THE STRANGE CASE GROWS STRANGER

IT WAS NOT my intent to confirm the guilt or establish the innocence of Hiss," writes San Francisco psychoanalysist Meyer Zeligs in the preface to his "analysis" of the Hiss-Chambers case. The disavowal is necessary. Friendship and Fratricide only further complicates the already hopelessly complicated questions surrounding Alger Hiss's alleged crime. But Zeligs is less than consistent in his avowed aims: he denies at the outset any desire to prove Hiss's innocence, because he is treading on unsure ground; later the distinction between pschoanalysis and detective-work is ignored and finally abandoned when Zeligs finds certain propositions incompatible with the possibility of Hiss's guilt. His initial disclaimer is just a way of excusing subsequent excursions into the unprovable.

The value of Zeligs' book lies in its clarification of Whittaker Chambers. Zeligs expands, revises and documents a wealth of speculations about Chambers, most of them postulated around 15 years ago, and then evolves his own explanation of the enigmatic man who became a Communist in the '20's, an underground agent in the '30's, and a prolific informer in the '40's.

The essence of Chambers' character, says Zeligs, is an overriding guilt dating back to the suicide of his brother Richard. Chambers imagined some sort of death pact with his younger, stronger and more personable brother, and since then has sought out brother-figures to befriend and betray. Alger Hiss was one such figure; son, according to Zeligs, were at least half a dozen of Chambers' fellow students, workers and party members.

The need in chambers to erase guilt by resurrecting likenesses of his dead brother, and then to prove his misculinity by destroying them, is offered by Zeligs as the motive for Chambers' falsifications against Hiss. The only problem with this neat analysis is that it applies equally well if Chambers told the truth. Whether he destroyed Hiss through real or forged evidence, his motives may still be as Zeligs defines them.

THE unswerving premises of Friendship and Fratricide, for all the author's talk of "the spirit of free inquiry," is that Hiss was innocent. By assuming rather than substantiating this, Zeligs places his analysis within an unconvincing and circular logical structure, which in turn calls otherwise well-argued propositions into question. The book fails as a whole because its often compelling psychoanalysis is so clearly founded on clumsily linked, improperly evaluated facts.

At the opposite extreme, Zeligs occasionally probes too deep for his own good. His discussion of Chambers' mistaken recollections of individual dates -- some critical, some petty -- seems particularly force. "In the second Hiss trial," writes Zeligs, "Chambers . . . testified that Richard [his brother] had died on September 19, 1926. Whether Chambers knew it or not (and it is likely that he did), September 19, 1926 was the birth date of Alger Hiss's stepson. Timothy Hobson (an easy slip away from September 9, 1926, the actual date of Richard's death)." Zeligs attempts to tie this error into a chain of meaningful mistakes on Chambers' part:

It occurred with remarkable frequency and in varying forms. I shall point up a number of others later on, as they appeared in his sworn testimony, his autobiography, and other documentary sources. Chambers' special manipulation of dates, names and other symbols included among its features a magical symbol of numerical alternates. From an examination into this area it became evident that Chambers either invented or exchanged real and imagined events. Most striking was the discovery of his manipulation of birth and death dates. For example, by substituting a birth date for a death date (or vice versa) he restored to life whomever he had earlier destroyed in fantasy. Thus he practiced a magical art of doing and undoing, warded off feelings of guilt, invoked new ideas for the future, or finessed disturbing ones from his past.

What is bothersome in this passage is not so much the meaning Zeligs attached to Chambers' misrecollections, but the weight. Never does he give the reader a sense of the wildly conjectural nature of his evaluation. Never does he acknowledge that Chambers' errors could derive not from "a magical art of doing and undoing," but from an all-too-earthly had memory. The analyst will of course, contend that people forget and remember by subconscious design, but in specific instances a man's faulty testimony -- unless it fits a really obvious pattern -- is hardly something to be strongly emphasized. One could probably pick a date of a hat and find a significance for it in just about anyone's life.

THE depth and intricacy of Zeligs' treatment of Chambers contrast sharply with the superficial generalizations in which he talks of Hiss. Where Zeligs' vision of Whittaker Chambers never crosses the line from psychological commodity to human being, his appreciation of Alger Hiss stops well short of analysis.

Zeligs draws incomplete and consequently inaccurate portraits of both men. Chambers emerges as cold, sick, and vengeful. Hiss is dry, methodical, charming and generous. While we can understand what made Hiss an appealing person we can at no time comprehend what part of Chambers' character made him even remotely tolerable, to Hiss or anyone else.

Neither picture has much bearing on the issue of Hiss's guilt. Just as an angered, homosexual Chambers could have been telling the truth, so a calm, likeable, industrious Hiss could have been lying. Zeligs gives no credence at all to his incongruous but hardly indefensible possibility. Nor does he explore a number of other, more speculative theories about the Hiss case which might have lent themselves to psychoanalytic study. Several people suspected either Hiss's wife or stepson of being involved in the passing of documents to Chambers, but Zeligs, after mentioning these hypotheses, subtly changes the subject without ever testing them out.

In one sense, Zeligs' analysis of Chambers -- the crux of his book -- is a solid contribution to an understanding of the McCarthy Era. In trials like Hiss's, there were inevitably three categories of participants: investigators, victims and informers. Chambers, for all his obvious peculiarities, had much in common with informers as a group: he was passionate, confused and fanciful, extreme both in his early devotion to Communism and in his later conversion to anti-Communism.

At first he looked to the Party for the nation's complete salvation. When he saw himself growing older and achieving as little in the hierarchy of Communism as the Party was achieving in the hierarchy of the country, he despaired of ending up on the wrong side of the fence. The ugly affairs of the Communist underground--either in fact or in Chambers' romanticized imagination--plus events in Stalin's Russia must have triggered a more sudden and violent change in Chambers than in his less devoted comrades. His total commitment became total disillusionment.

But someone as passionately devoted to a cause as was Chambers to Communism cannot readily resign himself to futility. Whittaker Chambers had made many sacrifices for utopia and could not bring himself to abandon the vision. So he about-faced his ideals to the realm of practically. Eventually he utilized his past connection to Communism as a vehicle for his own--as well as the country's--success and glorification.

In Zeligs' terms, the Communist Party -- with its potential, real and imagined, for secrecy and excitement--was the most prominent brother-figure in Chambers' life. He attached himself to an institutional embodiment of strength and masculinity, then broke with it in a dramatic attempt to assert these same qualities within himself.