STEPHEN KOCH
39
the second and third ranks, the anonymous place where so often even the
best of the quite good sinks and drifts forever. In 1931, it was generally
assumed that Guy would become one of the great academics of his era.
Given how Burgess ended- bleary, sentimental, slobbering- it is difficult
to grasp how many serious people thought Guy Burgess the youth one of
the most brilliant, compelling, promising human beings they had ever
met.
In preparing my own book, I have met many agents of influence who
worked for various governments within the Miinzenberg tradition. More
than one has left me with a troubling, nameless afterimage, the sense of
some shadow hovering over our talk. I'm tempted to call that lingering
shade the ghost of Guy Burgess. Repeatedly, it comes cropping up again:
the same glib charm. The same startling but too-glancing erudition and
intellectual range. The same enthralling capacity for gossip; the same
breezy knowing of everybody and everything. Often, the same elegance -
though often a failed elegance, grown a tad seedy, a little dirty, or sloppy,
or out of date, or somehow off. Often the same sexual gamesmanship -
whether heterosexual or homosexual is incidental. Often, a similar river
of alcohol flowing nearby. These men (the ones I've met have all been
men) who began life dazzling everyone with their promise. Like Guy,
they set out with the very grandest connections in the world of politics,
the intellect, and the arts. And then -
We might call it the Burgess curse. The same desolation, often ac–
companied by alcoholism. The same deepening obscurity covered by one
lurching move from one doubtful option to another, and the same shab–
biness of promises worn down, then worn thin, and at last worn out.
They strike one as men whose double lives were born in a fatal disjunc–
tion between their great expectations and their true secret selves. For
them, failure began virtually at the moment of early success, back when
splashy debuts look like achievement. Their failure would be failure felt
before it was seen as promise and loss mingled in bafflement.
For many such people, work in the secret world can be wonderfully
restorative. It places them in the realm of power; it locates them, albeit
secretly, in a network of larger importance, a role like the one which
hope once offered. Once again, their hand is on the pulse. Secretly, they
can feel it, there again. Except that by that time, the work of ruin is very
nearly complete. Those whom the gods have wrecked with promise, they
next make spies.
But if Guy Burgess was failure's tragic creature, Blunt was spiritually
tied, and absolutely so, to success. He could not, would not, did not fail:
ever. His driving demon was not the muse of failure but the wish to be
connected to the network of power. Success defined Blunt's life as surely
