162
PARTISAN Il...EVIEW
Spy
Gan1e
W HITTAKER CHAMBERS.
By
Sam Tan enhaus.
R.
.lndom House.
$33.()O.
Sam Tanenhaus has written what is likely to be the definitive biogra–
phy
or
Whittaker Chambers. Here are the f:lctS, all the flcts and nothing
but the racts. It is a solid achievement. Yet in spitt' of the knowledge now
available about him, or maybe on accoullt of it,
Ch~lIllbers
remains elu–
sive. He was a most pecu liar character, sonlehow dl't.\ched rrom other
people and his surroundings, a rugitive fi'olll sonle doubtful country, anti–
Ruritania, without passports or.1 tlag. Everything was ag,linst him and yet
his tragedy was also of his own devising. Perhaps only Shakespeare could
have risen
to
the complexity of it.
" I am an outcast," Chambers was to write in I
Villll'SS,
h is own sad but
powerrul memoir. "My f:1I1lily is outcast. We have no tl'iends, no social
ties, no church, no organisation that we claim and th,lt claims us, no com–
munity." It was true. In his own (lIllily he experienced madness and
poverty, the uncertain sexuality or his Lither and the wilting artistic pre–
tensions of his mother. Hi\ p,lrL'Ilt\' hou\e was li tl'r:l ll y (1 lling
to
bits in a
perrect symbol ror middle-class people sliding off the social scale.
Seemingly a lI1an born without hope, his brother cOlll lllitted suicide at
the age of twenty-two. Chambers put the whole blame on American soci–
ety, summarily declaring
th~lt
he was at war with it .
Tanenhaus sees Chambers as the author and sole ,Ictor of an endless
series of plays, each one a
st~lging
of himself' f()r purposes or escape and
recovery. He ran away from hOIl1t' and took a laboring job, wellt to
Columbia University only
to
drop out, launched illto prose and verse,
stole library books, was a I\'l'publican supporting Calvin Coolidge, and,
like his o\Vn rather, had lovers or both sexes . ThL' process or cause and
efTect brought him slap up against his own limitations, whereupon he
recast himsl' lr with great invention into another pl.ly, ,mother ra ise start,
romantic and inconsequellt. Contemporaries of the ca liber of Lionel
Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow and Mark Van I)oren nonethe–
less had no doubt that he was building on real gifts rat her than scattering
himselr to the wind.
Chambers joined the
C:ommuni~t
Party in
1
()15,
~cripting
a part for
himself with a timetable, ,I comillunit)' and COlllmittllll'nt. As a system or
values and as a pattern or behavior, C:ommunisnl h,ld little poillt of entry
into American society; it wa,
,111
,Jiien transplant ,It best. J>,lrty tC)(H soldiers
were usually either inlllligrallts tl'om
RlISSi~l,
PoLlIld, ,1I1d Hungary, or
unassimiiatL'd, first-gcneration AnlericallS. With Lire l'XCl'ptiOIlS, they were
