they must serve a cause. Atheism wouldn't do. He was by nature a believer, not a skeptic; he needed something to argue for, not against. He found it in the summer of 1923, when he and Meyer Schapiro travelled abroad and got an eyeful of Weimar Germany, then on the brink of anarchy. This was months after French troops had brutally occupied the Ruhr valley and months before Hitler's Munich putsch. The two Americans went to Berlin, where purse-snatching was mirthless sport and marching Communists sent up an ominous chant: Blut muss fliessen, Blut muss fliessen, Blut, Blut, Blut. Chambers returned to New York wrapped in Spenglerian gloom. The Abendland would sink under its own corrupt weight. The answer was revolution. He read Lenin and Sorel while he held down a night job in the Newspaper Division of the Forty-second Street library (he remained in its employ, on and off, till April 1927). He enrolled again at Columbia in September 1924, promptly cut classes, and in February 1925 joined the Communist Party, feeling “joy and exultation in the thought of surrendering one's self to the wash of the wave, of being carried higher on the sun-touched crests of wild billows than one could ever be by a dry, lonely effort of one's own.”

Chambers didn't write those words. Henry James did, in The Princess Casamassima (1886). Its protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, cannot choose between the rival imperatives of art and revolution and ends up a suicide. Chambers, in the middle Twenties, strove to satisfy both claimants. He adopted the unsmiling guise of the young Bolshevik but at the same time honed his poetic skills. The November 1924 Morningside includes his tender narrative “Braun.” A sailor has returned home to Long Island after many years at sea and now wants to make amends with his father. He ambles along the shore and there meets another solitary walker, a poet, who strikes an uncannily Wordsworthian tone:

Filled by the sun,
Moved, as by the tide, as slowly,
I prolonged the hour of my intention,
And heard the whistles blow
Noon in the meadow villages,
And heard them cease.

Records at Columbia list Chambers as a student until June 1925, but in name only. He was consumed by extracurricular activity. He studied “the law of social revolution” under Scott Nearing at the Rand School, was a go-fer for The Daily Worker, travelled to the Far West, and wrote poetry. He sent lyrics to Van Doren, now the poetry editor at The Nation, who accepted them for publication. In May 1926 Chambers contributed “Railroad Yards (Long Island City)” to the inaugural issue of New Masses. Here his considerable feeling for nature succumbs to an ideal vision of “the workers” rising toward collective strength:

… swing of motion thru the darkness
without stay or let:
With only the delicate human hands set
Motionless above the controls, as a threat.

This was written at a time of intense personal anguish. Chambers's brother, Richard, who had passed untouched, it seemed, through the “rough weather” of childhood, had suddenly grown despondent. He dropped out of college, drank incessantly, and talked of suicide. In September 1926, after repeated attempts foiled by Whittaker, Richard succeeded in taking his own life, at twenty-three. Chambers, devastated by the loss, felt the waters closing over his own head, but “[d]eep within me,” he wrote, “there was a saving fierceness.” He clambered aboard the life raft of the party and busied himself at The Daily Worker with editorial and organizational tasks, pausing only to compose lines like these, which appeared in the March 1927 issue: “For the dead, the dead, the dead / we march, comrades, workers.” The poem is called “March for the Red Dead” and it is so defiantly unpoetic that it amounts to a proclamation: from now on Chambers's words will be conscripted into the service of, in James's phrase, “the great grim restitution.”

But the party, it turned out, was not a safe haven. Chambers had enlisted during a particularly chaotic time, the so-called Third Period, marked by Stalin's brutal and despotic ascent. Party watchdogs in the United States mounted a purge, thinning the ranks of The Daily Worker. Chambers quit in disgust in 1929. His literary energy had already found a new channel, thanks to his chum Clifton Fadiman, now an editor at Simon & Schuster. The firm had started up a high-toned imprint, the Inner Sanctum, that was bringing out foreign novels; in 1928 Chambers prepared for it the first English-language edition of Felix Salten's Bambi. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it was released in a printing of 75,000 copies, complete with a puff from John Galsworthy (who had been bowled over by the galleys of Chambers's translation). The reviews were rhapsodic, and Chambers was instantly in demand. Between 1928 and 1931, he Englished three more books by Salten, Heinrich Mann's Mother Mary, Kasimir Edschmid's The Passionate Rebel (a fictionalized life of Byron), and Franz Werfel's Class Reunion.⁴ During the Hiss trial, Werfel's novel, the story of a destructive friendship, was ingeniously though erroneously cited as the inspiration for Chambers's “plot” to destroy Hiss.

This early work remains tucked away in more or less obscure places, and for many years Chambers's journalism was also hard to find. But an important chunk of it has now been exhumed by Terry Teachout and issued as Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-59.⁵ Teachout includes in his collection four short stories written by Chambers in 1931 and published in New Masses. The magazine was presided over by Michael Gold, the author of Jews Without Money (1930) and a bleak exemplar of literary Stalinism—a sort of switchman who alertly changed his ideological track as new semaphores were flashed from Moscow. New Masses bore Gold's stamp but not his alone. It is a startling experience to examine antique issues of this publication—filled with jejune caricatures of obese capitalists and emaciated workers—and see the illustrious names on its masthead: Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford. John Dos Passos was a regular contributor—sections of U.S.A. originally ran in New Masses. Katherine Anne Porter reviewed fiction in it.

Chambers, the renegade “Lovestonite,” reached a truce with party regulars and reemerged as a radical writer, though not of verse, “for as soon as I began to shake off the influence of authentic poets, I found myself writing prose.” He began with agitprop short stories. On one level, they were flummery; yet Teachout rightly calls them, in his incisive introduction, “the product of a writer of considerable technical skill and a genuinely poetic sensibility.” Each story doles out a different morsel of Communist dogma. The message of the first, “Can You Make Out Their Voices?,” is “Organize!” Chambers based his story on news reports of a small insurrection in Arkansas, where five hundred destitute farmers had stormed a Red Cross station. It happened in January 1931, the nadir of the Depression, and it heralded the coming revolution, at least in Chambers's treatment. His pious rebels seem lifted from the movies, not from the sod:

“What did you say you called yourself?”

“A Communist.”

“That's like a Red, Russians, huh?”

“No, workingmen and poor farmers, like you and me.”

There are, however, taut descriptions of the blighted landscape and its suffering inhabitants, human and animal: “A red-headed woodpecker lay on the front path, its wings spread out. The boys took it into the house. In the shade it revived. They gave it a drop of water; it uttered its single sharp scream.” “Can You Make Out Their Voices?” was published in March 1931, and New Masses proudly announced a thick drift of fan mail. Hallie Flanagan, of Vassar's Experimental Theater, secured permission for a stage adaptation. She and her collaborator, Margaret Clifford, expanded the original by adding a subplot built around a debutante and her political coming of age. The result, entitled Can You Hear Their Voices?, became a staple of the radical repertory. News of Chambers's talent widened on the Left and rippled all the way to Moscow. A Soviet literary journal extolled him for “rais[ing] the image of the Bolshevik.” His other stories are more experimental. “The Death of the Communists” concludes with a Brechtian peroration:

The Communists were obviously men of courage, single-minded no doubt, but capable of a kind of fanatical calm in the face of death, on the basis, however difficult for one of us to comprehend, of certain convictions arrived by means of an intelligence no matter how limited. Were possessed, I mean, of intelligence, conviction, courage. Were, therefore, men, gentlemen, men. Men! Men, do you hear me, you beasts, men!

“The Death of the Communists” appeared in December 1931. Soon Chambers was placed on the editorial board of New Masses. But in the spring of 1932, in the wake of his first literary triumph, he was recruited to undertake more useful, clandestine work—work that would lead him, in 1934, to Washington, D.C., and the Communist cell set up there by Harold Ware. When the call came, Chambers, age thirty-one, was the author of several published poems, four stories, and eight translations—hardly the marginal flop who dominates accounts of the Hiss case.

The bulk of Ghosts on the Roof consists of articles, reviews, and essays written by Chambers after he arose from the Communist netherworld in 1938. It took him a year to find a steady job, but it was a good one, on the staff of Time. (The man who hired him, T. S. Matthews, had reviewed Class Reunion, favorably, in The New Republic.) Chambers shared an office with James Agee, with whom he formed a close friendship, especially after Chambers discovered God (Agee was a tormented Episcopalian). They also led their section—book and film reviews—to the top of the reader polls. For a man who had struggled up to daylight from the bottom rungs of Hell, the corporate ladder of Time Inc. was not insurmountable. Chambers scaled it nimbly. It helped that he had a wife and two children to support and that his party salary had peaked at $165 a month (in the Thirties spies rarely were in it for the money). At Time Chambers routinely worked forty-eight-hour shifts, and in 1942 he suffered the first of several heart attacks (the last would kill him). By his own estimation, he wrote a thousand articles for Henry Luce—news stories, features, reviews, occasional essays. None, as a rule, was signed. Hence, Teachout and his research assistant, Patrick Swan, have had to do some detective work. Luckily, not even the lacquer of Timese can entirely obscure an original style. It is undoubtedly Chambers that Teachout has given us—the rounded phrases, the wide learning. Sidney Hook was right to call Chambers an autodidact, despite all those semesters at Columbia. He had the autodidact's fondness for making big connections and the autodidact's fingertip command of everything he's read.

Time Inc. was not just a publishing company. It was the prototype of today's corporation, a pretend empire. Its monarch, Luce, noticed Chambers right away—first his prose, then his manner. Chambers was a potent presence. People smiled at his glum countenance, portly figure (loosely bagged in oversized suits), and enigmatic air. Not many smiled at his politics; these were the days when “right-wing” meant Trotskyist, and as Chambers evolved toward anti-Communism, he undertook to reorient the political views of his colleagues. “The driving force of my work at Time,” he wrote Luce in a letter quoted by Teachout, “has been a sense of mission, of calling.” He was girding for Ninevah. He polarized the local chapter of the Newspaper Guild, regaled colleagues with tales from the underground, and campaigned for the editorship of Time's “Foreign News” section. He got the job in 1944. The war was ending, and Luce, who agreed with Chambers that the Soviet Union loomed as the next global threat, gave him license to promote this worldview, even if certain writers did not share it. There were mutinous showdowns with John Hersey, Theodore White, and others. In 1945, after Chambers blacked out on a train, he was relegated to the culture desk. There, partnered again with Agee, he produced his celebrated cover stories on Reinhold Niebuhr, Arnold Toynbee, Rebecca West, and Marian Anderson—each an example of oratorical journalism raised to a standard that would never be surpassed at Time.

Chambers was Luce's pet writer. Few begrudged him his special status. His copy was legendary for its “flow” and he had an infallible eye for the striking image. His skills were shown to best advantage in literary portraits, such as “Silence, Exile & Death” (1941), a haunting précis of James Joyce's flight, his last, from Nazi-occupied Paris: “Every afternoon at 4 sharp, Joyce and [Paul] Léon reread Finnegans Wake. Joyce would sit with his long thin legs wrapped inextricably around each other while he held the book close to his eyes, studied it through a thick lens. Léon read aloud. They would then make corrections.”

The attacks on Witness created an impression—still with us—that Chambers had a weak mind. This wasn't so. True, he sanitized Toynbee (and made him, in the process, a household name), but it was a feat that demanded mental agility and that earned him the admiration of college professors. Those who have avoided Witness will be surprised to discover that Chambers could be epigrammatic and astringent: “Fundamentally benevolent and humane, [American intellectuals] loved their fellow countrymen in distress far more than they could ever love them in prosperity.” He had, as well, the ability to carve a shapely thesis from an inchoate mass of details: George Santayana, wrote Chambers,⁶ had

an integrity of Catholic suppleness and irrefragability, enriched by the deep experience of two cultures (one rock-bound, Protestant and New England, the other Catholic and Mediterranean), international yet intensely local (for most of Santayana's life has been passed in the Spanish provincial city of Avila and the American provincial capital of Boston). It had been lent fluency by his necessity of thinking in two languages, Spanish and English, and tempered by the age's ultimate test of individualism, the discipline of preserving the classic mind, smiling and ascetic, in a world of technological uniformity. It is an integrity in which there is room for humor, for it has traveled in the world and looked upon the Woolworth Building as well as the Dome of St. Peter's. And it has been matured by overcoming a duality of experience that was both geographic and psychic—a divided family, the alternating influences of a Spanish father and a Spanish boyhood, and a Spanish mother and a New England boyhood.

Chambers closed out his days at Time Inc. with a series of brief historical Baedekers published in Life in 1947-48. He wrote on, among other subjects, “The Middle Ages,” “The Glory of Venice,” and “The Protestant Reformation.” It was his turn at the public lectern manned variously by Adler, Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling, all veterans like himself of Columbia's innovative Great Books courses. Chambers's Life essays were immensely popular, though he badly overshot his deadlines. He was distracted, I suspect, by certain events taking place in the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “The Tranquil Years,” as Chambers fondly characterized his decade at Time, were in fact fraught with anxiety. He feared violent reprisal from his ex-comrades and was troubled by the faltering signals sent from Washington, which seemed curiously indifferent to Soviet infiltration. As early as September 2, 1939—ten days after Hitler and Stalin became blood brothers and the day after the Nazis invaded Poland—Chambers gave a thorough run-down on the Washington spy apparatus to Adolf A. Berle, Assistant Secretary of State. But nothing came of it. FBI interviewers visited Chambers's office in 1942 and again in 1945 and both times left convinced that everything he had to tell them was “history, hypothesis or deduction.” Not until 1946 was there a glimmer of genuine interest: the Bureau had targeted Hiss, and agents alerted Chambers to stand by. On July 31, 1948, Elizabeth Bentley, “the Blonde Spy Queen,” told HUAC a fanciful tale about Washington officials passing on secret documents to Soviet operatives, and two days later Chambers, who had begged the Committee not to summon him, was served with a subpoena. His vassalage at Time was over and his public trauma began.

Prophecy erupts in concentrated bursts, and the two-year paroxysm of writing Witness left Chambers drained. He started another book, but it kept changing shape; finally it became an albatross. He repeatedly assured Bennett Cerf, his publisher, that he was at work, and he was—contributing essays to National Review and polishing the reminiscences and meditations issued posthumously as Cold Friday. He preferred shorter forms. All the more remarkable that he saw Witness through to completion. In some respects, it was his most taxing ordeal. It was lightened, though, by moments of optimism. In December 1950 he informed David McDowell, his editor at Random House, that he had at last found a suitable opening line. He meant the first sentence, not of his foreword, “Letter to My Children,” but of “Flight”: “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.” Of course it was the example of another resurrection, Jonah's, that Chambers was fated to follow. For, like all true writers, he could not escape the burden of his eloquence.

Notes

1. Witness, the autobiography of Whittaker Chambers, was published in 1952; a paperback edition, with a preface by Robert Novak and a foreword by Milton Hindus, is available from Regnery Gateway. Cold Friday, a posthumous collection of memoirs and fragments edited by Duncan Norton-Taylor, was published in 1964. Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers's Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-61, was published in 1969.

2. From Trilling's introduction to the 1975 reissue of The Middle of the Journey (1947). Gifford Maxim, the pivotal character of this, Trilling's only novel, was based on Chambers.

3. “The Damn Fool” was published in the March 1922 Morningside. Copies of this and the other issues of Morningside mentioned in this article are in the Columbiana Collection, Columbia University.

4. Chambers translated two more books after he left the party. One was about the Red Cross; the other, which he co-translated with Barrows Mussey, was Gustav Regler's The Great Crusade (1940), a novel about the Spanish Civil War.

5. Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-59, edited and with an introduction by Terry Teachout; Regnery Gateway, 361 pages, $24.95.

6. In “Santayana, Poet of Dissolution,” a review of Persons and Places: The Backgrounds of My Life; The American Mercury, March 1944.