“The history of the world is the judge of the world.”
—Hermann Ullmann

Two ironies attend the life and career of Whittaker Chambers. The first is that the one-time Communist spy, foreign editor of Time, and witness against Soviet espionage became notable during his life and afterwards only because of the Hiss Case, which brought him such notoriety that his career as a professional journalist came to a quick end. The second is that his legacy as a thinker and writer to a world he believed was dying issued from the Hiss Case itself and from what he had to tell that world about the meaning of the case. Unable to continue the profession he followed after leaving the Soviet underground, Chambers evolved into a prophetic figure, an almost Dostoyevskian character, whose brooding vision of a decadent West engaged in a desperate death struggle with communism and with its own poisons has haunted those few Westerners who have perceived the unfulfilled greatness of the man.

Terry Teachout’s collection of Chambers’s miscellaneous writings, from the Marxist fiction of his early days to his last mordant syllables in National Review, is in part intended to correct the view we have had of Chambers as either (on the left) a “messianic anticommunist” or (to much of the right) a bottomless pit of often lachrymose horror stories about the god that failed and its worshipers. It is no fault of Mr. Teachout’s that his anthology does not entirely succeed in this effort. What Chambers wrote for Time and Life during the period he called in Witness “The Tranquil Years” conspicuously lacks the power that Witness itself, the posthumous Cold Friday, and his letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. possess. That is not entirely Chambers’s fault either; the pieces for Time and Life contain most of the flaws those magazines have inflicted on the reading public throughout their history. Usually, when Chambers’s own glimpses of some of the major minds of his era—Einstein, Toynbee, Niebuhr, Joyce—were allowed to be seen, they were quickly dimmed by editorially necessary trivia about personalities and the glib oversimplifications in which American mass journalism likes to swaddle itself.

Nor, probably, was Chambers yet capable of that power. Only when the ordeal of the Hiss Case had brought him to that “last path of the earth, in the Scythian country, in the untrodden solitude” of which he wrote in Cold Friday, when his mind had been stripped and concentrated on the meaning of his life and its meaning for the West, did he become privy to his country’s fate and able to foretell and analyze it in his final testimony.

Yet the glimpses are there, and to those who recognize in Whittaker Chambers not only a man who altered the course of history but also one of the most compelling American writers of this century, Mr. Teachout’s anthology IS indispensable. It includes four short stories Chambers wrote for The New Masses while he was still a fledgling apparatchik. It continues with all the major essays and reviews he wrote for Time and Life in the 1940’s, when his mind had been cleared of Marxism and was beginning to see more clearly the lines his age was etching in the dust of history, down through his contributions to The American Mercury and National Review, when he had become the prophet for a cause. But even in the early short stories, despite their rigid adherence to the party line, the embryo of the mature Chambers is present.

The major value of Mr. Teachout’s collection consists not so much in the intrinsic worth of what Chambers was writing in his early post-communist period as in what these pieces show about the development of Chambers’s mind and world view. By examining what he had to say in the Tranquil Years, before the Hiss Case forced him for the rest of his life to defend his own integrity and to play a role that merely distracted him and his readers from his essential message, we now can see more clearly not only what Chambers had to tell the West about its enemies in Moscow and their agents in Washington, but also what he wanted to tell the West about itself. That message, whatever happens to communism and the West in the future, is likely to prove more enduring than the facts about the Woodstock typewriter, the prothonotary warbler, and the vapid young traitor whose perjury made Chambers famous.

“The social symbol of our age,” Chambers wrote in The American Mercury in 1944, “is autolysis, a medical term for the process whereby the stomach, for example, by a subtle derangement of its normal functions, destroys itself by devouring its” own tissues.” He could not, before the Hiss Case, fully substantiate his belief, implicit in this passage, that the West was dying by suicide. To have done so would have involved telling what he later would tell the House Un-American Activities Committee about his own descent into the Marxist Avernus, and Chambers was not yet ready to tell, nor was the world yet prepared to listen.

Throughout these popular pieces there runs the theme of the worldhistorical meaning of current events and the suggestion that the West, even as it was crowing with glee in its triumph over the Axis and its grand illusion of global peace and progress, is of the same flesh with Ninevah and Tyre, yet finds its own mortality altogether inconceivable. But the experiences that had brought Chambers to this bleak vision remained known only to him, and his effort to convince his readers of his belief, never quite fully stated in these pieces, relied on symbolism and suggestion rather than the police-blotter factuality of Witness and the hearing room. “The rouge applied by an undertaker to the lips of a 20th Century corpse,” he wrote in Time in 1947, “is one measure of 20th Century civilization. But modern man’s effort to deny or minimize death is part of a much more important necessity—the need to deny or minimize God.”

To Chambers, the most complete organization of that need was communism itself, “the world’s second oldest faith,” as he calls it in Witness, whose “promise was whispered in the first days of the new Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.'” But communism was not the only manifestation of that need, which permeated the West and, in what became Chambers’s view of history, modernity itself. From Toynbee’s A Study of History, Chambers came to believe that “one hopeful meaning stands out: not materialist but psychic factors are the decisive forces of history.” His seven-part series for Life on “The History of Western Culture” extrapolates the “psychic factors” that had brought the West to the brink of its dissolution.

The Enlightenment, he wrote, was the “one great source of modern culture.” It “revised the fundamental idea of man’s destiny and purpose which civilization had developed over more than 1,000 years” and was “the intellectual chemistry whose gradual precipitate was the modern mind—secular, practical, and utilitarian.” The denouement of the Enlightenment he saw in the Edwardian era, which was

the fulfillment of the 18th Century’s Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment’s basic intuition was the idea of progress—the belief that man, by the aid of science, can achieve a perfection of living limited only by the imaginative powers of the mind. Implicitly the Enlightenment denied faith in the name of science and the Kingdom of God in the name of the kingdom of this world. It whetted that knife-edge, dividing the world’s greatest focuses of force—the power of religion and the power of science—along which the thoughtful man has teetered ever since.

The Edwardians—not merely the British in the decade after Queen Victoria’s death, but also the Americans and Europeans—wrapped themselves in the exuberant confidence of the Enlightenment’s legacy. “A new tempo was entering life with the abridgement of time and distance by speed and the multiplication of power by the generation of energy. . . . The Edwardian era was one of those rare interludes of history where everybody who could possibly do so had a wonderful time.”

Of course, it was all an illusion, had been illusory ever since the Enlightenment, and would be dashed in World War I and the Russian Revolution, the political, economic, and intellectual wreckage of the 20th century, and the chaos that ensued. It was neither Voltaire nor the Edwardians who understood what would happen when the illusion broke, but a squat little gentleman unknown to and unimagined by their cherubic innocence. “When the train of history makes a sharp turn,” said Lenin, “the passengers who do not have a good grip on their seats are thrown off.”

The shallowness of the Enlightenment and its legacy in the liberal, democratic, and industrialized West in Chambers’s view had weakened the grip of Western men on their seats and had failed to prepare them to survive the sharp turn history was about to take. That Chambers saw the weakness of Western liberalism in the face of the challenge is clear enough. That is why he can never be a hero to contemporary anti-Soviet social democrats and neoconservatives who pride themselves on their pragmatic humanism and their own adherence to the values of the liberal, modern West. Only by ignoring Chambers’s dark vision of human unreason and sin and his belief that liberalism was a close cousin to communism, or by twisting him into a Third Generation yuppie chirping about SDI, tax cuts, and Jonas Savimbi, can today’s “right” honestly regard Chambers as an icon. “For of course,” he wrote in Life in 1953,

there is a strong family resemblance between the Communist state and the welfare state. The ends each has in view have much in common. But the methods proposed for reaching them radically differ. Each is, in fact, in direct competition with the other, since each offers itself as an alternative solution for the crisis of the 20th Century; and Fabian Britain has at last supplanted Soviet Russia in the eyes of political liberals when they look abroad. Nevertheless, that family resemblance is nerve-wearing, since all the minds that note it are not equally discriminating, especially in a nation that has only just become conscious of Communism and still rejects socialism. So, at every move against Communism, liberal views come unglued, and liberal voices go shrill, fearing that, by design or error, the move may be against themselves.

Yet if Chambers rejected 20th-century liberalism, he was not much more sympathetic to the conservatives of the 1950’s. He declined to attach himself in any way to Joe McCarthy, less perhaps from dislike of the man than a belief that McCarthy would eventually taint his witness. He was not comfortable at National Review and found preposterous the quaint dogmas of classical liberalism dressed up as conservatism. In a letter to Buckley in 1957, he called the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises “a goose,” and Frank Meyer’s self-appointment as the ideological gatekeeper of the American right seems first to have amused, then bored, him. The ideas of Meyer and Russell Kirk struck Chambers as “chiefly an irrelevant buzz.” Only with Buckley himself and with James Burnham did he seem to share anything like a common outlook, and at last he resigned from National Review, acknowledging to Buckley and himself that he was not a conservative in any serious sense, but “a man of the Right.”

What exactly Chambers meant by this term is far from clear, but he contrasted it with “conservatism” and seems to have identified it with a defense of capitalism. “I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative.” Yet despite his identification with capitalism, almost nowhere did Chambers offer an explicit defense of it, and in both his letters to Buckley and in a National Review piece of 1958 on federal farm policy, he was perfectly conscious of the contradiction between capitalism and conservatism and the link between capitalism and the advance of socialism. Like most conservatives and like his neighbors in rural Maryland, Chambers saw the freedom and independence of farmers threatened by federal regulation of agriculture. But he also believed such controls were “inescapable.”

The problem of farm surpluses is, of course, a symptom of a crisis of abundance. It is the gift of science and technology—improved machines, fertilizers, sprays, antibiotic drugs, and a general rising efficiency of know-how. The big farm, constantly swallowing its smaller ‘neighbors, is a logical resultant of those factors. . . . If farmers really meant to resist these trends, to be conservative, to conserve “a way of life” (as they often say), they would smash their tractors with sledges, and go back to the horse-drawn plow. Of course, they have no intention of doing anything so prankish. . . . Controls of one kind or another are here to stay so long as science and technology are with us.

Chambers’s belief, expressed as early as 1944, that “the land-owning farmer, big and little, is the conservative base of every healthy society, no matter how many miles of factories may be required to keep the average city dweller in a state of civilized neurosis,” reflects an apparent sympathy for agrarianism and the American South. But his recognition of the self-destructive dynamic of modern capitalism, relying on science, sponsoring continuous enlargement and social innovation, and eventually spawning socialism, brings him close to Burnham and Joseph Schumpeter.

Nowhere in all his writing does Chambers more clearly show the weaknesses of unrestrained capitalism and its kinship with communism than in his devastation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in National Review in 1957. “Randian Man,” he wrote, “like Marxian man, is made the center of a godless world.”

. . . if Man’s “heroism”. . . no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity.

Like the materialism of “godless Communism,” the hedonism of godless capitalism winds up as the tool of a political despotism that manages the pursuit of happiness as pleasure.

In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau.

The significance of Chambers’s witness, then, is considerably diminished if it is mistaken for merely an account of Soviet communism and its Western stooges. His point throughout his writings in the 1940’s and 1950’s was that the roots of communism lie in the West itself, and that they flourish because the modern age has chosen to credit the serpent’s promise. That promise and its lethal consequences for the West were as palpable to him in the United States of Truman and Eisenhower as they had been under the Edwardians, and as they were in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Only when the West had awakened to the falsehood of the promise could it bear what he called “that more terrible witness” by which it would destroy its external enemy and begin to purge itself of its internal toxins. But he had no expectation that the West would do so, and no suggestions on how to do it.

For all the authority Chambers commanded in Witness, in the last decade of his life he seemed uncertain about many things and had no clear answers for the political crises of his age. He was not at bottom a political thinker but a Christian existentialist who shunned politics by enveloping himself in suffering and by dwelling on the intractability of man’s fate without God. Christianity and the tragic vision of history became for him an intellectual crutch with which history’s walking wounded could limp away from a battle they could not win. Like Burnham, as Chambers himself wrote to Buckley, he sought “to understand what the reality of the, desperate forces is, and what is their relationship in violent flux,” and he had what he called “the direct glance that measures what it leaves without fear and without regret.” But despite his grasp of the main forces of the 20th century, Chambers was unable to communicate the realities he saw in a form that would allow a secular resolution of the challenges they presented. Hence, his response was one of other-worldly withdrawal—from journalism and National Review to his farm and family, to a furtively private pietism, to an autobiographical justification of his vision, to a handful of occasional essays for the conservative press, to an intensely emotional (often maudlin) prose published mainly in posthumous fragments and filled with introspection, grotesque anecdotes, bizarre characters, and metaphors of death, lunacy, and decay. Chambers relentlessly smashed his readers’ faces against the window panes of history and forced them to look at scenes few of them wanted to see. But having shown them the worst that human beings in this century could do, he had little to offer them except to burrow deeper within a storm cellar of intense devotionalism. His oeuvre, for all its merits of style and truth and all that it has to tell the West about why the West is dying, is not what a Marine wading up the sea beach at Tarawa would carry in his knapsack.

 

[Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959, Edited by Terry Teachout (Chicago and Washington: Regnery Gateway) 361 pp., $24.95]