Three Unforeseen Masterpieces

The Sarah Palin opening is dated, I know, but the point of it is clear enough, so I won't revise it with a more timely name, for now.


Three Unforeseen Masterpieces
by James O'Brien

Masterpieces by Grant, Hart Benton, Chambers

Imagine Sarah Palin wrote a book, actually wrote it herself, alone at an Alaskan keyboard concentrating hard. And in it she told a personal story so compelling, so literate, so true and revealing and yet so lucid and tasteful that James Salter, writing in the New York Review of Books, called it “one of the ten great personal narratives in contemporary American literature.” Or imagine that the publication of an autobiography by Michael Moore found The Weekly Standard competing with The Economist to out-praise the filmmaker’s Hemmingway-like prose.

It’s unlikely any of these things could happen in this time of blinding partisanship and literary apathy. No conservative publication would do anything but gag over a book by, for example, Hillary Clinton. As for Palin, bookstores are closing down every day, and yet a shop in the San Francisco Bay Area declined to even carry the best-selling Going Rogue back in 2009. God forbid we should give even a crumb of succor to our enemies lest they triumph. 

 

Sometimes it feels like no non-writer, no politician, no actor or artist alive today would even be capable of producing a work of high literary value. I mean a book that tells a story in rich, unselfconscious, sublime, truly self-styled prose, a book that transcends barriers of ideology and hate to garner stirring praise from staunch adversaries.

There are examples, though admittedly moving ever deeper into America’s past, of great works of literature being produced by public figures whom we might not have thought capable of writing an undeniable literary gem. And in three particularly controversial cases, neither their bitterest enemies nor their harshest critics could naysay the literary force at work in narratives by three men each of whom had found fame without words: one as a zealot and informer, one as an iconoclastic muralist, one as a master of the art of war and a drunk who kept falling off his horse. 

What Whittaker Chambers, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ulysses S. Grant have in common is this: each at a critical point in his life wrote a brilliant autobiography evocative of his times, his country, and his soul. All three wrote books that betrayed an intimacy and skill with words unforeseen in an otherwise complex life. Each author achieved a singular, unmistakable tone. Each work is an invitation into the distinct and fertile mind of its creator.

Personal Memoirs

Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is probably the best known and most widely read of the three autobiographies. Grant’s illuminating relation of his wayward early life, military career, and Civil War victories was an immediate success when it appeared in 1885, and has never been out of print. Praised for its clear prose and for Grant’s frank depictions of his own youthful inertia and later battlefield brutality, Personal Memoirs has been called the greatest autobiography by an ex-president, and the greatest military memoir since the Commentaries of Julius Caesar. This last endorsement is no doubt a little biased, having been written by the book’s famous midwife and first publisher, Mark Twain.

Twain began urging the ex-President to compose his memoirs in 1881, but not until three years later did Grant, in financial ruin and the early stages of debilitating throat cancer, agree to take on the task. The two volume tome, at 295,000 words longer and more beautifully written than Twain had apparently hoped for, was proofed and corrected and ready for print only days before Grant’s death at Mount MacGregor, New York, on July 25, 1885.

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Grant had agreed to write the book in an attempt to provide some financial security for his family. In this he succeeded, his fight with the grim reaper having proved great advance publicity.

The first few pages of Personal Memoirs sound like the ironic, understated groundwork for an epic, death-haunted novel by Stendhal:

[M]y great grandfather, Noah Grant, and his younger brother, Solomon, held commissions in the English Army, in 1756, in the war against the French and the Indians. Both were killed that year. 
          My grandfather, also named Noah, was then but nine years old. At the breaking out of the war of the Revolution, after the battles of Concord and Lexington, he went with a Connecticut company to join the Continental Army, and was present at the battle of Bunker Hill. He must however have been on furlough part of the time...for he married in Connecticut during the war, had two children, and was a widower at the close.

So we don't think his grandfather a slacker, Grant assures us that most soldiers of the Revolution were furloughed. In fact, Grant rarely has a bad word for anyone and his gentle treatment of all proves both gracious and annoying.

For example, his description of Lincoln at the end of the war is sensitive, insightful, even kind:

“He always showed a generous and kindly spirit toward the Southern people, and I never heard him abuse an enemy. Some of the cruel things said about President Lincoln...used to pierce him to the heart; but never in my presence did he evince a revengeful disposition -- and I saw a great deal of him at City Point, for he seemed glad to get away from the cares and anxieties of the capital.”

But by the time says, of a dangerously hesitant Army general at the Battle of White Oak, that he was “a man of fine intelligence, great earnestness, quick perception...but I had discovered a defect that was beyond his control,” you wish he might go ahead and call the man a coward.

It’s actually a bit of a relief to encounter one person who evokes derisive sarcasm in Grant: U.S. Army Colonel and later President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, whom he’d known before the Civil War. Grant says Davis had an “exalted opinion of his own military genius” and that “on several occasions during the war he came to the relief of the Union Army by means of his superior military genius (italics Grant’s).”

Grant is laughably brief in describing events in his personal life about which one might expect to learn more. The book is called Personal Memoirs, after all. In a paragraph that begins with the treaty that ended the Mexican-American War and ends with an order to report to Detroit, Grant tells us (in a passive voice) pretty much all we’ll hear about his marriage: “On the 22^nd of August, 1848, I was married to Miss Julia Dent, the lady of whom I have before spoken.”

But what stands out in Grant's work, as in all three of these books, besides the prose, is each author’s readiness to admit his faults, to relate amusing, even embarrassing anecdotes -- twice while strutting in his first Army uniform Grant is treated with total disregard by street urchins -- in which his sense of self importance is quickly and thoroughly deflated.

For all his frustrating willingness to understate the big events in his personal life, Grant is frank and forthcoming about his poor work at West Point where, in his fourth year, he is demoted to private. He admits to an indifferent business career, the highlight of which was a very short-lived real estate interest founded between the Mexican and Civil Wars. After its closure, he becomes a clerk in his father’s store in Galena, Illinois.

Grant often portrays himself as floating in the dramatic currents of his times, as when, in 1861, he grudgingly comes to the aid of Missouri in organizing its militia. He then rather apathetically re-enters the military and even declines the captaincy of the newly-formed Army company at Galena. Nevertheless, here he begins his rise, never seeking promotion or a greater command, but accepting them as they are offered, and always excelling.

         "...the colonel, elected by the votes of the regiment, had proved to be fully capable of developing all there was in his men of recklessness. It was said that he even went so far at times as to take the guard from their posts and go with them to the village near by and make a night of it. When there came a prospect of battle the regiment wanted to have some one else to lead them. I found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination; but the great majority favored discipline, and by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask."

The New York Tribune and New York Times wasted no time in praising the book. Harper’s and The Nation quickly followed suit. William Dean Howells, the father of American Naturalism, wrote to Twain: “I am reading Grant’s book with delight I fail to find in novels. I think he is one of the most natural – that is, best – writers I ever read. The book merits its enormous success, simply as literature.”

Matthew Arnold, that literary lion of 19^th Century Britain, and no fan of the Army of the Potomac or of American letters, came to appreciate Personal Memoirs so devoutly that he wrote a lengthy essay to promote its moribund sales in England. Arnold had met Grant on a post-presidency tour of Europe and had described him as entirely “ordinary-looking, dull, and silent.” Along with much of Britain’s elite, he had judged Grant not a great general, but a man who “by possession of unlimited resources in men and money, and by the unsparing use of them, had been enabled to wear down and exhaust the strength of the South.”

Then he read Personal Memoirs. In an essay called “General Grant” Arnold admitted he found Grant’s literary voice “straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing the general high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.” Despite the praise, many Americans found the tone of Arnold’s essay condescending to both the author and his countrymen. Some editions of it are printed with a funny and combative response Twain made to Arnold in a speech to the Army and Navy Club of Connecticut, in 1887, in which he says:

“Lately a great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grant's English. That would be fair enough, may be, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more instances to the page in General Grant's book than they do in Mr. Arnold's criticism upon the book—but they don't. It would be fair enough, may be, if such instances were commoner in General Grant's book than they are in the works of the average standard author—but they aren't.”

For over 100 years admirers of Personal Memoirs have come back to two things: the immaculate prose and the guileless character of its author. Grant’s understated descriptions of his battlefield victories and his matter-of-fact relations of his failures reveal a likeable, credible man whom greatness found. He may have been brutal in war, but comes across as gentle on the page. While Grant seems to have envied the mythology around General Lee (“...but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal...”), his measured relation of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox is certainly the best I’ve read:

“What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Personal Memoirs is a picaresque, a cousin to Fielding or Stern, or even Grant’s good friend, Mark Twain. You might expect a memoir that deals with the battles and unpredictability of war. What you don’t expect in a book about war is such empathy and tenderness. It’s a paradox, and the book leaves you wondering, as the author describes the dilatory paths of his military, civilian and political lives, if, Claudius-like, this towering American figure has somehow only stumbled into history.

An Artist in America

In painter Thomas Hart Benton’s 1937 chronicle of his travels over many of the same parts of America as Grant, we can hear the sound of American prose evolving from Grant’s 19^th Century loftiness to a post-WWI intimacy and informality. The barriers between author and reader infringed so discreetly in Grant are utterly breached in Benton. In a conversational tone, Benton gives us a travel journal full of evocative vignettes, but also a keen anthropological document of America between the wars. He covers four regions in four long chapters titled The Mountains, The Rivers, The South, and The West. It’s a portrait of an unceasingly surprising, even exotic country I kept having to remind myself was America not too, too long ago.

1937 An Artist in America title page

 After nearly a decade of economic depression, Americans were becoming ornery, and indeed irritability is abundant in Benton’s opinions. He is a blunt observer of America in the wake of Reconstruction and a harsh critic of the American art scene of the Thirties.

Still, in contrast to the contempt he expresses for the denizens of the urban art world, Benton shows a great affection for what on his travels he sees as an America of unpretentious, earnest, creative and hard living people.

Benton’s great uncle and namesake had been the first Senator from the state of Missouri, and the author himself had been born into a politically connected family in Neosho, near the Oklahoma Indian territories. It was a time before the transformation of the land by the horseless carriage, a time when veterans of Grant’s war were still part of the fabric of small town society. His description of the lingering, living artifacts of the pioneer days is vivid:

"Old soldiers of the Civil War sat around in the shade of store awnings or lounged about the livery stables... Confederate and Union gatherings occurred every year and the square would be full of veterans, with imprecise triangles of old men’s tobacco spit staining their white or grizzled beards."

Like a good novelist would, Benton pulls us in with subtlety. He sounds sincerely amused while describing what could be some fictional eccentric southern family from which a lasting literary character will inevitably emerge. 

“My Dad was...a great eater, drinker, and talker. He was stubborn and there was nothing on earth that could hurry him. He was at times a secretive man, inwardly turned, and although he had a great belly laugh, was not always quite happy. He was addicted to odd and inexplicable ways of self-communion. He frequently talked vigorously to himself and time and again he settled himself in the privy in our wood lot, which he preferred in warm weather to the toilet in the house. There he sat adding, subtracting, dividing tremendous figures. This would go on while a client would be waiting in his office on the square, or even while his presence was awaited at court.”

Young Benton takes a shine to drawing and eventually rejects the path toward the law his family has foreseen for him. He becomes an illustrator for a newspaper in Joplin, then studies art in Chicago, where he insists on creating an aura of genius around himself, putting on artful airs and foppish clothing, including a black shirt, red tie, peg-top pants and a derby hat over his long hair.

Like Grant before him, Benton doesn’t get quite the reaction he’s seeking when, one day walking home from art school, he passes a group of girls.

“’Look at that crazy freak,’ a young lady on the first stoop giggled as I passed. Down the block toward my door I ran a gauntlet of mounting, hilarious feminine laughter, echoed by the catcalls of a gang of boys across the street. I was furiously embarrassed. That night I slipped out, got a haircut, and rolled the paraphernalia of genius in a bundle.”

Benton had achieved some popular success by 1935, when he began making the back roads travels that make up An Artist in America. His work would have been recognized by many average Americans, and his name and contentious opinions were well known among artists and critics. Often the very people who had commissioned his murals for state houses and universities found offensive Benton’s insistence on including history’s skeletons alongside its heroes. Frank depictions of lynchings were as much a part of his visual repertoire as were elongated images of heroic pioneers struggling to tame the land. But an untrained eye could understand his works, and this made Benton the painter of choice among an unsophisticated populace.

In 1954, Harry Truman would call Thomas Hart Benton, “The best damn painter in America.” (Of course, Truman also thought his daughter was a good singer.) However, among art critics then (as now) his work was not often very highly considered. Critics condemned his work as cartoonish and overwrought, too intent on telling a story, and too aggressively representational at a time when abstract impressionists (like Benton’s one time student, Jackson Pollock) were in the ascendancy. Said curator Dorothy Miller, “His color was bad and he didn’t draw well. I don’t know why he became a painter.”

Art critic Hilton Kramer was even less generous. In Ken Burns 1988 documentary about Benton he says, “What I see in his art is the work of a man who really shrank away from what I consider the largest tasks of art in this century. He had a glimpse of it in Paris and New York. He made an attempt at it and he wasn’t equal to it.”

Kramer, however, had this to say about An Artist in America: “Every sentence is a kind of bull’s eye.”

Open the book to almost any page and read any paragraph and you’ll be rewarded by crisp, driven prose. Here’s Benton raising dust and noise in unapologetic nostalgia, using internal rhymes and bovine anthropomorphizing, to lament the changes taking place in the American West:

          "The pioneer West has gone beyond recall. The land is largely fenced. There are no more great cattle treks. Solemn Herefords have taken the place of the wild-eyed longhorns of the old days. There are no more six-shooter belted cowboys. The tough work of the cattle business is done by plain cow hands and fence tenders. On the trails to Wichita and Dodge City, where the hard-riding boys of the old days used to drive their long strings of cattle, the tractors and the combines are chugging."

Throughout, Benton grips your attention in paragraphs thick with narrative intrigue:

"Old Man Carney’s dad had a slave. The slave had stuck with him after the Civil War. The Negro in his old age found a loose girl and got a boy-child from her. When Carney’s father died he left him a little farm on the outskirts of town, and the three Negros who worked it. Carney was about forty when he got the farm. The old Negro died and the girl, now a woman, went off. The boy stayed with Carney."

To read An Artist in America is to spend time traveling a still-regional nation with an insightful, if sometimes deliberate iconoclast as companion.

Benton was an effective battler of the received wisdom of his time. But he was also subject to the Century’s worst prejudices. He demonstrates an uncanny ability to sound a tone of praise while simultaneously belittling. Unlike many of his time, he recognized the aesthetic achievement of Native American art, but still considered its creators savages. He describes with sympathy and poignancy harrowing scenes of abuse against blacks, but seems himself incapable of rising above a patronizing, generalizing tone.

“The Negro of the South is not stupid. Under the lash of difficulty to which he has been submitted for a long time he has learned how to adapt himself to the drolleries of the white people. He his quick, notoriously quick, to find the pattern of his white brother’s whether that brother wants to embrace him or kick him in the buttocks. He knows how to turn a tory’s anger to laughter and a reformer’s love into dividend. The Negro is not stupid but, on the other hand, he is not farseeing. As a rule he is ignorant.”

He reserves particular scorn for homosexuals, whom he describes as the “limp-wristed set,” and whose perceived influence on the art world he deplores.

It’s an unfortunate, and often surprising discovery, especially after reading repeated passages in which Benton easily finds an affinity with whomever he meets: coal miners in western Pennsylvania; rivermen in Louisiana; the black members of a traveling minstrel show preparing for a performance in probably the worst place they could have chosen, a small theater deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“Three Negro boys and two girls, poor adventurous mummers who had learned the sad little tricks of their trade from medicine shows and carnivals of the South, recited stale jokes about old maids and sang “corney” jazz songs. Once in a while a tremor of fear came over them again. The cornet player blared out and shook the rafters...in a wild bid for restored confidence, and the singers, throwing their heads back, their mouths wide open, attempted to keep up with him.”

Hilton Kramer believed that when Benton settled back in Missouri after his travels, he was retreating from the art world and reeling with a sense of inadequacy. Maybe Kramer was right. Nevertheless, it's a happy occurrence for us that Benton ventured out beyond the big cities, and that out there he discovered and documented the lives of Southern farmers looking for work in the textile factories of Birmingham, the violence and poverty of the Ozarks, the Bible-thumping hypocrisy of itinerant preachers, the easygoing lives of shanty boat captains along the Cincinnati River, and the great, bawdy vibrancy of 1930s New Orleans.

An Artist in America is a Benton mural truer and more expansive than anything he ever painted on terra cotta. Sometimes, in its honesty, and in the way it infiltrates and captures the raw spirit of the nation, the book can feel Whitmanesque. That is, if the poet had had a strain of bitterness, if he’d been only half in love with America.

Witness

1950s Book-of-the-Month Club equivocation

When it came out in 1952, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness was a primary selection of the Book-of-the-Month-Club. However, the Club felt the need to send with it a stark disclaimer, saying that its editorial board “cannot...offer Witness to members without being frank about some reservations of its own, which in general are concerned with the complex character of its author.” The report goes on to say of Witness that, “No psychological novel can exceed it in interest.”

 

Witness is Chamber’s Confessions. It is a spiritual document, but one that happens to contain an insider’s history of the Communist Party in America and a true believer’s desperate warning about the power, determination, and resourcefulness of the Soviets. It’s also a tense spy tale.

Its opening feels claustrophobic, even paranoiac. It sounds whispered.

“In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. I began to break away from Communism and to climb from deep within its underground, where for six years I had been buried, back into the world of free men.”

Credible rumors of Stalin’s purges were regularly reaching Chambers as he plotted his exit from the Party. As a high-level underground operative, he had sensitive information, close contact with Russian agents, and a profile low enough that his death or disappearance would be of little note. For Chambers, leaving the Party would be about much more than letting his membership lapse.

Four years before the release of Witness, Chambers was in his late forties and suffering from a bad heart. By now, he was working as a senior editor for Time Magazine, and writing essays on world politics, religion, and literature for Time and Life. He was also running a small farm in Western Maryland. He was a known and vocal anti-Communist. Also well-known by Chambers’ colleagues was his early history as an active member of the American Communist Party of the Twenties and Thirties.

Already, the Soviet Union had evolved from ally to adversary. Communists were officially a menace. America’s pre-war tolerance of Communism, such as it was, had dissolved. Here the Republicans had found their cause. Truman was running for President, and operatives of Roosevelt’s New Deal were firmly entrenched throughout official Washington. But were these New Deal liberals simply that, they asked, or were there among them Communist sympathizers, operatives, and spies?

In this furious political atmosphere Whittaker Chambers made his famous, or infamous, accusations against Alger Hiss. At the time president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hiss had been an accomplished New Dealer and a minor advisor to Roosevelt at Yalta. He had been a key operative at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, and a high ranking State Department official.

According to Chambers, Hiss also had been a committed member of the Communist Party and Chambers’ best friend prior to the latter’s defection. Hiss was a Communist and he may still be, said Chambers, in private, under oath, and on Meet the Press.

Portraits of Chambers, Hiss from B-O-T-M Club pamphlet

In Witness he wrote that productive Soviet sources in Washington "were few, but occupied unusually high (or strategic) positions in the Government. The No. 1 source in the State Department was Alger Hiss, who was then an assistant to the Secretary of State, Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson."

Eventually Hiss and Chambers would go to court, where again Chambers would accuse Hiss of being a spy. They would testify before Congress, on television. It was a national sensation. Hiss would be convicted of perjury and sent to jail. He claimed innocence till his death.

The Democrats won the White House in ‘48, but the anti-Communist era was only just beginning. Many of the most passionate defenders of liberalism and the New Deal worked in the press, where Chambers was sometimes cast as at best a tool of the Nixonian, and later McCarthyite, witch hunters, and at worst a positively evil, possibly homosexual, and maybe even insane master liar bent on ruining Hiss for some small slight committed far in their past.

Whether Chambers’ accusations against Hiss were true or not, the two men became emblems of the very thing their opponents feared most: if true, then Hiss was the perfect example of what the Republicans were claiming about the governing Democrats; if false, then Chambers was the perfect example of the Republicans’ willingness to do anything, no matter how evil, to win the White House and end twelve years of liberal New Deal progress.

The hostility had only intensified by the time Bennet Cerf’s Random House issued the 350,000 word Witness. Cerf had been no fan of Chambers’ role in the Hiss case, but after reading the first few chapters of Witness, he agreed to be its publisher.

To most Americans who had heard of him, this Chambers was a mystery: sinister, slovenly, monotone, and once a Communist spy. What would he reveal about the Party? What would he do for our own lingering doubts about Hiss? What other names would he name?

In Witness we do get more names, though none of greater interest than Hiss. However, we get something better than Communist gossip: we get Chambers’ life story and the intimate, intricate details of his friendship and co-treason with Hiss. 

 

(Some thought Chambers’ story was too intricate, too specific to be true, that it was too similar to the plot of a novel Chambers had translated in 1929, from the German: Franz Werfel’s Class Reunion, in which one man ruins another’s life out of vengeance.  

Chambers' translation from the German

An entire book would be written about Chambers’ supposed fratricidal psychosis.)

Chambers had led in his youth a sad, bohemian existence, the kind of early life that often breeds an artist. And he had been for a time, according to biographer Sam Tanenhaus, the “hottest literary Bolshevik” in America. Deep in his past there could be found fragments of promising poetry. But nothing he’d done before would prepare readers for the visceral language and stark, personal revelations of Witness. Or the crisp and nuanced narration of Chambers’ final days as a Communist.

The Chambers we come to know in Witness is susceptible to the occasional delusion of grandeur. He is even capable of seeing himself in messianic terms. “[O]ne man must always be willing to take upon himself the onus of evil that other men may be spared greater evil,” he writes to an editor at Time. He was a zealot, and his devotion served him well; without total conviction, it is impossible to imagine him surviving the trials he would endure on his path out of Communism and into the public eye.

The great shifts of Chambers’ great passions are all spelled out in a dense, muscular, deeply allusive prose unseen in his journalism or in his Communist short stories published twenty years earlier in the Marxist cultural paper, The New Masses.

In Witness, the specter of death never quite vanishes. Chambers wrote the book at a torrid pace while suffering from a failing heart. When the suspense of the spy story lifts, the tone is often mournful. He is most touching in the relation of the tragic fate of his suicidal younger brother.

“That this world was dying both brothers knew. We differed as to how to face the fact. My brother’s way had the grace of disdain and simple subtraction. He removed himself from what he found unsolvable or unworthy to be solved, and which he refused to encumber. Such fortitude and such finality are like a smile before a firing squad. When a man makes himself his own firing squad, he is beyond pity or judgment, since it is difficult to pity or to judge those who are merciless first of all with themselves.”

After the abject rawness of his youth, after the painful, anxious, exhausting days of testimony, there is the angst of his spiritual journey from atheistic Communist to Quaker patriot. Chambers can be harshly self-critical. On the stand at trial or beneath the withering lights of television, he’d really had no choice but to testify to having been a traitor to his country. He had admitted to being a petty thief and a holder of many aliases. By the time he sat down to write his memoir, he had little left to hide. In the book he discusses his known weaknesses and failures, adding to the list the one he regretted most of all: having lived so long a Godless life. Finding God leads to some of Chambers' darkest prose:

"I do not mean that I was exalted or conspicuously changed. I was still an erring, inadequate man, capable of folly, sin and fear. Like other men, I still must walk through the damp pockets of desperation. But those were surface vicissitudes, as the surface of water is torn up while the depth below remains unchanged. Henceforth, in the depth of my being there was peace and a strength that nothing could shake. It was the strength that carried me out of the Communist Party, that carried me back into the life of men. It was the strength that carried me at last through the ordeal of the Hiss Case. It never left me because I no longer groped for God; I felt God. The experience was absolute."

When he came to religion, as in all the arrivals in his life, whether to Communism or to anti-Communism or to God, Chambers came as an extremist:

"The saints are invariably violent. They know what the age has forgotten in its pews – that spirit, if it truly stirs, never brings peace, but always brings a sword. Submission to the spirit may bring peace. But the spirit itself, aroused in man or nation, is a blade that exists to divide the truth from the untruth, the living from the dead, the conformist from the Christian."

Witness reached #1 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list, and stayed there for months. Publications that had treated Chambers the witness with open hostility praised his book for its breadth and honesty, and its prose. During the trial, A.J. Liebling had regularly belittled Chambers, but in the New Yorker he praised Witness.

Many critics on the left did. Some were former Marxists. Some were former members of the Party, but unlike Chambers, no friends of the Right. In the New York Times Book Review, Sidney Hook wrote that "Witness throws more light on the conspiratorial and religious character of modern communism, on the tangled, complex of motives which led men and women of goodwill to immolate themselves on the alters of a fancied historical necessity, than all of the hundred great books of the past combined." In the Saturday Review, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., called it “one of the really significant America autobiographies.” In the New Criterion, Philip Rahv wrote that Chambers was like Dostoyevsky without the sense of humor.

This is not to say that critics of Chambers failed to pounce. A dozen proudly left-wing writers, among them John Dos Passos, Irving Howe and Hannah Arendt, trashed the author, if not the book. But in Witness, as in each of these books, writing overwhelmed ideology and personal history. It overpowered prejudice in ways somehow hard to imagine happening today.

In a time when the publishing world floods the market with the embarrassing and the repulsive, sometimes both at once, it’s refreshing to read books written by the authors who signed them, books in which words and careful writing are as important as the trials, personal faults and achievements they examine. We may not see their like again. 

 

If we do, it will need to come from a rare public figure who has shed the modern fetish for constant communication, who is able to break the bonds of the computer and the television, who has spent a great deal of time reading more that twitter, who has wrested from the modern world copious time to spend absorbing the prose of great writers, who then has found the quiet isolation in which to reflect, to listen carefully for the sound of his or her own voice, and who finally has found the time and skill to translate it to the page. It's a lot to ask of anybody these days.

And should Barak Obama write a masterpiece of a memoir after his White House years, will William Kristol admit it? If William Kristol writes an autobiography of lasting literary value, will Alec Baldwin be its champion? If Alec Baldwin or another politically-engaged actor should leave Hollywood to write about his life and times, will he compose paragraphs that consider, at once, the vastness of the universe and a father’s folksy wisdom, like this one near the end of Witness:

"But what little I know of the stars I have passed on to my son over the years. When we go together to secure the ewes in the orchard -- our last chore on the late summer nights -- we often stop to watch through the apple trees the great sky triangle tipped by the evening stars: Vega in Lyra, Altair in Aquila and Deneb, burning in the constellation of the Swan. Sometimes I draw my son’s eye to the constellation Hercules, especially to the great nebula dimly visible about the middle of the group. Now and again, I remind him that what we can just make out as a faint haze is another universe -- the radiance of fifty thousand suns whose light had left its source thirty-four thousand years before it brushes the miracle of our straining sight."