DIANA TRILLING
13
have chosen a less fortunate vehicle for it. His series of six articles ap–
peared in a popular British weekly,
People .
They were unsigned but their
author was immediately recognized. By now Burgess's involvement in
Soviet espionage was of course widely known: it was five years since, to–
gether with Donald Maclean, he had fled the country. Actually, only a
short time before the appearance of Rees's series, he had surfaced in a
television interview in Moscow. The punishment meted out to Rees for
his revelations about his friend was nevertheless prompt, cruel and lasting.
He was forced to resign his position at Aberystwyth. More, he was
permanently ostracized by his old acquaintances at Oxford and by the
British intellectual establishment. As late as 1964, when Lionel and I
came to Oxford for Lionel to take up his year's appointment as Eastman
Professor, Goronwy was still "received" at his old university by only two
friends from the past, John Sparrow, then head of All Souls, and the
renowned intellectual historian, Sir Isaiah Berlin.
It is plain that E. M . Forster was not alone among the educated
British in believing that as between betraying one's country and betray–
ing a friend, it was fur preferable to betray one's country. In response to
Rees's exposure of the already self-exposed Burgess, the noted Oxford
classicist Maurice Bowra proposed that a stand of Judas trees be planted
in Rees's name . No one proposed that the traitorous Guy Burgess be
similarly dishonored.
Maurice Bowra was homosexual, as was Guy Burgess. On his first
meeting with Goronwy, Burgess had made a homosexual advance which
Goronwy pleasantly rejected - even at this early age , Goronwy was al–
ready an accomplished womanizer (that lovely English word) . E. M.
Forster, too, was homosexual and there is small doubt but that there
was an element of sexual kinship in the unwillingness of so many of
Burgess's associates to be troubled by his treason: Goronwy's exposure of
Burgess bore
all
too closely upon Britain's homosexual community. The
Cambridge spy ring had come into existence in the Thirties when in
Britain, as in America, the economic depression was at its height and
when Communism on the Soviet model was being embraced by many of
its best-educated and idealistic young people as the sole remedy for the
glaring failures of capitalism. ·It was also a period in which homosexual–
ity, widespread though it might be in practice, was harshly condemned in
British social custom and law. The left-wing British homosexual could
well feel that his sexual preference made him an alien in his own country
and that to betray Britain to the Soviet Union, far from being an act of
treason, was an act of hope .
In the years of our friendship with the Reeses - they extended from
