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PARTISAN REVIEW
being an agent of some very sophisticated and covert American opera–
tions. The charge, quite memorably expressed, amounted to saying that
as a forum of opinion it "was not quite an open forum" and that " its
political acoustics were a little odd." It had not escaped O'Brien's no–
tice that certain topics elsewhere regarded as pressing were neglected or
avoided in a journal that professed to be keeping an intelligent eye on
the world, at least until somebody in Washington said, probably via
Geneva, that it was time to give them a judicious airing.
It
might just have been possible to let O'Brien's remarks pass with–
out notice. A report in
The New York Times
questioning the source of
the fake foundation funds had been disconcerting but not particularly
damaging, and despite his persistence and persuasiveness, O'Brien's re–
marks might have simply been ignored. But there was now an unex–
pected and intemperate intervention by Goronwy Rees. This strangely
celebrated man, once Bursar of All Souls, Oxford, and then the Principal
at the Aberystwyth branch of the University of Wales, wrote a regular
Encounter
column signed simply "R. " The column, occasionally quite
pungent but normally unexciting, well enough though sometimes stodg–
ily written, was the justification for his spending several hours a day at
the office. The sale of review copies, it was said, brought in just about
enough to keep Goronwy in Scotch.
He had been famous in his youth, as brilliant, as a great lover, and as
the original of the character of Eddy in Elizabeth Bowen's novel
Th e
Death of the Heart .
Amazingly well-known to many important people in
London, he had fairly recently become more generally notorious because
of a newspaper article he wrote about his friends, the spies Burgess and
MacLean. This cost him his job in Wales. Now he made a not very
good living writing the official histories of department stores and the
like, and doing this column for
Encounter.
He once said to me (this was
about 1966), "You can live decently in London on £7,000 a year, but
it's bloody well impossible to make £7 ,000 a year." Nevertheless, he was
always in a sense looked after. I often wondered why we were so faithful
to his sometimes tedious column, but Lasky clearly regarded it as sacro–
sanct. After his death it began to appear that Rees had probably been
more closely and more professionally associated with his spy friends than
he had allowed the world to think. People die off, but at this time there
were many survivors of wartime secret service agencies, some well
known, and it seemed that the indiscreet Goronwy had a special place in
their affections.
They didn't find it necessary to talk about this and other allegiances,
for of course they all knew the story already, but equally of course I had
