This is an excellent anthology of Whittaker Chambers' writings from his moonlighting as a communist journalist to the period after his fall out with the Reds. He follows his subsequent migration to Time and his days penning for the National Review. If you've read and enjoyed his autobiography, Witness, than you will probably enjoy this book.

For forty years the accepted establishment view of Whittaker Chambers was that of a fat, rumpled weirdo, obsessed, presumably for some kind of degenerate sexual reasons, with the destruction of Alger Hiss, a man who was in every way his better. Even the publication and excellent sales of his extraordinary memoir, Witness, could not erase that caricature from the minds of the elites. I remember a PBS miniseries about the Hiss case, which must date from the late 70's or early 80's (I checked; it looks like it was, fittingly, broadcast in 1984), which portrayed Hiss as a victim, if not an outright innocent. But then the pendulum began to swing :

-First came the 1978 publication of Allen Weinstein's authoritative book, Perjury : The Hiss-Chambers Case, which convinced most of the holdouts of the guilt of Alger Hiss.

-Then, in 1984, Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

-Five years later came this collection of the journalism of Whittaker Chambers, Ghosts on the Roof, which began the process of restoring his literary reputation.

-The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of government secrets from both US and Russian files which exposed both the extent and success of Soviet efforts to penetrate the US government, media and Hollywood in the 30's & 40's and peace groups in the subsequent decades.

-In 1995, the VENONA intercepts were revealed, with their decoded messages confirming that the Rosenbergs and Hiss, among others, had been Soviet agents.

-Finally, the publication in 1997 of the first serious biography, Whittaker Chambers : A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus, and the truly bizarre moment on Meet the Press when Clinton CIA nominee Tony Lake could not bring himself to declare Alger Hiss guilty, even fifty years after the fact, forced a major re-examination of Chambers, his legacy, and the legacy of those who were simply unable to accept his charges no matter the evidence (like Lake and like CNN in their Cold War series).

After all of that, it is perhaps now possible to contemplate Chambers the writer in a somewhat more neutral, less partisan, light. This collection includes everything from political essays to reflections on the Hiss case to movie and book reviews to a set of historical essays on Western Culture written for LIFE. Among the best pieces are a review of Finnegans Wake and a tribute to Joyce on his death; a review of the movie version of Grapes of Wrath, which Henry Luce said was the best film review ever published in TIME; a really scathing review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; and the prophetic title essay.

...

The outstanding piece though may well be the one that Teachout chose for the title. Ghosts on the Roof ran in TIME on March 5, 1945, shortly after the Yalta Conference, when the Allies were still basking in the glow of having cooperated to defeat Hitler. With admirable foresight, Chambers pricked this gonfalon bubble. The essay fantasizes that the ghosts of Nicholas and Alexandra and the other murdered Romanovs descend upon the roof of the Livadia Palace at Yalta to watch the goings-on. There they meet Clio, the Muse of History, who has likewise come to observe the Big Three Conference. When History expresses her surprise at finding the Romanovs there, they reveal that they have become fans of Stalin and have converted to Marxism, actually Stalinism. The Tsar and Tsarina explain that Stalin is achieving conquests which even Peter the Great never dared and now come Britain and America as virtual supplicants, unwittingly giving him the opportunity to grab more land in the East in exchange for entering the war with Japan. They share the Marxist belief that in the years following the war, England and the U.S. will collapse because of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Clio tells them that this will not happen, that the years to come will see a conflict between two opposing faiths, leading to "more wars, more revolutions, greater proscriptions, bloodshed and human misery." The Tsarina asks why she does not intervene to avert this, and Clio answers that humans never learn from History and :

Besides, I must leave something for my sister, Melpomene to work on.

Melpomene, Clio's sister, is the Muse of Tragedy. Here, years before he became embroiled in the Hiss case, long before the Cold War started, before the Atomic Age had even dawned, is Whittaker Chambers warning the West of the future it faces and forecasting it uncannily.

These essays, and the many others included here, make for really interesting reading. They reveal Chambers to be both a gifted and a prescient writer. His opinions on the Arts stand up extremely well. His assessments of political situations were as much forty years ahead of their time; particularly perceptive in this regard is one ("Soviet Strategy in the Middle East" [National Review October 26, 1957]) in which he predicted how the Soviets would foster Arab radicalism in the Middle East. All in all, the book serves to add depth and heft to a man who spent almost half a century as a caricature, who was more an undeserving victim of Anti-Anti-Communism than any of those who were blacklisted were "victims" of Anti-Communism. It is altogether fitting that the 20th Century, which Chambers did so much to redeem, ended with his reputation ascendant and those of his opponents in rapid decline.

GRADE : A

Most people know Whittaker Chambers as the former Communist spy who gave testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the process, he blew the cover of fellow agent, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking official in FDR's State Department.

That was in 1948. Even in recent times, with evidence by now thoroughly convincing, liberal Democrats have refused to believe that Hiss, a left-wing icon, was a traitor. In the introduction to this book, Milton Hindus writes that their lack of contrition makes relevant Chambers's work, some of which is collected for the first time in this anthology of journalism. For a wider view of Chambers, outside the famous case depicted in Witness, one can turn to these articles, reviews, and stories written between 1931 and 1959.

The chronological arrangement of the pieces allows the reader to see the progress Chambers made from his revolutionary fiction for The New Masses, through his authoritative anti-Communism as an editor at Time, to the mature conservatism he composed for National Review from his farm in Maryland late in life. In all there is a steady introspection and honesty. He was that rare thing, Hindus reminds us - his own man.

There is also a good bit of variety: reviews of Ayn Rand, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and George Santayana; a prophetic short story about the rise of Russian imperialism; a history of western culture; and a moving piece about the resistance of Maryland farmers to the intrusion of bureaucrats from the Department of Agriculture.

The review of Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is particularly devastating. Chambers found this popular book to be less a novel than a political tract in which Rand presented a melodrama meant to depict the world's problems, then, in the sort of authoritarianism she denounced, set herself up as that world's savior. Chambers criticized Rand's inability to see shades of grey. In effect, the review drew a line between conservatism and libertarianism, with Chambers and Rand at opposite poles, a line just as sharp as the one Chambers often drew between Christianity and Communism.

In leaving the Communist Party, Chambers was convinced that he was joining history's losing side. It should not surprise us that the word "witness" in Greek also means "martyr," for in Chambers work there is more than a hint of martyrdom. At times his gloomy pessimism about the fate of the West trips his logic, causing not so much a leap of faith but a jump to a conclusion.

Yet I believe that Ghosts On The Roof still has something to offer: for the craftsmanship of its fine prose; for the challenging breadth of its world view; and for a perspective on the central political and moral events of the twentieth century, a perspective based not on theory but on experience, on having felt these conflicts in his bones.

Quick, name another newspaperman/critic/author from the Twenties who is a household name eighty years later. The answer is: We still have Mencken, so who cares!

It's amazing how H. L. Mencken's career as a wit and cynic has survived his mortal life. Every quotation book except the most insipidly sweet has a generous helping of his wit. His will specified that his diaries be published thirty years after his death, and his autobiography thirty-five years (IINM) from the same event. So, in the past decade and a half, we kept having these time-delayed literary stink-bombs going off, causing as much uproar among the present-day Sensitivity Commissars as his stuff did among the more conventionally upright in his time. And then prime material like in this book has been lying in closets, forgotten, for decades.

This book was compiled from a sheaf of manuscript that Mencken had been working on, intending for a sequel to _A Mencken Chrestomathy_, when he was incapacitated by his career-ending stroke. This material is not floor sweepings, as might be feared with a posthumous sequel consisting of diverse material from a considerable range of time. _A Second Mencken Chrestomathy_ is as rich a feast of Henry Louis' output as could be imagined. Much of it had been through Mencken's revision process: a piece would originally appear in the newspaper, then HLM would spiff it up for one of his _Prejudices_ collections, then it would get a going over for inclusion in the _Chrestomathy_. Editor Terry Teachout has done a great job boiling the results down to the present tome.

By most accounts, Mencken was a kind and generous man. So the arrogance bordering on misanthropy towards his fellow Americans on display here makes for unsettling reading. As much as one wants to laugh along at his deprecations of Congressmen, mobs, and professors, one knows that one's own turn on the dunking platform is coming. In my case, it's the South, which, intellectually speaking, according to HLM, barely exists. Ouch!

Unlike a critic like, say, Randall Jarrell, Mencken didn't try or pretend to be anything other than a critic, his language book and some poetic juvenalia aside. Instead, he poured quite a lot of creative energy into his criticism--in some especially vinegary pieces here, the words practically curdle on the page. He was a Libertarian at bottom, convinced of the mindlessness of the populace at large, the rascality of the elected officials, the wrong-headedness of any kind of professional uplifters--and yet seemingly peace with himself and the world, and quite happy to be here to see the show. Times changed, and he fell out of vogue with educated types. In the Twenties his libertarian instincts set him in opposition to Prohibitionists and Gantry-ish clergy. But in the Thirties the same instincts caused him to pish-tosh Marxists and other social engineers--and suddenly he was alone, as Marxism had quite carried the field of upper-class American intellectuals. (Read Sidney Hook's _Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century_, for more of that aspect of that era.)

His literary criticism passed through the same prism. In this collection, he damns with faint praise _The Grapes of Wrath_, for Steinbeck's depiction of the Joads' being the victims of anything other than their own inferiority. And he praises _Ethan Frome_ for its depiction of the utter joylessness of the New England peasantry. In music criticism, German music was the high-water mark. In political reporting, democracy was a circus run from the monkey cage. In such a long, public, and highly outspoken career, there were of course errors of more than just tact. He judged the onset of the Second World War by the experience of the First--indeed, his pride in his German heritage made him more wrong than he might have been. Disbelieving in goodness, he never perceived Hitler's unique evil.

But all this is a matter of record. If you love Mencken but have missed this collection, you'll want to lock yourself in your room with it for a week at least.

Terry Teachout's new biography is largely a rehash of Fred Hobson's biography of Mencken and to complete the feeling of déjà vu, the same controversies that greeted Hobson's book swirl around this one as well. Unlike Lord Byron or de Sade, Mencken led a life that was fairly bourgeois and apparently book reviewers resent it, thus playing up his alleged anti-Semitism. It is something of a fad these days to unmask literary anti-Semites and those who do it sometimes make themselves look foolish. One dunce who reviewed this book for the Seattle Times and compared Mencken unfavorably to Voltaire was apparently unaware of a large body of criticism condemning Voltaire for his anti-Semitism. Teachout himself is apologetic about Mencken's attitudes to the Jews, but doesn't go far enough in pardoning him.

Part of the demonizing of Mencken these days might be attributed to the fact that American society is still intolerant of a critical attitude to religion. Mencken was indeed critical of Judaism. However, as readers of "Treatise on Gods" know, Mencken was also critical of Christianity and Islam. A rationalist to the core, Mencken had little time for people who believed in the supernatural. He detested the religious impulse in Christians, Jews and Muslims alike.

As for those who claim that Mencken is racially prejudice against the Jews, they will have to explain away the fact that, as Teachout shows, Mencken had many close Jewish friends and that he used harsh language toward everyone (the English, the Irish, African-Americans, Italians), not just against the Jews.

As so often with the genteel, the critics of Mencken have focused almost entirely on his manner of writing than rather than the substance of his writing. He argued quite forcefully for a humane foreign policy. Unlike the timid Walter Lippman, Mencken urged the US government to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. For a man who is so often characterized as nasty, he was surprisingly pacific in some of his politics: he was against participation in both world wars.

Much has been made about Teachout's use of Mencken's unpublished writings for this biography and many reviewers have implied that these writings reveal his dark side. Actually, these unpublished writings appear to reveal some new facts, not new prejudices. If Mencken said nasty things in the diaries, a look at his published writings will show that he was nasty there as well. By the way, he could also be nice sometimes too. Again it's just that Mencken's style is far more biting than anything allowed in today's journalism, which is apparently stocked with aspiring political consultants and public relations people.

The best account of the events of Mencken's life is still his Days books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days). The collection of his newspaper columns, The Impossible Mencken, is better reading than this biography and a good record of Mencken's opinions on the issues of the day.

Terry Teachout is one of the most reliable, readable and fair-minded conservative journalists and critics we have. "The Skeptic" is his long-awaited biography of H.L. Mencken, perhaps the most important American journalist of the first half of the 20th century and a huge influence on modern conservativism. This book is relatively compact and briskly-paced, which sets it apart from most modern biographies. But it doesn't leave anything important out; if you want to read just one book about Mencken, this is probably it (although once you are exposed to the guy, you almost certainly won't want to stop at one.) Walter Lippman said that Mencken "calls you a swine and and imbecile, and increases your will to live." That's the secret of Mencken's appeal; what Teachout calls an "18th century force and candor and rationality" wrapped in a rollicking comic prose that is absolutely unforgettable. During the 1920's, he was almost worshipped as a cultural deity in America because of his stylistic greatness. And in the world of ideas, Mencken could be thought of as a founder of today's libertarianism. But Teachout is clear-eyed enough to see the man's foibles as well as his many virtues. There was the postumously notorious anti-Semitism, which also caused Mencken to seriously underestimate Hitler. (During and after World War II Mencken kept a public silence about these subjects; I think feelings of embarrassment might have played a role.) Mencken was oblivious to the burgeoning artistic Modernism of the 20's; Hemingway, Faulkner, jazz, and Frank Lloyd Wright were beyond his comprehension. And he could be a bigot and a bully. "In Memoriam: W.J.B", his brilliant obituary of William Jennings Bryan is one of the greatest pieces of invective ever. But Mencken never realized his malice and close-mindedness became every bit as great as Bryan's was. And in his high-handed dismissal of religion he didn't see that there was more than one way to be a Puritan: he was one about his atheism and radical skepticism. But Teachout restores Mencken to his rightful place as not merely a gifted comic writer, but a serious (if flawed) thinker on ideas that are still very relevant.

Terry Teachout's new book about H.L. Mencken is a revelation, largely because it is no mere hagiography; nor does it attempt to smear Mencken as a one-dimensional bigot. Instead, Teachout admits that while yes, Mencken was anti-Semetic, often petty, and sometimes out of touch (especially from about 1935 on), he was also a brilliant writer, master critic, and unparalleled wit in the Mark Twain tradition. Teachout provides a nice balance of the personal and the public man (using previously unpublished letters and journal entries) so that it is often the case that Mencken's own words indict him (rather than the P.C. crowd taking things out of context). What we are left with is a man still worthy of admiration (at the very least, for a journalistic style that is unrivaled), but one who deserves to be further scrutinized for his contradictions. Bravo, Teachout, for giving us a living, breathing Mencken rather than a caricature.