Anyone who later read his personal memoir, Witness, could understand why he was so tortured. His had been a childhood of unrelieved misery. His father was an alcoholic who eventually left home for a homosexual lover. As a boy, Chambers used to say to himself: “I am an outcast. My family is outcast. We have no friends, no social ties, no church, no organization that we claim and that claims us, no community.”
