Yours Ever (12 page)

In his memoirs, de Gaulle referred to Roosevelt as “this artist, this seducer.” The quick note was his means of turning on the charm. In talking Harold D. Smith out of quitting as budget director, Roosevelt tells him: “I would no more accept your resignation than fly by jumping off a roof.” He convinces Harold Ickes not to leave the administration by saying that they have been “married ‘for better or worse’ for too long to get a divorce or for you to break up the home.” Such cozy expressions give a kind of rhetorical ballast to all his snazzy epistolary sailboats.

Beyond the immediate demands of the in-basket, Roosevelt likes to maintain genuine, ongoing correspondences: with his old Groton headmaster, Endicott Peabody; his childhood friend, now Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King; and his new close associate, Winston Churchill, to whom letters, before mixing business with pleasure, sometimes begin “Former Naval Person.” If the president’s faceless bonhomie toward Stalin looks naïve or just plain silly, Roosevelt’s natural informality acts, in the case of Churchill, as a sort of wartime crash-construction program, speeding up the relationship’s development at a pace beyond the natural. As the editors of their correspondence note, “the two leaders did not really know each other at all at the time the war broke out.” Their single meeting, which Churchill could not even remember, had been at a London dinner in 1918, which FDR had attended as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy.

Before they meet again, in the North Atlantic during the summer of ‘41, Roosevelt’s side of their exchange has a tentative feel to it. “I wish much that I could talk things over with you in person,” he writes early in 1940; a year later he is dispatching Harry Hopkins to London to “talk to Churchill like an Iowa farmer,” and sending another letter via the just-defeated and newly cooperative
Wendell Willkie. Only after their own face-to-face encounter does Roosevelt rise to his usual full epistolary gusto, one ingredient of which is the chance to talk about third parties behind their back. Sizing up de Gaulle and his Free French rival General Henri Giraud, Roosevelt confides to Churchill his “very distinct feelings that we should not send further equipment or munitions to the French Army in North Africa if our prima donna is to seize control of it from the old gentleman.” The casualness of such letters, which did their bit to save the world, can be regarded as one more species of wartime deception.

When Roosevelt writes to Churchill, a connoisseur of language is addressing one of its princes. In one unsent letter he tries to deflate the prime minister’s interest in Basic English (“I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only ‘blood, work, eye water and face water,’ which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words”), and he learns to ration his own broadcasting partly because he has seen the diminishing returns from “too much personal leadership” by Churchill.

The president writes a good many letters to European royalty just before and during the war; the recipients are the only people in the world who can leave him a little starstruck. He offers shelter to several sets of royal offspring, and the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries makes him even more conscious of his Dutch ancestry than he had been. There is a familial feel to the letters being sent Princess Juliana (“Affectionately” from “your old uncle”) and her mother, Queen Wilhelmina. With the monarchs of Europe he could now play knight chevalier, and after years of noblesse oblige toward destitute Americans, his fealty must have been a relief. “You do not know it,” he writes Wilhelmina in 1939, “but the only time I have seen you was when we were both children—and you were driving in one of the parks at The Hague.” When five years later things are reaching their victorious conclusion, he expresses a wish to the exiled Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxemburg (“Dear Lottie”) that he “could stand on the street corner to welcome you back to the city.”

The state of others’ health always offers Roosevelt a chance
to display some cheering, if passionless, affection. (Ira Smith, the White House mails chief, never found “anything particularly personal” in Roosevelt’s “almost professional attitude of good-fellowship,” and a reader of his letters may not either.) When any appointee is under the weather, he approaches them as “special consulting physician” with a tip-top bedside manner. In the summer of ‘35, ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long is ordered to “Watch out for that tummy!” while over in Moscow, Ambassador Bullitt is reassured that “the small growth on [his] spine will develop eventually into wings!” One would have thought he was a perfectly well man himself. Writing these letters may have given him the intermittent illusion that he was.

Roosevelt liked to remember himself as a young assistant secretary, made for merriment and fast on his feet. If years later, as president, he tried micromanaging any part of the government, it was the Navy. Two days after Pearl Harbor, he would be writing Captain John R. Beardall about plans for a ship called the
Sea Cloud:
“I incline to her use as a weather patrol ship, that her four lower masts be retained and that she be rigged on these masts with two jibs and four trisails.” The
Sea Cloud
was a yacht, undergoing conversion, as he had so long ago, to more serious uses.

IN THE LETTERS
of Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss is often “Alger,” not “Hiss,” for a reason beyond the two men’s having once (pace Hiss) known each other. After Chambers left the Communist party, even after he exposed Hiss and brought about his imprisonment for perjury, the two men had something fundamental in common, a peculiar position in the world that made them into familiars. Both were creatures of faith, their “case” an article of belief to supporters on each side of it. As Chambers puts it, both men were pursuing “a mystery in the religious sense.”

Following Hiss’s conviction, Chambers had little taste for combat of any kind. He preferred to remain on his Maryland farm, nursing his deep glooms and “almost incurable wound.” In June 1952, he writes to his fervent supporter, the conservative journalist
Ralph de Toledano, about passing “hours of bitterness which can only be called crippling. While they last, and they come unexpectedly and last for long times, half a day, a whole day, I am unfit for any good use. I woke at dawn the other morning, and, half asleep, felt a sense of pain and distress, and slowly realized, as I wakened more, that it’s because I was sorry that another day had come and that I must live through it.”

This cry is uttered at an especially hard time, during the liberal press’s predictably negative reviews of Chambers’s memoir
Witness
, but it’s not terribly different from much of what’s spoken before and later. Immediately after telling de Toledano of “an effort to spare you the darker moods of the last few months,” Chambers asks him: “Do you think I care whether I get out of this bed again or not?” Reserving suicide as an option, he considers the convenient weapon he carries inside his body, a heart so damaged by disease that any overexertion will kill him: “God has given me one out of infinite mercy. It is in my left side. I have only to run upstairs to use it.”

The man whom FBI agents called “Uncle Whit” relies on de Toledano and his wife, Nora, for practical assistance with the foreign editions, dramatic adaptations and lawsuits growing out of
Witness
, as well as for considerable help to Chambers’s son. In return, Chambers dispenses a wisdom that de Toledano seems almost worshipfully eager to hear. Politically marginalized at
Newsweek
, the younger man listens to Chambers’s pleas to hang on there, such as this one offered shortly after Republicans have recaptured the White House in 1953: “these jobs on the established journals … offer the best base from which the Right may utilize the changed climate to infiltrate and practice a little cell fission.”

There is no doubting the strength of the bond between the two men. “When I was alone, you walked beside me,” writes Chambers. “And when I was without a roof, you sheltered me.” Inclined to second-guess his own letters, and destroy them before they can make it into the mail, Chambers writes to few others (“The bile is better kept within”). With de Toledano, he is tripped up by the unconscious telepathy that runs between sympathetic letter-writers:
“I can’t remember whether I wrote to say, of course come when you can get away. If I didn’t, it was simply because that was what I thought when I read your letter.”

However nourishing it may be to correspondents, mutual admiration is not very satisfying to later readers. In
Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers–Ralph de Toledano Letters
, the younger man never quite loses an acolyte’s reverence; when he attempts to trim a British edition of
Witness
, it feels as if he’s “cutting living flesh.” A sonorous morbidity dominates both sides of the exchange, each man outdoing the other with fortissimo chords. “In this tremendous room,” writes de Toledano, “even a whisper has the sound of doom.” Their literary range is rich—the two talk of Rilke, Shakespeare and Cervantes—but even on this ground there are signs of self-consciousness and strain.

Only in the late 1950s does de Toledano seem to have raised the possibility of one day publishing “our noble correspondence,” but the letters’ stentorian quality makes one feel that he and Chambers had this idea in the back of their minds from the beginning. A reader must struggle—in considerable fascination—with the way the book’s dual protagonists, as well as the United States, simply cannot win. The truth may eventually have given Chambers his Medal of Freedom (in 1984, no less), but it never set him free. In fact, if he had lived to accept the honor from Ronald Reagan’s hand, it is doubtful he would have felt much triumph. Publishing the letters in 1997, de Toledano made plain that, despite everything since 1989, Chambers would see no reason to retract his famously pessimistic declaration, in
Witness
, about having left the winning for the losing side. The Soviet empire’s demise, de Toledano argued, “did not demonstrate the strength of the West but a viral infection which the sapping of the world’s immune system could not fight.”

Chambers already saw, in 1956, a growing resemblance between the United States and the USSR. Technology was socializing the West, and its capitalists were killing souls just as surely as the commissars were:

This comes from Chambers in rural Maryland, but it sounds like Solzhenitsyn, twenty-two years later, delivering his jeremiad against the West in Harvard Yard. For anyone who ever admired the jut of Barry Goldwater’s jaw, or the goofy grace of Ronald Reagan’s smile, the Chambers–de Toledano letters amount to the strangest sort of anti-anti-Communism, a fraternal echo chamber of high regard and dankest despair.

LIKE “SISTER CITIES”
and Esperanto, the “pen pal” phenomenon—not quite a movement, but a venerable twentieth-century activity, especially for the well-intentioned young—made its own small contribution toward piercing the long international darkness that enveloped Chambers and de Toledano. At the phenomenon’s apogee, many thousands of American students were matched with new epistolary friends, both foreign and domestic, by a giant, boxy computer inside the Parker Pen Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair. Most of the pairings lasted no longer than a summer romance, but some, here and there, endured for decades.

In 2001, an American named Caren Gottesman and an Englishwoman named Carol Clarke could look back on a thirty-seven-year-long exchange that was now being reported on by a magazine writer who’d gone along to witness the pen pals’ first face-to-face meeting, in London. Clarke, by then a forty-seven-year-old receptionist and the divorced mother of four, explained: “Because Caren is so far away, I knew she would never tell anyone else. So I told her lots.” Inside Clarke’s home the women gave each other presents, one of which, amidst the charm bracelet and the necklace and the flowers, must have struck a forward-looking but slightly sad note: Gottesman presented Clarke with a laptop. One guesses that their
correspondence is now instant and electronic, the visit having broken the long air-mail exchange as if it were an enchantment needing to be lifted.

“Snail Mail Lives!” cries the homepage of The Letter Exchange, a cozy twenty-seven-year-old enterprise that makes use of the Web mostly to advertise its thrice-yearly print magazine for people in search of old-fashioned papery fellowship. A subscriber can respond to—or submit—one of the anonymous, numbered requests for mail that the publication carries, such as “4035. I enjoy baseball, music, Monty Python … movies, history, comic strips—the list goes on. Please feed my mailbox.” From its home in North Oaks, Minnesota, The Letter Exchange forwards any initial replies to an ad; after a connection has been made, correspondents may write each other directly. “No prisoners or singles ads,” the website gently warns, though it does encourage fantasizing: “Ghost Letters let you write in character as historical or fictional people (or whatever!)” From the look of the Ghost Letter listings in one old issue, “whatever” seems to include a lot of movie characters: “Red Sonja, Where are you? Miss you very much.—Conan.”

Any actual meeting between Conan and Sonja seems so certain to guarantee anticlimax that we can be pretty sure these two role-players never intended to proceed from missives to mattress. And yet, probably one defining circumstance of every friendship-by-mail is the desire of its participants to move, like Caren Gottesman and Carol Clarke, toward a moment when both parties step from behind the curtain. No matter how sincere or formal, long-term epistolary relationships always have an element of the tease, a should-we-or-shouldn’t-we subtext that only complex logistics and insufficient funds may keep from being directly discussed.