ODYSSEY OF A FRIEND OF FREEDOM:

I was at a book sale on Saturday and bought Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley Jr. 1954-1961 (1969) for $1. I'm a huge Chambers fan so I didn't really even look at the book, which I knew I wanted, just dropped in my bag. But I took it out tonight to look at it and noticed there's a faceplate inside inscribed "To Mrs George Runnels Gratefully Wm F Buckley" and that the book was "Privately Printed by National Review". Kinda cool.

If you know Mr. Chambers only by his rather dubious reputation, he's someone you should really read more by and about. His memoir, Witness, is one of the best written and most important life stories of the 20th Century. That life is also told well in an excellent biography by Sam Tanehaus.

Chambers's essays and reviews, collected several years ago are marvelous. Here's one that especially good, his review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a review that demonstrates how you can be intellectually honest and even savage toward someone whose philosophy you may in part share should you find the rest of their philosophy unacceptable:

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind, which finds this one natural to it, shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be
heard, from painful necessity, commanding: " To the gas chambers— go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture— that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the differences between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

That passage is so reminiscent of George Orwell in Coming Up for Air, in the scene where Fatty recognizes that the hysterical tone of an anti-fascist diatribe resembles nothing so much as a fascist diatribe:

I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture.  But there are more ways than one of listening.  I shut my eyes for a moment.  The effect was curious.  I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.

It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping.  It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour.  The same thing over and over again.  Hate, hate, hate.  Let's all get together and have a good hate.  Over and over.  It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain.  But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him.  I got inside his skull.  It was a peculiar sensation.  For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I was him.  At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.

I saw the vision that he was seeing.  And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about. What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn't go into details.  Leaves it all respectable.  But what he's seeing is something quite different.  It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner.  Fascist faces, of course.  I know that's what he was seeing.  It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him.  Smash! Right in the middle!  The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam.  Smash!  There goes another!  That's what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it.  And it's all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists.  You could hear all that in the tone of his voice.

Interesting that their bitter experience as men of the Left prepared them to recognize the danger of dogmatism in whatever form it took. In both of these passages we hear the echo of the line from Orwell's 1984, when Winston Smith is being tortured:

If you want a picture of the future imagine a boot stomping on a human face-forever.

No wonder both fled to conservatism, which is sometimes said to be characterized by its "absence of ideology".

And here you can find the great letter to his children with which Chambers introduced Witness:

Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts.

At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.

But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.

For Chambers, of course, the drama had to be specifically Communism versus Freedom, a conceit we can allow him given his own role in the former's eventual defeat. But history always casts up new "-isms" to challenge Freedom, new ideologies that, at their core, seek to provide men with a comforting certitude about themselves and the world around them. In the end there's a deadening (and murderous) sameness to all such ideologies. Eric Hoffer described well the exchange of freedom for security that goes on amongst each "-isms" adherents:

Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.'

and again when he noted:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

All three of these men, were they to be transported here today, would find Osama and Saddam and Arafat quite familiar. They'd have recognized, probably long before most of the rest of us, that Palestine and Islam and all the rest have fairly little to do with the jihad. They'd have recognized that these are merely men who wish to wear the boots that stomp on all our faces--forever. But they'd have also known how easily we could all succumb to the urge to don the boots ourselves and sink to the level of such men. This in particular, the way they prick at our own consciences even as they warn us what to watch for in others, makes these authors both timely and timeless. Particularly fascinating is Whittaker Chambers, who once aspired to wear the boot, but who, at great personal cost, chose to instead to join the cause of Freedom, a cause he believed to be doomed. By bearing witness to the true nature of communism he helped us avert that fate for at least a while. And, by reading him today, he can summon us once again to freedom's cause. What better legacy could a man leave behind when his own odyssey is done?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2002 10:46 AM