STEPHEN KOCH
45
crude personal gain - heaven forbid! - but in the service of tyranny.
Nicolson had been jerked around and kissed up to and deceived not to
make a few pounds or pull off admission to some club. Burgess had
stooped to all this in order to betray his country and to serve the enslave–
ment of nations. Speaking of it, Nicolson forgets that he was something
more than a friend with Guy Burgess. He was a minister in Winston
Churchill's cabinet, a man upon whom the fate of whole peoples,
strangers to him, to some measurable degree depended. He seems inca–
pable of addressing any of this. He cannot face a scrap of it; he would not
even really face it in the years to come. In his correspondence to
Moscow, Nicolson continued to treat Burgess as if he were merely an ex–
ceptionally errant friend with whom he happened to disagree. He never
could see that this "friend" had used him, his position, his confidence,
that unmentionable thing called his political power
and
his political trust
to betray his friend
and
his country, along with a number of other coun–
tries - most wretched of all - into the bargain. It was all E . M . Forster in
reverse, but with a relentless vengeance. Rather than acknowledge such a
thing, Nicolson's voice reverts to childish babble. "Did a bunk"? He
speaks as if Burgess were a ten-year-old classmate caught cheating at some
game, albeit a game on the playing fields of Eton.
It
makes a nightmarish
final twist in Lytton Strachey's malicious, power-driven, angry cult of
"friendship."
Yet it would be very wrong to end on a note of mere condemnation
of this used and deluded man. Nicolson's diary entry ends on a note of
great personal pain. He
is
in agony; he
is
ashamed. "During my dreams,"
Nicolson concludes, "his absurd face stares at me with drunken unseeing
eyes."
Some rough beast, born in Bloomsbury, had slouched all the way
home.
