Books: Words from the Center of Sorrow

ODYSSEY OF A FRIEND: WHITTAKER CHAMBERS' LETTERS TO WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. 1954-1961. 303 pages. Putnam. $6.95, "If the West can find no voice better than Senator McCarthy's to rally its cause, or even to lead its forlorn hope, then the West must have lost that creative virtue, the loss of which spells doom for those who have lost it . . .A distaste for Communism and socialism is not a program."

Even out of context one could swiftly establish that the Senator in question was named Joseph, not Eugene. Yet few Americans, even today, would guess that the admonitory voice and the bitter sentiment about the Right came from Whittaker Chambers, the man so long cast as the eminence grise behind the Great Red Hunt of the 1950s. That gloomy misjudgment was Chambers' considerable cross to bear during the closing decade of his shadowed life. For the rest of us it is a significant loss that a mind as remarkable as his and a life lived so close to the shaping struggles of this century are still obscured by controversy and caricature.

In 1948, when Chambers testified that Alger Hiss had been an espionage agent of Moscow, he hoped to awaken America to the relentless political struggles of the era. The country was not ready for the revelation. What resulted was no intellectual inquiry but a raw political charade of blame and guilt. The Left was deeply discredited. The Right was besmirched and divided by the tac tics of Senator McCarthy. Almost everyone, liberals in particular, heaped abuse on Chambers, who was regarded, at worst, as some sort of a malignant monster; at best, as an informer who had nothing to offer but the bare facts of his accusation.

In 1952 Chambers published Witness. It was one of the most wide-ranging American autobiographies ever written. But the enduring revulsion against Chambers all but buried it critically. Now, nine years after his death, readers have a new occasion to study the lineaments of Whittaker Chambers' character and thought. He emerges as a man with an apocalyptic turn of mind and a weakness for describing himself in Promethean terms (I wanted to "give the children of men a slightly better chance to fight a battle already largely foredoomed"). He is a man who can speak of Communists as cobras and Socialists as pit-vipers. Yet his tragic concerns thrust far beyond such passion—and beyond simple-minded notions of crusading against Communism by police methods and the more ranting assertion of American virtues. Chambers scorned such methods. For he saw and eloquently argues that survival—if it is to be won at all—will depend on the moral qualities of society, on spiritual strength, on unflinching perception of our time's cruel complexities.

Stock Tips. His letters would be fascinating and touching documents even if the author were not infamous. Buckley sought out Chambers in the seclusion of his Maryland farm and prevailed on him to contribute to the National Review. But what began as a professional alliance (wary on Chambers' part) grew into an absorbing polemical discourse and finally into a true friendship.