The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (review)

The British journalist Alistair Cooke noted the ordeal of “a generation on trial” when Whittaker Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the mid-twentieth century, and even now, more than 60 years later, Canadian forests continue to be chopped down to provide books on the case that exposed Soviet espionage (and some denial of its danger) during the most anxious phase of the Cold War. Although Chambers died in 1961, his legacy has lingered in conservative and neoconservative precincts because of the apocalyptic warnings he issued on behalf of an embattled Western civilization. Posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984, Chambers called himself “a man of the Right” (p. 241) rather than a conservative. The correspondence between him and William F. Buckley, published as Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, 1954–1961 (New York: Putnam, 1970), reveals considerable ambivalence about the admiration that the National Review bestowed on this former agent of Soviet military espionage. Buckley became, after all, an unabashed McCarthyite, which Chambers never was. Is there perhaps another way to slot Chambers, whose play-for-keeps morbidity made him seem a character Fyodor Dostoevsky might have invented, into an American political tradition known for its pragmatism and its resistance to ideological intensity?

Why not Lionel Trilling, for instance? He and Chambers began their careers as writers for the same magazine, The Morningside, published by undergraduates at Columbia College. Though never a Communist, Trilling could not entirely escape the allure of Marxist literary criticism, with its proclivity for connecting works of the imagination to their historical setting. His The Middle of the Journey (1947), an inert novel that is the “keystone” of Michael Kimmage’s study of parallel political lives, comes alive only when Gifford Maxim, inspired largely by Trilling’s remembrance of Chambers, joins the action (or rather the inaction). After surfacing to testify against Hiss, Chambers charged that the liberal imagination weakened the West in its desperate struggle against the dynamic totalitarianism of the East. But Trilling, in his The Liberal Imagination (1950), published the same year in which Hiss went to prison, probed for weak spots of sentimentality and vacuity in order to strengthen the tradition that political families like the Roosevelts and then the Kennedys personified. Chambers cultivated a wary friendship with Richard Nixon, whereas Trilling voted Democratic. Though both Chambers, the onetime senior editor of Time, and Trilling, the prototypical contributor to the Partisan Review, came to share a revulsion against Stalinism, is that common stance so striking that it provides the intellectual sparks for an entire book?

The regrettable answer is: no. The similarities of Kimmage’s two figures are not so prepossessing as to add any fresh perspectives to the work that either left behind, and the contrasts are not deep enough to be likely to revise any reader’s sense of divergent paths to anti-Communism. The careers of Chambers and Trilling are simply not commensurate. The Conservative Turn reveals, for example, how low an opinion the Columbia University professor had of the Time editor’s famous efforts at haute vulgarisation (such as an elucidation of Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History). Trilling considered such writing platitudinous. Nor could he bring himself even to admire Chambers’s huge, haunted, exquisitely wrought autobiography. Kimmage turns up no evidence that Trilling had any influence on Chambers, either in political positions or in literary taste. This asymmetry is reminiscent of Trilling’s own fierce repudiation of the critical effort to contrast Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, whose differences (according to The Liberal Imagination) were not merely of social attitudes but of sensibility, sophistication, and especially artistry and a fundamental capacity to write fiction. Trilling’s interest in politics was modest, subdued, and dispassionate. Even during the crisis of the Second World War, he claimed to be doing something “useful” (p. 166) by writing a short book...