Notes & asides.

* Dear Bill: I am reading Andree [Andree, Don Pesci's wife, is blind] your latest book, Miles Gone By, a sumptuous feast.

We arrived last night at your tribute to Whittaker Chambers. I confess I choked up a little at the end and could not get through the final paragraph because, I told Andree, I did not want it to end; by which I meant, I did not want him to end--not before he had seen the promised land, a world in which the Soviet Union, the incubus against which he labored, had disappeared.

In the meantime, I have settled to my own satisfaction a bothersome lingering question.

Several years ago, I sent you a paragraph written by Soren Kierkegaard--very evocative--that seemed to describe Chambers's unique position in the world of his time and ours.

The passage was this one, from the diapsalmata in the first part of Either/Or.

   What is a poet? An unhappy man
   who in his heart harbors a deep
   anguish, but whose lips are so
   fashioned that the moans and cries
   which pass over them are transformed
   into ravishing music....
   And men crowd about the poet
   and say to him, "Sing for us soon
   again"--which is as much to say,
   "May new sufferings torment your
   soul, but may your lips be fashioned
   as before; for the cries would
   only distress us, but the music, the
   music is delightful." And the critics
   come forward and say, "That is perfectly
   done--just as it should be,
   according to the rules of aesthetics."
   Now it is understood
   that a critic resembles
   a poet to a hair; he
   only lacks the anguish in
   his heart and the music
   upon his lips. I tell you, I
   would rather be a swineherd,
   understood by the
   swine, than a poet misunderstood
   by men.

Sometime later--during a visit to your house, I think--I asked if Chambers had been familiar with Kierkegaard, and you said he had never mentioned him to you. But Chambers's use of the idea of witnessing seemed to suggest a more than coincidental influence.

It was one of those irremovable burrs in the mind that one is forced to endure.

A couple of years later, needing a reference for a letter to a newspaper, I was driven to unearth a quote from the volume of Chambers's letters to you, Odyssey of a Friend, and once again was struck by some ideas in a few of the letters that reminded me of Kierkegaard. So, I was driven further back to Witnessitself and read the book to Andree, who had not read it before.

And there, staring back at me in the very first chapter of the book, was Kierkegaard.

Chambers, God bless him, certainly suffered. You offered him succor. When finally God put before him the water of life, I like to think he took it and drank it down in deep draughts. And now surely he knows what God's purposes in time were.

Don

[Donald Pesci]

Vernon, Ct.

--WFB