The Eclipse of the Gentleman

By Malcolm Muggeridge

The Blunt affair came as no shock to the author of this Essay. He was recruited into the M16 branch of British intelligence during World War II, and operated for 18 months as a spy at Lourengo Marques in Mozambique. His boss at M16 headquarters was Kim Philby--as it turned out--of the KGB. "Intelligence gathering, "the author later observed, "is even more fantasy-prone than news gathering. In the latter, you are often expected to make bricks without straw, but in the former, to grow lemons without a tree. "He thus retired from spying with some relief at the end of the war, to "fall subsequently," he recalls, "into the more serious business of editing Punch." Since his days at the British humor magazine, he has plied his trade as a self-described "vendor of words" on radio and TV broadcasts, in magazine and newspaper articles and in a number of books, including his own pungently self-critical memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time.

In the latest outburst of spy mania, the English may be said to have embarked upon the last stages of the long drawn-out obsequies of the upper classes. Never again, we may be sure, shall we hear any serious suggestion that so-and-so, being a gentleman, may be relied on to tell the truth, be loyal to his country and behave with sexual propriety. The eclipse of the gentleman has happened stage by stage, as did that of the medieval knight at arms, with P.O. Wodehouse playing the part of Cervantes in affectionately revealing the absurdity of knight errantry in the new social circumstances.

Nonetheless, the signs were there for those with eyes to see.

Thus, when I was at Cambridge (1920-24), undergraduates like myself from modest homes and borough secondary schools tended to emulate the dress and manner of speech of the Etonians, Harrovians and Wykhamists, etc., etc., among whom they found themselves.

Nowadays it is the other way round. The richer and more upper-class the undergraduates, the more prone they are to get themselves up on proletarian fancy dress--which, incidentally, can often be quite costly--and to cultivate a nondescript accent which might belong to anyone anywhere. This is part of the worldwide social revolution for which America has provided the musical accompaniment--rock--and the uniform--jeans.

It is in relation to this social revolution rather than to any serious preoccupation with Marxism that the spy scandal must be seen. Of the four principal characters who have emerged so far, Maclean is the only one who might be assumed to have devoted any serious study to Marx's writings. Burgess's two most prized possessions, which he insisted on showing to everyone, were an inscribed copy of Winston Churchill's war memoirs and a note from Anthony Eden in his own hand thanking Burgess for being so attentive during a visit to Washington. These would scarcely rate as revolutionary trophies. Philby, the only one of the four I knew at all well, he being my wartime boss at M16, never gave me an impression of having any serious intellectual interests. I regarded him as just an adventurer, who found in Stalin's very ruthlessness something to admire, as his father, St. John Philby, the Arabist, had found in King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Anyway, his appalling stutter would have precluded any sort of Marxist dissertation: Marx spoken is bad enough, but Marx stuttered would be intolerable.

As for Blunt, he is the classic pattern of the Cambridge aesthete, with a quiet precise voice, and a taste for subdued lighting and respectfully adoring young men. In some ways, given the difference between Cambridge, Mass., and Cambridge, England, he is reminiscent of Alger Hiss. He mentioned in his apologia that in the '30s he was drawn to Marxism and the U.S.S.R. in the light of Chamberlain's appeasement policy, but went on to admit that it was the influence of Burgess that led him to translate this vague sympathy into active service on behalf of the KGB. I cannot, in any case, see Das Kapital as his bedside book.

More evident than a common grasp of Marxism was the common practice of homosexuality, at least as far as Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were concerned. Here again Philby was different, being an ardent womanizer, though, it would seem, odd in his ways. His third wife, an American lady acquired in Beirut, in her excellent little book The Spy I Loved, describes how he wooed her, which involved sending her a whole series of loving messages written on tiny pieces of tissue paper, with instructions to burn them when read and carefully scatter the ash, or, if that should be inconvenient, to swallow them--an illustration of how the fatuities of espionage infect even the practice of seduction.

Without any question, however, in the '30s at Cambridge, homosexuality and leftish opinions tended to go together. For instance, many of the Apostles, an elitist society at one time dominated by [Economist John Maynard] Keynes, and closely associated with his college, King's, notoriously combined culture, Communism and the love that nowadays all too readily dares to speak its name. Also in residence at King's, and also decisively homosexual, was the famous but, as I think, much overrated novelist E.M. Forster, who provided putative traitors with a serviceable formula for justifying their treachery by insisting that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. Burgess fastened eagerly onto this line of thought, but how fraudulent it is! After all, betraying one's country would automatically involve betraying all one's friends who were also fellow countrymen: the two propositions are not alternatives but collateral.

What is it, then, that makes homosexuals tend to sympathize with revolutionary causes, and to find in espionage a congenial occupation? No doubt, psychiatrists' case books shed light on this, but just common sense suggests that the same gifts which make homosexuals often accomplished actors equip them for spying, which is a kind of acting, while their inevitable exclusion from the satisfaction of parent hood gives them a grudge against society, and therefore an instinctive sympathy with efforts to overthrow it. I remember reading an account of [Biographer] Lytton Strachey sitting on a rock in the Isle of Skye, weeping over a lost lover he had shared with Maynard Keynes, and thinking to myself how perfectly they got their own back, Keynes by inventing an economic theory which, after a period of spurious prosperity, must infallibly bankrupt the countries which adopt it, and Strachey by overturning the gods of the Victorian age, and with them the virtues such as thrift, hard work, integrity and truthfulness which they symbolized.

Such scenes can best be conveyed by the use of the word decadence, whose reality I first encountered in Weimar Germany, and which so easily turned into Hitler's Third Reich. In England they have coincided with the decline of British power and influence in the world, and the transformation of an empire on which the sun never set, into a ramshackle and absurd commonwealth in which it never rises. Whereas our grand fathers found their heroes in empire builders celebrated by Rudyard Kipling, we have had to make do with expertise in espionage celebrated by Ian Fleming and Le Carre.

Doubtless, some future Gibbon will amuse himself expatiating upon this theme, but he will still have to find some explanation for the fact that favored, pampered children of the Establishment like Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt should have seen fit to be tray their country, their culture and their class in order to help advance the power and influence of the most ruthless, philistine and materialistic autocracy the world has ever known. Brooding upon this, he will surely note that, in all the speculation and analysis relating to espionage and treason, two essential categories would seem to have been left out: good and evil, conveying, as they do, a sense of a moral order, without which no other order--economic, political, what you will--can possibly exist. Moreover, that the voice making this point most eloquently came not from ancient universities like Oxford and Cambridge, but from, of all places, the Gulag Archipelago. I refer, of course, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Furthermore, our future Gibbon may well go on to discover another prophetic voice--Dostoyevsky, who, in his novel The Possessed, shows how the absurd liberal, Stepan Verkhovensky, in the person of his son, Peter, is transformed into the revolutionary, who, in Baader-Meinhof style, calls for one or two generations of debauchery, to be followed by a little fresh bloodletting, and then, he exults, "the turmoil will begin." Has it not already begun?

--Malcolm Muggeridge

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