I perceived that the Communists were much more firmly embedded in Government than I had supposed, and that any attempt to disclose or dislodge them was enormously complicated by the political situation in which they were parasitic. Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. If only for the sake of their public health record, the liberals, to protect their power, must seek as long as possible to conceal from themselves and everybody else the fact that the Government had been Communist-penetrated. Unlike the liberals, the Communists were fully aware of their superior tactical position, and knew that they had only to shout their innocence and cry: “Witch hunt!” for the liberals to rally in all innocence to their defense. I felt, too, that a persistent effort by any man to expose the Communists in Government was much less likely to lead to their exposure than to reprisals against him. That fact must be borne constantly in mind in understanding what I did and did not do in the next nine years, and indeed throughout the Hiss Case, which was to prove on a vast scale how well-founded my fears had been.
One of my close friends, himself an ardent New Dealer, who knew my story in full detail, summed up the situation tersely. “I see,” he said one day, “why it might not pay the Communists to kill you at this point. But I don’t see how the Administration dares to leave you alive.”
XII
One form of attack the Communist Party invariably makes upon all ex-Communists, big or little. It tries to make it impossible for them to live by preventing them from getting a job. If they succeed in getting one, the party tries to make it impossible for them to keep it. This is very easy to do. For unless an employer is acutely aware of the larger issues involved, and not always then, he does not want the orderly running of his business continually upset by an ex-Communist who is a constant focus of gossip or turmoil, as the Communists take care that he will be. I had not been at Time a fortnight before the Communists went to work on me. The fortnight’s grace was due merely to the fact that the Communist Party had not yet discovered my presence at Time and warned its local members.
The first or second day that I was in my office, a researcher sidled up to me. A quiet, somewhat sheep-faced girl with slow, observant eyes, she was, as she later told me, a great friend of Vito Marcantonio’s. “We are so glad you got the job,” she confided in a whisper. “We were afraid that Rahv was going to get it.” (Philip Rahv was a Trotskyite literatus of that era.)
A few days later, a Time writer stopped me in the hall and asked me to join the Newspaper Guild. At that time, and for a long time afterwards, the Time unit of the New York Newspaper Guild was tightly controlled by a small knot of Communists. I said that I did not believe that he would want me in the Guild. He thought I meant that I was so far underground that my politics were a secret from him. A great, knowing smile wreathed his rather striking face (one of Time’s editors always referred to him as “The King of the Golden River”). “Oh we know,” he said, “that you are a well-known revolutionist.” I said: “You are mistaken. I have broken with the Communist Party.” The sunlight faded from the mountaintop. He turned away, incredulous but cool. No doubt, he checked at once. A few days later, the smear campaign against me was in full swing.
This same journalist reappeared at Time (which had at last got shut of him) immediately after I began to testify about Alger Hiss, in 1948. He was canvassing my colleagues, asking them to make affidavits including “any dirt at all that you know about Whittaker Chambers.”
XIII
During my first day’s testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee, Congressman Rankin asked me if there were any Communists at Time. I answered that, like the United States Govemment, Time had had its troubles with Communists, but that, perhaps because it was a somewhat smaller enterprise, Time had been more successful in solving them.
I might as well have said: like every other publication, Time has had its troubles. There is probably no important magazine or newspaper in the country that is not Communist-penetrated to some degree. A staff member of one of the most persistently anti-Communist dailies in the country told me recently that the Communist Party book and registration number of its city editor, a man unsuspected and trusted for years, had just been discovered. So had the party book and registration number of another editor, of even longer standing and greater trust, while a switchboard operator, spotted by one of the paper’s reporters who had been smuggled into a Communist rally, turned out to be a high official in the Communist Party’s local bureaucracy. There is no defense against such infiltration except eternal editorial and personnel vigilance. Time was no more immune than any other publication, but, once it had reluctantly learned the facts of Communist infiltration, it acted with such tactful purpose that today there is not, so far as I know, a Communist writer on its staff.
Like the Government’s, the great majority of Time’s personnel was always overwhelmingly non-Communist. In fact, half the difficulty was that Communism was so remote from the experience of most Time people that they could not identify a Communist even when he was quoting Lenin. Their innocence sometimes made them almost perfect dupes. An instance stays in my mind.
I did presently join the Newspaper Guild, and I remember watching the Communists pop up here and there in the meetings to make their prearranged speeches about the points or people they wanted supported. The Time unit of the Guild was made up of a proletariat of file clerks, office boys, and other unskilled intellectuals whose interests the Communists were peculiarly solicitous of, for their numbers gave the Communists control. But the unit also included a sizable group of responsible writers and researchers, most of them college graduates, and, in the case of the writers, men who helped to shape the opinions of a million people every week. Yet there they sat, time and again dutifully voting what was wanted by the Communists whom most of them were completely incapable of recognizing for what they were. To them the Communists just looked like more impassioned liberals.
In those days, I had a horror of uttering half a dozen words in public. But one night the spectacle of so much passive stupidity among so many intelligent people brought me to my feet. “Can’t you see,” I stammered, “that these speakers are simply Communists and that, in voting their way, you are voting the Communist line?”
It was the first time that the hideous charge of Communism had ever been uttered in the Time unit of the New York Newspaper Guild. The meeting greeted it with murmurs of outrage from the non-Communists and a wave of pitying laughter from the Communists, some of whom just shook their heads at the hopelessness of my singular attitude. I saw that it was no use and soon after withdrew from the Guild, in spite of warnings that it was against the rules to do so.
But that night, as we left the meeting, one of the non-Communist girls, a young socialite of an old and good family, and an M.A. or a Ph.D., marched upon me. She was ultra smartly gowned and booted. But her studiedly cool and intelligent face was working in lines of most unintelligent anger. “How dare you,” she asked with the voice of Bryn Mawr but the snarl of a fishwife, “how dare you call us Communists?” It was no use to explain to her that what I had said was, not that she and others like her were Communists, but that they were non-Communists who were letting the Communists lead them by the nose. She never spoke to me again from that night until she left Time to make one of the year’s more brilliant marriages. Scores of her kind, just as impeccably pedigreed, socially and culturally poised, also staggering under M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and just exactly as witless, were to howl for my head in the Hiss Case.
The specific smear of me at Time was pitched in the same tone of pitying ridicule that greeted me from the Communists at the Guild meeting. No sooner had the Communists discovered that I was a deserter than word rippled through the Time staff that Chambers was a crank on the subject of Communism. Specifically, he suffered from a delusion that the Communists were after his life. At Time, which in those days was in effect a big fraternity where people either intangibly belonged or they didn’t, su
ch gossip was poison, not so much because of what it might imply about my past, but because it made me ridiculous. Even a year or two later, when I was working on a difficult cover story and holed up at a midtown hotel to write out of reach of the telephone and other office interruptions, I overheard my editor (no Communist at all) laughingly remark in good faith that I was writing outside the office because I was hiding from the G.P.U. The Communists only have to start the smear; the others keep it going for them.
Actually, I was struggling desperately, with the thought of my wife and children haunting me, to make good at Time. I was having to learn from scratch how to write a wholly new (and to me) rather unnatural journalistic form. There were other difficulties. In my first or second month at Time, I had, for example, to write a readable cover story on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, scarcely a line of which is intelligible to the average reader, and which few of my colleagues and, indeed, comparatively few people in the world then pretended to understand. My essay can be read in the back files of Time, together with the shorter, but much more sincerely felt obituary that I wrote during the war, when Joyce died.
The Communist whispers against me were abetted by other factors, as they always are; for the whole Communist smear strategy pivots on the knowledge that everybody is human, almost nobody can stand close scrutiny. For one thing, from the very first, I made no secret at Time of my Communist past (the Communists, of course, had the advantage of never admitting that they were Communists), and freely admitted that I had been underground. Over the years, a number of my colleagues knew what I had been doing in the past in considerable detail. Then, too, I never missed an opportunity to jab at Communism in my stories. That was completely out of line with Time’s prevailingly liberal tone and made me at best a rather unmannerly fellow.
To complete my handicaps, I was deeply and organically different from most of the people at Time. It was not only a matter of appearance. One of my colleagues always wore low white sneakers to work and another affected plaid lumberjack shirts, corduroy suits with norfolk jackets and sported a beard. But those were recognizable carry-overs of campus individualism. My lack of clothes sense was a complete lack of ability to be interested in appearance at all. My years in the Communist Party and its underground had extraordinarily unfitted me for the conventions and relationships of ordinary life.
To me many of my colleagues at Time, basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like little children, knowing and clever little children, but knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else. There were, of course, mighty exceptions. Time was tops among the world’s news-magazines, consistently able and sometimes brilliant, because of the work of a small group of men. The whole show was possible at all because, within the framework of his creation, Henry R. Luce is a publishing genius. T. S. Matthews’ contribution to the humanity of Time, both in the intellectual and personal sense of the word, cannot be overstated. There were a few others. One thinks at once of James Agee, Robert Cantwell, Robert Fitzgerald, John K. Jessup, Louis Kronenberger, Winthrop Sargeant, Tom Hyland and the late Calvin Fixx among the writers.
If Time people seemed sometimes curiously truncated to me, I hesitate to think of how I must have appeared to them, though it is a happiness to remember the generosity with which they ultimately voted me into the club. Most of them were liberals, and I was incapable of being a liberal. Nor could my chronically equable and even fun-loving manner really deceive anyone. Mine was the gayety that has been retained in spite of life; their gayety was carefree. Experience had implanted at my core a somberness that I thought to conceal except in my writing, but whose mute shadow was stronger than I realized and sometimes made people uncomfortable. I was drinking one night with a group of my higher editorial colleagues. Among them was David Hulburd, then, I believe, the chief of Time’s domestic correspondents, more recently the author of a best-seller about the Pasadena school situation. As the evening wore on, Dave suddenly shifted uncomfortably and said: “Look at Chambers. He just sits there, saying nothing, just watching us and thinking and thinking.”
In my first months at Time, too, I inevitably went through the “Time curve” that most Time writers suffer and all experienced editors expect, dread and allow for. The curve graphs the rise and fall of a writer who begins by writing more or less naturally. Then he becomes conscious of something extra that Time requires. He tries to achieve it by writing “Time style,” which he invariably succeeds only in parodying because his predicament proves that he has not yet grasped the fact that the style is a discipline of expression, and not a horseplay with queer words and elliptical phrases. The more he parodies, the worse he writes. The worse he writes, the more often his stories come back from the editor to be written over. The more he must rewrite, the more frantically insecure he feels, as writer and jobholder, and the worse he rewrites. Meanwhile, nobody comes near him to advise or guide. He is left strictly alone in his little bare Time office, which, if a writer is in form, is one of the best workshops ever devised, but if he is near disintegration becomes a setting for Time’s special version of the pit and the pendulum.
There used to be a story at Time about a writer who went through the curve, month after month, with some of his stories accepted by the editor, but more of them rejected for rewrite, but with never a word of encouragement, advice or even criticism—in fact, no editorial contact of any kind. The monumental silence was driving the writer slowly mad when one day his heavy door swung open and his editor appeared holding the writer’s latest story. “At last,” thought the desperate man “now the axe—or he will tell me what’s the matter.”
The editor placed the copy on the writer’s desk and laid his finger on the word “fourteen.” “At Time,” he said, “we write all numbers above twelve as numerals.” Then he walked out, and the door swung softly shut cushioned by compressed air.
Caught between a mounting sense of my failure as a writer and the intolerable atmosphere, due in part to my own behavior, but also to Communist whispers, I used to stand at my office window, stare across the Hudson and the blue Jersey Hills toward Maryland and my family, and long for release from my ordeal. “Will no one,” I used to wonder, “have the simple mercy to fire me?” I could not quit. And each time I touched bottom, something drove me back to write and rewrite and rewrite my rewrites, all unconscious that a dozen eyes were watching the performance with great interest and understanding. I knew only that I must not fail. I must not fail because my family depended on me to succeed; but, above all, because the opportunity to succeed had been granted me by a kind of miracle, to prove whether or not there was in me something worth saving. If I succeeded in saving it, it would not be for myself primarily, but for something else.
I sat one night with a woman who became one of my closest friends at Time. “I don’t know how you stand it,” she said, “and I don’t see how you’ve survived.” “I stand it,” I said, “for the same reason that I’ve survived. I cannot really be beaten because on my side is a Power.”
XIV
From the first, I had wanted to write foreign news for Time. I was soon given a chance. The Foreign News staff was large. I was the last and least of its members. Moreover, I soon had reason to suspect that the writer who assigned and edited my copy was at least a close fellow traveler.
At first, I was given some Russian news to write. I wrote the stories with a tone clearly unfriendly to Communism. As stories, some of them turned out rather well. They clearly displeased my colleague. Soon I received no more Russian news to handle.
Instead, I got the stories that nobody else wanted, those that were least newsworthy and least likely to “make the book.” Thus when the “marked copy” of the magazine reached the editor, with each writer’s name indicated on the story h
e had written, my name would sometimes be missing altogether, or would appear only on a few lines of copy. In short, I was not worth my wages.
I did the best I could with the stories I had been given; my best was not very good. I particularly regretted the lack of background material and research that would give the stories body and color. For my stories there was seldom any research. One day, entirely by chance, I discovered why. I went to my senior colleague’s office to ask him for something. He was not there, and while I was rummaging around for whatever I needed, to my astonishment, I found buried at the bottom of his basket, neatly clipped together in one lot, all the research for my week’s stories.
A few days after that discovery, my editor called me into his office. He spoke frankly. My senior colleague, he said, had made an issue of me. He had announced that either I went or he went. Time valued my colleague highly, he said—and let his voice trail off. I expected him to say also that I was fired. Instead, I was put back to reviewing books. It was the spin of the coin for me at Time. To this day I know no practical reason why I was not fired. But for several years, it was the unwritten rule at Time that Chambers’ treatment of Communism and Russia was so controversial that he was not to be permitted to write directly about either.
I was soon put to writing such comparatively uncontroversial departments as Art and Cinema. Even so, the forbidden subject sometimes crept in. My delighted review of the movie, Ninotchka, threw my fellow-traveling researcher into hideous gloom, while my review of The Grapes of Wrath (as smart cinema but mischievous propaganda) brought me my first invitation to a Time editorial lunch. At the head of a table, lined by my colleagues, sat Henry R. Luce, whom I had seen only distantly before, usually as the subject of awed whispers. He proved to be entirely human and thanked me briefly for my piece. It was almost the first kind word that I had ever received at Time.
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