42
PARTISAN REVIEW
presence was, to me, malodorous and sinister; as though he had some
consuming illness - like the galloping consumption. . . . The
impression fitted in well enough with his subsequent adventures; as
did this millionaire's nest altogether, so well set up, providing, among
other amenities, special rubber bones to bite on if the stress of the
Blitz became too much to bear. Sheltering so distinguished a company
- Cabinet Minister-to-be Oohn Strachey], honored Guru of the
extreme left-to-be
D·
D. Bernal], Connoisseur Extraordinary-to-be
[Blunt], and other notabilities,
all
in a sense grouped around Burgess;
Etonian mudlark and sick toast of a sick society.
One of the Bloomsbury grandees well known to Burgess was Harold
Nicolson. Nicolson met Guy Burgess in the early thirties, and Nicolson's
biographer cites Burgess as one of the young men who held some grip on
the feelings of Nicolson all through this period. Whether they were lovers
is unclear and doubtful, but they obviously became close friends. It is
clear that Burgess used his friendship with Nicolson as part of his rise. It
was through Nicolson's influence that Burgess joined the staff of the BBC
in 1936; in fact, much of Burgess's rise through the British establishment
took place under Nicolson's sponsorship. Nicolson shared none of Guy's
political values; the bond was not political in the large sense, but in the
more narrow Bloomsbury sense, and it was bound to the old code of
Bloomsbury assumptions.
Burgess was guided into broadcasting, obviously, by his "friends" in
the
apparat,
but only after a year or two posing as fascist fellow traveller,
working in the office and bed of Captain Jack. Simultaneously Burgess
took a job directing public relations for a Nazi fellow-travelling front, the
Anglo-German Fellowship, a group Philby was likewise ordered to join.
Both men were active members for two years, spouting the line. That this
fact alone did not automatically disqualify them for any place whatever in
war-time British intelligence has never been explained. Indeed it is over–
looked in almost all the discussions of their rise, yet short of a brass band,
it is difficult to know how a gross risk to British security could have been
more blatant. Membership in the Fellowship forthrightly proclaimed Nazi
association. No matter. Both men were shoehorned into the most sensi–
tive areas of the British services by their untiring admirer within the ser–
vices, a major figure in the history ofBritish intelligence, Guy Liddell.
Guy Liddell is one of the enduringly mysterious figures in the history
of secret service intrigue. He was from the mid-1920s until he left the
service in the mid-1950s probably the most important single figure in ei–
ther the British or American services to address himself primarily to the
question of covert Soviet activity in England and outside Russia. Virtually
everything known by the American State Department about the
apparat
