DIANA TRILLING
Goronwy - and O thers:
A R emembrance
of England
When late in 1979 the news reached me that Goronwy Rees had died in
London, I had not seen him for a long time, more than six years, other
than for the two or three hours we had spent together on his visit to
America four years earlier, shortly before my husband died, nor had he
and I, or he and Lionel, been in correspondence since we had last been
in England six years earlier. On the occasion of his brief stop-over in
New York - he was here for only a weekend - the two of us,
Goronwy and I, met for a quiet lunch, after which he came to our
apartment to make his farewell to Lionel. Lionel died not many days
later and in a forthcoming issue of
Encounter
magazine, the distinguished
Anglo-American journal to which Goronwy contributed a monthly col–
umn, he published a moving memorial to his American friend.
There was of course no reason for Goronwy's not having simply
explained to me why he was in New York for only so short a time
when he at last - at long last - got to this country and why his stay in
New York followed a similarly brief visit to San Francisco. His daughter,
Jenny Rees , has now published in England a biography of her father,
Looking for
Mr.
Nobody,
and from her careful reconstruction of his
movements I learn that in 1975 Goronwy visited the United States, also
Canada and Australia, as part of a quick overview of the Dalgety
Enterprises about which he had been commissioned to write a book. He
hurried the visit because his wife Margie was now gravely ill and he
wanted to get back to her as fast as possible.
But why did he himself not make this explanation to me? The an–
swer, I fear, is
all
too obvious. Secrecy was Goronwy's habit and nour–
ishment. Like a familiar perfume, it announced and trailed him. In Jenny
Rees's memory of her family, mystery had always pervaded the Rees
household. In fact, it was in order to discover what her parents hid from
their children and from the world - it was a Secret so portentous that it
is regularly capitalized in her book - that she undertook her research
into her father's life.
From the start of our acquaintance with Margie and Goronwy, I
had the sense, not of Goronwy alone but of the pair of them, that there
was something they withheld from us, an aspect of their thought or ex–
perience which, though it undoubtedly had its original reference to
