SOURCE: Buckley, William F., Jr. “The Poetry of Friendship.” National Review 49, no. 22 (24 November 1997): 57-8.

In the following laudatory review of Notes from the Underground, Buckley describes the friendship between Chambers and journalist Ralph de Toledano, asserting that the letters “beckon to sensitive readers who care about great feats of literary expression.”

Readers drawn to this book [Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960] will come in looking for yet more from the numinous pen of Whittaker Chambers, and they will find his special idiom abundantly there. But they will have also absorbing material from Ralph de Toledano. “You are essentially a poet,” Chambers wrote him in 1958. “Hence I suspect that, like me, your grasp of pretty damned near all is intuitive.” Chambers was ever so gently discouraging Toledano from publishing a book on atomic espionage, which advice Toledano—a poet, but also a working...