Notes and Asides.(Saul Bellow and Whittaker Chambers)(Column)

-- Dear Bill: Reading in James Atlas's life of Saul Bellow, I came across the following passage, at once amusing and somewhat maddening. As it begins, in June 1943, Bellow is (apparently) on the brink of being hired as a staff writer at Time.

There was [Atlas writes] just one hurdle-a formality, [Time editor Dana] Tasker assured him. He would have to see Whittaker Chambers, who edited the back-of-the-book pages on books and the arts. The house highbrow at Time, Chambers prided himself on his grasp of Western culture and was rumored to keep a score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in his drawer. He was also a fanatical anticommunist [sic]. "In his own person he had experienced history," Bellow wrote of Chambers in one of his many unpublished manuscripts about those years, describing him as "a GPU agent turned Quaker" and a chain-smoking paranoid with rotten teeth. "Passing through hell, the suffering servant of God, he brooded from his high window over downtown New York, stuffed with thoughts about the future of Christianity, the fate of the West, the spiritual struggle with satanic totalitarianism." Chambers had done more damage as an editor, Bellow joked, than as a spy.

At their interview-as Bellow often told the story, frequently altering the details-Chambers faced away from him, enthroned on a wing chair. Was Mr. Bellow familiar with Wordsworth? he asked. (Sometimes it was Blake.) Bellow protested that Wordsworth had nothing to do with writing journalism for Time, but Chambers adamantly pursued his English-lit line of questioning. Wordsworth was a Romantic poet, Bellow replied. And what was his greatest poem? Chambers persisted. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Bellow ventured.

He was sorry, Chambers announced curtly, there was no place for Bellow at Time. The only poem of Wordsworth's that counted was "The Excursion." Bellow had flunked. As he was leaving, a disgruntled employee shook his hand and assured him it was his "lucky day." (Years later, John Berryman told Bellow that he had suffered an identical humiliation at Chambers's hands.)

My first thought on reading this was something like terror. I thought, "What if I, meeting this man whom I ...