The View from Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir

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The Barnes & Noble Review
"Letters are, for me, the most effective biographies and almost equally valuable as history," wrote Alger Hiss from the United States Penitentiary at Lewisburg in 1954, "— not only the writers but their social settings come alive more truly than through any other form of literature." In The View From Alger's WIndow, Hiss's son takes this statement as an article of faith. Through excerpts and interpretation of letters his father sent from prison, Tony Hiss brings to light the sympathetic side of the accused cold war spy, contending that the warm, upright, vital man they portray is the real Alger Hiss.

The public knew Hiss only as the man convicted of spying for the Soviets in the late 1930s and '40s. Before charges were leveled against him in 1948, Hiss appeared to be a patriot, serving as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a State Department official under FDR (and one of the senior American officials at Yalta in 1945), and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When Whittaker Chambers denounced Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee (first claiming that Hiss was a Communist and later alleging that he was a spy), Hiss's family and friends were shocked. The Hiss they knew was not the cold, cruel man Chambers described. But, as Tony Hiss points out, "you can't prove a negative," and Hiss was found guilty of perjury (though not of espionage; the statute of limitations on espionage had expired).

Tony Hiss's memoir doesn't exactly seek to prove a negative. In fact, it doesn't face the issue of Hiss's guiltorinnocence head-on. Instead Tony introduces us to his father, a family man who worked hard to be present for his wife and son even as he was physically absent from them, with visits allowed only once a month for two hours. Hiss was a faithful correspondent, and The View From Alger's WIndow consists largely of extracts from his letters from prison, discovered by Tony after Hiss's death, along with other family correspondence.

Tony Hiss makes one thing clear from the outset: "There is nothing in any of the six decades of letters that in any way either corroborates the accusations of treason and espionage...or gives even a suggestion or hint that he was the kind of man willing to betray his country." But he does not seek to show his father's innocence through documentary proof; what he instead tries to prove is his father's innate decency, kindness, and warmth.

In this, he succeeds. The letters from prison are charming. While Hiss the public figure could come off as clipped and remote, the private man seems engaging and playful. His letters are sprinkled with private family jokes, groan-worthy puns, rebuses, and clever drawings. He tells Tony imaginative, instructive stories about the Sugar Lump Boy, casting Tony as the mentor to the goofy and fearful "S. L. B." Hiss understood that he needed to keep morale high at home; his letters speak of stargazing with other inmates, making tasty drinks out of melted Life-Savers and chocolate bars, and, in the book's most affecting passages, teaching an illiterate fellow inmate ("B. R." — the Beginning Reader) to read and write.

Even so, Tony believes Hiss was not just putting up a good front for the folks at home. He asserts that prison left Hiss not embittered but sweetened: "Alger's inner sweetness deepened and intensified, so that when the fires actually surrounded him, he was not consumed or even badly scorched. He emerged intact."

Indeed, people in Hiss's inner circle worried that this sweetness and decency did him a disservice. "Chambers was able to slap a label on you and the label stuck," wrote one of them, "and the reason why the label stuck is that you are not oily enough or greasy enough for it to slide off harmlessly. You were much too clean, too forgiving, too gentle, too honest, too loving. Such persons refuse to be slippery and so the labels stick." But to Tony, his father's serenity was invaluable. Tony speaks candidly about the problems he had as a result of the tumult during his childhood — depression, anxiety, a strange string of accidents — but is quick to assert that his father's loving guidance, even from prison, helped stabilize him during those difficult times.

Tony Hiss sidesteps the issues that interest political historians today, primarily the guilt or innocence of his father. Although he obviously believes in Hiss's innocence, he is much more intent on proving the goodness in his father's character and not his actions. The value of The View From Alger's WIndow is more subtle than a definitive declaration; it's a rare story of how a loving father's influence can sustain a troubled boy despite physical absence.

—Julie Robichaux

Ann Douglas

[The book] unfolds a painful story of the family as a factory of denial, offering a haunting record less of the father's innocence than of the son's loyalty....A supremely expressive son tries here to endow his inexpressive father with his own gift. We all need, sometimes desperately, not to feel fatherless. One can only be glad that Tony Hiss has found so much blood in this particular stone, but to this outsider's eyes, a stone it remains. —The New York Times Book Review

David Ignatius

...A loyal and loving memoir....The letters are endearing, if nothing else for Alger Hiss's absolute refusal to admit guilt, confess weakness, feel sorry for himself, or blame others....The larger purpose of Tony Hiss's memoir, in addition to asserting his father's innocence, is to argue that prison may actually have been the best thing that ever happened to him.
— The Washington Monthly

Francine Prose

Drawing on childhood memories, on his parents' extensive correspondence, and on the reports of other relatives and friends, Hiss pieces together, in this affecting 'son's memoir,' his ownview --- not only of Alger and of family history, but of something even harder to get into focus. He fixes his sights on the nature of evil and forgiveness, on the damaging effects of anger, fear, and lies, on the importance of loyalty, on the responsibilities of parenthood, and on the challenge of ever understanding the people we love and know best.
— Elle

Richard Hoffman

The View from Alger's Window is less about setting the record straight than about sharing with tthe world the example of a man who showed his son that a life can be well-lived, well-loved, and lit from within, even in dark times, even when it appears that one's enemies have truimphed.
— Boston Globe

Library Journal

Fifty years ago, the Hiss case transfixed the country and launched the political career of Richard Nixon. Whether or not Alger Hiss was a spy has been the subject of numerous books, but beginning with Allen Weinstein's Perjury (LJ 3/1/78), the scholarly consensus has been that Hiss was guilty. The opening of the former Soviet Union's archives has further cemented this impression, as revealed in new books like Sam Tanenhaus Whittaker Chambers (LJ 2/1/97), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona (LJ 4/15/99), and Weinstein's recent The Haunted Wood (LJ 11/15/98). Despite all this, Tony Hiss steadfastly maintains his father's innocence, and through an analysis of the letters Alger wrote to his family while serving a 44-month sentence for perjury, the son seeks to understand his father's mind and life. The result is an intriguing picture of the soul of one our country's most infamous figures. Tony Hiss's account may not change many minds as to the guilt or innocence of his father, but it does provide another piece in a complicated puzzle that still awaits solution. For libraries large and small.--Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Charles Wright

The author doesn't rehash the Hiss case or attempt an explicit defense....If The View from Alger's Window is to be believed, Hiss served his term with patience; but Lewisburg never managed to confine his imagination or his spirit.
— Biography

Christopher Caldwell

One can condemn the crimes of Alger Hiss and remark his sons' delusions without faulting Tony Hiss for writing this book....Indeed, one of the most curious things about Communists turns out to have been their consistent inability to triumph over their bourgeois feelings for their families.
— National Review

David Ignatius

...[A] loyal and loving memoir....[The letters are] endearing, if nothing else for Alger Hiss's absolute refusal to admit guilt, confess weakness, feel sorry for himself, or blame others....The larger purpose of Tony Hiss's memoir, in addition to asserting his father's innocence, is to argue that prison may actually have been the best thing that ever happened to him.
— The Washington Monthly

Boynton

Beautifully written...artful, insightful...The View from Alger's Window provides such a vivid portrait that perhaps one day Alger Hiss will be remembered as a person as well as a court case.
— The New York Observer

Kirkus Reviews

In a painful, poignant memoir, the son of Alger Hiss (The Experience of Place, 1990, etc.) proudly recalls his late father's life, trial, and sufferings. The author does not fail to sketch the well-known trajectory of Alger Hiss's tragic fall from grace: a brilliant lawyer and preeminent New Dealer, Alger Hiss became the target of allegations that he spied for the Soviet Union. Ultimately, convicted of perjury, he served over three and a half years in federal prison. The author visits the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., the somber product of 1930s penal reform that was his father's home during those years, in an effort to understand his father and bid him farewell. Though Tony Hiss's belief in his father's innocence and contempt for his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, are apparent, his goal here is not primarily to persuade the reader, but to pay tribute to a father he loved and to trace the transformative effects of his father's conviction and imprisonment on his own innocent life. Using his father's letters from prison as a starting point, the author paints a portrait of a warm, generous man, philosophical and unembittered about his experiences, whose main concern in the horror of prison life was to keep up the morale of his family, and whose integrity and kindliness, evident in his correspondence, showed the son that Alger Hiss was "the mirror image of the man he was accused of being." Tony Hiss constantly juxtaposes the image of Alger Hiss the spy, held by many people who did not know him, with that of the honorable and deeply patriotic father of his own experience, apparently shared by most of those who did. Timely in view of a recent judicial decision to declassify thegrand jury testimony in the Hiss case, this is a warm and eloquent tribute that will add to the knowledge of the principal of that case, even if it does not change many minds. (First printing of 40,000)