28
PARTISAN REVIEW
peasement of Hitler at Munich. Forever after the Pact, he was a patriot.
In England as in America, however, it is now a long time since patrio–
tism has earned the respect of intellectuals. Love of country is all but
ceded to the side of reaction. Even where the patriot is not thought to
be politically retrograde, he is assumed to be ungenerous and a creature
of convenient moral accommodation.
A Chapter of Accidents
moves briskly over the war years and
Goronwy's rise in the army from an early volunteer in the Welsh
Fusilliers, posted to the docks of Liverpool, to a Lieutenant Colonel on
the staff of Field Marshal Montgomery. In this high post he was privy to
top military secrets, including Allied plans for the landings in Nonnandy.
The fact that despite his sensitive wartime position, Goronwy continued
to frequent the Bentinck Street flat and to drink with Burgess and the
riffraff whom Burgess collected around him' is, for me, the most disturb–
ing feature of his memoir and of his life.
It
was early in the war that he
had met and married Margie. Margie, too, became friendly with Burgess
- he was named godfather to one of the Reeses' sons.
And yet Rees reports in
A Chapter of Accidents
that he was never
certain that Burgess had told him the truth when he said that he was a
Comintern agent, nor was he convinced that if Burgess had once been a
spy, he had continued in this traitorous activity during and after the war.
The reader is bound to find such naivete difficult to credit. Day in and
day out, before the war, during the war, after the war, the two men
engaged in constant political talk. It is hard to suppose that Goronwy
drew no conclusions from Burgess's strange associations or from his many
shifts in declared political opinion. How could it not have occurred to
Rees that behind his various masquerades Burgess pursued the
underground assignment to which he had confessed?
However, nothing of Goronwy's historical past, nothing of his po–
litical past, entered into our early acquaintance with him and Margie.
Even the fact that this attractive couple seemed not to be welcome
among their old Oxford friends didn't intrude into our relationship. At
most, it left us mildly puzzled.
No matter how well-infonned American visitors may be in the his–
tory and literature of England, they rarely know as much about that
country as the average educated Englishman knows about America. An
Englishman's command of past and present American culture and custom
is like a natural extension of his schooling in the history of his own
country. Goronwy's store of infonnation about the political culture of
