Philip Rahv
THE SENSE AND NONSENSE OF
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
What chiefly caught my interest when I first encountered
Whittaker Chambers, back in the early thirties not long before the
"underground" claimed him, was something in his talk and manner,
a vibration, an accent, that I can only describe as Dostoevskyean in es–
sence. I thought at the time that he was far from unconscious of the
effect he produced. He had the air of a man who took more pleasure in
the stylized than in the natural qualities of his personality. Still,
whether aware or not, it was distinctly the Dostoevskyean note that he
struck-that peculiar note of personal intensity and spiritual truculence,
of commitment to the "Idea" so absolute as to suggest that life had no
meaning apart from it, all oddly combined with a flair for mystification
and melodrama. That early impression, since confirmed by other peo–
ple, is now re-affirmed in his book.
Witness
1
is in the main a fully convincing account of the role its
author played in the Hiss case. It is also a heady mixture of auto–
biography, politics, and apocalyptic prophecy; and it contains a good
many of the characteristic elements of a production
a
la Dostoevsky,
above all the atmosphere of scandal and monstrous imputation, the
furtive meetings and the secret agents, the spies, informers, and police–
men, desperate collisions, extreme ideas, suffering, pity, and remorse,
the entire action moving inexorably toward the typical
,denouement
of a
judicial trial, in the course of which heroes and victims alike are ex–
posed as living prey to the crowds and all the secrets come tumbling
out.
The influence of the Russian novelist is literally everywhere in the
book, in the action as in the moral import, in the plot no less than
in the ideology. And Chambers goes in for ideology without stint or
limit. Even his Maryland farm, of which he writes at great length,
is at once a real place and a piece of ideology pure and simple. And
the ideology is fashioned in accordance with the precepts of the Rus–
sian master, from whom he borrows some of his key terms and char–
acteristic turns of thought. Thus Chambers seems to have appropriated,
1. Random House. $5.00.
