FRIENDSHIP AND FRATRICIDE: AN ANALYSIS OF WHITTAKER CHAMBERS & ALGER HISS by Meyer A. Zeligs, M.D. 476 pages. Viking. $8.95.
This is not a conventional biography, but something that might be called a "psychograph." Like the recently published study by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt of President Wilson, it applies psychoanalytic theory to a subject the author did not know, let alone treat.
To a whole new generation, the Hiss-Chambers case is only a dim memory or a hearsay mystery, but it retains its historical significance and fascination. If one assumes that Hiss was guilty, his behavior made perfect sense; by his denial of the charges against him, he was trying to hide his Communist past. But if one assumes that Hiss was innocent, the behavior of his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, made no sense at all; what could his motive have been for accusing an innocent man? The only plausible answer: he must have been mad. From the start, people who could not accept Hiss's guilt took refuge in that belief. Now a reputable psychiatrist has written a massive book in support of that thesis.
In 1950, a federal jury found Hiss guilty of lying when he denied having passed state secrets to Chambers, who had been a Communist spy. San Francisco's Dr. Meyer A. Zeligs asserts that he is not concerned with anyone's guilt or innocence. But he admits that "whatever imbalance" the book contains he has "carefully left untouched." That is putting it mildly. Zeligs has, in effect, undertaken to rewrite Chambers' autobiography, Witness, and reshape its author to fit a Procrustean bed of neuroses. To a more casual reader, Witness, while a little Wagnerian in style, presents the picture of a very emotional man who was driven by a capacity for total dedication, first to Communism and then to combatting Communism. But to Dr. Zeligs, Chambers was a sex freak, a gnome of evil spirit, whose life was a phantasmagoria of "psychic manipulations."
From his birth to his death (hinted in the book to be suicide, even though he was known to be seriously ill with heart trouble), Whittaker Chambers was a guilt-ridden man, in Zeligs' view. He felt guilty for his painful birth, guilty for his "hatred" of his parents, and guilty for his love of his brother Richard, a wild, leching lad who committed suicide at 22. Chambers' whole life, to hear Zeligs tell it, became a search for a mystical brother whom he could force to re-enact a ritual death pact. The consummation of that search was the symbolic destruction of his "mystical brother," Alger Hiss.
Pumpkin Idol. The rest of the analysis is equally imaginative. When Chambers climbs through a window (in the course of his tempestuous courtship of his future wife) he is not climbing through a window, he is "symbolically re-enacting the fantasy of his birth and the near-loss of his mother." His gift for self-dramatization and his vivid imagination are turned into alleged proof that nothing he said could be true.