It will be impossible for a non-Communist to conceive the fever with which I decided to read my first anti-Communist book. I mean fever quite literally; and furtiveness as if I were committing an unpardonable sin, as I was. For the fact that I voluntarily opened such a book could mean only one thing: I had begun to doubt. By chance, and I will let that evasive word stand for something which I do not hold to be chance at all, the first book I read was the book best calculated to shake me to the depths. It was called I Speak for the Silent. Its author was Professor Vladimir Tchernavin.
Professor Tchernavin was not a Communist. He was a Russian technician of some kind. He was a little man in the Communist world, gentle, humane, good. He went about his routine chores, finding what happiness he could in his love for his wife and small son. Suddenly, for no reason at all, he was arrested and carried away by the secret police. He began that long transit of the Soviet prisons, like a gummed fly slipping from strand to strand in the web of a spider that was always waiting to pounce. At last he was sent to a sub-arctic prison camp (from which together with his wife and son he later made a sensational escape to Finland). In freedom, he wrote of the horrors of that slave labor camp, simply, factually; it was their monstrousness, not his pathos that sickened the soul. Some years before, a British trade-union delegation had toured Russia and reported that there were no slave labor camps, and that had been good enough for me. I wrote off the recurring rumors as propaganda. Now for the first time, I believed that slave labor camps existed.
A year before, that would not have mattered much to me. I would have put down Tchernavin’s book and would not have reopened it. I would have known that, even if some of it were true, it was the price of social progress. I would have known, as what Communist does not know, that terror is an instrument of policy, right if the Communist vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century. Now, too, I put down I Speak for the Silent. But for a different reason; because I could not go on, because I could not endure the question that it raised. I was that Communist whom I have described in the foreword to this book. About me had closed a separating silence—the deathly silence of those for whom Tchernavin spoke—and in that silence I heard their screams. “He hears them for the first time. For they do not merely reach his mind. They pierce beyond. They pierce to his soul. He hears them for the first time because a soul in extremity has communicated with that which alone can hear it—another human soul.”
I did not know what had happened to me. I denied the very existence of a soul. But I said: “This is evil, absolute evil. Of this evil I am a part.”
I can no longer retrace with certainty the stages of my inner earthquake or distinguish its successive shocks. The structure of my Communist thought was firmly and logically built. It was not the structure but the ground it stood on that was in convulsion. I knew confusion and despair long before I knew what to do about it. I knew that my faith, long held and devoutly served, was destroyed long before I knew exactly what my error was, or what the right way might be, or even if there were a right way. For my mind and the logic of history had told me that Communism was the only way out for the 20th century. If Communism were evil, what was left but moral chaos?
One thing I knew: I was no longer a Communist. I had broken involuntarily with Communism at the moment when I first said to myself: “It is just as evil to kill the Tsar and his family and throw their bodies down a mine shaft as it is to starve two million peasants or slave laborers to death. More bodies are involved in one case than the other. But one is just as evil as the other, not more evil, not less evil.” I do not know at just what point I said this. I did not even know that with that thought I had rejected the right of the mind to justify evil in the name of history, reason or progress, because I had asserted that there is something greater than the mind, history or progress. I did not know that this Something is God.
Obviously, no book, however moving, could have overthrown the faith and viewpoint of an adult lifetime if that faith and viewpoint had not been secretly and deeply sapped. I do not know how long there had existed, side by side with my militant acceptance of the implications of Communism, an uneasiness, an anxiety, which I would now call spiritual, but which in the past I would never willingly have admitted to my mind. If ever it slipped out, I would have crushed it back as a weakness, a base token of my inadequacy as a Communist, of my immaturity as a revolutionist—for, of course, Communists are not born fully developed Marxists.
I do not know, either, by what subtle stages this conflict of the spirit of man gained on the doctrine and practice of Communism in me. I do know that over the years the unwanted thought sometimes crossed my mind: What is lacking in Communism? What lack is it that keeps the human level of Communism so low, that makes the party a rat’s nest of intrigue and faction? What is the source of its corroding cynicism, that makes the workers, in contrast to the Communists, seem like heroes of simple honesty, that makes us waste human life and effort without scruple and turns our greatest victories into sordid waste? Why is it that thirty years after the greatest revolution in history, the Communists have not produced one single inspired work of the mind? What is our lack?
Now in my despair, I asked at last: can it be God? I asked it first as an acknowledged absurdity which the mind is reduced to after rejecting every other possibility. I asked it, astounded that I could ask it at all, and with aversion as if something old, cunning and fetid from the past had reached out unfairly to possess my mind in its moment of greatest weakness. I associated God with ill-ventilated vestries and ill-ventilated minds.
How could it be God? Yet if it was just as evil to kill the Tsar as to kill two million peasants, it was evil because a violence had been committed against the soul—the soul of the murderer as well as of the murdered. It was not evil for any lesser reason. By the logic of history it was expedient, and in its directness merciful. “How long are you going to keep on killing people?” Lady Astor would ask Stalin brightly. “As long as it is necessary,” he answered and asked in turn: “How many people were killed in the First World War? You killed that many people for nothing,” he had added, “and you blame us for killing a handful for the most promising social experiment in history?” In terms of the modem mind, which excludes from its reasoning the undemonstrable fact of God, Stalin’s answer was unanswerable. It could only be answered by another question: “And man’s soul?”
At some point, I sought relief from my distress by trying to pray. I had tried to pray a few times before, in my boyhood and my youth. I had not been successful. My whole life as a man lay between those failures and my present need. Now, as I tried to pray, it was as if that spirit from my boyhood and youth took my hand and knelt and prayed beside me, so that in the act of seeking oneness with God, I became one with myself. The secret springs of my life, which had been lost so long in the desert of modernity, joined their impulses, broke free and flowed unchecked. At the same time, I began to sense that the two mirages that had beckoned me into the desert—the mirage of Almighty Mind and its power to plan human salvation—were illusions.
As I continued to pray raggedly, prayer ceased to be an awkward and self-conscious act. It became a daily need to which I looked forward. If, for any reason, I were deprived of it, I was distressed as if I had been deprived of some life necessity, like water. I cannot say I changed. There tore through me a transformation with the force of a river, which, dammed up and diverted for a lifetime, bursts its way back to its true channel. I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.
What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected on
ly Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility, the most persuasive because the least hypocritical in announcing its purpose and forcibly removing the obstacles to it. If I had rejected only Communism, I should have changed my faith; I would not have changed the force that made it possible. I should have remained within that modern intellectual mood which gives birth to Communism, and denies the soul in the name of the mind, and the soul’s salvation in suffering in the name of man’s salvation here and now. What I sensed without being able to phrase it was what has since been phrased with the simplicity of an axiom: “Man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God man can only organize the world against man.” The gas ovens of Buchenwald and the Communist execution cellars exist first within our minds.
But the torrent that swept through me in 1937 and the first months of 1938 swept my spirit clear to discern one truth: “Man without mysticism is a monster.” I do not mean, of course, that I denied the usefulness of reason and knowledge. What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail—the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God. Thus, in pain, I learned the distinction between wisdom and knowledge—knowledge, which however exalted, is seldom more than the making of careful measurements, and wisdom, which includes knowledge, but also includes man’s mystery.
I cannot say that I then believed in God. I sought God. I sought Him with the hopeless sense that by finding Him I must at once lose what I had scarcely found. For though in finding prayer, I had found myself, I did not see how I, or any other man like me, could at so late an hour retrace the steps of his life and make what I have called in the first line of this book “the impossible return.” I asked myself if I must not kill myself. And even when I answered: “No,” not from force of reason, but from force of life, I felt that the answer should be: “Yes.”
Then there came a moment so personal, so singular and final, that I have attempted to relate it to only one other human being, a priest, and had thought to reveal it to my children only at the end of my life.
In those days, I often moved about or performed tasks more or less blindly from habit, while my mind was occupied with its mortal debate. One day as I came down the stairs in the Mount Royal Terrace house, the question of the impossible return struck me with sudden sharpness. I thought: “You cannot do it. No one can go back.” As I stepped down into the dark hall, I found myself stopped, not by a constraint, but by a hush of my whole being. In this organic hush, a voice said with perfect distinctness: “If you will fight for freedom, all will be well with you.” The words are nothing. Perhaps there were no words, only an uttered meaning to which my mind supplied the words. What was there was the sense that, like me, time and the world stood still, an awareness of God as an envelopment, holding me in silent assurance and untroubled peace. There was a sense that in that moment I gave my promise, not with the mind, but with my whole being, and that this was a covenant that I might not break.
On one side of that moment were nearly forty years of human waste on all the paths and goat paths of 20th-century error and action. On the other side was humility and liberation, the sense that the strength would be given me to do whatever I must do, go wherever I must go. The moment itself was something which to deny would be a blasphemy. It was decisive for the rest of my life, and incomparable in that I never knew it again. I have sat in a Quaker meeting, in which I shared with the others a spiritual experience so intense that the leader of the group, the late Arthur Burke, had no choice but to say in the silence: “This meeting has had a divine covering.” But even that was not the same.
If I were asked to say, in terms of the modem mind: “What is the meaning of this experience?” I should answer: “I do not know. Something happened in the hall at Mount Royal Terrace. I experienced something.” From that hall, I walked into life as if for the first time. 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 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 me3 because I no longer groped for God; I felt God. The experience was absolute.
I did not seek to know God’s will. I did not suppose that anyone could know God’s will. For, as I was to tell a grand jury ten years later: “Between man’s purpose in time and God’s purpose in eternity, there is an infinite difference in quality.” The words are Kierkegaard’s; the experience that gave them life for me is mine. Nor did I ever regard myself as an instrument of God. I only sought prayer-fully to know and to do God’s purpose with me. And I did not suppose that those words, “All will be well with you,” implied my happiness, for I never supposed that what man means by well-being and what well-being means to God could possibly be the same. They might be as different as joy and suffering. I only knew that I had promised God my life, even, if it were His will, to death.
This is my ultimate witness.
XVIII
One night, in the spring of 1939, my wife opened her purse and showed me that it contained less than fifty cents. It was all the money that we had. The rent was due or overdue. I had borrowed all that I could borrow. There was really nowhere to turn. I thought: “Well, we are beaten at last.” I went to bed.
The morning mail brought a letter from my friend, Robert Cantwell, the author of Laugh and Lie Down, and later, the biographer of Hawthorne. Cantwell was then one of the editors of Time magazine. Some time before, Cantwell had asked me whether he should take the job that Time had offered him. I had urged him to, in part because I thought that the experience and the salary would do him good; in part, because, at the back of my mind, was the thought that my having a friend at Time might some time be useful to the underground. The Communist mind works in that thrifty way. Cantwell, of course, was not a Communist, and knew nothing about what was in my mind. He was one of the people who urged me to break away from the Communist Party. He helped me with money and part-time work after I broke. One day I said to him that I thought that I should like to work for Time. “You are not really serious?” he asked, a little aghast; and quickly added that there were no jobs then. I thought that that was his way of saying no.
But his letter, on that rather desperate morning, urged me to go to New York at once. As sometimes happens at Time, several jobs were suddenly open. Cantwell thought that I might get one of them.
I did not have the train fare to New York. Without telling me what she was about to do, my wife went to our next-door neighbors, explained the situation and asked them to lend her ten dollars. Those generous people, the Eubanks and Chesneys, who over the years have become our friends, were then practically strangers. Without question, they lent my wife the money.
I went to New York. I rode, for the first of several thousand times, in the swiftly purring elevator to the twenty-ninth floor of the Time and Life Building in Rockefeller Center. I had wanted to write foreign news. Cantwell thought I should try for a book reviewer’s job. I wrote several trial reviews. A few days later, Time hired me at $100 a week. I have always insisted that I was hired because I began a review of a war book with the line: “One bomby day in June....”
Thus, we crossed that bridge from death to life which faith said: “Try,” but cold reason said: “Even to think of trying is hopeless.”
XIX
I was thirty-eight years old when I went to work for Time. It was the first real job that I had ever held. I held it for nine years. I went to Time in April, 1
939, almost exactly a year after I had deserted from the Communist Party. I resigned from Time, at my own suggestion (the Hiss Case had reached a crisis), in December, 1948, almost a decade after I broke with the Communist Party.
In those nine years, I rose from third-string book reviewer to senior editor (there are seven of them). I became at last the editor who could do almost anything and was moved at need from one section of the magazine to another. For in time I had edited or written all the departments except Business. I also became Time’s most controversial foreign news editor; in the middle of World War II, I reversed the magazine’s news policy toward Russia, making it clear on the basis of the weekly news that Russia was not a friend, but an enemy, who was actively using World War II to prepare World War III. With the same weekly insistence, I pointed out that China was the key to world politics, and that to lose China to Communism was to risk losing World War III. In later years, when Time wished to point out how prophetically right its interpretation of foreign news had been in the past, it saw fit to reprint The Ghosts on the Roof, the sad satire I had written on the Yalta Conference the week that it took place (I did not then know that Alger Hiss was a member of the American delegation).
In my last years at Time, I organized, edited and wrote a good deal of the section known as Special Projects. It dealt chiefly with religious, literary and philosophic subjects.
I began writing for Time at a salary of about $5,000 a year. At the time I resigned, Time had just multiplied that figure about six times—on its own initiative, for at no time during my nine-year service, did I ever ask for a raise, or know exactly, or particularly care what I was earning.
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