STEPHEN KOCH
41
debris and confusion from the party that had taken place the night be–
fore." Beside the bed were piles of books - Burgess seems to have read
and reread
Middlemarch
almost continually through his adult life - and
many liquor bottles, variously knocked back. Also near at hand was a
frying pan brimming with the nauseating slop of a kind of homemade
stew which Burgess concocted each weekend as a somewhat less liquid
fortification for all the alcohol, and in order not to waste any tiresome
time at a stove.
"An
evening at Guy's flat," writes Goronwy Rees, "was
rather like watching a French farce which has been injected with all the
elements of political drama. Bedroom doors opened and shut; strange
faces appeared and disappeared down the stairs where they passed some
new visitor on his way up; civil servants, politicians, visitors to London,
friends and colleagues of Guy's popped in and out of bed and then con–
tinued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue.... "
The Bentinck Street flat was Guy Burgess's home during the war. As
the Allies' capital, London was the capital where all the conspirators came
to roost. Many roosted, at least now and then, at Bentinck Street.
It
was a
delightful place, very much a step up, even luxurious; testimony to Blunt
and Guy Burgess's increasing influence over their good friend Lord Victor
Rothschild, who had sublet it to Burgess for a song.
If one could capture who, and what, passed through Bentinck Street
during those years it would be possible to reconstruct some grotesque but
remarkably full secret history of the Second W odd War.
It
would be po–
litical Proust belated by a quarter century, the cataclysm of the age as
viewed by Jupien. Bentinck Street became a kind of salon, in which
Burgess gathered the homosexual underworld of London together with
some of the most devious and despicable political operatives then at work.
I'm thinking for example of the Baron Wolfgang von und zu Putlitz,
along with a distasteful creature from the upper anonymity of French
politics named Edouard Pfeiffer. All this was crowned by the Bloomsbury
elite.
Malcolm Muggeridge describes a visit there even more memorably
than does Rees. Muggeridge was a middle-class boy. In this passage one
can hear his own bitter, anomalous protest against Bloomsbury and its
snobbery:
There we found another gathering of displaced intellectuals, but more
prosperous, more socially secure than the
Horizon
ones - John
Strachey,
J.
D. Bernal, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, a whole
revolutionary
Who's Who .
It
was the only time I ever met Burgess,
and he gave me the feeling, such as I have never had from anyone
else, of being morally afflicted in some way. His very physical
