DIANA TRILLING
31
of its principles and program and if Chambers had approached me earlier
I am far from certain that I would have refused. Treason and even
illegalities less extreme than treason are not my moral style and my taste
for risk is sadly limited to the life of discourse, yet I recall my bumbling
delay in replying to Chambers and the throb of pride which ran through
me because he thought me worthy to be part of his conspiracy.
In the years that followed our first stay in Oxford, Lionel and I were
frequently back and forth to England and often in the company of the
Reeses. Goronwy never spoke of Guy Burgess or Aberystwyth. He
reserved to himself many areas of his experience: he never referred to his
Welsh boyhood or his travels on the Continent; he never mentioned his
novels or his having been an editor of the
Spectator;
he made no
mention of having been Estates Bursar at All Souls or of his having been
sent to Germany at the end of the war to help in the administration of
that conquered country. Even on innocent themes he talked around
large gaps, as one might walk around holes in an otherwise solid
pavement.
Had it not been for the publication of Costello and Tsarev's
Deadly
Illusions
J
the case against Rees might have remained what it had always
been for the English intellectual establishment: Rees was the man who
had so contemptibly betrayed a friend. But this was only the lower-case
secret which had had such major consequences for him. It was an upper–
case Secret which, as Jenny tells us, had always hung over the Rees
household and it was this Secret which she set out to uncover. In her
book she lifts the veil on what Margie and Goronwy had for the whole
of their marriage struggled to conceal: far back in the Thirties, before
the war and even before he had met Margie, Goronwy had briefly been
a Comintem agent. He had not stayed long in Stalin's service, probably
less than a year. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he had become forever
disillusioned with Communism. Poor hectored, guilty Goronwy! His
long, wearying effort to bury his moment of error had failed.
In the spring of 1965, Norman Mailer published his novel
An
Ameri–
can Dream
in England and came to London for its publication. Beverly,
his wife at the time, accompanied him. Norman and I had long been
friends and I invited him and his wife to visit us in Oxford. Would he
like a party, I asked him on the telephone, or would he prefer that we
simply have a few people in for dinner? He chose the latter and in reply
to my inquiry whether there was anyone whom he would especially like
to meet, proposed Iris Murdoch - he had always been interested in her
