Books, Arts & Manners: The Poetry of Friendship

Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960, edited and annotated by Ralph de Toledano, introduction by Terry Teachout (Regnery, 342 pp., $24.95)

READERS drawn to this book will come in looking for yet more from the numinous pen of Whittaker Chambers, and they will find his special idiom abundantly there. But they will have also absorbing material from Ralph de Toledano. “You are essentially a poet,” Chambers wrote him in 1958. “Hence I suspect that, like me, your grasp of pretty damned near all is intuitive.” Chambers was ever so gently discouraging Toledano from publishing a book on atomic espionage, which advice Toledano—a poet, but also a working journalist—did not take, suffering the displeasure of a press critical of any enterprise that focused on domestic subversion (has any book on clandestine domestic Communist activity—ever—been welcomed by the establishment press?). The friendship had taken root when Toledano covered the Chambers-Hiss trial for Newsweek. From it, much that is wonderful issued. Mutual support and affection, and a correspondence lovely and heuristic. Here are the letters from Chambers—the master—but also from Toledano, the young, learned poet/activist who in these letters records many things, among them the early disillusionments, personal and professional, of an arrested career.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960, edited and annotated by Ralph de Toledano, introduction by Terry Teachout (Regnery, 342 pp., $24.95)

READERS drawn to this book will come in looking for yet more from the numinous pen of Whittaker Chambers, and they will find his special idiom abundantly there. But they will have also absorbing material from Ralph de Toledano. “You are essentially a poet,” Chambers wrote him in 1958. “Hence I suspect that, like me, your grasp of pretty damned near all is intuitive.” Chambers was ever so gently discouraging Toledano from publishing a book on atomic espionage, which advice Toledano—a poet, but also a working journalist—did not take, suffering the displeasure of a press critical of any enterprise that focused on domestic subversion (has any book on clandestine domestic Communist activity—ever—been welcomed by the establishment press?). The friendship had taken root when Toledano covered the Chambers-Hiss trial for Newsweek. From it, much that is wonderful issued. Mutual support and affection, and a correspondence lovely and heuristic. Here are the letters from Chambers—the master—but also from Toledano, the young, learned poet/activist who in these letters records many things, among them the early disillusionments, personal and professional, of an arrested career.