Whittaker Chambers is my idea of an exemplary conservative. He dug Beats and Sorrow Songs, did in Ayn Rand in a definitive National Review piece, distanced himself from William Buckley, hung tight with his old friend James Agee, and tried to convince other conservatives Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin. Not that I knew all that until pretty recently. It wasn’t a surprise, though, to find out Chambers aged well once I got around to reading Witness, his account of the Hiss case and its back story. That book proved Chambers (as Malraux once wrote) “had not come back from hell empty-handed.”
Yet Chambers has always been vaguely disreputable among “the better people,” and Witness is rarely read. Here’s how I came to try it one spring a few years ago…
I was out with my (then) five-year old in Riverside Park watching him play solitary war games (frowned on by his progressive public school and by his playmates’ parents). He had his tri-corner hat and his wooden musket (which is way too heavy for him – re-enactors have ruined childish things). My boy was fighting the Brits in his head. (What the hey – it was Harlem Heights!) We were on a bushy slope above tennis courts. He was battling hard but noticing purple crocuses, daffodils. The birds were wailing…It all reminded me of my times war gaming when I was a kid. Looking back way après la guerre, what kept me in the fight as a child – more than the prospect of imaginary victories – was the undeclared possibility of being lost in a familiar place. Given my lousy sense of direction, it was easy to get some strange in the no man’s lands beyond the backyards in my hometown. Lacking a compass head, I could get real gone in those woodsy areas before thinking my way back home. (As per Heil Heidegger, who defined thought as “coming into the nearness of distance.”) …My boy was getting out ahead of me as he stepped off into the tatty half-forest. Not that he could get very far from the path (or from Riverside Drive and the City higher up on the hill). I was just wishing – since it was still early in the season – maybe he wouldn’t run into much litter. Or leftovers from a camp of homeless guys. It occurred to me the place where we were getting back to nature must be close to the spot Hemingway has sad old men searching for hustlers to piss in their mouths in To Have and Have Not. It probably wasn’t too far from where that friend of Kerouac’s murdered a man who had a history of making passes at him. Onward, I kept up with my scout (and kept an eagle eye out). There was a little trash. And, beside it, a book. Looking odd, all by itself. Though we were just 10 blocks or so from Columbia. I checked the book out a little gingerly. It turned out it was Witness. Soiled. Wet through? Nope. The cover was bad but the text was intact. Could it get a witness?…My boy called out to me from behind a stump and I suddenly recalled my own pop’s offhand line on Chambers. We never talked through the Hiss case. It was long before my time. But I remember my pop allowing to his “shame” that he’d identified for a hot second with Chambers’ ally Richard Nixon when the grocer’s boy from Whittier went toe-to-toe with the Harvard man Hiss. My pop also wasn’t entirely sure about Chambers’ probity. Yet he was certain of one thing: Chambers could flat-out write. That tore it. I ripped the hanging hardcover off Witness. I‘d be slipping this dirty (literally) book by my neatnik wife…
After a few more skirmishes in the Park, my boy and I headed for the Columbia campus where there’s a spot we like to play soccer. On the way through the gate, by the Columbia Journalism School, I saw a face I knew coming out. It was…Victor Navasky – longtime publisher of The Nation and fervent apologist for Alger Hiss. A tell-tale sign that pretty much ensured I’d be reading Witness right away.
More by DeMott on Chambers here.