Volume 3, Number 7 · November 19, 1964
The Perjured Saint
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
Cold Friday
by Whittaker Chambers
Random House, 327 pp., $5.95
This collection of posthumous fragments—notes, letters, articles—is of little importance in itself. The main themes—Communism, God, Whittaker Chambers—have already been thoroughly ruminated in the copious pages of Witness, and Cold Friday offers us no new revelations of any great importance about any of them. What the book does, however, is to raise again the interesting question of the liar as saint: the question of why this veteran liar should have become a saint in the eyes of so many intelligent people who dislike lies, or say they do. That is the question I propose to discuss.
Review, 3103 words
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