22
PARTISAN REVIEW
adulthood the lesson of his parents' high-mindedness and their sense of
social responsibility. For the whole of his life, this man who would be
so widely scorned for his Aberystwyth publication carried within him,
whether he was pursuing the parental instruction or seeming to do
violence to it, the heavy legacy of parental principle. Even where he
plainly flouted the stern "Calvinistic Methodism" (as Jenny calls it) of his
. upbringing, it continued to make the armature of his moral being.
But I stop myself This is my view of Goronwy.
It
is not the view of
others who knew him.
I had to sit at the side of Margie Rees as she maneuvered her car on
the hazardous highway between Oxford and London in order to have a
first intimation of her practical competence and, just so, I had to learn a
great deal more about her than was
~o
be gathered from a casual first
meeting - indeed, I had finally to see her from the vantage of my pre–
sent-day knowledge of Goronwy's difficult life - to have some measure
of her bravery and dedication as his enduring partner. Today, I think of
Margie as no less than a domestic heroine, making her decent home and
raising her five children on what was always so insufficient and unde–
pendable an income; coping with her husband's infidelities, whatever
their extent and however much she came to hear of them; most daunt–
ing of demands upon her courage and resilience, managing as she did the
consequences of the Aberystwyth incident and Goronwy's tangled rela–
tionship with Guy Burgess. If the miracle of Goronwy Rees lay in his
having recognized Margie's quality and chosen her as his wife, the mira–
cle of Margie Rees was the grace she brought to her life with a husband
who became virtually an official object of public condemnation, some–
one from whom the people they met at dinner parties drew back their
moral skirts.
Margie knew nothing of self-pity. Her gallantry declared itself only
as good manners. Her valiant nature served her well: as far hack as when
we first met, she was already battling the cancer from which she eventu–
ally died. This no doubt made for the note of wry fatality which one
soon discerned at the edge of her quiet liveliness. I'm sure she died
bravely. She died in the summer of 1976, not long after Lionel died. We
last saw her in the late spring of 1973. This final time that we were to–
gether, she gave me a gift of two little blue and white porcelain fish
which I keep on my desk. My hand rests on them now as I write of her.
Gossip is everywhere its own sweet pastime. Although we heard only
so minimally of the Aberystwyth scandal, we had been living in Oxford
no more than a few months when we learned - I don't now remember
