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Ghosts on the Roof : Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959 (1989)

For forty years the accepted establishment view of Whittaker Chambers was that of a fat, rumpled weirdo, obsessed, presumably for some kind of degenerate sexual reasons, with the destruction of Alger Hiss, a man who was in every way his better. Even the publication and excellent sales of his extraordinary memoir, Witness, could not erase that caricature from the minds of the elites. I remember a PBS miniseries about the Hiss case, which must date from the late 70's or early 80's (I checked; it looks like it was, fittingly, broadcast in 1984), which portrayed Hiss as a victim, if not an outright innocent. But then the pendulum began to swing :

-First came the 1978 publication of Allen Weinstein's authoritative book, Perjury : The
Hiss-Chambers Case, which convinced most of the holdouts of the guilt of Alger Hiss.

-Then, in 1984, Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-Five years later came this collection of the journalism of Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts on the Roof,
which began the process of restoring his literary reputation.

    -The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of government secrets from both US and Russian
    files which exposed both the extent and success of Soviet efforts to penetrate the US government,
    media and Hollywood in the 30's & 40's and peace groups in the subsequent decades.

-In 1995, the VENONA intercepts were revealed, with their decoded messages confirming that the
Rosenbergs and Hiss, among others, had been Soviet agents.

    -Finally, the publication in 1997 of the first serious biography, Whittaker Chambers : A Biography
    by Sam Tanenhaus, and the truly bizarre moment on Meet the Press when Clinton CIA nominee
    Tony Lake could not bring himself to declare Alger Hiss guilty, even fifty years after the fact,
    forced a major re-examination of Chambers, his legacy, and the legacy of those who were simply
    unable to accept his charges no matter the evidence (like Lake and like CNN in their Cold War
    series).

After all of that, it is perhaps now possible to contemplate Chambers the writer in a somewhat more neutral, less partisan, light. This collection includes everything from political essays to reflections on the Hiss case to movie and book reviews to a set of historical essays on Western Culture written for LIFE. Among the best pieces are a review of Finnegans Wake and a tribute to Joyce on his death; a review of the movie version of Grapes of Wrath, which Henry Luce said was the best film review ever published in TIME; a really scathing review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; and the prophetic title essay.

Chambers is too adulatory about Joyce's achievement in Finnegans Wake for my taste, but he does an admirable job of explaining its literary importance.

    As a gigantic laboratory experiment with language, Finnegans Wake is bound to exert influence far
    beyond the circle of its immediate readers. Whether Joyce is eventually convicted of assaulting the
    King's English with intent to kill or whether he has really added a cubit to her stature, she will
    never be quite the same again.

And his description of Joyce's final days in wartorn Europe is genuinely moving, even to someone like me who would have voted for conviction in the trial Chambers posited above.

In his review of Grapes of Wrath he masterfully differentiates between the bloated novel and John Ford's superb film, describing how Ford's version, stripped of political cant and excess verbiage, renders a stronger story than the original :

The Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book. ... It would be the
best John Ford had directed if he had not already made The Informer.

    Part of the credit belongs accidentally to censorship and the camera. Censorship excised
    John Steinbeck's well-meant excesses. Camera-craft purged the picture of editorial rash that
    blotched the Steinbeck book. Cleared of excrescences, the residue is the great human story which
    made thousands of people, who damned the novel's phony conclusions, read it. It is the saga of an
    authentic U. S. farming family who lose their land. They wander, they suffer, but they endure.
    They are never quite defeated, and their survival is itself a triumph.

The Rand review, Big Sister is Watching You (available online), offers a textbook example of how to dismantle an author even though they share some of your political views. Even if you like Ayn Rand's books, and I think they are okay if taken with a large grain of salt, you have to agree with his line :

From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity,
commanding : 'To a gas chamber--go!'

Though clearly a harsh assessment, this nicely captures her unfortunate stridency and intolerance for anyone who doesn't accept the most extreme tendencies of her ethos of individualism.

The outstanding piece though may well be the one that Teachout chose for the title. Ghosts on the Roof ran in TIME on March 5, 1945, shortly after the Yalta Conference, when the Allies were still basking in the glow of having cooperated to defeat Hitler. With admirable foresight, Chambers pricked this gonfalon bubble. The essay fantasizes that the ghosts of Nicholas and Alexandra and the other murdered Romanovs descend upon the roof of the Livadia Palace at Yalta to watch the goings-on. There they meet Clio, the Muse of History, who has likewise come to observe the Big Three Conference. When History expresses her surprise at finding the Romanovs there, they reveal that they have become fans of Stalin and have converted to Marxism, actually Stalinism. The Tsar and Tsarina explain that Stalin is achieving conquests which even Peter the Great never dared and now come Britain and America as virtual supplicants, unwittingly giving him the opportunity to grab more land in the East in exchange for entering the war with Japan. They share the Marxist belief that in the years following the war, England and the U.S. will collapse because of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Clio tells them that this will not happen, that the years to come will see a conflict between two opposing faiths, leading to "more wars, more revolutions, greater proscriptions, bloodshed and human misery." The Tsarina asks why she does not intervene to avert this, and Clio answers that humans never learn from History and :

Besides, I must leave something for my sister, Melpomene to work on.

Melpomene, Clio's sister, is the Muse of Tragedy. Here, years before he became embroiled in the Hiss case, long before the Cold War started, before the Atomic Age had even dawned, is Whittaker Chambers warning the West of the future it faces and forecasting it uncannily.

These essays, and the many others included here, make for really interesting reading. They reveal Chambers to be both a gifted and a prescient writer. His opinions on the Arts stand up extremely well. His assessments of political situations were as much forty years ahead of their time; particularly perceptive in this regard is one ("Soviet Strategy in the Middle East" [National Review October 26, 1957]) in which he predicted how the Soviets would foster Arab radicalism in the Middle East. All in all, the book serves to add depth and heft to a man who spent almost half a century as a caricature, who was more an undeserving victim of Anti-Anti-Communism than any of those who were blacklisted were "victims" of Anti-Communism. It is altogether fitting that the 20th Century, which Chambers did so much to redeem, ended with his reputation ascendant and those of his opponents in rapid decline.

(Reviewed:11-Feb-01)

Grade: (A)

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Ghosts on the Roof : Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959 (1989)

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