In "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers, p. 134
The Education of
Whittaker Chambers by Les Miserables -
“Witness”[1]
“I lifted from the
top of one barrel a big book whose pages were dog-eared, evidently from much turning
by my grandfather. It was an old-fashioned book. The text was set in parallel
columns, two columns to a page. There were more than a thousand pages. The type
was small. I took the book to the little diamond-shaped attic window to read
the small type in the light. I opened to the first page and read the brief
foreword…
“The book, of
course, was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
– The Wretched of the Earth. In its
pages can be found the play of forces that carried me into the Communist Party,
and in the same pages can be found the play of forces that carried me out of
the Communist Party. The roots of both influences are in the same book, which I
read devotedly for almost a decade before I ever opened a Bible, and which was,
in many respects, the Bible of my boyhood. I think I can hear a derisive
question: ‘How can anyone take seriously
a man who says flatly that his life has been influenced by Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables?” I understand. I can
only answer that, behind its colossal failings, its melodrama, its windy
philosophizing, its clots of useless knowledge, its overblown rhetoric and
repellent posturing, which offend me, like everybody else, on almost every
page, Les Miserables is a great act
of the human spirit. And it is a fact that books which fall short of greatness
sometimes have a power to move us greatly, especially in childhood when we are
least critical and most forgiving, for their very failures confess their humanity.
AS a boy, I did not know that Les
Miserables is a Summa of the revolt
of the mind and soul of modern man against the materialism that was closing
over them with the close of the Middle Ages and the rise of industrial
civilization – or, as Karl Marx would later teach me to call it: capitalism.
“I took the book
downstairs and read for the first time that first line of its story: In 1815,
Charles Francois Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.’ I do not know how many
times I have since read that simplest of leads, which has for me, like many
greater first lines, the quality of throwing open a door upon man’s fate.
“I read and reread
Les Miserables many times in its
entirety. I taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things - Christianity and revolution. It taught me
first of all that the basic virtue of
life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power
are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the
mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is
authentic and consistent. It taught me justice and compassion, not a
justice of the law, or, as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends
human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where
justice and compassion are one. It taught me that, in a world of force, the
least act of humility and compassion requires the utmost exertion of all the
powers of mind and soul, that nothing is so difficult, that there can be no
true humility and no true compassion where there is no courage. That was the
gist of its Christian teaching. It taught me revolution, not as others were to
teach me – as a political or historical fact – but as a reflex of human
suffering and desperation, a perpetual insurgence of that instinct for justice
and truth that lay within the human soul, from which a new vision of truth and
justice was continually issuing to meet the new needs of the soul in new ages
of the world.
“I scarcely knew
that Les Miserables was teaching me
Christianity, and never thought of it that way, for it showed it to me, not as
a doctrine of the mind, but in action in the world, in prisons, in slums, among
the poor, the sick, the dying, thieves, murderers, harlots and outcast, lonely
children, in the sewers of Paris and on the barricades of revolution. Its
operation did not correspond to anything I knew as Christian in the world about
me. But it corresponded exactly to a need I felt within myself.
“Les Miserables gave me my first
full-length picture of the modern world – a vast complex, scarcely human
structure, built over a social abyss of which the sewers was the symbol, and
resting with crushing weight upon the wretched of the earth (…).
“It was, above
all, the character of the Bishop of Digne and the stories about him that I
cherished in Les Miserables. As a boy
I read them somewhat as other people read the legends of the saints. Perhaps it
is necessary to have read them as a child to be able to feel the full force of
those stories, which are in many ways childish and appeal instantly to the
child mind, just as today they appeal to what is most childlike in me as a man.
“That first day,
when I sat in our living room and read how the Bishop came to Digne, I knew
that I had found a book that had been written for me. I read how the Bishop
moved into his palace with its vast salons and noticed next door a tiny
hospital with its sick crowded into a few small rooms. The Bishop called in the
director of the hospital and questioned him: How many rooms are there in the
hospital; how many sick; how many beds in each room? ‘Look,’ he said at last,
‘there is evidently some mistake here. You have my house and I have your. Give
me back my house and move into yours.’ The next day the bishop was in the
hospital and the patients were in the palace. ‘He is showing off,’ said the
solid citizens.
“The Bishop’s
views on human fallibility fixed mine and made it impossible for me ever to be
a puritan. ‘To be a saint,’ he sometimes preached to the ‘ferociously
virtuous,’ ‘is the exception; to be upright is the rule. Err, falter, sin, but
be upright. To commit the least possible sin is the law for man… Sin is a
gravitation.’
“He first raised
in my mind the question of relative human guilt. Everybody was praising the
cleverness of a public prosecutor. A man and woman had been arrewt3ed for some
mischief. There was no evidence against the man. By a trick, the prosecutor
convinced the woman falsely that the man had been unfaithful to her. She
testified against him. ‘Where are the man and woman to be tried?’ asked the
Bishop. ‘At the assizes;’ ‘And where,’ asked the Bishop, ‘is the prosecutor to
be tried?’
“The Bishop lodged
in my mind a permanent suspicion of worldly success and pride of place that
never changed in all the changes of my life. He was not one of the ‘rich
mitres.’ In Paris he did not ‘catch on.’ He was not considered ‘to have any
future.’ For, said Hugo, ‘We live in sad society. Succeed – that is the advice
that falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging corruption.’
“The story about
the Bishop that I liked best also invovlved the question of worldly
appearances. Once day the Bishop had to visit a parish in the steep mountains,
where no horse could go. Few bishops would have gone there, either. The Bishop
of Digne went, riding on a sure-footed donkey. The solid citizens of the town
turned out to greet him. When they saw the Bishop climbing down from his donkey,
some of them could not hide their smiles. ‘My bourgeois friends,’ said the
Bishop pleasantly, ‘I know why you are smiling. You think that is pretty
presumptuous of a poor priest to use the same conveyance that was used by Jesus
Christ.’ Thus I first learned the meaning of the word bourgeois, so that,
unlike most Americans, I was quite familiar with it when I came across it later
in the writings of Marx and Lenin.
“Finally, the
Bishop’s view of the world left a permanent, indelible impress on me: ‘He
inclined toward the distressed and the repentant. The universe appeared to him
like a vast disease; he perceived fever everywhere; he auscultated suffering
everywhere. And without try8ing to solve the enigma, he sought to staunch the
wound. The formidable spectacle of created things developed a tenderness in
him…
“… Even as a
Communist, I never quite escaped the Bishop. I put him out of my mind, but I
could not put him out of my life.”
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