26
PARTISAN REVIEW
darius throughout British publishing, broadcasting, academia, and intellec–
tual life was, to say the least, fertile ground.
Which is where Blunt came in.
On the public level, the move to Stalinize Bloomsbury taste was led
by Otto Katz and the Miinzenberg apparatus, using British fronts such as
the Left Book Club and its many appendages. Covertly the process was
led by Blunt and Burgess, guided by various members of the Soviet secret
apparatus, probably assisted by a plant in the London offices of the Secret
Intelligence Services (SIS), silently sustained by the talent-spotters
throughout the universities and in the Miinzenberg-Gibarti propaganda
network, and tied to the Soviets through a dual NKVD-Comintern
network running through Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris. The process was
in motion by at least 1927, when "Ludwik" - the code name of Ignace
Reiss, a founding father of the Soviet services - set up shop in
Amsterdam. Hitler had nothing to do with its founding.
It
was complete
by 1935, and it culminated in Spain, where certain observers such as
George Orwell began to dare to dissent.
Back at Strachey's Cambridge, the obvious heir to all this was Blunt.
For the Cambridge spies were Bloomsbury's heirs by direct line of de–
scent. The crucible for both was the "Cambridge Conversation Club,"
the Apostles, a long-established campus secret society for aristocratic
young intellectuals: Tennyson and Hallam had been members. Strachey
and Leonard Woolf had taken over the Apostles for their own political
purposes before the war, and a generation later Blunt and Burgess remade
it for theirs.
It
was Blunt who saw what rich possibilities were waiting to
be used by the
apparat
in the Apostles.
A secret club of brilliant young men, the Apostles had been the ideal
venue for Strachey's mingled fantasies of sex and power, played out
among corrupted tousle-haired youth. By only slightly modifying
Strachey's essential principles, Blunt transformed it into an equally ideal
arena of
apparat
recruitment.
It
was elite, secret, and bound by its own
loyalties. Controlling it, Blunt and Burgess were able to capture the
imaginations of Bloomsbury's children, while preparing them, as Strachey
had prepared their parents, for lives of leadership nicely fused with scorn
for the established order. Within Strachey's supercilious view of the
British middle class was encoded an assumed right to rule that class. This
was precisely the contempt which Blunt found so congruent to his own
disdaining soul, and so
very
useful as a political instrument.
One link was Blunt's early love affair with Virginia Woolfs nephew,
Julian Bell, who ten years later died in Spain. Julian wrote home to his
mother in some detail about this adventure (his sexual initiation), the high
point of which was Blunt spiriting Julian away to a culture conference in
