Whittaker Chambers on Couch

By Alvin Beam

The ninth book, across the years, on the controversial, emotions-stirring Chambers-Hiss case of the late 1940s comes from a San Francisco psychoanalyst, Meyer A. Zeligs.

Dr. Zeligs' effort, Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Cham bers and Alger Hiss (Viking, $8.95), offers nothing new on the direct question of whether Hiss was indeed, as Chambers asserted, a secret member and informant of the Communist party while in high government service in the 1930s. But it does cast new doubt-or at least casts doubt in a novel fashion--on the general credibility of witness Chambers.

Dr. Zeligs' look at Hiss, who served 44 months of a five-year federal prison term for alleged perjury in answering Chambers' testimony, is hardly more than a conventional character study, basically friendly, with a minimum of scientific probing and terminology. Chambers gets the full psychoanalytical treatment.

AN ODDITY of this is that Chambers, who died in 1961, had refused in life to talk with Dr. Zeligs or to cooperate in any other way-while Hiss spent many hours with him and made personal correspondence and other files available.

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The study of Chambers, perforce is based on his autobiography, "The Witness,' on much of his other written work, on interviews with people who knew him and on public documents.

The word "fratricide" in the book's title stems from Dr. Zeligs' postulation of Chambers' involvement, deeply and guiltily, in an envied younger brother's suicide at 22-with transfer, nearly a decade later, of his fantasies about the brother to a new acquaintance, Hiss, then a rising young man in

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the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Washington. Hiss too would have to be destroyed.

Dr. Zeligs finds in Chambers' youthful poetry and fiction a strong trace of homosexuality and he presents an allegation, by an anonymous Chambers' acquaintance, of an overt homosexual act. He prodence, some of it noted by duces an abundance of eviother writers on Chambers, of lying, deception and sponging.

BUT HIS MAJOR emphasis is on the tortured world of fantasy in which he maintains Chambers lived-from childhood through his literary jobwork and Communist years and into his career as a brilliant senior editor of Time magazine.

When Dr. Zeligs is through, there is little credibility left in the man who ended the public life of Alger Hiss, who by then had served in high State Department posts and gone on to the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But that little may still be enough to keep alive in the minds of most readers the opinion-however cheerfully or somberly held, however reluctantly or unreluctantly -that Hiss was guilty of perjury as formally charged.