'Warmth of Heart and Incandescence of Mind'

A reader writes:

“Several months ago I read a wonderful post about Lamb on your site. I searched for all the posts you’ve written about Lamb and I got something like 244 results. I printed out each post, punched holes in them, and put them in a thick binder. That binder has been with me for the past 3 or 4 months and I just finished the last post today. What a pleasure! Your love for Lamb is infectious. I now own the three-volume set of Lamb’s letters and the Penguin collection of Lamb’s selected prose. Thanks for turning me onto one of the most companionable authors I’ve read.”

That’s a relief. It means I’ve accomplished the goal I set for Anecdotal Evidence: to share enough enthusiasm for a writer to move at least one reader to read him. Ours is an aliterate age. Reading is an outré hobby, like collecting dental floss. I’m always gratified to discover someone reading, and doubly so when the book in question is a good one. In a time of social distancing I appreciate my reader’s use of companionable. That’s how I think of the books that mean the most to me. The OED’s definition – “sociable, friendly; pleasant or agreeable as company” – fits the books and magazines on my bedside table – Tolstoy, Eric Ormsby, Rebecca West, The New Criterion. I think too of Henry Van Dyke’s Companionable Books (1922) and George Stuart Gordon’s More Companionable Books (1947). The latter includes a chapter devoted to “The Humour of Charles Lamb.”

In the spirit of companionability, let me share an article by Peter Baehr in National Review devoted to two of my most companionable writers, “Whittaker Chambers Through the Eyes of Rebecca West.” Chambers reviewed West’s The Meaning of Treason in the Dec. 8, 1947 issue of Time (collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959; ed. Terry Teachout, Regnery Gateway, 1989), and West reviewed Chambers’ Witness in the June 1952 issue of The Atlantic (collected in Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul; ed. Patrick Swan, ISI Books, 2003). Here is the conclusion of “Circles of Perdition,” Chambers’ review, which was featured on the cover of Time:

“For all her warmth of heart and incandescence of mind, she is seldom averse to a good brawl. She listens, calmly poised for pouncing, when she is called a Fascist, a Communist, an anti-Semite, though she is none of those things. The root of the misunderstanding is that in a world racked by partisan passion, which more & more insists on viewing men in black & white, as caricatures of good or evil, she finds them blends of both. Her view asserts the faith that what distinguishes men, not so much from the brutes as from their more habitual selves, is the fact that however tirelessly they pursue evil, their inveterate aspiration, invariable even in depravity, is never for anything else but for the good.

“This faith Rebecca West tries to express with a tonality equal to its meaning. Thus, in a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time.”