Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  This cry is uttered at an especially hard time, during the liberal press’s predictably negative reviews of Chambers’s memoir Witness, but it’s not terribly different from much of what’s spoken before and later. Immediately after telling de Toledano of “an effort to spare you the darker moods of the last few months,” Chambers asks him: “Do you think I care whether I get out of this bed again or not?” Reserving suicide as an option, he considers the convenient weapon he carries inside his body, a heart so damaged by disease that any overexertion will kill him: “God has given me one out of infinite mercy. It is in my left side. I have only to run upstairs to use it.”

  The man whom FBI agents called “Uncle Whit” relies on de Toledano and his wife, Nora, for practical assistance with the foreign editions, dramatic adaptations and lawsuits growing out of Witness, as well as for considerable help to Chambers’s son. In return, Chambers dispenses a wisdom that de Toledano seems almost worshipfully eager to hear. Politically marginalized at Newsweek, the younger man listens to Chambers’s pleas to hang on there, such as this one offered shortly after Republicans have recaptured the White House in 1953: “these jobs on the established journals … offer the best base from which the Right may utilize the changed climate to infiltrate and practice a little cell fission.”

  There is no doubting the strength of the bond between the two men. “When I was alone, you walked beside me,” writes Chambers. “And when I was without a roof, you sheltered me.” Inclined to second-guess his own letters, and destroy them before they can make it into the mail, Chambers writes to few others (“The bile is better kept within”). With de Toledano, he is tripped up by the unconscious telepathy that runs between sympathetic letter-writers: “I can’t remember whether I wrote to say, of course come when you can get away. If I didn’t, it was simply because that was what I thought when I read your letter.”

  However nourishing it may be to correspondents, mutual admiration is not very satisfying to later readers. In Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers–Ralph de Toledano Letters, the younger man never quite loses an acolyte’s reverence; when he attempts to trim a British edition of Witness, it feels as if he’s “cutting living flesh.” A sonorous morbidity dominates both sides of the exchange, each man outdoing the other with fortissimo chords. “In this tremendous room,” writes de Toledano, “even a whisper has the sound of doom.” Their literary range is rich—the two talk of Rilke, Shakespeare and Cervantes—but even on this ground there are signs of self-consciousness and strain.

  Only in the late 1950s does de Toledano seem to have raised the possibility of one day publishing “our noble correspondence,” but the letters’ stentorian quality makes one feel that he and Chambers had this idea in the back of their minds from the beginning. A reader must struggle—in considerable fascination—with the way the book’s dual protagonists, as well as the United States, simply cannot win. The truth may eventually have given Chambers his Medal of Freedom (in 1984, no less), but it never set him free. In fact, if he had lived to accept the honor from Ronald Reagan’s hand, it is doubtful he would have felt much triumph. Publishing the letters in 1997, de Toledano made plain that, despite everything since 1989, Chambers would see no reason to retract his famously pessimistic declaration, in Witness, about having left the winning for the losing side. The Soviet empire’s demise, de Toledano argued, “did not demonstrate the strength of the West but a viral infection which the sapping of the world’s immune system could not fight.”

  Chambers already saw, in 1956, a growing resemblance between the United States and the USSR. Technology was socializing the West, and its capitalists were killing souls just as surely as the commissars were:

  I, for one, have never envied a capitalist in my life. Quite the contrary.

  They, their minds, their notions, and ways of life, fill me with nothing so much as an irrepressible desire to keep as far away from anything like that as possible. They fill me not with envy, but with abhorrence tempered by compassion. I do not want to liquidate them; I want to get away from them. They seem to me the death of the mind and the spirit.

  This comes from Chambers in rural Maryland, but it sounds like Solzhenitsyn, twenty-two years later, delivering his jeremiad against the West in Harvard Yard. For anyone who ever admired the jut of Barry Goldwater’s jaw, or the goofy grace of Ronald Reagan’s smile, the Chambers–de Toledano letters amount to the strangest sort of anti-anti-Communism, a fraternal echo chamber of high regard and dankest despair.

  LIKE “SISTER CITIES” and Esperanto, the “pen pal” phenomenon—not quite a movement, but a venerable twentieth-century activity, especially for the well-intentioned young—made its own small contribution toward piercing the long international darkness that enveloped Chambers and de Toledano. At the phenomenon’s apogee, many thousands of American students were matched with new epistolary friends, both foreign and domestic, by a giant, boxy computer inside the Parker Pen Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Most of the pairings lasted no longer than a summer romance, but some, here and there, endured for decades.

  In 2001, an American named Caren Gottesman and an Englishwoman named Carol Clarke could look back on a thirty-seven-year-long exchange that was now being reported on by a magazine writer who’d gone along to witness the pen pals’ first face-to-face meeting, in London. Clarke, by then a forty-seven-year-old receptionist and the divorced mother of four, explained: “Because Caren is so far away, I knew she would never tell anyone else. So I told her lots.” Inside Clarke’s home the women gave each other presents, one of which, amidst the charm bracelet and the necklace and the flowers, must have struck a forward-looking but slightly sad note: Gottesman presented Clarke with a laptop. One guesses that their correspondence is now instant and electronic, the visit having broken the long air-mail exchange as if it were an enchantment needing to be lifted.

  “Snail Mail Lives!” cries the homepage of The Letter Exchange, a cozy twenty-seven-year-old enterprise that makes use of the Web mostly to advertise its thrice-yearly print magazine for people in search of old-fashioned papery fellowship. A subscriber can respond to—or submit—one of the anonymous, numbered requests for mail that the publication carries, such as “4035. I enjoy baseball, music, Monty Python … movies, history, comic strips—the list goes on. Please feed my mailbox.” From its home in North Oaks, Minnesota, The Letter Exchange forwards any initial replies to an ad; after a connection has been made, correspondents may write each other directly. “No prisoners or singles ads,” the website gently warns, though it does encourage fantasizing: “Ghost Letters let you write in character as historical or fictional people (or whatever!)” From the look of the Ghost Letter listings in one old issue, “whatever” seems to include a lot of movie characters: “Red Sonja, Where are you? Miss you very much.—Conan.”

  Any actual meeting between Conan and Sonja seems so certain to guarantee anticlimax that we can be pretty sure these two role-players never intended to proceed from missives to mattress. And yet, probably one defining circumstance of every friendship-by-mail is the desire of its participants to move, like Caren Gottesman and Carol Clarke, toward a moment when both parties step from behind the curtain. No matter how sincere or formal, long-term epistolary relationships always have an element of the tease, a should-we-or-shouldn’t-we subtext that only complex logistics and insufficient funds may keep from being directly discussed.

  The most famous postal friendship of modern times may be the twenty-year exchange begun in 1949 by Miss Helene Hanff of New York City and the employees of Marks & Co., London booksellers at 84 Charing Cross Road. The first letter from Miss Hanff—as her principal correspondent, Frank Doel, will call her for quite some time—is a response to the firm’s ad in the Saturday Review: “The phrase ‘antiquarian booksellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare e
ditions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.” Hanff encloses a list of her “most pressing problems,” two of which are soon alleviated by the delivery of essay collections by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson.

  After a bit of coaxing, Frank Doel emerges from the initials he’s been concealing himself with, and he is soon learning more than he would ever himself ask about his new customer and correspondent. Miss Hanff, in her early thirties, works out of an underheated brownstone in the East Nineties, reading scripts and also writing them, for the new black-and-white television Adventures of Ellery Queen. Thanks to her comma-spliced wisecracks and his clerkly fastidiousness, the Hanff-Doel letters become a winning vaudeville of American sass and British reserve. Her mock scoldings about the slow pace of Marks & Co.’s commerce (“Dear Speed—You dizzy me, rushing Leigh Hunt and the Vulgate over here whizbang like that … it’s hardly more than two years since I ordered them”), or against the shop’s disgraceful use of old book pages for wrapping paper, are always met with his muted forbearance: “please don’t worry about us using old books such as Clarendon’s Rebellion for wrapping. In this particular case they were just two odd volumes with the covers detached and nobody in their right senses would have given us a shilling for them.” After eight years have passed, one can hear Doel finally acquiring a bit of Hanff’s mischief, when he tells her about a crush of American tourists who’ve been visiting the shop, “including hundreds of lawyers who march around with a large card pinned to their clothes stating their home town and name.”

  Hanff’s own liveliness extends to a penchant for personifying whatever books make the trip across the ocean: “SAM PEPYS … says to tell you he’s overJOYED to be here, he was previously owned by a slob who never even bothered to cut the pages.” Not having the money to finish college, Hanff had derived her literary tastes from reading the criticism of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “whom I fell over in a library when I was 17.” She prefers old books to new; antique prose to the revised-standard sort; frankness to expurgation; and nonfiction to novels. She would rather read Chaucer’s diary, if he’d written one, than The Canterbury Tales. Only Jane Austen makes a temporary dent in her bias toward reality: “went out of my mind over Pride & Prejudice which I can’t bring myself to take back to the library till you find me a copy of my own.”

  The letters between New York and London lack nothing in the way of plot. Their referential weave—replies alluding to letters just received, or to ones far back in the exchange—makes for a natural storytelling that most novelists, vexing themselves with the creation of a narrative arc, can only envy. Once Hanff begins sending food parcels to the still-rationed Londoners who work in the shop, there are questions to be settled (next time, fresh eggs or powdered?) and an expanding cast of characters wanting to get in on the epistolary act. Cecily Farr (“I do hope you don’t mind my writing. Please don’t mention it when you write to Frank”) says she’s decided that Miss Hanff must be “young and very sophisticated and smart-looking,” a series of inferences Miss Hanff quickly corrects: “I’m about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler. I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks.”

  Within a couple of years, even Frank’s wife is writing.

  The underlying drama is, of course, whether Helene and Frank will ever lay eyes on each other. By 1952, she has an open invitation to come to England, and she gives it careful thought, confiding both her desire and reluctance to a friend: “I write them the most outrageous letters from a safe 3,000 miles away. I’ll probably walk in there one day and walk right out again without telling them who I am.” The possibility of going over for the queen’s coronation is soon dashed by dental bills: “Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me,” she tells Frank; “teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.” In 1956, the owners of her brownstone are making renovations and evicting the tenants, and she needs to put what savings she has toward a new apartment.

  The years pass, references to Churchill giving way to mention of the Beatles, whom Frank “rather” likes, if only “the fans just wouldn’t scream so.” In September 1968, Hanff opens a letter with:

  “Still alive, are we?” and the two of them appear ready to settle into a new phase of gentle complaints about growing older but no richer. As it turns out, within three months of the joking salutation, Frank Doel is suddenly dead, from peritonitis that follows a ruptured appendix. Hanff receives word from the shop secretary—somebody new, one feels sure—who closes by asking: “Do you still wish us to try and obtain the Austens for you?”

  By the time she at last travels to England, the shop itself has closed for good. Its sign will find a new home in Helene Hanff’s apartment, once it’s filched for her by a fan of the letters that she published, in 1970, as 84, Charing Cross Road.

  CHAPTER THREE Advice

  LORD GORING: I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

  Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

  EPISTOLARY COUNSEL operates with a number of advantages over the face-to-face variety. Its written form betokens a certain effort—and hence, perhaps, sincerity—that oral persuasion may lack. If spoken advice is one’s “two cents,” the inked kind now costs at least forty-four. Paper permits no interruption and preserves advice for purposes of reinforcement, unless of course the recipient chooses to rip it up, a gesture that can be as satisfying as stabbing Polonius behind the arras.

  In letters, as in person, advice is often offered with its own prefatory suggestion—advice about the advice—that the recipient should “feel free to take it or leave it.” The admonition relieves the advisee of pressure and the advisor of potential embarrassment: if the advice is rejected, no matter; its extension was never a matter of consequence. How awful, by contrast, to have been in the position of the Archbishop François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, a tutor to young seventeenth-century noblemen who wrote letters to his star charge as if the fate of all France lay in the balance.

  The author of Télémaque (1699), an instructive romance on politics and world affairs, Fénelon gradually fell into the role of epistolary advisor to any number of wellborn scions: “Fulfill your vocation—” he writes the duc de Chaulnes in 1713; “mine is to torment you!” Indeed, his letters to the young and the noble are exacting little syllabi of good sense. The Vidame d’Amiens, something of a wastrel, gets lectures against ambition; in favor of piety; against flattery; for charity. He is told to “eschew melancholy, folly, and false modesty; be neither proud nor pliant,” and advised, dispiritingly enough, to put aside pleasure until such time as “the passion is gone out of it.”

  Fénelon’s highest and most tricky responsibility is the duc de Bourgogne, grandson of the aging Louis XIV and second in line to the throne. The duke is told, repeatedly, to model himself on Saint Louis, who before canonization had been the merely royal Louis IX: “Before you inherit his crown see to it that you inherit his virtues.” Less remotely, Fénelon points to the current pretender to the English throne, the would-be James III, as a fit, if unexciting, subject for emulation: “He is very self-possessed, good-tempered, and with no quirks of character, does not possess a great deal of imagination and acts at all times by the light of reason.”

  When need be, Fénelon’s mentoring can move from the pious to the politic. In 1708, he tells the duke to remain at the head of the armies around Lille, even if French forces fighting the War of the Spanish Succession can’t lift the siege of the city; sticking it out will give him political credit he can draw on later. The pupil, when requesting counsel, can get equally specific: “I would take this opportunity of asking you whether you think it is right that I should have my headquarters in a convent as is the case at present.”

  Fénelon is a bit besieged himself. Out of favor at court—thanks to Télémaque and for promoting heresy—he is forbidden to speak with the duc de Bourgogne without a third person there to hear the conversation. He must send his letter
s of advice through another tutor, the duc de Beauvilliers, and take care not to put the duc de Bourgogne’s name on the envelope. Grateful for the royal heir’s loyalty, Fénelon calls him “our dear Prince” in letters to the go-between, who becomes one more recipient of Fénelon’s counsel. “Take care of your health,” the archbishop writes Beauvilliers; “no medicines but a rest occasionally, freedom and high spirits.” He adds advice on how to advise: “Concern yourself with the inner rather than with the outer life of Monsieur le Duc de Bourgogne.” So compulsively, in fact, does Fénelon counsel change and correction and proactivity that it becomes difficult for a reader of the letters to remember that the heresy with which the author had been associated was the passive, soul-surrendering doctrine of “quietism.”

  His theology can’t stop him from fretting over his protégé, or from worrying about himself. In 1712, the duke—not yet thirty and by now the dauphin—suddenly dies. The seventy-three-year-old Sun King, having outlived his son and grandson, remains on the throne, and Fénelon must now nervously write to the duc de Chevreuse about what he long ago transmitted in those unmarked envelopes:

  Was there not, among our dear Prince’s papers, an article of mine and some letters which I wrote to him during the siege of Lille? Was there not also a gold reliquary containing a piece of the jawbone of St. Louis which I once gave him? Are all his papers now in the possession of the King? …