The Bookshelf: Betrayal and Witness

In Changing Places, the first novel in his campus trilogy, David Lodge has his characters at Euphoric State University play a party game called “Humiliation.” The players are literature professors, and a turn in the game is played by naming a literary work one has not read, and finding out which of the other players has read it—the more of them that have done so, the more points one earns. You can see that naming an obscure work will not earn many points, and so the winner is the one who humiliates himself by naming prominent works that most—perhaps all—of the others have read. Hence the name of the game; it’s “a kind of intellectual strip poker,” says one of the characters. In one memorable round of the game, a professor immolates his career in spectacular fashion.

I feel like a player in Lodge’s game when I think of all the famous books I haven’t read. This is particularly so where classics of conservatism are concerned. I have been an outspoken conservative since the 1980s—a reader and in more recent decades a contributor to conservative publications, which has not always endeared me to academic colleagues—but because for years my teaching duties and research occupied much of my reading time, I can think of quite a few landmarks of conservative thought that I still have not read. Some of them I have had in my library for years but haven’t found time to read. (See Umberto Eco on having many unread books in one’s possession.) Now I have the time, and I plan to write here occasionally about some of these books I’ve finally gotten around to.

The first such book is Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. I own a first printing—and have had it so long that I don’t remember where I bought it—but it has no value as a collector’s item, because there are many just like it. Chambers’s memoir was one of the bestselling books of 1952. It was reviewed everywhere, topped the New York Times list that summer, and was even a main selection of the Book of the Month Club—an agent’s and author’s dream in those days.

Who was Whittaker Chambers? In the course of his life he was a student of language and literature, a translator (of Bambi, among other works), a member of the American Communist Party and a writer and editor for the party’s press, an “underground” agent passing U.S. government information to Soviet military intelligence, a writer and editor for Time magazine, a farmer, and (after 1955) a notable early contributor to National Review. (For other writings representing his varied career, see this volume edited by the late Terry Teachout.) His memoir is titled Witness because that was what Chambers became in 1948—a key witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), testifying with firsthand knowledge about Communist infiltration of the government, especially regarding former State Department official and then-president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss. The crisis of that testimony occupies roughly the final third of the book, the rest being devoted to the author’s early life and education, his years as an “open” Communist and then a clandestine agent of Stalin’s Russia, and his break with Moscow and recovery of something like a normal life.

I have previously praised historian Allen Weinstein’s book Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case as “unputdownable”; I read it years ago, and thought I knew all I needed to know about the case, and about Whittaker Chambers, so I didn’t bother to read Witness, which sat right next to Perjury on my shelves. How wrong I was. Witness is an absolutely absorbing work, a self-examination as candid and cataclysmic as St. Augustine’s Confessions or St. John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Like those saints, Chambers records the experience of a conversion. Two conversions, really: the first brought him into the Communist Party in the mid-1920s, full of idealism and convinced that only the Revolution could save a world in crisis, and the second brought him out again, full of revulsion at Stalin’s great Purge in the late 1930s, and convinced that he, Chambers, had become a servant of “absolute evil.” Here is a glimpse of that searing experience, and a taste of the author’s writerly gifts:

What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationality the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step.

Chambers had the courage to hope, and to act—first to save his family and then to warn his country. But hope, as we must remind ourselves, is not optimism; it is inseparable from a faith that all will be put right in the end, though that ultimate justice arrive long after our own brief span. Chambers found his faith and hope, worshiping in a Friends Meeting, but he was no optimist. When he took his young family and fled from the party in 1938, he writes, he “knowingly chose the side of probable defeat.” At the time he wrote Witness, three years after testifying against Alger Hiss, Chambers seems still to have believed that the Cold War struggle of the West with the Communist powers could more easily be lost than won. He may have believed this to the end of his life, at age 60, in 1961.

One thing that surely fed Chambers’s pessimism was that in 1939 he had told a high appointee in the State Department of the espionage he knew about, and had named names—to apparently no effect whatever. When he was called to testify to HCUA in 1948, his testimony that Alger Hiss had been and might still be a Communist sparked outrage in the establishment Left—outrage not at Hiss but at Chambers himself. For months, while testifying to both Congress and a grand jury, he had a reasonable fear that he might be indicted for perjury, as Hiss denied everything. Hiss even sued Chambers for defamation—a huge gamble on the former’s part, it turned out, based on an arrogant belief that the latter could not make good on his accusations.

But Chambers had initially held something back, at first accusing Hiss only of having been a clandestine Communist in the government’s employ. He and Hiss had once been good friends, whose families knew each other, and a kind of tenderness restrained Chambers for a time. But Hiss forced his hand, and Chambers finally revealed that Hiss had actually engaged in espionage for the Soviets. When he produced the proof, in the form of documents Hiss had passed to him that Chambers had kept for a decade, Hiss’s world came crashing down. He could not be charged with espionage due to a statute of limitations, but he was convicted of perjury and sent to prison. Amazingly, for three-quarters of a century, Hiss (who died in 1996) has continued to have defenders on the left; I’m aware of two books published since 2000 that claim he was framed, though revelations from the Soviet and FBI archives have made the case against him airtight.

Why did New Deal partisans—whose own patriotism is not in question—deny, dismiss, or obfuscate Hiss’s guilt? I think it was in part a defense against shock—a reflexive disbelief that a darling of the liberal establishment (Supreme Court clerk, congressional staffer, high diplomat at Yalta, Bretton Woods, the United Nations)—could be a traitor to his country. In part it can be explained by a “no enemies to the left” attitude, in which Communists appeared to be simply progressives in a hurry, but not really a threat to the American way of life. And many just recoiled from having to admit that the FBI or HCUA or (of all people) Richard Nixon, one of the committee’s most dogged members, could be right about something.

But the middlebrow reading public, less given to ideological blindness, made Witness a bestseller—partly serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, featured by the Book of the Month Club, snapped up by the thousands in bookstores across the country. In its 799 pages a man bared his soul and wrote movingly of his own failings, his loves and hates, his moments of terror and despair, even his attempted suicide. And it all has the ring of truth. 

As I said, Witness was reviewed everywhere, and by notable figures. The liberal anti-Communist philosopher Sidney Hook, in a three-page review for the Sunday New York Times Book Review, accepted Chambers’s testimony against Hiss as altogether truthful and had much praise for his memoir. But Hook was repelled by Chambers’s deeply religious outlook on the crisis of the West, and faulted him for not seeing that “genuine American liberals” too opposed Communism because of their “opposition to all forms of authoritarianism.” Hook’s model liberal was John Dewey, who had indeed done much to bring attention to the outrages of Stalin’s Purge; but as Allen Weinstein tells us, Dewey had disbelieved Chambers’s charges against Hiss because he “had difficulty in bringing himself to believe that the Russians operated a widespread espionage network in the United States.” It was perhaps just too awful to contemplate.

The British writer Rebecca West reviewed Witness for the Atlantic Monthly. She too believed the author’s testimony against Hiss, and had more sympathy than Hook did for Chambers’s forebodings about liberalism’s ability to save itself. What amazed and appalled West was that Chambers could still affirm that his first conversion, to Communism, had been idealistic, not cynical or self-interested, and that he regarded this as true of Communists generally. West complained that Chambers “makes on their behalf a staggering claim to priority as idealists,” responding that in her view “Bolshevik Communism” was an altogether “hard-boiled” ideology concerned only with its own elite’s “monopoly of political power.” But Chambers had anticipated West’s response in his book, writing that Communism’s opponents “suppose it is greedy only for power, and not the revolutionary ends which that power has in view. In that lies the danger of underestimating the force of faith that moves the enemy.”

The great theme of Witness is its other witness. Beyond the testimony of a man that he had once betrayed his country, and knew of others who had done so, is the testimony of a human being who has passed through a fire and lived, though scorched and scarred for life, and has come to believe that there is authentic freedom only under God, not in rebellion against his works. Whittaker Chambers twice committed himself to faiths he thought worth dying for; the first was a tragic error, and the second a hard-won redemption.

Image by Ryan and licensed via Adobe Stock.