STEPHEN KOCH
Bloomsbury and Espionage
There is a link between culture and espionage.
To a very remarkable degree , the most interesting elites in the
twentieth-century democracies chose to define their taste and language
through the vocabulary of revolution and the dissociation of sensibility.
The democratic elites were linked - they were sometimes even identical
- to what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture." Picasso would
hang on bankers' walls. This simple and salient fact about life in the land
of the bourgeoisie was noticed early and exploited with verve by the
propagandists who guided and advised the Comintern secret service, and
the
apparat
did not fail to take the obvious next step, seizing upon this
truth of the adversary culture - and of the modernism at its center - as a
wedge into power. It is in the bond between the language of the
democratic elites and the language of revolt, that culture is tied to
espionage. And it is likewise in this sense that the famous Cambridge
circle of spies - Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim
Philby - might be more accurately known as the "Bloomsbury spies."
Well, to speak more precisely, they were Bloomsbury's
children:
The
second generation. In 1932, the brightest and best of the
marxisant
youth
at Cambridge and Oxford were, often literally, progeny of the original
Bloomsbury circle. One of Anthony Blunt's first lovers was Virginia
Woolfs nephew, Julian Bell; it was Blunt and his people who guided
Julian Bell toward Spain, where he was killed. Blunt likewise recruited
Michael Straight in the midst of his grief over the death in Spain ofJohn
Cornford, the son of two academic members of the Bloomsbury group,
Frances and Francis Cornford. Burgess and Blunt breathed the
Bloomsbury atmosphere - an affinity perfected in Burgess's intimacy with
Harold Nicolson. The Cambridge spies began their careers as young
people raised in the world of Bloomsbury, and they must be counted
Editor's Note: "Bloomsbury and Espionage" is excerpted from
Double Lives . Spies
and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West
by
Stephen Koch, to
be published in January 1994. Copyright
©
1994 by Stephen Koch . Reprinted
by permission of The Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc. The reader is re–
ferred to
Double Lives
for complete citations, references, and footnotes regarding
"Bloomsbury and Espionage" as it appears here.
