12
PARTISAN REVIEW
Goronwy rather than Margie, had come to color not only his state of
being but hers as well. While one would not have thought to describe
Goronwy as a silent person, he seemed always to be on guard in conver–
sation. He was the author of several volumes of memoirs, yet he em–
ployed the medium more for the statement of ideas or, as in the case of
A Chapter of Accidents
J
to correct the troubling historical record than for
self-exploration. Even his column for
Encounter
was signed with only the
initial "R," as if, by keeping the whole of his name from view, he was
himself shielded. And indeed this was in some part the case. In America,
even regular readers of
Encounter
were little aware of him as a figure in
the literary life of our time and as for his reputation in England - well,
in England he was always recognized less for his critical accomplishment
than for his association with the notorious Cambridge spies, Guy
Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, in particular
his long-time friend Guy Burgess.
Goronwy was himself not a Cambridge man nor was he, like
Burgess and Burgess's co-conspirators, a product of the British public
schools. He was Welsh, the son of a well-known theologian, and had
attended a grammar school in Cardiff. His university was "the other
place," Oxford, which he attended on scholarship. Oxford had also been
his father's university. At Oxford he took a First and on graduation won
a much-coveted junior fellowship at All Souls. But the academic promise
he had shown as a student was not to be realized: he gave up his All
Souls fellowship to travel on the Continent and try his hand at fiction.
Although he published several novels, he was never successful as a fiction
writer. On his return to England, until he joined the army in the late
summer of 1939, he earned a precarious living in various branches of the
higher journalism. Early in the war, he met and married Margie with
whom he fathered a family of five children. In the early Fifties, he re–
turned to Oxford as Estates Bursar at All Souls, a position from which
he was recalled to his native Wales to become Principal of University
College at Aberystwyth.
.
It
was while Rees was in his Aberystwyth post that he effectively
ruined his career. Whether because he was in need of money - he usually
was - or because he was driven for patriotic reason to alert Britain to
the presence of Soviet spies at high levels of British government, he pub–
lished a series of articles in which he revealed the traitorous activities of
Guy Burgess. He had been an intimate of Burgess for many years, ever
since they had come to know each other while Burgess was still a
Cambridge undergraduate and Goronwy had just taken up his fellowship
at All Souls. Whatever his motive in making the disclosure, he could not
