40
PARTISAN REVIEW
as failure defined Guy's.
It
may well be that the secret of his prolonged
shadowy love for Burgess can be located in this odd coupling of shabby
ruin with the impeccably achieved.
In a BBC dramatization of the defection made in the 1980s, the
screenwriter has Burgess warn Blunt that he is going to run to Russia
with Maclean by mailing Blunt a note containing nothing more than
some numbers. The numbers are page references to some lines of poetry,
a stanza from Robert Browning, a ballad entitled "Waring," about a
once-exciting youth turned failure, who finds he can no longer endure
being what he has become. As the poem begins, Waring has decided at
last to leave London without so much as a goodbye. He is running, and
he will run to ... Russia.
In the film, Blunt gets the note, opens it, and sees the reference.
Browning? "Waring?" Perplexed, he takes down his copy of the poems,
leafs through the book until he finds the place, then reads,
sotto voce:
What's become ofWaring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boats and chest or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any
longer London town?
In a moment, Blunt takes it in. It comes as the shock of recognition,
and we see him absorbing it. Guy? "Giving us all the slip?"
Guy is difecting
too.
Then, enraged - at once betrayed, bereft, and very much endangered
- Blunt flings the book across the room. I've not seen any evidence that
this incident really occurred, but it is a brilliant, genuinely moving
screenwriter's touch, and
ben trovato .
At the height of his adventures in London, Guy Burgess lived in two
successive flats there. The first, from the thirties, consisted in the top floor
of a place in Chester Square. The second, where he lived during the war,
was a large, pleasant place leased through Victor Rothschild on Bentinck
Street. The two places seem likely to linger in the iconography of espi–
onage as two
maisons de rendezvous.
Both have been vividly described
several times, notably by Goronwy Rees and Malcolm Muggeridge. In
Bentinck Street especially, the muse of history seems to have decided to
play one of her periodic pranks: Outside number 9 Bentinck Street is af–
fixed a blue-and-white plaque indicating that here once lived Edward
Gibbon, author of
The Decline and Fall
cif
the Roman Empire.
In Chester Square, Burgess held court, usually in bed like a squalid
Louis Quatorze, receiving visitors in rooms filled with the "indescribable
