PARTISAN REVIEW
real.
In
the biographical chapters, too, the story is sometimes given a
Dostoevskyean twist. Consider the following brief passage in which,
while recalling
his
student days at Columbia, Chambers portrays him–
self for all the world as if he were writing not about a boy from Long
Island but a blood brother of Shatov or Raskolnikov, brooding in the
Russian cold about the ultimate problems of existence. "One day, early
in 1925, I sat down on a concrete bench on the Columbia campus, fac–
ing a little Greek shrine and the statue of myoid political hero,
Alexander Hamilton. The sun was shining, but it was chilly, and I sat
huddled in my overcoat. I was there to answer once for all two questions:
Can a man go on living in a world that is dying?
If
he can, what
should he do in the crisis of the twentieth century?" The "huddled in my
overcoat" is a good touch; but the peremptory "to answer
once for all
two questions" (and what questions!) is really priceless. Here, histrionics
aside, it is not only the inflection of the narrative line which reminds
us of the author of
Grime and Punishment;
even more suggestive is the
thoroughly
ideologized
conceptions of life it reveals. Essentially it is
the idea that in order to live at all one must first ascertain the answer
to the ultimate questions-an idea so utterly unpragmatic that one is
almost tempted to call it "unAmerican."
However, in spite of Chambers' wonderful aptitude for turning
ideas into dramatic motives, in its lack of humor and irony his book
is anything but Dostoevskyean. His seriousness is of that portentous kind
which in a novelist we would at once recognize as a failure of sensibility.
For Chambers eliminates from his account anything that might con–
ceivably be taken as ambiguous or incongruous in his own motives and
convictions, and this permits him to bear down all the more heavily on
those of his opponents. No sense of humor or irony can survive that sort
of attack. He is a splendid satirist; the mordant phrase, manipulated
with ease and perfect timing, is ever at his disposal; but of that true
irony, which implicates the person writing no less than other people, the
subject as well as the object, there is not a trace in his pages. This
deficiency makes it hard for him both to modulate his ideas and to
relate himself to them without pomposity and self-conceit. Perhaps that
will explain the occasional lapses in taste and the tone of heroic self–
dramatization which is sometimes indistinguishable from sheer bathos,
as when he writes that at issue in the Hiss case was "the question
whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in
its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he
would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, in–
cluding life, to defend it."
