26
PARTISAN REVIEW
Burgess promptly made a homosexual advance to Goronwy; it was de–
clined. Burgess was untroubled by the refusal. They shared a youthful
idealism which expressed itself in their left-wing politics. At Cambridge,
Burgess was a ripening revolutionary; Goronwy had brought with him
to Oxford his father's socialist preference. In the next few years their
paths diverged: Goronwy was travelling on the Continent, writing fic–
tion. But in the mid-Thirties they found themselves living near each
other in London and fell to drinking together at the same pub or
spending their evenings together at Burgess's flat on Bentinck Street.
Burgess's Bentinck Street dwelling is now famous in London's social
history. By
all
report, it was a sordid affair. Burgess drank inordinately
and lived in filth . He apparently subsisted on a dic;:t of dried fish and
garlic; unrefrigerated, this smelly mash sat on one of his windowsills. Yet
such was his power of mind and personality that he had no difficulty in
bringing the world to his door, the luminaries of English society no less
than a range of unsavory characters who were present either as an aid in
his undercover political activities or in response to his indiscriminate sex–
ual appetite. Some years later, Malcolm Muggeridge, that most finicky
of observers, would describe the scene:
There we found ... a whole revolutionary
Who 's Who.
It was the
only time I ever met Burgess; and he gave me a feeling such as I have
never had from anyone else, of being morally aillicted in some way.
His very physical presence was, to me, malodorous and sinister. . ..
There was not so much a conspiracy gathered round him as just decay
and dissolution.
It
was the end of a class, of a way of life; something
that would be written about in history books, like Gibbon on
Heliogabalus with wonder and perhaps hilarity, but still tinged with
sadness, as all endings are.
According to
A Chapter of Accidents,
it was on an evening in 1936
that Guy Burgess abruptly revealed to Goronwy that he had been a
Comintem agent ever since he had come down from Cambridge. He
proposed that Goronwy become his fellow-conspirator. Goronwy tells
us that he declined the invitation. In this conversation, as a final seductive
stroke, Burgess identified for Goronwy one of his, Burgess's, most illus–
trious partners in espionage: swearing Goronwy to solemnest secrecy, he
told him that Anthony Blunt, who was already in 1936 highly regarded
as an art historian and critic, was also a Communist agent. It could be
that Burgess was very drunk when he made this dangerous disclosure. But
more likely he was employing the mention of Blunt as his trump card in
