14
PARTISAN REVIEW
1964 until 1973, when we were last in England - neither Margie nor
Goronwy ever spoke of Guy Burgess to us or alluded to the
Aberystwyth incident. Other than to speak of the Hiss-Chambers case, a
subject to which Goronwy recurred with some persistence, we indeed
spoke very little of politics. I nonetheless assumed - and I am sure. that
Lionel did, too - that politics were not only important to Goronwy
but the ground in which was planted at least one root of his romantic
adventurousness. I recall, for instance, that after one of his inquiries about
Chambers, I proposed to Lionel, and not in entire frivolity, that perhaps
Goronwy had himself once been a spy.
What we did speak about with the Reeses now escapes me. What,
after all, does one talk about as one moves from acquaintance to friend–
ship with someone one has newly met? What is it that initiates or bol–
sters the relationship, separating it from the more ordinary of one's social
encounters, those which make up the everyday content of our lives but
fail to give them their substance or shine?
Eventually, someone other than Goronwy or Margie did tell us of
the Aberystwyth publication. This could not but have happened since ev–
ery knowledgeable Briton knew about it. It would turn out, however,
that this was not the Secret which inspired Goronwy's daughter to
launch her researches. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the files of
Soviet Intelligence were slowly becoming accessible to foreign scholars
and in 1993 a respected British historian of espionage, John Costello,
writing in collaboration with Oleg Tsarev, a former Colonel in the
KGB who had become Historical Consultant to the new Russian
Foreign Intelligence Service, published a volume called
Deadly Illusions
which disclosed that Goronwy, once so much at pains to publicize the
treason of others, had himself been a Soviet agent. In studying her fa–
ther's life, it was the truth or untruth of this charge that Jenny set out
to investigate. If true , this was the upper-case Secret, the mystery of mys–
teries, which had shadowed the Rees household.
We were introduced to Goronwy by Fred Warburg of the English
publishing firm of Secker
&
Warburg. Fred had for some time been
Lionel's British publisher and he was about to become mine as well. In
literary circles in New York he was chiefly known as the publisher and
friend of George Orwell. While this gave him literary distinction, it also
brought him political distrust: left-wing intellectuals have never been able
to comprehend how anyone with Orwell's supposedly liberal principles
could also be so firm and vocal an anti-Communist. To most people this
