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PARTISAN REVIEW
the truth and thought it didn't matter. In which case he was an idiot and
an incompetent. And nobody thinks Liddell was that.
Harold Nicolson, on the other hand, was a major broadcaster, a
power in the BBC: during the war he became the BBC's political head,
with full access to Churchill, as well as parliamentary secretary to the
Ministry of Information, which ran the secret services. And of course he
was a legendary personage in the Bloomsbury group, husband of Virginia
Woolfs lover Vita Sackville-West, and a very notable diarist, diplomat,
and arbiter of taste.
Nicolson's numerous published diary entries on Burgess are anything
but complete or candid.
Mter
1952, Nicolson plainly did his best to cover
this ill-favored and credulous union with the spy. The full story in its
emotional and political dimensions has never been seriously explored,
though an exceptionally meticulous historian of broadcasting, Mr. W.
J.
West, has studied its consequences for the BBC.
Under Nicolson's patronage, Burgess advanced spectacularly through
the Bloomsbury networks; he was soon the most influential political pro–
ducer in the entire BBC, where he introduced Soviet propagandists and
fellow travellers wholesale. These naturally included Anthony Blunt,
whose many appearances at the BBC were most useful in his rise. For
Blunt's kind of ambition, the scholarly reputation needed the added luster
of a little popular chic.
Meanwhile, Burgess exploited his role at the BBC with subtlety and
dexterity. But there was more to it than that. As Nicolson's biographer la–
conically notes, "there can be little doubt that Guy Burgess extracted
from Harold inside information which he passed on to his masters in
Moscow."
When Guy Burgess defected, Nicolson as usual wrote in his diary,
and what he wrote is revealing. The entry is filled with anguish. "If I
thought Guy a brave man, I should have thought he had gone over to
join the communists. As I know him to be a coward" - one wonders
how Nicolson knows this, exactly - "I suppose that he was suspect of
passing things to the Bolshies and realizing his guilt, did a bunk."
There is something a little repellent in this notation. Anguish - yes.
But one also is struck by the schoolboy tone; by the weak-minded, eva–
sive thought about "courage" made in a remark that reveals ignorance of
both Burgess's actual courage and his actual communism; by the unid–
iomatic use of the word "realizing" and finally by the kid's talk about
"passing things to the Bolshies," and "doing a bunk." Here was an
"Apostle," the very incarnation of Lytton Strachey's ideal, who had spent
a friendship with one of the foremost of the Bloomsbury group lying to
him in every meeting and using him at every opportunity not for mere
