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PARTISAN REVIEW
He was really a very high-class blackmailer. It all swung on a kind of
sadomasochistic hinge, which is in some way reminiscent of Strachey's
ethic of ambiguous contempt. Blunt invariably put himself in a position
to despise those he served. He despised the sleek and Outing members of
the establishment, whom he viewed as history's fools, doomed to be
swept away. He likewise despised the Soviets who ran him, and whom he
brushed aside even as he obeyed. Bumblers, clods, boors. In the void
between servility and loathing Blunt found power.
That so many of the Cambridge spies were homosexual can likewise
be traced to Strachey and Bloomsbury. Strachey's cult of "friendship" was
in practice a cult of homosexuality. Strachey genuinely believed that as a
homosexual he belonged to an erotic elite that had passed beyond the
crudity and grossness of heterosexual manhood into the realms of finer
feeling. In a letter to Keynes, Strachey speaks of Cambridge, with its "sad
atmosphere of paradox and paederasty" as the ideal place to launch his
critique of English life, a critique that was simultaneously contemptuous,
masochistic, enraged, and (seemingly) passive. Yet, he went on, "we can't
be content with telling the truth" even though "we must tell the whole
truth and the whole truth is the Devil. ... It's madness for us to dream of
making dowagers understand that feelings are good, when we say in the
same breath that the best ones are sodomitical . . . our time will come
about a hundred years hence."
Maly must have been especially shrewd on this score. Communist
morality and Marxism-Leninism in general have been relentlessly hostile
to any variety of homosexual freedom. Whenever the subject is raised, it
has usually been inside a dank fog of talk about bourgeois decadence. My
suspicion is that Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess used their own great
shrewdness to make their Soviet controls see how a homosexual coterie
based on Strachey's model could be exploited, both in its unstated loyal–
ties and its unstated possibilities for blackmail, and thereby form the basis
for an espionage ring. I have no evidence to prove it, but some such
conversation may well have taken place, and if so, it must have been an
interesting one. In the files of the former Soviet Union, there exist
shrewd, most far-sighted assessments of the role played within the ring by
homosexuality. They are explicit about the ways the half-seen sexual
bond held Burgess, and they stress the ways in which his sexual alienation
could be used. Similar reports are no less insightful about the long reach
into the elite that this sort of "homintem" bond provided. (Bear in mind
too that certain members of the ring were not at all homosexual. Kim
Philby was certainly not in the least homosexual, and the self-tortured
Donald Maclean can be called homosexual only rather tendentiously.)
Certainly there was very little tolerance for homosexuals in Stalin's
apparatus, though of course there were plenty of homosexuals in it.
