Notes On "Witness"

(Just now out in e-mail)

I fully realize that I completely stiffed your 2/17 note, asking about "Witness". It's been on my mind ever since. That week, I was ass-deep in two large AutoCAD projects (I ignored my blog for at least three whole days), and the thing just got trampled underfoot.

Know what? If someone were to pay me for a review, I'm pretty sure I could buckle-down and get it done. The book has been simmering in my mind since I finished it nearly three weeks ago. Really: so far, it's been subliminally unforgettable. Just lurking. There are two reasons for this: 1) the story is so naturally compelling; 2) Chambers really is a sensational writer.

However, I have two distinct and necessarily parallel lines of thought about it.

1) Essentially, a question: is the story told in "Witness" really so generally historically important as I think it is? I was asking myself, "Is my notion correct, that this whole episode was really seminal to an awakening of just how serious was the communist threat in those times?" The necessary implication of an affirmative answer is that Chambers is every bit the hero that he serves up in "Witness", whether he set out to claim the mantle or not. (It's fairly clear that that's not what he had in mind, but I don't see how readers on the correct side of the thing could avoid that conclusion.) He's the anti-Benedict Arnold: the man who went from dreadful wrong to whatever right he could redeem, in a time when that was desperately important.

2) However, in lots of ways, he was the wrong man to conduct this fight. I can't help it: his whole religious angle on the story is completely impertinent. Many times, I've wondered just how much of the religious characteristics of conservatism as it's come down to us are directly dependent on "Witness". (Part of this goes to point one: the book's importance and influence.) His Quaker rationale for not exposing espionage just enraged me. There is a profound moral contradiction in all of this that incites nothing but my contempt. He was able to steel himself to the task, but I cannot abide his reluctance. This man should have realized all the deepest implications of the thing -- and he sometimes states them, or things very near them -- and, to my mind, that sort of conceptual clarity should have been all the reason required to take the matter to a state of total war to the best of his ability without reservation of any sort.

The title of the book is aptly chosen for its passive implication. It would have been a lie had he called it "Prosecutor", but the story should have played that way.

In lots of ways, the man was a dingbat. There are details all over the story that had me rolling my eyes in exasperation. For instance, it's utterly amazing to me that he had forgotten the nature of the documents hidden for a decade before he handed them over to officials. I've been trying to come up with an analog in the history of my own work -- a consideration of what people put into their work, how seriously they take it -- and I can't find anything like it.

I'll say this, though: he definitely, explicitly, fingered an enormous aspect of the essentials in the passage that begins on page 741:

"The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades."

I take issue with the final clause of his first sentence. He didn't "hit something else". It's the same thing. This point goes to something that's been lying in the corner rotting and smelling badly to sophisticates for decades on end, which is the crucial importance of thinking in principles. It's an epistemic point, with extremely pervasive political implications, running straight down to the present day.

Along the way, I also spent time with, among other volumes, Roger Morris' 1990 biography of Richard Nixon. Necessarily, he devotes a great deal of attention to the case, but not without first carefully couching it in terms of a cynical political (read: election) squabble with no greater implications. To Morris, the whole thing was just a goof cooked up by people sitting around bored in a committee room and looking for a new angle on headlines. He gleefully cites Karl Mundt's answer to a reporter asking "what others the Committee believed to be involved": "We'll name them as they jump out of windows." Never, in any of it, does he remotely acknowledge that Lawrence Duggan really was a Soviet spy. This is a simply unconscionable omission of a necessary element of context. It didn't surprise me, though. It's just the way these people refuse to think.

"Weebles wobble but they don't fall down."

Addendum -- this correspondence continues on to this vital point, on the matter of Chambers being "the wrong man to conduct this fight":

> I don't think so. It's a tough angle for you to take,
> but without his faith he clearly could not have
> gotten it done.

I understand that, and I don't dispute it. Like I keep saying, "Everybody gets to go to hell in their own go-cart." (I imagine that you can stand the joke.) I wouldn't have a problem if he'd kept the religious rationale completely personal, but he goes far past that. He pits the fundamental antagonism as "Communism vs. Christianity" and that's simply not true. Now, I wouldn't even have a problem if the man wanted to sneer at me because I'm an atheist. I could take that with relative equanimity. But the fact of the matter is that I am no Christian who is also at least as adamantly opposed to communism as he is. The importance of this as a fact is crucial. He wouldn't have to like me, but he would bloody well have to come to grips with at least one probative exception to his assertion, or be dismissed as someone not to be taken seriously on this, his chosen point of ground.

> I've had a general stall out of all my reading. I
> put Witness and about four other things down
> and have gone into thinking mode. But each
> paragraph in Witness was like a trip back into
> the deep heart of what Henry Miller called
> "the street of early sorrows" -- the homely
> etchings of American life and its version of
> ancient ignorance.

(nod) That's true. I know what you mean.

It gets (generally) better as it goes, though. I don't know where you were when you put it down last, but the last third or quarter of it really is heroic.

> There are those moments, not when our
> parents die and we go through the pagentry
> of death and grief and remembrance, but
> when the dog dies, or when as kids, we
> get left out, or mocked, or catch our
> parents falling down drunk. I think that
> Chambers, as far as I've gotten with him
> so far, understood "the street of early
> sorrows" and realized that it was the big
> hole at the middle of everyone's donut, and
> that Communism will fill that hole so quickly
> with its cement that many people will not
> even be living when it's done with them. He
> understood it as a kind of living death: Hiss,
> for example.

Yes. I can see that.

To me, though, the far larger issue is the matter of lessons not learned. It's the same problem that infuriates me about having to -- essentially -- fight the American Revolution all over again, conceptually, two hundred-odd years after the thing was so crucially done the first time. Every day, I look upon an elect of philosophical zeros prattling utter horseshit in stark defiance of facts of reality and the evidence of history, and I just want 'em all to drop down dead because I know there is simply no reasoning with someone like that.

That's the largest context in which I put "Witness" after fifty-two years of its existence and everything attached to it.