Notes From the Underground

...The American Spectator • November 1997 Notes From the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers—Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960...

...After Hiss's conviction, Chambers had little taste for combat of any kind...

...In return, Chambers dispenses a wisdom that de Toledano seems almost worshipfully eager to hear...

...If I didn't, it was simply because that was what I thought when I read your letter...

...It was Pope—not the USSR...

...According to de Toledano, he feared a reopening of the Hiss case by any Democratic administration elected in 1960...

...I do not want to come, though its editorial method, by liquidate them...

...awfully arrhythmic reading...

...A sonorous morbidity dominates was better armed and organized (the feckboth sides of the exchange, each man out- lessness of the intellectual right is a fredoing the other with fortissimo chords...

...Consider this remark of Columbia University's Allan This comes from Chambers in rural Nevins, quoted by de Toledano to Cham- Maryland, but it sounds like Solzhenitsyn, bers: "'Really?' Nevins said, seeming sur- twenty-two years later, in Harvard Yard...

...Technology was socializing the Wordsworth, as Chambers thinks—who West, and its capitalists were killing souls "lisped in numbers...

...The Soviet empire's demise, his owever nourishing it may be to correspondent now argues, "did not H correspondents, mutual admira- demonstrate the strength of the West but lion is not, for a latter-day reader, a viral infection which the sapping of the the basis for a very satisfying volume of let- world's immune system could not fight...

...No one has better explained the continuing support for Hiss, even after his perjury conviction, than Chambers did to de Toledano on January 2,1956: "The people who still believe Alger innocent are (with the usual passel of exceptions) the people for whom he can never be guilty...

...when he and Nora just from a sense that the West was unconattempt to prepare a British edition of Wit- sciously committing suicide ("it keeps ness they feel as if they're "cuffing living defeating itself"), or that the opposition flesh...

...In June 1952 he writes of passing "hours of bitterness which can only be called crippling...

...it was the last angel he would see, Hiss Nixon and Joe McCarthy are the two hung around up here for what seemed Cold Warriors about whom the letter-writlike forever, outlasting Whitman and, in ers principally wonder and worry...

...In fact, if he had lived to accept the honor from Ronald Reagan's hand, it is doubtful he would have felt much triumph...

...The mills of God had done their slow grinding...

...After Chambers left the Communist Party, they still had more in common than not...

...The spiritual despair in this volume of letters amounts, finally, to another sort of antianti-Communism, and as we say these days, I won't go there...

...The man whom FBI agents called "Uncle Whit" relies on de Toledano and his wife, Nora, for practical assistance with the foreign editions, dramatic adaptations and lawsuits growing out of Witness, as well as, before and after Chambers's death, considerable help to his son...

...correspondence," but the letters' stento- They, their minds, their notions, and ways of life, fill me with nothing so much rian quality makes one feel that he and f o k ac b e th in i ea id this d a h Chambers b am Ch as an irrepressible desire to keep as far away from anything like that as possible...

...Quite the contrary...

...In this new volume of Chambers's correspondence with his fervent supporter Ralph de Toledano, experts on the Hiss case will find little fresh detail—nothing really new about the Woodstock typewriter and the prothonotary warbler—but they will be afforded some stunning, if occasionally overwrought, statements about the meaning of it all...

...They seem to me the death of the extended interpolations, makes for some mind and the spirit...

...and consciousness and strain...

...Prone to second-guess his own letters, and destroy them before they can make it into the mail, Chambers writes to few others ("The bile is better kept within"), and is, with de Toledano, tripped up by the unconscious telepathy that runs between sympathetic letter-writers: "I can't remember whether I wrote to say, of course come when you can get away...

...When I was alone, you walked beside me," writes Chambers...

...Not because the facts do not prove him guilty...

...De Toledano makes plain that, for everything that's happened since 1989, Chambers would see no reason to retract his famously pessimistic declaration, in Witness, about having left the winning for the losing side...

...The volme not with envy, but with abhorrence ume's long-delayed appearance is wel- tempered by compassion...

...De Toledano never elaborates on how that could have happened...

...Less of a firebreather than his younger correspondent (who refers to "Dwight David Kerensky"), Chambers adopted a number of middle-of-the-road positions, and declared that "McCarthy's notion of tactics is to break the rules, saturate the enemy with poison gas, and then charge through the contaminated area, shouting Comanche war cries...

...Why even old [Professor James] In his foreword, de Toledano writes of Shotwell [one of the aged stalwarts on the how "all that once gave America dignity Columbia faculty who had defended Hiss and meaning has fallen hiccuping at the in the early days of the controversy] admits foot of a toppling cross...

...He preferred to remain on his Maryland farm, nursing his deep glooms and "almost incurable wound...

...just as surely as the commissars: Only in the late 1950's does de Toledano seem to have raised the possi- I, for one, have never envied a capitalist bility of one day publishing "our noble in my life...

...The truth may eventually have given Chambers his Medal of Freedom (in 1984, no less), but it never set him free...

...THOMAS MALLON'S most recent book is the novel Dewey Defeats Truman (Pantheon...

...themselves—a secular materialism more Their literary range is rich—the two talk of akin to than different from the CommuRilke, Shakespeare, and Cervantes—but nists' own...

...72which the book's dual protagonists, as well as the United States, simply cannot win...

...No doubt knowing because both are justified...

...There is no doubting the strength of the bond between the two men...

...I have only to run upstairs to use it...

...This cry is uttered at an especially hard time, during the predictably skewed reviews of Witness, but it's not terribly different from much of what's spoken before and after it...

...Reserving suicide as an option, he considers the peculiar weapon he carries inside his body, a heart so damaged by disease that any over-exertion would kill him: "God has given me one out of infinite mercy...

...Except for an embarrassing filial farewell in the New Yorker, the overall response to Hiss's death, as to Sam Tanenhaus's recent biography of Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961), was remarkably free of liberal self-delusion...

...For all my admiration of Chambers, I retain a very different sense of who buried whom...

...It was this country that finally decided the Cold War was worth winning, and winnable—and then won it...

...It is a function of Double Think...

...Politically marginalized at Newsweek, the younger man listens to Chambers's pleas to hang on there, such as this one offered shortly after the Republicans recaptured the White House in 1953: "These jobs on the established journals...offer the best base from which the Right may utilize the changed climate to infiltrate and practice a little cell fission...

...While they last, and they come unexpectedly and last for long times, half a day, a whole day, I am unfit for any good use...

...Both were creatures of faith, their "case" involving, as Chambers puts it, "a mystery in the religious sense...

...It is in my left side...

...04...

...The loud, bumptious nation I live in spent two centuries brawling its way to the Pacific and the Patent Office and the moon, and when it did manage to go to church on Sunday, it never stopped looking at its watch...

...Well, he'll get Hiss is guilty.'" no argument from me about the cheesiBeyond this clumsiness, the real mat- ness of our culture, but when exactly did ter with which a reader must struggle—in this "once-great country which had broconsiderable fascination—is the way in ken its compact with God and with itself, November 1997 • The American Spectator Reserving suicide as an option, he considers the peculiar weapon he carries inside his body...

...prised...

...It is not moral equivalence (some faiths are true and some new anthology of obituaries from aren't), but, up to a point, a temperathe New York Times notes that mental one, a sharing of "the humility Alger Hiss, after agreeing to be which...compels one man to go to prison interviewed by the paper's Alden Whit- or where have you, forever denying, and man, remarked: "I have just been visited enjoins the other to die, if that is necessary, by the angel of death...

...and sold its soul for a mess of pottage" exist...

...But because Guilt is Innocence...

...I woke at dawn the Still Darkness at Noon And Alger is often Alger, not Hiss, in Chambers's letters, for an even more fundamental reason than the men's having, pace Hiss, once known each other...

...Alger is Innocent because he is Guilty...

...ters...

...I want to get away from which footnotes are avoided through them...

...Immediately after telling de Toledano of an "effort to spare you the darker moods of the last few months," he asks him: "Do you think I care whether I get out of this bed again or not...

...Edited by Ralph de Toledano Regnery / 342 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Thomas Mallon 71 other morning, and, half asleep, felt a sense of pain and distress, and slowly realized, as I wakened more, that it's because I was sorry that another day had come and that I must live through it...

...I cannot substitute his tragic countenance for the jut of Goldwater's jaw, or the goofy grace of Reagan's smile...

...De Toledano never quite loses an Chambers's defeatism stemmed not acolyte's reverence...

...De the end, receiving an obituary that read Toledano, author of Seeds of Treason, quite a bit closer to the nasty truth than would come to feel that Nixon let down would have been the case even a decade McCarthy (and eventually de Toledano before...

...They fill their minds from the beginning...

...In quent theme), but that the real enemy this tremendous room," writes de Toledano, within was within the anti-Communists "even a whisper has the sound of doom...

...Chambers saw, in 1956, a grow-even on this ground there are signs of self- ing resemblance between the U.S...

...And when I was without a roof, you sheltered me...