You may have heard that Ayn Rand really disliked C.S. Lewis. But do you know what happened when Saul Bellow met Whittaker Chambers?
Bellow’s biographer James Atlas provides the anecdote. The context is that Bellow has very nearly gotten a reporting job at Time magazine via Dana Tasker, an editor there. It a gig that would mean a real windfall for the struggling author:
There was just one hurdle–a formality, Tasker assured him. He would have to see Whittaker Chambers, who edited the back-of-the-books 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. “In his own person he had experienced history,” Bellow wrote of Chambers in one of his many unpublished manuscripts about these years, describing him as “a GPU agent turned Quaker” and a chain-smoking paranoid with rotten teeth.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 in Rockefeller Center 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.)
Lee Trepanier, an editor of A Political Companion to Saul Bellow, writes that in Bellow “we discover is a trajectory from the youthful idealism of Trotskyitism, gender equality, and disaffiliation with his ancestral Judaism to a growing cynicism, misogyny, racial anxiety, and a return to his religious roots. However, Bellow did not become a ‘neoconservative,’ as he is sometimes portrayed, but rather was predominantly concerned about the viability of civilization and high culture in America. It was only in these areas of high culture and the arts that Bellow joined the Political Right.”
And as for Whittaker Chambers, he famously detested Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which he said “can be called a novel only by devaluing the term” and characterized as “a massive tract for the times.”
“Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal,” said Chambers. And here’s a clip where William F. Buckley Jr. discusses Rand and Chambers’ review, which appeared in the pages of the National Review.