WHITTAKER CHAMBERS 1961-1971

It is not true that Whittaker Chambers died ten years ago. He died long before his great heart stopped beating, and he still lives today for those of us who loved him. I need only re-read his letters to me to know that he is still alive, need only look back over the years to know how real was his death. Time has slipped by, but it could have been yesterday that I sat on the porch of the “back farm” in Westminster, watching the kingfishers circle, looking down the long vista of trees and hills fading in the sloping light, listening to that quiet voice parse the agony of our era, looking into those blue and prescient eyes which minimized the pain of living even as they saw life plain.

It is hard to think of Whittaker Chambers without forgetting that in our culture men must not cry, that they must ignore the fate incumbent in the flesh. And yet for me, it is no shame to cry for there was a bond between us which transcended friendship and blood. By birth, he was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—but he was the only American I have ever known who was of heart and mind a Spaniard (“We Mediterraneans,” he would say) with that combination of Caliphate Arab, Jew and Visigoth which makes up the Spanish character, that pride grown of humility, that understanding of the human condition which found itself in a line from John of the Cross: “Pués si más vivo más muero.”

RT

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R. de Toledano

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It is not true that Whittaker Chambers died ten years ago. He died long before his great heart stopped beating, and he still lives today for those of us who loved him. I need only re-read his letters to me to know that he is still alive, need only look back over the years to know how real was his death. Time has slipped by, but it could have been yesterday that I sat on the porch of the “back farm” in Westminster, watching the kingfishers circle, looking down the long vista of trees and hills fading in the sloping light, listening to that quiet voice parse the agony of our era, looking into those blue and prescient eyes which minimized the pain of living even as they saw life plain.

It is hard to think of Whittaker Chambers without forgetting that in our culture men must not cry, that they must ignore the fate incumbent in the flesh. And yet for me, it is no shame to cry for there was a bond between us which transcended friendship and blood. By birth, he was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—but he was the only American I have ever known who was of heart and mind a Spaniard (“We Mediterraneans,” he would say) with that combination of Caliphate Arab, Jew and Visigoth which makes up the Spanish character, that pride grown of humility, that understanding of the human condition which found itself in a line from John of the Cross: “Pués si más vivo más muero.”