Chambers' Music and Alger Hiss

...He didn't go to prison on the word of Whittaker Chambers...

...These included (1) ten microfilmed pages which Hiss had handled (he initialled them) and to which Chambers' other source at State, a man named Wadleigh, would not have had access...

...6) William F. Buckley, Jr., The Jeweler's Eye, pp...

...That was "written in the Sand Hill graveyard," he tells us, "the first winter of my brother's death...

...Readers have not been wanting who detected a false, a passe, note in Chambers' rhetoric...

...the scenario after all establishes that Alger Hiss has been perjuring himself for 31 years and living a lie for at least 45...

...It is only when the lid is taken off the box that you can see the scatter of elements out of which that illusion was contrived, their wrenched perspective a tax to the perceptions, their variousness a burden to the memory, their disarray an affront to normal experience, which, whether in arranging cues into 3-D space or threading a story line through happenings, is guided by economy and by experience with the usual...

...4) Odyssey of a Friend, p. 260...

...The story was big and bylined ("By Mark Bowden, Staff Reporter...

...Making a tight prosecution case meant nailing down hundreds of such wearisome details...

...His way of signalling an irony is to leave them unresolved...

...He possibly could not have explained to himself why they were necessary...

...Why, for that matter, did he always deny having been in Russia, where he and his wife Esther went on fraudulent passports in early 1933...

...Then a student of no special prospects, Zukofsky was indeed an implausible passer-out of pamphlets...

...the parts glinting, the motor humming, the needle hopping, the pieces of material lapped and fed: no thread in the bobbin, none in the needle...

...The Sun, yes, the Baltimore Sun will wobble all round the ideological compass...

...Tracing it all out has taken Allen Wein-stein, a crisp and economical writer, some 325,000 words, including whole pages summarizing tergiversations about typewriters...

...Chambers' taste, especially in paragraph endings, was for the resolved cadence, to an extent perverse in the twentieth century...

...A polemic to study for its pacing...

...In breaking with Communism, he had defined a new role and formulated its rhythm...

...says to another of the most respectable old ladies (gentlemen): 'Really, I don't see how Alger Hiss could brazen it out that way unless he were really innocent,' Multiply Hartford by every other American community...

...I answered slowly: 'I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist.''' (Witness, p. 715...

...Was the lifelong player of roles assuming yet another role, the world-weary man become as a little child, humbly attending classes with adolescents...

...Another is to feed reporters information he can feel sure they won't check...

...203-210...

...My brother lies in the cold earth, A cold rain is overhead...

...What is vindication for him...

...2) LouisZukofsky, "A", p. 9 (written 1928...

...It is the rhythm of the sewingmachine, busily piecing and stitching...

...A sheet of ice is over his face...

...Hook remarks that "there is no arguing with symbolic allegiances...

...My brother lies in the cold earth, A sheet of ice is over his head...

...Communism is almost exclusively concerned with images (though its guns and bombs are real and go off...

...He was presumably there for top-level indoctrination...

...Would you let Peter Lorre bring down Robert Redford...

...His latest book is Joyce's Voices...

...115-16, 602...

...they nag at me not because I. sniff sinister ramifications, but because their existence makes the latter-day Chambers who's projected in Witness and in the letters to Buckley-the weary sojourner in an ultimate Siberia of the psyche, a Last Ma.n whose last luxury is bleak and utter candor-appear to be but one more fabrication, a last role in the long sequence of roles that began as early as 1919, when Jay Vivian Chambers began to use his mother Laha Whittaker's family name...

...Hiss is the American Boy, and the case against him is tainted...

...But the Hiss nemesis, as reporter Bowden never got around to considering, was Whittaker Chambers, not Nixon: the implacable testimony of Chambers, those damning documents...

...his elegy for Whittaker's brother Ricky (dead by suicide, 1926) bespeaks affection: At eventide, cool hour Your dead mouth singing, Ricky, Automobiles speed Past the cemetery, No meter turns...

...But never mind...

...He was a Time hack...

...and he had reneged on the Party too, and how could you trust him after that...

...Weinstein certifies the fluency on the word of unspecified "close friends" (p...

...Never mind that though belief in a-new-trial-by-spring was reported by the News-American in 1976, spring '77 didn't after all come up daisies, nor did spring '78 or spring '79...

...146), he memorized from a book, at his mother's urging, "two or three thousand Russian words," but remained innocent of any grammar...

...To summarize...

...That, we may speculate, was what Communist theory did for him: It shaped actualities of want and warfare into a dissonant music you could dance to...

...One was blank...

...let them once discard Adam Smith's cover story, though, and it will collapse...

...What Hiss didn't mention to Mr...

...he had been accepted on sight...

...In the long (32-inch) story Nixon is named eight times, Whittaker Chambers ("the confessed spy-ring courier") twice...

...Nixon in 1976 was merely a better blue herring even than he is now...

...Whittaker Chambers" was merely the most enduring of his aliases...

...There were two typewriters, one skillfully faked...

...Who were the "close friends," we may wonder...

...The logic is ultimately simple: It depends on connecting Alger Hiss with those documents Chambers produced...

...On July 7, 1949, a hung jury was dismissed...

...But when the true-blue unproofread News-American fixes its gaze on a convicted perjurer whom only the statute of limitations shielded from an indictment for pro-Communist espionage, and perceives him on the verge of the "best deserved last laugh in American history," then the sun in the sky, you'd be inclined to say, has taken to rising in the northwest...

...He was still shielding Hiss from the worst, and denied under oath that Hiss was guilty of espionage...

...That the Hiss of this intricate narrative should remain schematic, as contrived as an Agatha Christie least-likely-suspect, a jointed paper doll we've watched gesticulate, is unsurprising...

...Chambers (or someone) snuck into their house and used the machine, or spirited it away and used it...

...Nor {Witness, p. 306) could he follow a Russian conversation...

...Man, the symbol-using creature, makes shift to make himself at home in the world by the way he talks about it and in no other way...

...It was a long, agonizing, increasingly dangerous dance, and by 1938 the harsh music had lost all enchantment...

...They contained, among other things, State Department documents with Alger Hiss's initials, and how Whittaker Chambers could have obtained them for photographing, if not from Alger Hiss, has been a theme for much improvisation which Mr...

...In 1949, between the two Hiss trials, a newsman asked him, "What do you think you are doing...

...1) II Chambers, as everyone knows, had been a member of the Communist, underground, circa 1932-1938...

...After Nixon had his day with them before the cameras, they were never introduced as evidence during the trial...

...The cold earth holds him round...

...You know what was on them...

...III The mere evidence which compelled the second jury to believe Chambers rather than Hiss dismays by its miscellaneous-ness, its profuseness, its frequent triviality...

...IV Which being said, we may safely regret that Perjury isn't perfect...

...All evaluations, all alliances, are provisional, instrumental...

...At his question I turned to look out at the mists that were rising from the bottom below the house, filling the valley...

...and in the newsreels (remember newsreels...

...There are pages in Witness on which the word "history" occurs a dozen times...

...The clipping, admittedly, is no longer current...

...With a sharp ear for cadences you can catch overtones of the Gettysburg Address...

...Weinstein tells all this differently, saying ''occasionally he even feigned ignorance of Russian, a language in which he was fluent" (p...

...Hiss was not framed by Nixon, whose role in the case was ambiguous throughout...

...One respects people who stick by their convictions...

...Alger Hiss lives yet, to a rhythm of his own...

...Or perhaps he's an FBI stooge...

...I linger on it because it's stuck in my mind for three years, so admirably does it epitomize the skills by which Alger Hiss has contrived to gain credibility as the American Dreyfus: pilloried, railroaded to Lewisburg for 44 months, latterly toiling as a (for gosh sakes) stationery salesman- are there stationery salesmen?-while he expects vindication momentarily...

...He said furthermore that he had them, and had passed similar things to the Russians, thanks to his source at State: Alger Hiss...

...He was entrapped by numerous and carefully established and inexorable facts...

...Chambers" in the months in question at all...

...Whittaker Chambers is more interesting and more puzzling, and though his own long confessional narrative, Witness, offered to bare all as long ago as 1952, tracts of the merely factual remain pointlessly mysterious...

...They nag, though...

...This is easy because when he went to jail in 1951 today's most vigorous reporters were unborn or toddling...

...Alger and Priscilla had parted with the Woodstock before the State papers were copied (and when was that...

...Whittaker Chambers understood why...

...Chambers, though, pudgy, in slacks and open-necked shirt, was a different proposition...

...It had a socko one-sentence lead: "Alger Hiss may be on the verge of the longest awaited, best deserved last laugh in American history.'' It went on: "His brilliant diplomatic and legal career was ruined more than 25 years ago with perjury convictions and a cloud of cloak and dagger communism...

...When the "pumpkin papers" burst upon the scene he was a safe distance away, in Panama, just in case there was a backfire...

...O'Brien leaped too fast, and William Buckley roasted him on a slow spit: There are indeed nine forms of the noun Tsargrad...

...A new trial is not the point...

...Chambers' credibility, by 1948, had little going for it...

...116...

...Making it cohere was the prosecuting attorneys' job, and in Perjury Allen Wein-stein achieves an even more conclusive coherence, chiefly because he's dug up so much more that we need no longer suspect a controlled selection...

...Was he minimizing Esther's complicity in his secret life...

...At about 16, he tells us in Witness (p...

...If in the open Party, he is impersonating one of the prescribed ways of being a Communist: a theoretician, a strike-leader, a marcher, a Friend of the Soviet Union, a shrewd son of toil...

...3) There are only two ways to discount Weinstein...

...They weren't evidence of anything...

...Conducting a defense meant making the details difficult to establish (it was all ten years ago), meanwhile developing a motive for a monstrous trouble-making Chambers...

...6) Still, O'Brien in his shallowness was on to something: Chambers' need to resolve his cadences, in a prose propelled less by the wish to impart information than by the need to give it shape...

...there was a Hitler-Stalin pact before the Hitler-Stalin war...

...Mark Bowden, Staff Reporter, questioned nothing that Alger told him...

...At age 58, the Hiss case long behind him, he enrolled in the University of Western Maryland College ("I do not wish to die an ignoramus" [4]) in part to study elementary Russian...

...The microfilm made Americans think I was a spy, and, I think, ultimately influenced the grand jury and the trial jury.'" Yes, yes, there was a lights truck microfilm roll...

...A rhythm surrendered to is a self-definition...

...At age 31 {Witness, pp...

...For which bless him...

...Conor Cruise O'Brien observed Chambers writing in Cold Friday that the depth of the special Russian feeling for Byzantium was "perhaps suggested by the fact that Tsargrad alone, among the names of foreign cities, is declined through all nine of the inflections of the Russian noun...

...It didn't matter what was on them...

...He was certainly not framed by the FBI, whose director, every time we catch him dictating a memo, sounds like a Commissioner of the Keystone Kops (when he first heard that Weinstein was interested in the case-in 1969- his immediate response was to open a file on Weinstein...

...He was sentenced to five years and served 44 months...

...3) Sidney Hook, "The Case of Alger Hiss," Encounter, August 1978, p. 55...

...moreover, the most efficacious stratum of language, the one that effects the orienting adjustments between his experience and his sense of himself, is not semantic but rhythmic...

...Having read Perjury through twice I can see no reason to dissent from Sidney Hook's verdict, that thanks to Weinstein's expert labors the guilt of Alger Hiss "can no longer be contested on any reasonable grounds...

...There were facts, presumably, such as knowledge of Russian, which the rhythm would not accommodate...

...we've had in this case and others enough psychohistory, something normally confected out of an Identi-Kit on the model of Freud's analysis of Moses...

...It was that kind of case...

...If in the underground, he is impersonating a lawyer, a newspaperman, a screenwriter, an English professor-trades in which he is fully credentialled...

...No, the readers of the News-American were allowed to suppose that brilliant Baltimorean Hiss was framed by squalid non-Baltimorean Nixon (Boo...

...By rhythm and repetition, in sentences of mounting complexity, he exorcised all his adult life what he calls rather often History...

...Microfilm is spooky...

...So what else is new...

...Just think of all the people Nixon ruined,'" Alger Hiss exhorts, and Bowden dutifully paraphrases: "He believes Nixon prejudiced the nation against him 'for purely opportunistic reasons.' " Very possibly...

...For in that disorienting decade, 1925-1935, when everybody on the hard Left seemed to go by a false name-Chambers at various times was "Bob," "Charles Adams," "David Breen," "Lloyd Cant-well," "Arthur Dwyer," "Hugh Jones," "Karl," John Kelly," "Harold Phillips," "Charles Whittaker," perhaps "George Crosley"-in that time of roles and show trials, the very mainspring of Party activity was the proposition that things are never as they seem...

...The principle at work here is mysterious but demonstrable...

...Today the native Baltimorean believes he will win a new trial by spring...

...By rhythm and repetition, a 25-year-old is exorcising a corpse he nearly feels is alive...

...so naturally "they were never introduced as evidence during the trial...

...This is quaint, because Chambers' only substantiated perjury occurred early in the case...

...For the CP, that is victory And all that Alger has to do for this victory is to persist in his denials...

...If so, why on earth...

...On December 15, 1948, a grand jury indicted Alger Hiss on two counts of perjury: having spoken falsely, first in denying that he had passed those papers to Chambers in February-March 1938, second in denying that he "did in fact see and converse with the said Mr...

...5) Epigraph to Chapter 2 of Witness (p...

...Another nine weeks, and Chambers had produced typed copies of papers, and microfilms of more papers, purloined from the State Department late in the 1930s...

...we may even say that he is what he impersonates, that the Communism with which he burns is the off-hours role...

...It sounds like spy stuff, with cameras stuck in belt buckles and watches...

...And Zukofsky enjoyed telling how Chambers (about 1926...

...The others were films of pages inside a common U.S...

...Postcards in their handwriting with Moscow cancellations survive {Perjury, pp...

...602) of the present whereabouts of "the introductory Russian primer used by Chambers to learn the language early in the 1930s...

...The Communist Party too had its concern for images...

...The late Louis Zukofsky, as sharp a skeptical intelligence as I've known, was a Chambers classmate...

...The other is to pick nits in the manner of the Nation, hoping simple folk will conclude that Weinstein falsified, elided, tampered, or that for all his digging he didn't dig deep enough...

...1) Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers' Letters to William F. Buckley Jr., 1954-1961, pp...

...The Capitalist System survives because people believe the official theory of its workings...

...This was new: As you'd guess from its native-son angle, the story appeared, yes, in a Baltimore paper: but not in the Baltimore paper that comes to mind...

...That, if I gauge him aright, was central: a rhythm: one that could accommodate his shorter themes, overarch his longer ones, and permit what he cherished, the harmonization of his mishaps and History...

...As it regularly does, when the press and Alger Hiss are in critical proximity...

...So if Chambers was a perjurer that day, Hiss was a spy...

...5) The second quatrain would be doggerel had it not the first to modulate away from...

...All nine of the inflections of the Russian noun' gives just the reverberation Chambers needed at this point in his boomy incantation...

...Was he perhaps going through the motions of opsimathic study to establish (contrary to fact) that in his Party days he'd been ignorant of Communism's mother tongue...

...He doesn't mention the 1959 classes in Maryland...

...Fifty-five days later Alger Hiss sued for slander...

...But the microfilms worked against me...

...This is bottomless...

...Ma Bloor's son Harold Ware organized the Washington underground in which Chambers was to meet Alger Hiss, and for Hiss, who by Chambers' account went direct to the underground without passing through the open Party, pressed pants and fedora were no disqualification at all: in fact indispensable cover, They still help render implausible the suggestion that he was ever anything as scruffy as a spy: perhaps, at most, a member of a left-wing Study Group...

...Take the question of the Russian language...

...Though Weinstein is aware of these and other contradictions, he does nothing with them beyond noting their existence...

...2) typed copies of State Department messages, to the extent of 65 pages, the typing of which matched the output of a Woodstock, serial #N2 30099, which the Hisses had owned and used in the 1930s...

...Bowden was the existence of two more strips of microfilm that did get introduced at the trial...

...87-88...

...And the Hiss-Chambers case resembles an Ames Box, carefully arranged so that if you look through the peephole you see normal things-a parlor, a Ford car, a typewriter, the bourgeois bric-a-brac of a Washington lawyer in the 1930s, and two dolls, one decent, upright, one shifty, vengeful...

...Those microfilms didn't amount to anything,' he explained...

...301-2) he was still, he says, incapable of reading anything in secret Russian messages save the salutation, Dorogoi droog- Dear Friend...

...And there were two rolls of Navy documents, some of them unclassified (but not from "a common manual"), in which no one ever claimed Alger Hiss had a hand...

...Sleep, With an open gas range Beneath for a pillow...

...Before that he had been by his own admission a CP functionary: not a gallant Communist either, like an English poet, nor a tart screw-you Communist like you know, whatshername, nor even a devoted faceless spearcarrier, but the wrong sort of Communist, with a taste for theatrics, pseudonymns, History, microfilms even...

...Its gestures mime his sense of how the world goes, how he goes...

...O'Brien leaped: The Russian noun has only six inflections, and the mistake was revealing...

...To the all-important meeting Zukofsky went, tie in place and by custom trousers neatly creased, and Ma Bloor herself rejected him because he looked insuperably bourgeois ("And my father pressed pants all his life...

...My brother has no more The cold rain to face...

...Alger Hiss," he wrote to William F. Buckley, Jr., late in 1954, "is one of the greatest assets that the Communist Party could possess...

...2) It's a cool transcension of the many turgid poems Chambers wrote on the same theme...

...602), and even informs us (p...

...Alger Hiss was a graduate of Johns Hopkins ('26) and of Harvard Law ('29), moreover had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whereas Chambers dropped out of Columbia and had bad teeth: not matters for the ladies (gentlemen) of Hartford to overlook...

...It is the moment when one of the most respectable old ladies (gentlemen) in Hartford (Conn...

...Hence, in the edifice of written words Chambers constructed so carefully, those odd little blurs and lapses...

...Amid public realities which according to his creed are wholly unreal, the Communist is always on stage...

...recruited him for the Party...

...For "the pressure to distort is a rhetorical pressure...

...years on public library shelves...

...Yet the pages of Witness which conduct us so circumstantially through the preparation of a secret agent are silent on this trip, and on p. 352 Chambers even remarks flatly, "I have never been in Russia.'' Why...

...He had squirreled them away, he said, while planning his dangerous break with the Party...

...To an ignoramus you could sound fluent in French if you merely said rapidly, "Avec la plume de ma tante, le chat etait assis sur la natte.') More: Since Weinstein has read (and cites) Odyssey of a Friend, what does he make of its disclosure of those Russian classes at a rural Maryland college, two years before Chambers' death...

...A crack "Staff Reporter," which means he writes down what people say to him, Mr...

...It ran on page one of the October 25, 1976 Baltimore News-American: the Hearst paper...

...Sometimes you will hear that he was framed by Chambers, "a self-confessed perjurer...

...It was easier still before April 1978, since when whoever wants to can check out the facts in a single heavily-documented book, Allen Weinstein's Perjury...

...The point is the gullibility of the world's Mark Bowdens, who get the word to some 200,000 readers per story that Alger Hiss was Framed...

...Allen Weinstein is not Dostoyevsky, and when his narrative is over we may feel that we know everything except who the protagonists were...

...yes, even when the arsenic of their convictions is destined for your soup...

...Navy manual that had been available for Hugh Kenner is Andrew W. Mellon Pro fessor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University...

...nor will, we may safely predict, spring '80 or '81 or '82 (by which time Alger Hiss will be an octogenarian...

...he had little shifty eyes...

...They don't affect the substance of his testimony...

...History hit us with a freight train," is a phrase from his last letter to Buckley...

...But life is not always linear, and if you're encumbered by few enough facts it's easy to doodle alternative topologies...

...Was Chambers really never good at Russian at all, though he picked up other languages easily...

...One of his techniques is to keep a heavy thumb on the Nixon button...

...rather, what were their standards of fluency...

...One is to decline to read him, for fear of having a symbolic allegiance disturbed...

...Bowden in the best traditions of the free press wrote down what Mr...

...He keeps denying everything, doesn't he...

...So prima faciet the most probable link between State and Chambers is Hiss...

...Hiss told him, and was not even made wary when Hiss flaunted his expertise at playing jour nalists-"If you want a good topical angle for a story you might be interested in know ing " That gambit should have set off inner alarms but didn't...

...If there's a real Alger Hiss down under that cope of fanatical self-discipline, it's safe to guess that the Alger Hiss who files briefs and grants interviews lost touch with him long ago...

...To turn terrible actualities into music was an insistent pressure, an hourly need...

...it is related to the fact that every poet's rhythm excludes certain images...

...So ran the bare scenario, and to cinema-guided tastes it has everything wrong with it...

...Everyone's habits with language have a characterizing cadence, what we recognize when we recognize a "style...

...On January 21, 1950, a second jury found Alger Hiss guilty on both counts...

...Bowden was kindly spared...

...On August 3, 1948, he let it be known that Alger Hiss, previously a State Department luminary and by then President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had been one also...

...His researches show, by the way, what was never evident from the public record, that while the FBI and defense gumshoes were both hunting the Woodstock, Alger Hiss and his brother Donald knew where it was and lied persistently...