CORRESPONDENCE
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
SIRS:
Mr. Fraser finds so many of
Diana Trilling's judgments "shock–
ing" in his review of her
Claremont
Essays
(PR, Winter 1965), judg–
ments which left me unshocked
even when I did not altogether
share them, that I began
to
wonder
about the decline of my moral
sensibility. But then he himself goes
on to say such extraordinary things
that they left me wondering about
his.
In referring to Diana Trilling's
essay on the Hiss Case, whose point
he misses (it does
not
re-try the is–
sues but evaluates the reaction of
ritualistic liberals to them), Mr.
Fraser writes that he was struck
by the fact:
that she did not consider what
485
seems to me the most interesting
possibility, that Hiss really was
a fellow-traveler, and t hat
Chambers knew it and (a new
fanaticism being just as un–
scrupulous as an old one) had
no hesitation in framing him.
Now this possibility is so far from
being interesting that it is positively
banal. Far more interesting pos–
sibilities were bruited about before
the trials, for example, that Cham–
bers was still secretly a member of
the Communist Party under orders
to denounce Hiss in order to dis–
credit the New Deal, that
his
ac–
cusations were the revenge of a
cast-off homosexual (he had taken
up wrestling as a Columbia stu–
dent!), etc.
Now the striking thing about the
sentence I quoted from Mr. Fraser
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