Last month I commented under a different review:

My plan is for my next book to be a work of non-fiction, but also but [sic] a mid-20th century Catholic: Whittaker Chamber’s “Witness”.

This turned out to be incorrect, as he was never a Catholic, but instead a Quaker (despite rejecting their pacifism), and this book even points out different men being members of the two sects and indicators of how different they are. Perhaps I assumed that because I knew he was a Christian (at least by the time he became nationally known) and involved early on with National Review, where he famously panned “Atlas Shrugged”. Since I’ve now reviewed a (short) novel by Ayn Rand, it seems fitting to compare a contemporary detractor.

I could begin by quoting his and the book’s own detractor, a still-living contributor to National Review:

Witness became a canonical text of conservatism. Unfortunately, it injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism. It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing Buckley’s legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture. Chambers wallowed in cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment about “the plain men and women”—”my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness”—enduring the “musk of snobbism” emanating from the “socially formidable circles” of the “nicest people” produced by “certain collegiate eyries”.

George Will, Conservatism is soiled by scowling primitives, Washington Post, May 31st 2017

There is a populism to the book (particularly in the later sections where he’s recalling all the elites who sided with Alger Hiss against him), but the bigger facet I picked up on throughout the entire text was the “sour” one reflective of his depressive mind. Matthew Yglesias has noted the concentration of neurotic people in his political faction, while from the opposite side Richard Hanania does so much more often and derisively. Chambers goes beyond merely being worried, all the way to suicidal. He writes that he agreed with his younger brother that life was awful enough that no more of it should be created, and expected to regret his decision not to follow his brother to a self-made grave. Even after he’d not only had children of his own but left Communism for Christianity, he claims that he was willing to subject his own immortal soul to damnation by killing himself to avoid further testimony against people he’d already testified against (and even told the State Department were engaged in espionage for the USSR years prior), not doing so in one case only because his poor eyesight prevented him from following some instructions correctly. I had already heard that he believed he was leaving the winning side (Communism) for the losing one, and the foreword full of praise from Robert Novak (at a time when the collapse of the USSR showed how wrongheaded he was) affirms he maintained that defeatist view afterward. I have in the past spoken up for “depressive realism“, but this is a clear case of someone in whom such a mental defect caused him to be irrationally biased away from the truth and towards Communism and defeatism at different points in his life and on different sides of the political spectrum.

The best part of the book is the exciting beginning where he talks about escaping from the Communist underground using the very training in secrecy & subversion they’d given him. One might be tempted to think that he was being irrationally paranoid about the Party having him killed for defecting, but there are way too many of his Communist/ex-Communist acquaintances who really did get killed without witnesses (within the US, not just the ones who obeyed summons to the USSR during the Purges). It thus feels like a real letdown when the next section is titled “The Story of a Middle-Class Family”, devoted to his comparatively uninteresting childhood which (despite the unfortunate story of his brother, which culminated well after Whittaker joined the Party) didn’t contain anything bad enough to justify his conviction that capitalist society was doomed and that communism was thus necessary. He does add that the problem of war was the more important part of the “crisis of history” to him (economic crises being the other aspect of it which brought people to communism), but he never actually saw that himself as it ended just when he tried to enlist in WW1. He does mention visiting Europe and then concluding that some form of socialism was necessary before Lenin’s writings convinced him it worked in practice, but the rationalist in me wanted to tell him that most Europeans didn’t become communists despite much more exposure to the realities of war than he’d had.

While Chambers’ conversion to communism seems to have happened in a short amount of time, his defection from Communism took much longer. He himself claims that he privately stopped believing in 1937 after hearing certain stories coming out of the USSR during the great purges, but he’d already referred to the tendency toward less-lethal purges within the CPUSA as “fascistic”, regarding it as an unfortunate aspect of something still good on the whole. He talks a bit about his later conclusion that Stalin acted this way because he was following the true spirit of the evil of communism, but Stalin had solidified his hold via this method to become the Supreme Pope of Communism well before Chambers became disenchanted. Instead, Chambers became more dedicated over those early years, following the command to leave the above-ground party (shortly after his New Masses stories got popular enough in Moscow to rescind his unofficial CPUSA expulsion for refusing to take part in some petty factionalism) and join the underground. His later-to-be-murdered friend Walter Krivitsky referred to Kronstadt as being the turning point when the Soviet government became “fascist”, but of course both men continued serving long after that. Chambers’ taking a year to prepare to defect from the underground makes a certain amount of sense given the aforementioned murders, but privately confronting his former comrades telling them he’s trying to break them from their allegiance (rather than going to the authorities for protection without telling anyone) indicates a woeful deficiency of pragmatism (as does his claim that he likely would have destroyed the proof of espionage he hid with a relative of his wife’s if he hadn’t forgotten about it).

One of the reasons I chose to read this after O’Connor is because their religious perspectives were so different from mine. That was a bigger barrier here than for her stories, because those were just stories containing characters of varying degrees of religiosity rather than the author just giving her own views. Chambers seemed to have a need for faith, finding it first in the ends-justify-the-means dedication of communism, and then (perhaps less satisfactorily, given how gloomy & pessimistic he was afterward) in the same sect of Christianity he’d left in college. He declares that “man without mysticism is a monster”, not acknowledging the monstrousness (arguably worse per capita than the Nazis) of mystical political movements in his own lifetime. I also recently watched Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (review here), about a man who wrote “Only by preserving Japanese irrationality will we be able contribute to world culture 100 years from now”. I think both men should have had a dimmer view of irrationality/mysticism and a more positive take on rationality. Chambers could have remained a Christian and even relied on old-fashioned deontological/teleological ethics to avoid actions he would later regard as evil. I’m admittedly an atheist who lives in a far less Christian era (doing more to vindicate his pessimism about the larger struggle between God and materialist man than the Cold War he declared that was just part of) but most Christians in practice don’t seem to go that far off course.