Sunday, September 18
Witness, part two
My next Catholic Register column, a continuation of last month's.
***
Last month, I promised to tell you why you should read an old 800-page autobiography called Witness
. I don't usually write two-part columns, but it wasn't easy to make my case in the usual 700 worlds.
To recap: Witness by Whittaker Chambers was published in 1952. It recounts his seedy, sordid childhood, his work in a Soviet-run "apparatus" conducting espionage in the US, and his break with the Communists after his conversion to Christianity.
Chambers' painful private journey became extremely public in 1948. He had once been a Communist spy, he confessed to authorities, and so had one Alger Hiss. The patrician, impeccably groomed and well-spoken Hiss was a high ranking State Department official who'd been instrumental in the founding of the UN. His accuser -- short, fat, dour and nowhere near as successful or well connected -- aroused visceral contempt. Polish emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz noted ruefully that Chambers, once a TIME magazine editor, had suddenly been "excluded from the circle of people worthy of having their hands shaken."
The "best people" slandered Chambers and staked their reputations on Hiss's innocence.
All the "best people" were wrong.
Hiss was a traitor He and his wife had typed up copies of purloined State Department documents and handed them to Chambers, who in turn passed them to their Soviet handlers. Despite mounting evidence, and the outrageous statements he made in his defense -- "To the day I die I shall wonder how this man managed to break into my home and use my typewriter" -- Hiss loyalists stood their ground. The man was a symbol of their own enlightened, liberal, sophisticated worldview.
If Hiss was a criminal, then...
Even those who love Witness admit it can be tough going. No less a personage than Darkness at Noon author Arthur Koestler wrote, in a fan letter to Chambers, "There are trends of thought in Witness, both explicit and implicit, which I am unable to follow." He added, "it is a great book in the old, simple sense of greatness. (...) There are books which, if they had remained unwritten, would leave a hole in the world."
Witness, Koestler believed, was one such.
Yes, much of the book is obtuse. Chambers was still protecting some individuals and concealing some facts, like his youthful experiments with homosexuality. He left out his disillusionment with his once beloved Quakers; avid Hiss supporters, they cruelly shunned their fellow Friend during his trials. And his "old fashioned", oddly Russian prose style (Chambers loved Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for obvious reasons) demands one's undivided attention.
And yet, this book rewards the patient:
A civilization that could produce a book like Witness is one worth fighting for. Chambers' masterpiece teaches us not just why we should fight, but how one man fought: as a lonely, despised herald to the painful truth that eventually set millions free.
UPDATE: Hmmm. Thanks to Walker for the link.
***
Last month, I promised to tell you why you should read an old 800-page autobiography called Witness
. I don't usually write two-part columns, but it wasn't easy to make my case in the usual 700 worlds.To recap: Witness by Whittaker Chambers was published in 1952. It recounts his seedy, sordid childhood, his work in a Soviet-run "apparatus" conducting espionage in the US, and his break with the Communists after his conversion to Christianity.
Chambers' painful private journey became extremely public in 1948. He had once been a Communist spy, he confessed to authorities, and so had one Alger Hiss. The patrician, impeccably groomed and well-spoken Hiss was a high ranking State Department official who'd been instrumental in the founding of the UN. His accuser -- short, fat, dour and nowhere near as successful or well connected -- aroused visceral contempt. Polish emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz noted ruefully that Chambers, once a TIME magazine editor, had suddenly been "excluded from the circle of people worthy of having their hands shaken."
The "best people" slandered Chambers and staked their reputations on Hiss's innocence.
All the "best people" were wrong.
Hiss was a traitor
He and his wife had typed up copies of purloined State Department documents and handed them to Chambers, who in turn passed them to their Soviet handlers. Despite mounting evidence, and the outrageous statements he made in his defense -- "To the day I die I shall wonder how this man managed to break into my home and use my typewriter" -- Hiss loyalists stood their ground. The man was a symbol of their own enlightened, liberal, sophisticated worldview. If Hiss was a criminal, then...
Even those who love Witness admit it can be tough going. No less a personage than Darkness at Noon
author Arthur Koestler wrote, in a fan letter to Chambers, "There are trends of thought in Witness, both explicit and implicit, which I am unable to follow." He added, "it is a great book in the old, simple sense of greatness. (...) There are books which, if they had remained unwritten, would leave a hole in the world." Witness, Koestler believed, was one such.
Yes, much of the book is obtuse. Chambers was still protecting some individuals and concealing some facts, like his youthful experiments with homosexuality. He left out his disillusionment with his once beloved Quakers; avid Hiss supporters, they cruelly shunned their fellow Friend during his trials. And his "old fashioned", oddly Russian prose style (Chambers loved Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for obvious reasons) demands one's undivided attention.
And yet, this book rewards the patient:
"...I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I like to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear -- those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: 'No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.' The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead."Today, some of us battle the same enemy Chambers did, just with a different name. Others among us insist, as they did then, that docility and appeasement are the answer -- on our part, naturally, since the real enemy is "us". Despite the book's apocalyptic tone, Witness does not depress, because we have Chambers at an advantage: we know how the story ended, decades after the author's death -- with the fall of a wall "experts" believed, right up to the moment the first sledgehammer struck, would never crumble.
A civilization that could produce a book like Witness is one worth fighting for. Chambers' masterpiece teaches us not just why we should fight, but how one man fought: as a lonely, despised herald to the painful truth that eventually set millions free.
UPDATE: Hmmm. Thanks to Walker for the link.
