WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
475
And his prose is open to criticism on related grounds. He is a born
writer, greatly accomplished in a technical sense. Yet his prose, for all
its unusual merit, is not very adaptable to confessional writing. Tightly
organized and controlled, even streamlined, though in the best sense of
that much-abused word, it is hardly an appropriate medium for the ex–
pression of intimate personal truth or the exploration of inner life. It
shuns the spontaneous and repels subjectivity.
The fact is that when we are through reading this enormously
long book, with its masses of detail, we are still left with very little
knowledge of the author as a person. We have been instructed in his
politics and in his philosophy; we have learned much about his child–
hood years, so fearfully depressing and ill-making; and we have learned
to know him in his successive adult roles-Communist Party member,
Soviet agent, editor of
Time,
Maryland farmer, convert, and witness.
None the less he remains shielded from us to the very end, encased in
his "character-armor." We communicate almost exclusively with the
externalized Chambers, a man apparently bent on transforming his
life into a public destiny, incapable of projecting himself on any level
but that of objectified meaning, and possessed by a lust for the Absolute
(the ultimate and unqualified pledge of objective Being). He is certain
of its existence; and he finds it-invariably. First History, now God.
For he repented of his unbelief even before he openly emerged from
the Communist underground, thus insuring himself of uninterrupted
contact with the Absolute.
One wishes that Chambers had absorbed less of Dostoevsky's po–
litical ideology-a sphere in which he is assuredly a false guide-and
had instead absorbed more of his insight into unconscious motivation
and the cunning maneuvers of the battered ego in reaching out for self–
esteem, pleasure, and power. He might then not be quite so intent on
dissolving the concrete existence of men in their specific conditions of life
into the abstractions of the impersonal Idea, whether in its idealist or
materialist version. (The difference between the two versions is not
half so great as the devotees of metaphysics imagine.) Nor would he
take it for granted, as he now does, that behavior can be directly deduced
from ideology, thus overlooking the fact that the relation between
them is frequently not only indirect but devious and thoroughly dis–
torted.
But to Chambers the Idea is everything; men nothing. The
role of personality in history
is
abolished. For instance, he absolves
Stalin of responsibility for any and all of the evils of Communism,
and even goes so far as to characterize him as a "revolutionary states-
