When it first appeared in 1952, Whit-taker Chambers’s monumental spiritual autobiography Witness was hailed as a masterpiece of political writing and became an immediate best-seller. Today, Chambers (who died in 1961) remains a hero to many conservatives—and a monster to many on the Left—but to most of the educated public his life is little known and his writings still less read. Students stare dumbly at the mention of his name, or recall him, at best, as the strange man who hid microfilm in his pumpkins during the perjury trial of his nemesis Alger Hiss. Of course, everything Chambers stood for—and most especially his dogmatic belief that the spiritual decay of the West dooms it to defeat by Communism—goes against today’s prevailing intellectual grain, as it did, in truth, against yesterday’s. But whatever one’s view of the man, Chambers’s confessional Witness remains one of the most important works of political literature to be written in America.1
The outline of Chambers’s life is dramatic enough in its own right. Born into a cultivated but unstable Long Island family, Chambers became an accomplished student of literature and languages and showed distinct talent as a writer during his years of sporadic attendance at Columbia College in the early 1920’s. When he dropped out of school, one of his mentors, Mark Van Doren, suggested that he visit the Soviet Union because “the Russian Revolution is like Elizabethan England. All the walls are falling down.” Chambers got only as far as Europe, but, like others of his generation, he reacted to the growing economic and political crisis of the world (and to a personal crisis) by turning to Communism in 1925. Except for a period from 1929-30 when he left the American Communist party because of internal disputes, he worked loyally and successfully as a writer and editor for the Daily Worker and New Masses.
In 1932, Chambers was recruited into the Soviet underground. He acted as a courier for stolen government documents and became the instrumental contact for a variety of New Deal government officials, eventually including Alger Hiss, then with the State Department, whom he helped recruit into the Communist network. Chambers broke with the party in 1938, when the truth of the Stalinist terror became apparent to him. Denounced as a Trotskyite and summoned to Moscow, he went briefly into hiding (for he was convinced he would be killed). Upon his reemergence he worked for a decade as an editor at Time magazine, where his essays and reviews followed an implicit and sometimes explicit anti-Communist line, even during the war years when such a stance was not widely popular.
In 1948, after Elizabeth Bentley, an ex-Communist operative, accused several government officials of espionage for the Soviet Union, Chambers was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), of which Richard Nixon was then a member. In his testimony Chambers accused Alger Hiss, among others, of being a Communist, although he denied (and perjured himself in denying) that Hiss, to whom he had apparently been close in the underground, had been directly involved in espionage. Hiss was by then serving as a high official in the State Department. He ridiculed Chambers’s story, asserting that he had known Chambers only very briefly as a journalist named “George Crosley.”2
President Truman, who had instituted a federal loyalty program in 1947, dismissed the case as a “red herring” created by partisan politics. Although Truman’s stance galled Chambers and his sympathizers, it is evident now that the President was also working behind the scenes to squelch Hiss’s power. In any event, after Chambers repeated his charges on Meet the Press, Hiss filed a libel suit. In his deposition to Hiss’s attorneys in the libel action, and before a New York grand jury later in the year, Chambers finally produced evidence of Hiss’s espionage in the form of microfilm and transcribed documents.
The testimony that led ultimately to Alger Hiss’s conviction for perjury in 1949 also led to Chambers’s great written work—and to his personal exhaustion. Torn between the need to expose the Communist conspiracy and a desire to show mercy toward Hiss as an individual, Chambers went through episodes of deep despair during the grand jury hearings and subsequent trials, and he once attempted to take his own life rather than carry out his destruction of Hiss. The despair is evident in Witness, where, however, it is also disciplined by the overriding power of religious faith.
After the conclusion of the Hiss case in 1949, and still more after the success of Witness in 1952, Chambers largely withdrew from public debate, to his cherished farm in Maryland. His despondency over what he took to be the spiritual illness of the West would not go away, and again he several times contemplated suicide. But he still continued his testimony against Communism, writing sporadically throughout the decade and accepting a position with National Review from 1957 to 1959. A posthumous volume of prose, Cold Friday, appeared in 1964; and William F. Buckley, Jr., published a collection of Chambers’s remarkable letters to him, Odyssey of a Friend, in 1969.
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To what can we ascribe the obscurity into which the name of Whittaker Chambers has fallen? One factor may be merely personal. Chambers’s break with Communism, and his long witness against it, required a deep inner upheaval, of a kind that to many people now must seem quaint at best, if not altogether inexplicable. But more obvious than this are cultural-political factors: the enduring pieties of lay Stalinism (in Jean-François Revel’s phrase), and the accession of leftist politics and scholarship over the last two decades. Yet this does not fully explain the matter either, for even inside the academy the majority of liberals today appear to believe that Chambers generally told the truth, and that Hiss was guilty; whatever questions can be raised about the conduct of HUAC or the FBI, the central evidence against Hiss still stands. The problem, rather, lies elsewhere: first, in the belief that Chambers’s testimony and his ideologically charged autobiography helped pave the way for the often irresponsible tactics of anti-Communist investigation associated with Senator McCarthy; and, second, in what seems to many to be the reactionary and bizarre nature of Chambers’s vigorous appeal to faith in God.3
In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s much legitimate testimony against the “generation on trial” (to borrow the title of Alistair Cooke’s book on the Hiss-Chambers case) was engulfed in the public mind by the destructive theatricality of McCarthyism. In the ranks of the anti-Communist Left, friendships divided over the propriety of naming names and of public denunciation. (Chambers himself, it should be noted, considered McCarthy inept and dishonest, and he resisted the Senator’s attempts to enlist his support.) And even those ex-Communists and anti-Communists who shared Chambers’s cause seldom shared his religious faith or his sweeping condemnation of New Deal liberalism. Sidney Hook—both at the time and more recently in his autobiography, Out of Step—has not been alone in vigorously disputing Chambers’s Manichean claim that one must choose between God and Communism.
As McCarthyism passed into decadence, and domestic anti-Communism along with it, it became a fine question in some minds whether Chambers, the unkempt visionary who claimed that the whole of the New Deal was a “revolution . . . not by tanks and machine guns, but by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court,” was not somehow more at fault than Hiss, the well-groomed establishment figure exposed as a traitor. The distrust of Chambers exhibited by large segments of the political and intellectual establishment during the HUAC hearings and perjury trials—what Chambers refers to in Witness as the “pro-Hiss psychosis”—became ingrained thereafter in reactions to his autobiography. Even sympathetic assessments of Chambers, like Allen Weinstein’s in his definitive account of the Hiss-Chambers case, Perjury (1978), have typically considered Witness only as a source of information.4 All this has impeded a reconsideration of Witness as a political and, especially, a literary work. Such a reconsideration decidedly does not require yet another rehearsal of the details of the case and its accumulated minutiae. What it does require is that we not shy away from Chambers’s demanding conjunction of political freedom and belief in God.
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In a 1959 letter to Buckley, Chambers remarked that Witness was “chiefly a poem.” Like Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, he added, “few know it; they read into it the meanings they choose.”
The comparison with Koestler’s searing novelistic portrayal of the Moscow show trials is apt for several reasons. For one thing, in the course of the HUAC hearings and subsequently in the two trials, Chambers felt that he was on trial—that “in a manner startlingly reminiscent of the mechanics of the great Soviet public trials,” the media, the intelligentsia, and even the government were mobilized against him, “while public opinion was enveloped in a smog of smearing whispers.”
Yet the more important resemblance lies in the example of Chambers’s spiritual courage. Like Koestler’s hero Rubashov, Whittaker Chambers became a man whose “I,” whose witnessing conscience, refused to succumb to what Koestler called “the grammatical fiction,” the nihilism that lay at the root of Communism. Rubashov imagines that if the prosecutor had asked him, “what of the infinite?,” he “would not have been able to answer”—for as Koestler writes, under Communism “the infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the ‘I’ a suspect quality. The party did not recognize its existence.” As a statement of political conscience and of ultimate faith, Witness answers the great hypothetical question, “what of the infinite?,” yet not without agonies of doubt and punishing self-division. The poetic dimensions of Witness lie not just in its flights of mystical inspiration and sometimes ornate language, but also in its revealing strains of anxiety and ambivalence.
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While the massiveness of the book (which runs to over 700 pages) and its wealth of details resist convenient summary, the very structure of Chambers’s autobiography gives some indication of its narrative drama and its role as a document of freedom under siege. After a justly famous prefatory statement of anti-Communist faith entitled “A Letter to My Children,” Chambers begins his life in medias res with “Flight,” the story of his break with the Communist underground in 1938. “Flight” is the heart of the book insofar as it provides the grounds for Chambers’s conversion from evil and for his public witness against that evil ten years later. The motive lay in Chambers’s gradual recognition that the Soviet terror of the 1930’s, “like the Communist-Nazi pact later on, was the true measure of Stalin as a revolutionary statesman. That was the horror of the Purge—that acting as a Communist, Stalin had acted rightly.”
Only after this statement has been made does Witness travel backward to the birth of Jay Vivian Chambers (his given name) and detail his journey toward treason and ultimate salvation. The next eight chapters follow his life from boyhood up to the moment of the break recorded in “Flight”; and the following long chapter, entitled “The Tranquil Years,” which is devoted to Chambers’s troubled editorship at Time and his reclusive personal life on his Maryland farm, carries forward to the fateful year of 1948. Then the last chapters recapitulate the story largely known to the public (including long sections transcribing testimony before HUAC and in the Hiss trials), and an epilogue taking its title, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” from Macbeth, records Chambers’s final brooding thoughts on the meaning of his witness.
Just as “Flight” recounts the precipitating events of Chambers’s conversion, the “Letter” placed at the very beginning is in essence the philosophical conclusion of Witness. Focusing on the central issues of freedom, faith, and family, it courts sentimentality and pathos in order to express the union of religion and politics that will become the overriding crux of Chambers’s life and, in his view, of the age. One of the most moving of modern essays on the question of Communism, the “Letter” introduces a work that leads the reader (in Chambers’s words) “to Golgotha—the place of skulls,” there to hang “upon the cross of himself” and measure the depth of his own faith. If Chambers’s personal identification with Christ seems melodramatic, the larger point he is making here—that by mid-century, much of the modern world had become a place of skulls—is beyond question.
Chambers claims to have suddenly experienced in 1938 a moment of “untroubled peace”; but as he also goes on to demonstrate, his renunciation of Communism was produced less by a sudden religious illumination than by the recognition that totalitarian rule was condemning the world to darkness. As Chambers admits of the period when he broke from Communism, “I cannot say that I then believed in God. I sought God.” It appears, in fact, that the process of Chambers’s conversion took years, perhaps a decade or longer. The contention by some, including Hook, that Chambers falsely created a faith that he did not have in the late 1930’s thus misses two points that Witness itself makes clear: first, that to Chambers freedom from Stalinism and faith in God were joined not so much by logical causation as experientially; and second, that Chambers was so deeply troubled by his own treason and then by his escape from its demands that he came forward to testify only reluctantly, when subpoenaed to do so, not when moved by religious conviction.
The period following Chambers’s disavowal of treason and Stalinism may have seemed calm in comparison, but his characterization of it as “The Tranquil Years” can only be construed as ironic. Not only did he find himself, at Time, embattled with that magazine’s contingent of pro-Soviet reporters and editors, but nothing had come of the information he had given to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939. How deep, he wondered, did the espionage conspiracy go? In this period of agitated quiescence Chambers became more convinced than ever that Hitler and Stalin were cut from the same cloth—and convinced, what is more, that few in the free world were willing to face the fact.
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“The Tranquil Years” is not the only chapter whose title is colored by irony. “The Story of a Middle-Class Family” is the name of the chapter detailing the rather Dickensian beginning of Chambers’s life. His “terrible birth” on April 1, 1901 was physically difficult for his mother, while his father crumpled the telegram informing him of the event because “he did not think that April Fool jokes were in good taste.” A lonely child with few friends, Chambers grew up in a cultivated but eccentric and destructive family. Of his parents, his brother Richard, and himself, Chambers writes, “we were four people living in emotional and physical anarchy.”
By the time he turned to Communism, his family had become a living nightmare. His father, a cold and distant man who insisted that his sons call him Jay, deserted the family for several years (to take a homosexual lover, we now know) before returning to live, hermit-like, in a separate room. The disclosure by Chambers’s mother that his father “had never wanted” him cut his emotional ties “like a poisoned knife.” On one extreme occasion Chambers fought with his father to prevent him from beating to death the drunken Richard. His father’s emotional cruelty, the presence of an insane grandmother (who wandered the house with a concealed knife), and most of all the gruesome 1926 suicide by gas of his brother, on his third try—all these factors understandably contributed to Chambers’s sense that the modern world and the bourgeois family were alike suffering “the disorder that overtakes societies and families when a world has lost its soul” and “the toxins of its slow decay poisoned all life within it.” Emblematic of world crisis, the family for Chambers was the crucible of his descent into Communism—as it would later become the means of his spiritual regeneration.
The chapters devoted to Chambers’s youth and his early years as a Communist point toward a characteristic of his later life, revealing a split between what might be called the private and the ideological self. Thus, although the events of the following long chapter, “The Communist Party,” overlap to some degree those of “The Story of a Middle-Class Family,” Chambers separates them into distinct sections. So completely, indeed, do the parts of Witness devoted to Chambers’s life in the party ignore the private self that we find out very little about his several romantic affairs and nothing of substance about the illicit “party marriage” to Ida Dales that ended with the abortion of their child. Even his relationship with Esther Shemitz, whom he married in 1931, is treated but sparingly as compared with the wealth of details about his work for the Daily Worker and New Masses, the factional struggles of the American Communist party in the early 1930’s, and eventually the clandestine espionage he engaged in through a variety of contacts and under a number of aliases.
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As Allen Weinstein has shown, Chambers’s confidential testimony to the FBI would later make clear that he was in effect living four lives during his years as a Communist, especially after he went underground in 1932. He worked as an espionage agent; he led a deliberately separate existence in Maryland with his wife and children; he tried to maintain a circle of New York intellectual friends, including the Columbia art historian Meyer Schapiro, outside the party network; and he engaged in a series of homosexual affairs with mostly anonymous lovers, some dating back to the years before his marriage. It is here that the split between private and public selves becomes most complex, for although Witness glosses over entirely this darkest part of Chambers’s life, it was the cover of Communist underground work that allowed him to explore his hidden sexual self. Chambers would later tell the FBI that he “broke” from homosexuality at the same time he broke from Communism in 1938; but the evidence suggests that, just as his full religious conversion did not occur for several years, so his final choice of heterosexuality and devotion solely to his wife and children was not made immediately.
Chambers’s homosexuality would be one of the most notorious but suppressed issues of the Hiss perjury trial (suppressed, because any such charge brought by the defense would have redounded unpleasantly upon Hiss himself and his stepson, Timothy Hobson). While it seems to have had no bearing whatsoever on his ability to tell the truth about Hiss and the Communist network, Chambers’s homosexuality does bear on the story told in Witness by reminding us of the limits of his “confession,” marking off a portion of his soul—and what he came to depict as his descent into hell—that could not be revealed. Although Chambers would later denounce the implication by Hiss’s attorneys that he had had a homosexual attachment to his brother, it seems likely that his disturbed sexual life, like his embrace of Communism, was at least partly rooted in his grim childhood and painful family relations. More to the point, his work as an underground agent, offering anonymity and a life of secret personalities, created an environment in which both treason and sexual dissipation could take place.
Whatever the nature of Chambers’s homosexual life or his reasons for concealing it, the moral stability he later found in his marriage and family was likewise critical to his witness against Communism. As “The Tranquil Years” indicates, the family for Chambers was a bulwark against darkness and secularism. Indeed, a brief intervening chapter, entitled “The Child” and focusing on the birth of his daughter in 1933, links the two longer chapters on his establishment of an underground apparatus involving Alger Hiss and other government officials. “The Child” pits morality against ideology. Here Chambers asserts that he was torn between his longing for children and his belief that they should not be brought into so tragic a world. But rather than accept the Communist view that abortion, a “commonplace of party life,” was “a mere physical manipulation,” Chambers and his wife chose the life of a child “who, even before her birth, had begun, invisibly, to lead us out of that darkness, which we could not even realize, toward that light, which we could not even see.”
The meaning of “The Child” in Chambers’s life is even more striking in view of the private portion of his self he cannot confess. Ida Dales’s abortion, an event deleted from Witness, is now transformed and redeemed. “The Child” takes on the characteristics of an allegorical emblem, as Chambers recalls the miracle of his daughter’s ear, with its “delicate convolutions” giving evidence of God’s design. Whereas the degradation of Chambers’s childhood led him to choose Communism—in “an act of despair” consonant with the world economic crisis of the late 1920’s—the saving grace of his own family would lead him to choose freedom, in an act of faith consonant with the more terrible crisis of the late 1930’s.
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In committing “the characteristic crimes of my century,” Chambers says, he not only rejected God but did so for political reasons: Communism required the annihilation of faith. “The Division Point,” another brief chapter overlapping chronologically with “Flight” and separating Chambers’s underground life from the “tranquil” years of the war period, records the tentative reunifying of the religious and the political, the private and the ideological. The Stalinist purge had prompted Chambers to read Vladimir Tchernavin’s 1934 book, I Speak for the Silent Prisoners of the Soviets, which was available the following year in translation (although Chambers, a master of languages, possibly read it in the original). Tchernavin’s account of his escape to Finland after being sentenced in the “wreckers” trials in 1931 offered verification of stories about Stalinism Chambers already feared were true. A decade later it offered him a model of the book as weapon. “I tell my own story,” Tchernavin wrote, “because I believe that only in this way can I discharge the moral obligation which a kindly Fate imposed upon me in helping me to escape the Soviet Terror—the duty to speak for those whose voices cannot be heard.” The germ of spiritual rebirth lay at once in the Soviet slaughter and in the example of a witness whose testimony, steeped in bloody reality, would lead finally to Chambers’s own.
To suggest that Chambers himself escaped the Stalinist terror may seem absurd; many readers have found incredible his fear of assassination by the GPU after his break with the party. The fact remains, however, that party purges were not confined to the Soviet Union—either in the 1930’s or when Chambers later came forward to testify—and his nightlong vigils with a pistol at his side, if melodramatic, were not without cause.
More importantly, perhaps, the example of Tchernavin signaled to Chambers his own identification not so much with the victims of Soviet terror as with its perpetrators. This, indeed, might be the element lying behind the deep division within Chambers that runs through so many facets of the story in Witness. After all, Chambers too had committed treason. If he “heard screams”—to borrow a metaphor repeated several times in his text—they were screams for which he bore a measure of responsibility. Himself a sometimes posturing victim, Chambers also felt very deeply that his crimes were not distinct from those of the Soviet Union; and later, taking on the awful doubleness of the informer’s role, in his public witness he made Hiss and others the victims of his own confession. In this sense, neither Chambers’s faith nor his Manichean vision of a world divided between God and Communism gave him any peace or shielded him from self-laceration. On the contrary, the true meaning of faith would come to lie in the pain it caused.
So the tranquility of Chambers’s years at Time resided in the fact that the years preceding were ones of treason, while those after would be ones of vilification and private despair. The Time chapter is revealing not just for its account of his battle against Communism as a writer and editor in the national press but also for its picture of a private Whittaker Chambers—the Chambers who sought to adopt a simple Quaker life on his Maryland farm while publicly engaged in the great ideological war of the modern era. In “The Tranquil Years,” as elsewhere in Witness, Chambers identifies pastoral simplicity with honest virtue and anti-Communism. When his witness against Hiss begins, it is the “common” people, his farm neighbors, not the secular elite of the cities, who support him. Whereas before the Hiss trials the farm must often have seemed a disquieting refuge, an escape into treason by silence, it now became for Chambers both an “altar” where “to labor is to pray,” and a “witness against the world” of modernism and secular faith.
When he was called to testify in 1948, Chambers underwent extraordinary emotional turmoil. Doubtful that he would be believed, uncertain he could stand the strain of revealing the truth about himself, and equally disturbed by the moral implications of being an informer, he nevertheless felt morally obligated and he considered that it was in order to meet his fate that “the tranquil strengthening years had been granted to me.” As he writes in “Flight,” it is “practically impossible for a man who knows there is a murderer at large, quietly to cultivate his garden while ignoring the screams of the victims in the next yard.” In witnessing against Communism and against Hiss, however, Chambers also witnessed against himself, choosing deliberately to destroy a superficial public tranquility, and to betray a man whom he still considered a friend, in order to find a deeper, more lasting peace.
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In one of his last anti-Communist pieces for Time, a 1947 review of Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason entitled “Circles of Perdition,” Chambers explored an extended metaphor that would become important in Witness. Following Dante’s lead, the review describes “a descent into the circles of a drab inferno.” Treason, Chambers wrote, in its “sin against the spirit,” carries one down to a hellish circle of “absolute loneliness into which neither father, wife, child, nor friend, however compassionate, can bring the grace of absolution.”
In Witness, the use of Dante is more particular. Among other metaphors that variously describe his break from Communism as a rebirth, a recovery from illness, or a return from the dead, the most powerful, but in many ways peculiar, of Chambers’s figurative descriptions are his several allusions to Dante’s ascent out of the Inferno to behold the stars, his symbol of grace and salvation. Invoked first in the “Letter to My Children,” as a symbol of the infinite, the stars appear again in the final pages of Witness as a symbol of the faith that Chambers hopes to pass on to his son’s generation.
Chambers’s specific allusions to Dante’s ascent go even further than this. He quotes the final line of the Inferno—“And so we emerged again to see the stars”—in a footnote explaining that this was a line penned by him at the conclusion of the report of his interrogation by the FBI in 1949, and he mistakenly asserts that the words are also the last line of Marx’s Capital. He was perhaps confusedly remembering the preface to Capital, where Marx misquotes Virgil’s remark to Dante in the Purgatorio, “Follow your own course, and let people talk” (Marx, an avid reader of Dante, altered the Italian and wrote, “Follow me, and let people talk”). More likely, however, Chambers was recollecting the preface to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, the precursor to Capital, which ends with the famous line of Dante describing the entrance into hell: “Here must all fear be left behind; here let all cowardice be dead.”
For Marx, allusions to Dante are always a means of demonstrating that the wretched of the economic world are the victims of the ruling capitalist class. Marx’s Critique leads the reader into a modern inferno in order to expose its corruptions and exploitation. Chambers, by contrast, had experienced 20th-century Communism as the true inferno. His allusions, turning Marx’s use of Dante on its head, implicitly point to the next lines that record the legend inscribed above the portal to the Inferno: “Through me you enter the woeful city; through me you enter eternal grief; through me you enter among the lost.” This is what had come of Marx’s vision. By the same token, however, Chambers too remained in part psychologically lodged in hell, unpunished for his own treason despite his ascent toward grace. As his reading of Dante would have reminded him, the traitors trapped in the lowest circle of hell can find no absolution, but weep frozen tears and feed grimly upon one another.
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Some of the same doubleness of feeling animates several other important literary allusions in Witness, at least one of which is more consciously heroic. Quoting, from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, the lines that depict the biblical hero “Eyeless in Gaza, as at the mill with slaves,” Chambers dramatizes the fact that in 1936, after the birth of his son, he was on the verge of “violently [breaking] from the slaves of the Communist mill.” The passage is one of several in Witness containing allusions to Samson. Just as the blinded hero slew the Philistines by bringing down the pagan temple, thus delivering Israel from dominion, so Chambers, weakened and snared by forces pitted against his strength, hoped in his testimony to bring down the pagan temple of Communism. Both in the biblical account and more pointedly in Milton’s rendering, Samson’s story is one of secrets and betrayal, as Delilah and other “spies” attempt to discover the secret of his strength. That strength returns, by God’s grace, when Samson is called upon to perform comic entertainment at sacrifices to the Philistines’ god, Dagon; likewise, Chambers’s strength returns during his public humiliation and ridicule by the intelligentsia and the press. In Milton’s poem, the chorus speaks several times specifically of the sacramental “witness” dramatized in Samson and his “trial”—and Samson, of course, in bringing down the house of the Philistines, destroys himself, just as Chambers said he too was willing to do.
Allusions to tragic drama similarly abound in Witness, most of all to classic Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. As with Samson Agonistes, the tragic dramas on which Chambers drew tend to revolve around betrayals of national security, to depict heroes acting on behalf of populaces that in Milton’s words have grown to “love Bondage more than Liberty,” and in general to explore the ambiguous area between statesmanship and political tyranny.
Here, however, the disturbing undercurrent is often more telling than the surface meaning. For example, when Chambers quotes the famous choric lines from Antigone, “Much is there passing strange/Nothing surpassing mankind,” he not only places his narrative within the same transcendent pattern of fate spelled out by Sophocles’ chorus, but also invites the reader to recall the other actions of Antigone that are echoed in Witness. The king Creon has ordered that the body of Polynices, a rebel against the state slain by his patriotic brother Eteocles, be left on the battlefield unburied because he intended “to burn and destroy/His fatherland and the gods of his fatherland,/To drink the blood of his kin, and to make them slaves.” Antigone, Polynices’ sister, breaks the law established by Creon when she buries her brother.
Chambers and Hiss clearly parallel Eteocles and Polynices; but Chambers’s feelings of kindness and guilt toward Hiss are also echoed in Antigone’s witness of “mercy” and her claim, upheld by the vision of the prophet Tiresias, that the mercy of heaven cannot be overruled by the laws of man. Creon’s condemnation of Antigone leads to her suicide, to the suicide of her betrothed, Creon’s son Haemon, and to the suicide of Creon’s wife Eurydice, actions that may have sprung to Chambers’s mind when he recalled his own attempted suicide and his ill-conceived notion that in taking his life he could expose the Communist conspiracy but avoid the personal destruction of Alger Hiss.
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In addition to Samson Agonistes and Antigone, Chambers makes many exceptionally complex allusions to Shakespeare. The dominant references, not surprisingly, are to the histories and tragedies, especially to those concerned with treason and betrayal such as Macbeth and Richard II. The opening epigraph to Witness reproduces Horatio’s lines from Hamlet requesting the ghost of Hamlet’s father to reveal his foreknowledge of Denmark’s fate. If Chambers is clearly like Hamlet both in his melancholy and in his brooding indecision about whether and how to accomplish his revenge against Hiss’s treason, the several allusions to Macbeth give him an even more complicated character.
Once when reading Macbeth to his young son, Chambers tells us in the “Letter to My Children,” he came to the passage in which Macbeth, having murdered Duncan, gazes at his bloody hands and asks if “all great Neptune’s ocean” can wash them clean, or rather will his hands “The multitudinous seas incarnadine/Making the green one red.” As his son’s body convulses at the terrifying question, Chambers gives “great silent thanks to God” for the faith that has been returned to him and which he hopes to pass on to his son’s generation. Macbeth’s rise to kingship—first through acts of treason and equivocation by others and then by his own treacherous “murder” of the kingdom’s peace, which finally leaves him drenched in the blood of his comrades and friends—suggests the grim role assigned to those who commit treason on behalf of the Soviet Union. “I am in blood/Stepped in so far,” Macbeth concludes, “that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Making the green sea “red” is Chambers’s double pun for the crimes of his century, crimes in which all who acted on behalf of Stalin were necessarily involved.
Chambers may well have identified to a degree with Macbeth’s guilt, but his role more clearly corresponds to that of Macduff, who watches as his country “sinks beneath the yoke” of bloody tyranny and who leads the force that overthrows Macbeth. (It is conceivable that Chambers even intended us to read his own difficult birth, in which he was “taken by instruments,” as an echo of Macduff’s, “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”) Indeed, it is the colloquy on treason and perjury between Macduff’s wife and son that best explains both why Chambers felt compelled to testify and why he too felt deeply implicated in his antagonist’s guilt:
Son. Was my father a traitor, mother?
Wife. Ay, that he was!
Son. What is a traitor?
Wife. Why, one that swears, and lies.
Son. And be all traitors that do so?
Wife. Everyone that does so is a traitor and must be hanged.
Son. And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?
Wife. Every one.
Son. Who must hang them?
Wife. Why, the honest men.
Son. Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang them up.
If Macduff is a traitor, it is only to the bloody Macbeth, whose henchmen arrive immediately after this exchange to slaughter his wife and children; his final revenge against Macbeth mixes devotion to state and family. The scene thus highlights the importance of the family in Chambers’s renunciation of the Stalinist bloodbath. It is Macduff who, upon seeing the slain Duncan, calls forth the king’s sons to witness the horror, to look upon this “new Gorgon” of “murder and treason.” Likewise, Chambers writes in Witness that in the Hiss case the “sneaky mass” of the “Gorgon head of the Communist conspiracy” was placed before Congress and the public.
More than heroic revenge is revealed in the parallel between Macduff and Chambers. For in (at first) withholding the documentary evidence of Hiss’s espionage, Chambers too had been guilty of perjury, and he too had previously committed treason. This may explain the title of the final chapter of Witness, “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” echoing not Macduff but the doomed Macbeth in his most famous soliloquy. (“Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow . . . a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”) Chambers’s vision in the final pages of his life story is muted by fear for the future of the free world and sadness over his family’s suffering. His garden is “now overgrown with weeds,” and the spring weather of 1952 brings no healing to “a world grown older and colder,” a world which will soon either “have borne a more terrible witness” or “will no longer exist.” It is a conclusion in keeping with that of Antigone, or with the bleak resignation of Shakespeare’s ruined king.
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“Communism is never stronger than the failure of other faiths,” Chambers wrote. Convinced that he had chosen the side not of victory but of defeat, he watched during the 1950’s as anti-Communism briefly followed the path of wild excess and then lapsed into weakness. His central claim—that liberalism and Communism were the same—found fewer and fewer adherents, and the notion was soon anathema that belief in God had any place in political debate.
Chambers’s vision may well be too austere to be universally accepted, but it is not too much to wish that his unhappy and tragic witness be recognized for the courageous act it was, or that his autobiography be judged one of the most remarkable philosophical and literary documents of our age. Out of a terrible life, Whittaker Chambers made a troubled but deeply moving testament of faith in freedom.
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1 Witness is currently available in paperback editions from Regnery Press and the University Press of America.
2 For more on Hiss-Chambers, see Eric M. Breindel's article, “Alger Hiss: A Glimpse Behind the Mask” in last month's COMMENTARY—Ed.
3 Diana Trilling has expressed both these views in responding to an article by Hilton Kramer, “Thinking About Witness,” that appeared in the March 1988 New Criterion. Their exchange was published in the May 1988 issue of that magazine.
4 Weinstein's book remains the focal point of endless dispute, but its conclusive portrait of Hiss's guilt has never been dislodged. A convenient summary of the case can also be found in Irving Younger's “Was Alger Hiss Guilty?” COMMENTARY, August 1975.
