Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.

LEAFING through the introduction to the newly collected Holmes -Frankfurter correspondence, I found a passing reference to "the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss." Time was when such lawyerly weaseling left me speechless with anger. Now I just shrug. As Dostoyevsky, Whittaker Chambers's favorite author, once put it, "Man gets used to everything, the beast!" Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury in a court of law, and everyone who knows anything about the Hiss case knows perfectly well that he did what Chambers said he did. Allen Weinstein put the next-to-last nail in the coffin in 1978 with the publication of Perjury, and the coup de gr"ce came with the release last year by the National Security Agency of intercepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vishinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss's posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for a half century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

cepted Soviet cable traffic from the Forties, which revealed that Hiss flew straight from Yalta to Moscow, where Andrei Vyshinsky personally thanked him for his long years of service to the Soviet Union. But when Hiss died in November, virtually no obituary writer was willing to say flat out that He Did It, and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw both went so far as to suggest that he was framed. Such is the nature of Alger Hiss's posthumous victory: by lying steadfastly for half a century, he succeeded in hiding the truth behind the shadow of a doubt.

The truth which Hiss's lies concealed was not just that he was a Soviet spy, but that modern American liberalism itself bears the blood-red birthmark of complicity in the Communist cause. Once again, everyone who knows anything about the history of liberalism knows this. But it was (and is) the most inconvenient of truths for those liberals who understood (and understand) that an ideology whose legitimacy is rooted in the myth of its own absolute rectitude can ill afford to admit having partaken of original sin. So the liberal establishment shamefully turned its back on anti-Communism, and the inconvenient truth about Alger Hiss and his fellow Communists slowly vanished beneath a sea of qualifications, evasions, and outright lies.

What also vanished was the truth about Whittaker Chambers. To be sure, his memory was kept bright by those who had known him in his post-trial days, not least those who had worked with him at NR in the Fifties and the countless young Americans who had been converted to conservatism by reading Witness, his best-selling 1952 memoir. But until the appearance of Perjury, Chambers was visible only through the glare of partisanship. To his enemies, he was the spiritual leader of the dark legion of reaction; to his admirers, he was a symbol of the great moral cause of the postwar era. More than a few conservatives were thus understandably unnerved when Allen Weinstein revealed that Chambers was, like all human beings, all too human: one suspects they preferred the symbol to the flawed, confused man himself.

I doubt that Sam Tanenhaus's long-awaited biography of Whittaker Chambers will change anyone's mind about whether Hiss or Chambers was telling the truth. Nor is it intended to do so (though Tanenhaus includes a devastatingly efficient six-page appendix summarizing the additional evidence against Hiss which has emerged in the five decades since his conviction). For Whittaker Chambers: A Biography is not a rehash of United States of America v. Alger Hiss. It is, rather, the richly detailed story of a representative modern man, one who embodied in his tortured person all the tensions and complexities of the Thirties, and I know of no book that does a better job of explaining that low, dishonest decade.

Modernity, as Tanenhaus reminds us, was Whittaker Chambers's birthright: he was taught from earliest childhood that there is no truth, and he spent the rest of his life searching for it. His father was a bisexual magazine illustrator, his mother an arty, shabby-genteel agnostic. At Columbia University, he dazzled such teachers as Mark Van Doren (and such students as Lionel Trilling) with his literary gifts, but soon discovered that words alone could not fill the empty places in his soul. Tormented by inchoate homosexual longings, painfully aware of the squalor and misery in which the "other half" of America lived, Chambers sought deliverance in the secular religion that was Marxism, abandoning a promising career as a poet and translator to become a Communist journalist and, later, a spy. Idealism drove him into the arms of mass murderers, and idealism forced him in time to confront the enormity of what he and his Communist brethren had done: by choosing to testify against Alger Hiss, Chambers, in Arthur Koestler's striking phrase, "knowingly committed moral suicide to atone for the guilt of our generation."

All this is well known, at least in outline, to readers of Witness and Perjury. But Tanenhaus has put new factual flesh on the received view of Chambers, giving us, among many other invaluable things, the first fully convincing account of his college days --I came away from this book understanding at last why his fellow students admired him so extravagantly -- and, no less important, the first adequate discussion of his famously stormy tenure at Time:

Chambers was not reporting. He was explaining, reading political developments through the lens of Leninism. That lens collected its light from a narrow range of the spectrum, but the beam it threw on events was stunning in its clarity. Chambers overstated his case, often seeing dangers where they were not present. He was also not above crimping the evidence to suit his thesis. Still, he grasped, better than anyone else around him -- and as well as any other American of the day -- that the postwar world would be formed in the crucible of "power politics."

The drama, as is so often the case with biography, is in the details, which Tanenhaus supplies in abundance: what could be more potently symbolic than the fact (published here for the first time) that Chambers gave up the opportunity to translate the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu in order to go to work for The New Masses? And even when Tanenhaus revisits oft-tilled ground, as in his description of the Hiss perjury trials, he manages to make the familiar fresh: what could be more illustrative of Chambers's character than the fact that, as he waited for the first trial to get under way, he passed the time reading Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety?

No small part of the strength of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography comes from its scrupulous avoidance of cheerleading. Indeed, I came away suspecting that Tanenhaus rather disliked Chambers, or at the very least found his Dostoyevskyan temperament unsympathetic. Yet there is no question in Tanenhaus's mind about Chambers's honesty, and he is just as certain that in spying for the Soviets, Chambers served an unambiguously evil end. The resulting detachment with which he considers Chambers's life and thought, while likely to unsettle conservative readers accustomed to thinking of the author of Witness as a latter-day saint, adds immeasurably to the book's vividness: Chambers's bisexuality is discussed frankly (though not salaciously), and his tendencies toward self-pity and self-dramatization are acknowledged straightforwardly.

Tanenhaus's detachment also serves him well in assessing Chambers's problematic stature as writer and thinker. He correctly points out that Chambers's interest in "the convergence of religion and politics . . . is what makes Witness, for all its morbid imagery and Slavic passions, a uniquely American book, for only in America do religious and political ideals become interchangeable, even indistinguishable." He acutely compares Chambers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, noting that "Solzhenitsyn too would be misunderstood, his asperities interpreted as militant fanaticism." And his explanation of why Chambers proved incapable of finishing The Losing Side, his planned large-scale theoretical work on conservatism and Communism, seems to me exactly right:

He wanted to create a myth of the universe, as Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee had done. Like them, Chambers had an authentic feel for history as poetic drama. But he lacked the intellectual requirements of a system builder. For all his immense reading and his considerable mental strength, Chambers was neither a scholar nor a systematic thinker. . . . His intellectual style was a hybrid of the autodidact's and the educated publicist's. He was a forager of texts, who read widely and collected memorable tag lines he employed as a form of illustrative shorthand, filling out his intuitions and adding them to the accumulated wisdom of his own experience. Much as Chambers deplored "attempts to explain the Communist experience primarily in personal, psychological terms," it was the one thing he really knew how to do. And he had already done it, in Witness.

It is, of course, impossible to consider Chambers solely as a writer or a thinker. That is his tragedy. Like so many other men of the Thirties, his life was cloven by history, and by his own fateful choice of action over contemplation. Chambers the promising poet, Chambers the gifted literary critic, Chambers the journalist of near-genius: all were sacrificed on the altar of commitment. But the author of Witness, as Andre Malraux truly said, did not return from Hell with empty hands. If anything justified Whittaker Chambers's acts of treason, it was his decision to tell the truth about them to the House Un-American Activities Committee, whatever the personal cost; if anything justifies his youthful betrayal of his talent in the name of politics, it is the enduring significance of Witness, which will be remembered not only as a classic of American autobiography but as one of the founding documents of postwar American conservatism.

As for the case of United States of America v. Alger Hiss, it was finally closed by the death of the 92-year-old defendant, who presumably kept on lying to his last breath. Now he belongs to the ages, and one somehow doubts they will view his treachery as sympathetically as did his contemporaries. It is one of the not-so-minor consolations of history that Alger Hiss lived long enough to witness the protracted suicide of the evil empire he served so faithfully, and to see its archives thrown open to the searching scrutiny of Western scholars. Bit by bit, the record is being set straight on Communism, and the publication of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography marks an essential step toward that goal. The journalists of today may casually subscribe to the notion that Whittaker Chambers was a man of dishonor, but the historians of tomorrow -- guided by this indispensable book -- will know better.