SOURCE: Sheed, Wilfred. “Private Chambers v. Public Chambers.” Encounter 36, no. 3 (March 1971): 61-5.

[In the following positive review, Sheed maintains that Odyssey of a Friend provides insight into Chambers's true political ideology, religious beliefs, friendships, and personality.]

A reviewer is not, thank God, often required to judge an author on his legal merits. But the strange warp of Whittaker Chambers' career insists that even a benign collection of posthumous letters, Odyssey of a Friend¹ must be read in the gloomy light of litigation. Never mind about his literary virtue—would the writer of this prose lie under oath or wouldn't he? When he testified against Alger Hiss, Chambers went for good from the anonymity of a Time editor to a desk in Macy's window where his words and his personality could never be separated again.

William F. Buckley, who received the letters in the first place, bows to the inevitable and introduces them as a character reference. They are not a bad one at that: certainly better than Chambers' own floundering attempt at one, the elephantine Witness. It could be that the subject was more plausible in private than in public; and he was certainly more plausible by 1961, when the collection ends, than in 1954 when it starts.

The Hiss case was largely a question of character even then (to younger readers that is all the question that's left). Long before the investigation had passed from dentures and prothonotary warblers to pumpkins and typewriters, the public had chosen up sides on a basis of Which Kind of Man do you Prefer. Chambers knew his revolutionary politics and was able to trace that part of Hiss' support which came from Communist whispers. But for several reasons, he was not up to date on American psychology, and never saw why at that particular moment a good many people found him hard to take, all on his own.

He was right about one part of it: people distrusted his religiosity. This distrust was supposed at the time to have something to do with the West's rejection of God. But if the Chambers of 1961 had re-read Witness (he could not bear to see it lying about the house by then), he might have distrusted the religiosity himself. It is very much part of the period: the post-war spirit boom, when all kinds of unlikely people were hearing voices and receiving signs. Chambers himself left the Party because he heard “words,” telling him to choose freedom—a motive which even religious sympathisers might now advise him to keep under his hat. And he rested his case against Communism entirely on theology, or holy-war theory, where secular readers could hardly be expected to join him. Later, Max Eastman was to lead a charge against compulsory theism for conservatives: but at that point, the words atheistic and communism were seldom far apart.

Curiously, in these later letters there is very little reference to God. Chambers presumably remained a religious man to the end, but the confessional fever subsided, as it did with other converts of the time, and his case against Communism became more earthly. “The West … has two main goods to offer mankind: freedom and abundance” we find him writing—a far cry from the days when it offered God, or nothing.

Chambers' religiosity was also served a poor turn by his conditions of employment. As a writer for a news magazine, he had taken it upon himself to reduce his spiritual gropings to simple big-picture terms: the West, History, Man's Spirit, the hundred great capital letters. Most intellectuals would have given up the struggle as hopeless. A news magazine is not obliged to cover the Mysteries. But Chambers had a mission to fight Communism, and this was the only way he could do it. He was shunted out of Foreign News, and anywhere else where he could attack the enemy head-on. So he took to plugging the Western Tradition in Dick and Jane terms in any department that would let him. I had assumed that the florid simplifications were foisted on him by the magazine. But it seems likely that he foisted them on the magazine. And several of the pieces that had one wincing the hardest (e.g., the Arnold Toynbee cover story) were among Chambers' special prides.

The democratisation of great ideas was again part of the period, and perhaps it was snobbish to jeer at it. Anyway, people did, and it was part of the extra-legal case against Chambers, which he never seemed to fathom. For he found the habit hard to slip, and there are still great wedges of old-Time rhetoric in Witness, when he might have come on as the subtle and quite pragmatic thinker that these letters reveal.

For his pains, he acquired a reputation as a dime-store mystic, a Time-Life Dostoevsky, who couldn't see anything smaller than History: certainly nothing as small as a microfilm. The narrative parts of Witness are reasonably sober and convincing: working on a news magazine is not all bad. But then he would blow it with garrulous metaphors about Western Man struggling up the Cliff, metaphors which he seemed unable to turn off. And the credibility of the quiet parts was seriously damaged.

The rhetoric gets a few brisk airings in the first letters to Buckley: “I never really hoped to do more in the Hiss case than give the children of men a slightly better, only slightly better, chance to fight a battle already largely foredoomed,” etc., etc. A fine way to write to a friend. At this point he was still half in public, displaying his wares: the mechanical inflation of everything, the trade-marked pessimism, the gaseous abstractions. Just when you're used to thinking of yourself as the West, you find you've become the children of men and Mr Chambers is giving you a second chance. It took no Communist plot to make this seem tiresome.

But this changes quite sharply as we go along. Occasionally the rhetoric is challenged into life by some threat to make him public again. But his usual tone is not only moderate but scrupulously sensible. Hissites will no doubt find stray evidence of derangement, as when he writes seven-page letters and burns them (Chambers was a great burner), and then writes to tell Buckley he burned them; or when he doesn't open letters he gets himself. But this jumpiness seems normal enough, unless one disbelieves Witness altogether. Chambers may or may not have been in danger of murder when he left the Communist Party, but he surely had reason to think he was. The fact that he was theatrical about it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. (Theatrical people are always being persecuted.) For a year, he worked at night with a gun on his table, not knowing whether he was important enough for execution; not knowing in his bones whether the people he'd worked with did things like that.

This uncertainty accounts for a certain fantastic quality whenever he discusses revolution in the letters. The American party was trying to import a European religion, in which assassination was certainly part of the ritual. But had it survived the journey, the way the Mafia had? Or were the American communists partly playing at it? Chambers writes about their fanatical dedication unto death. But when a party-member came looking for him after his defection, said member gave up after a nervous glance: with the best will in the world, this pale literary agent could not make himself into the Mafia type. At that same time of the Moscow-German pact, European defectors were being gunned down as far west as Paris; but Americans had to imagine themselves into European situations to feel the same fear.

This was not difficult for Chambers, whose mind was always set towards Europe anyway and who was taken for a European by his Communist contacts. His hunters may not have known their roles, but he knew his. These letters long after the event are still packed with anecdotes of gallant European Bolsheviks showing excruciating dedication under fire. It is hard to feel this way about Elizabeth Bentley. But Chambers did his personal best to translate the atmosphere to America, and to incarnate, in himself, the stoic, world-weary Communist he believed in so ardently. Cut off from society, a hunted man in Baltimore, it was not hard for a gifted writer to imagine himself in St. Petersburg.

With so much of the revolution going on in his head, it is not surprising that he jumped when the postman came. A Hissite would no doubt press the point and say that Chambers was a role-player to the core, a cardboard revolutionary living out a dream. A Hissite would also dig out the familiar memory lapses—Chambers could not remember whether he had ever written about a particular man in Time, astounding in a writer—and the desolating melancholia, interspersed with skittishness.

Still, the letters would disappoint him, I think. Chambers' role-playing, if that's what it was, included a respect for the small facts, whether as spy or farmer. He took himself deadly seriously in the role of witness and was sometimes unintentionally funny about it. (For instance, after quoting a passage Trotsky wrote in 1902, he pauses to say, “I was then one year and several months of age.” Or discussing Randall Jarrell, he says, “Jarrell is as certain a sign of the end as I am.” Such portentous self-insertions pop up passim.) But in practice, as opposed to talk, he was pretty sensible about it. He declined to become a cocktail-party witness, or a lecture-circuit witness, and he didn't set out his shingle as a permanent oracle. Murray Kempton has pointed out that he did like to suggest mysterious private pipelines when the mood was on him and to come the old revolutionary who knows what he knows. But he also admitted that he was nearly always wrong about American politics, and he indulged in free-wheeling guesses without pretending they were based on any post-1938 party secrets. (Checked out from our present vantage points, they certainly weren't.)

In another respect, these letters clarify Chambers perhaps a little more than he might have cared to be clarified at the time. There are two sides to every revolutionary, and Chambers had chosen to show the visionary, garment-rending one to the secular public. But now he was writing to a Catholic romantic and a change of tactics was called for: the pragmatic, so-what, does-it-work? side, which had nailed Hiss, rhetoric notwithstanding, surfaces all the way for Buckley.

In Witness, he had still been facing towards the Communists, barely aware of his own allies. These were just the simple people who phoned up and said “God bless you,” in the middle of the night; honest, unintellectual folk who understood life's processes. (He was particularly charmed by a gun salesman in Baltimore who recommended aiming both barrels at prowlers and “Fay-ya-you-well.”) He did not yet understand that it was his allies who frightened people the most. Cultural wars, quite outside his Communist closed shop, were in progress, and his case managed to land plumb in the middle of them.

After the case, he had more time to look around at his new friends. The first thing he saw was Senator Joe McCarthy, and it was like a convert finding his first difficult doctrine. Swallow as he could, it wouldn't go down. He hadn't given up Communism to range himself with Yahooism. It might even have occurred to him at this point that simple people who call in the night are not necessarily well-wishers.

Next he found Mr Buckley, and that worked out much better. These two devotees of the simple folk were able to swap high culture and enough good argumentation to keep an ex-Marxist sharp. The intellectual training of Marxism can make the Right a lonely place and a man who knows his St. Thomas is a windfall. “You are articulate (rare on the Right),” he says. No matter what you think of pink professors and the like, it is always disconcerting to find that your side is dumber than theirs. “Think of it,” he groans. “In this great power, the Right can find no voice to speak for it except Senators McCarthy and Knowland.”

Buckley also offered him two attractions of which the Right has its own versions: agrarianism (at least, one assumes the silent partner was interested; he certainly got an earful) and Europe. Chambers moved from a Europe-centred Left to a Europe-centred Right. Among all the German tags and Russian fables, I could barely find a single reference to American culture, except a slighting one to Elvis Presley, a stilted one to Rocky Marciano “(if that is his name)” and some praise for Randall Jarrell. In a passage worthy of Graham Greene, he says that Alger Hiss “looks like the American boy … clean-cut, ‘nice,’ probably played basketball … America is dying of the American boy.” His good-hearted admirers might have been startled by this. They could hardly have supposed that America was dying of the American boy.

There wasn't much else that was congenial over on the Right. He underwent one of his formidable soul-searchings as to whether to join the National Review, but he seems to have spent a lot of time heckling it. He could see no earthly reason why Alger Hiss, or anyone else, should be denied a passport. The number of spies who travelled would be trivial. That wasn't what the fight for the West was about anyway. He abhorred wire-tapping and believed that conservatives should take over the cause of Civil Liberties. As the cumulus of rhetoric lifts, it is harder and harder to see what he has in common with his new side.

Mournfully, he runs his knife down the pasted-over area on the American Right. “A capitalist cannot be a conservative.” There is no greater agent of change than a capitalist. Yet Chambers prefers him to the woolly machine-haters who grind their own burlap, and while protesting that money bores him, he goes on about his own investments at some length, in a tone of strenuous whimsy (“we are heavy people,” says Esther Chambers). One senses by now that it is an effort to don the metaphysical robes. He chides the Right for its impracticability, even as a liberal might. And in a final whittling down of his past, he even appears to give up on Nixon, his first and last ally on the political Right. “We had nothing to talk about,” he says. The old subversive will not be taken for granted by anybody.

The neutral good sense of these criticisms does much to bolster his credit, retroactive to the Hiss case. Buckley has allowed a few good shots to be taken at his own positions in order to rescue a friend. Liberal leaders will likely agree that whoever wrote these last letters could have been a reliable witness and what they took to be hysteria might have been an extreme case of Cold War fever (or frostbite). As that let up, so did Chambers. His tone is so different by the end that it might be a different man—except that, at his worst, one still felt he could turn his mysticism on and off at will.

His critics have sometimes applied more rigorous tests of sanity to Chambers than they would to most writers. A bad poet should be allowed his licence too: and Chambers' worst flights strike one now as nothing more sinister than failed poetry. He was, incidentally, quite a good prose writer. But his most pernicious dream was that his sensibility was poetic; and he paid and paid for it. A dedicated witness should sacrifice such talents. As it was, the people who knew him and worked with him believed him in impressive numbers, but people who only read him had trouble.

Of course, to believe him is not necessarily to like him. His devotees still push him a bit too hard, accepting his own estimate of himself as somebody pretty damn important over whom one must choose sides. (One's response to this is apt to be surly.) In the flesh he seems to have affected people violently, but in his letters he simply doesn't have that kind of voltage, except in the context of his Case. He obviously had a gift for what the Jesuits call “particular friendships,” but outsiders are not warmed by this as much as the particular friends always seem to expect. Several times he tells Buckley that only thrice in his life (biblical sonority) has he had such a good friend as Bill—a bit hard on the particular friends he had over at Time, and elsewhere. But one assumes that he made them seem special too, at the moment.

Chambers also worked strenuously at maintaining his friendships, and while the flow of gratitude and apology makes for occasional sticky reading, it also suggests, in line with Buckley's purpose, a character that would not betray a friend like Hiss for the sake of showing off. Fair enough. But I believe what bothered St. Ignatius about particular friendships was the question, where do they leave the rest of us? Chambers was undeniably clique-y, as Great Friends tend to be, and he divided Buckley's National Review, as he had Time-Life, sharply into the Good and the Childish (a favourite term of opprobrium) or the historically irrelevant. There was no malice about it, but a good deal of condescension.

And what was this West that he loved so much? On a trip to post-war Europe, he managed to despise both the locals, for exploiting the tourists (which was not unreasonable of them at the time) and the tourists for being exploited. His West seemed to contain precious few living people, outside of a few heroes and cronies. Its main virtue was that it was not the East, which he really loathed. Chambers had a generous spirit, for those close to him, and for a few symbolic figures in the distance, selected peasants and old revolutionaries; but it could only work by choosing and discarding, by drawing a circle around what he liked and anathematising everything outside it.

Yet perhaps a man who enrols in college at 57 is not to be judged too easily. The growth and change recorded in these letters is surely exceptional in a man of his age. It is a pity that we don't hear the other side of the exchange, because Buckley also changed during those years from a one-sided point-scorer to a man who understood his opponents' ground increasingly well; and Chambers may have had something to do with it. This could just have been the changing times, Chambers' beloved History, that sweeps us all along, journalists in front. But reflecting on the sober sense of the later letters, one wonders whether Chambers, having whipped up so many Furies on the Right, did not help a little to calm them down and give us that brief interregnum between paranoias that seems now to be drawing to a close.

Note

1. Odyssey of a Friend, Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961. Putnams.