A Witness to Himself[br]William F. Buckley, Jr., Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961[/i]

Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961; edited with notes by William F. Buckley, Jr.; foreword by Ralph de Toledano, New York: Privately printed by National Review, Inc. 303 pp. $6.95.

The Letters included in this collection were written during the last seven years of Whittaker Chambers’ life. It was a period which, for him, was marked by the release of Alger Hiss from prison, by Chambers’ first heart attack, which ended his dream to live out his life as a dairy farmer, by his sporadic activity as a contributor and on the staff of National Review, by work on two or more books which were never finished, by a short trip to Europe during which he visited his old friend Arthur Koestler, and finally, by his resignation from National Review and his decision to go back to college. The last letter was written a few weeks before his death. For Buckley, the letters cover the period which began with the publication of his and Brent Bozell‘s McCurthy and His Enemies, which was the immediate reason for Chambers’ first letter to Buckley, and went on to the launching of National Review, the vicissitudes of which, and Chambers’ association with it, provide much of the subject matter of the letters or, at least, the igniting spark.

Chambers in his last years was a lonely man. He felt that few understood the nature of the battle for which he had sacrificed his career, his privacy, his peace of mind and ultimately, as it turned out, his health, or even vaguely perceived what he had done or why.

In one of his early letters to Buckley he remarks that his side was “the side of the disunited, the indecisive, the cowardly.” We can understand, then, what it must have meant to him, when this man, some twenty-five years younger than he, neither indecisive nor cowardly, but intelligent, outspoken, and at the beginning of what promised to be a brilliant career, came to him with the offer of friendship. In a letter written soon after their first meeting he said, “What you will do with your special grace I do not know. I shall watch with interest. And not watch only. My counsel, which you invoke, is yours for the asking.”

In the letters that followed, Chambers not only responded to Buckley’s offer of friendship by, among other things, giving him the benefit of his vast experience and highly professional journalistic skill, he did something e l s e h e explained himself. Buckley had invited him to take an active part on the editorial staff of his new magazine, National Review. Chambers was obviously pleased, but for various reasons seemed at first reluctant to accept. Finally, he agreed to write occasional pieces, and then, after his recovery from his first heart attack, mggested that he come to New York every other week to attend editorial meetings and to help with the final editing of the magazine. This continued until his second heart attack brought this activity, which he seems to have enjoyed immensely, to a close. Always, however, he seems to have questioned whether he belonged on National Review, and to have wondered whether Buckley really knew where Chambers stood, or recognized how different his position was from at least some of the editors of NationalReview, and, indeed, from that of Buckley himself.

In explaining to Buckley, for example, the influences that brought him into Communism, he tells the story of a young woman, a member of the revolutionary party called the Narodniki, who in 1907 was executed for shooting the Commandant of the Central Prison in Petersburg and planning to use herself as a bomb to blow up the headquarters of the Okhrana. Her last words, as quoted by Chambers, were, “Death itself is nothing. . . Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done . . . How good it is to love people.” It was under the influence of these people, Chambers tells Buckley, not of Social Democracy, that he came to Communism, and, he goes on to say, “I remained under the spiritual influence of the Narodniki long after I became a Marxist. In fact, I never threw it off. I never have. It has simply blended with that strain in the Christian tradition to which it is akin.” But he wants Buckley to understand that it is this background of his Communist experience which creates a ‘‘deep quiet river” between him and at least one other prominent member, also a former Communist, of the editorial staff of National Review.

Chambers also goes to some length to make it clear that he was not a Conservative, and why. He was deeply impressed, I have reason to believe, by Russell Kirk’s The Consertmtive Mind when it first appeared; I have always believed, in fact, that it was because of his recommendation that it was reviewed at considerable length, and very favorably, in Time, and at one point, in the present book of letters, he speaks of working on a moral apologia for conservatism, but he finally came to the conclusion that conservatism might be all well and good for some, but it wasn’t for him. “I am a man of the Right,” he told Buckley, “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.” In another letter, he describes his recovery from his first heart attack, which brought with it the realization “that I was not a Conservative, and that, if I insisted on trying to be one, the only result must be a profound deformation, ending in falsification.” He had come to the acceptance of the world as it was, he went on to say, one consequence of which was the liquidation of his farm “and, therewith, all that grotesque resistance to the real world of which it was last stand and symbol.” Hie final gesture, he said, was to wave farewell, “a little sadly,’’ to be sure, “to Frank Meyer and Russell Kirk.” In a letter to Willi Schlamm, one of the early members of the staff of National Review, which is included in the present book, he wrote, “Bill (Buckley) is a true Conservative; I am at heart a Counter-revolutionist .”

Although the letters in this collection were written over a period of seven years, and many deal with current issues or appear to be in response to a question involving the magazine or some subject which might be treated in the magazine, the book as a whole possesses remarkable coherence. Some of the letters were obviously spontaneous, others give the impression of having been written after considerable reflection and with great care, but all are the product of a man who was a master of the art of writing. It would be interesting to see some of the letters which induced Chambers to pour out his heart and mind as he did. The evidence is clear that Buckley was a good correspondent, and that Chambers. felt that he was worthy of the effort these magnificent letters required.

Two themes recur again and again in this correspondence; the inability of the West successfully to combat Communism, and the problem of evil. In one letter he writes, “ . . . the total situation is hopeless, past repair, organically irremediable,” and again, “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 largely fordoomed.” The West, he felt, was hopelessly divided: Modem Age 201

On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened articulate elite which, to one degree or another, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization-the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates. In short, this is the order of which Communism is one logical expression, originating not in Russia, but in the culture capitals of the West . . . It is a Western body of belief that now threatens the West from Russia. As a body of Western beliefs, secular and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret emotional complicity with Communism which they dislike, not the Communism but only what, by the chances of history, Russia has specifically added to it-slave labor camps, purges, MVD, et al. . . . The enemy- he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization.

The uprisings in Berlin, Poland, and Hungary gave him hope that perhaps Communism itself would produce the antithesis that would bring about its destruction. He also came back to the idea, which he said was implied in Witness, that “. . . the struggle is its own solution. Out of the struggle itself . . . the West may discover in itself or otherwise develop, forces that can justify its survival.” But for the problem of evil he can find iio answer, neither in t’neology, nor in reason, nor in history.

Chambers was a deeply religious man, but not in the orthodox sense. “The temptation to orthodoxy is often strong . . . But it is not a temptation to which I have found it possible to yield.” But for all his deep religious conviction, he could find no answer to the problem of evil-the slave labor camps, the extermination camps, the Katyn massacre, and all the rest haunted him. He tells Buqkley of an Orthodox Priest, con- (demned to death by Tito, who hanged himself before the executioner could shoot him, and left a note for his wife-“I have gone to remind God of a world He has forgotten.” But he could write, “All life is rooted in horror,” and still believe that life, his life, has a purpose. In the letters there is this remarkable line, “Those collapses (the heart attacks) which the world sees are due to the tension between my feeling that I do not have, as a man, the strength to do what will be laid on me, and the horror of knowing that, when it is laid on me, I shall do it.”

What sort of man was Whittaker Chambers, this fat, dumpy man in the rumpled grey suit who looked, he said, “like some, kind of intellectual,” whose testimony, subjected as it was to the most merciless scrutiny, shattered the illusions which had nurtured and sustained the American intellectual elite for more than a generation, and changed the course of history? Anyone who has read Witness knows that he was a superb writer, perhaps one of the best of our time; if he hadn’t been a highly competent journalist he never would have become a senior editor of Time under Henry Luce. Anyone who knew him will remember his deep, infectuous laugh-he loved to laugh -and his delightful sense of humor. He had the gift of friendship, loved his family, and was deeply attached to his garden and farm. In one of his letters to Buckley he says that he was essentially a poet, that Witness, for example, “is chiefly a poem.”

One of the ingredients, I think, which made up this most complex of men was a large dash of romanticism. it was his romanticism which drew him to Communism, and his intelligence, and his immense strength of character, which led him out. In this he differed sharply from, say Wyndham Lewis, with whom, as a writer, Chambers had much in common. Lewis would have found the Narodniki ridiculous, if not repulsive; he had none of the romanticism to which they appealed in Chambers, but both had the keen, relentless intelligence which got to the heart of the matter, which enabled them to see without flinching how 202 Spring 1970 it really is. Lewis once said, “The true image must be put down,” and that is how Chambers felt about it also.

The life of Whittaker Chambers covered almost exactly the first sixty years of this century. It can be said without exaggeration that few men experienced more deeply and with greater awarenes the whole spectrum of what this period had to offer than he, or that few if any better understood the forces that shaped it. Anyone who wishes to understand our frightening, puzzling time will find it most helpful to become acquainted with Whittaker Chambers-he was there, and no one thought more profoundly about it, or wrote about it with more understanding than he. Witness, of course, is the indispensible book, but in the present book Chambers bares his soul and speaks from his heart in a way which would scarcely be possible except in letters to a friend. We are greatly in Mr. Buckley’s debt for having inspired them, and for letting us read them. They are a part, an illuminating part, of the story of our sorry times.