34
PARTISAN REVIEW
them exhibited any effect of the drink. Murdoch and her husband went
home early, as soon as politeness allowed. Only now does it occur to me
that she may have vented on Mailer some of the annoyance which she
had felt at finding herself at dinner with the infamous Rees.
The next morning, Lionel and I and our houseguests had a long,
lazy breakfast and then the Reeses drove the Mailers back to London -
which is to say that Margie drove Goronwy and the Mailers back to
London. It had to have been as astonishing to Mailer as to Lionel and
me that Goronwy didn't drive and was content to be driven everywhere
by his wife. To look at him, one would suppose that Goronwy sailed,
skied, flew his own plane.
With Margie at the wheel and Beverly at her side, Goronwy and
Norman had sat in the back, talking. Later Mailer told me that on their
drive back to London, Goronwy had repeated to him a remark of mine,
that to an American man his car was an extension of his masculinity. Was
this so, Goronwy wanted to know of Mailer, and Mailer assured him
that it was. The Reeses deposited the Mailers at their London hotel. So
far as I know, they never saw each other again, nor did either of them
ever inquire of me about the other.
I could wish to have heard what Mailer and Goronwy talked about
so absorbedly that evening in our Oxford sitting room. It was not about
espionage, of that I can be fairly certain, but how fascinated Mailer
would have been had he been granted a glimpse of the business of spying
as Goronwy knew of it through his association with the Cambridge
group or even through his own direct involvement. Mailer had spent his
writing life as a conjurer of the subversive and forbidden. Yet, in sum, his
was of course more a universe of personal than political rebellion. The
closer he had drawn to what was meant to be the reality of left-wing
revolution, as in his second novel ,
Barbary Shore,
the more he was lost
in allegory. In
Barbary Shore,
the novel which followed his commanding
entrance upon the literary world, he had indeed broached the subject of
political treason. But he had been far from penetrating its ignoble
actuality: Mailer's spy novel is about the hunt for "a little object" which
holds the key to the political future of the democracies; its villain is the
FBI in sinister alliance with fascism. Such fictional conspirators as Mailer
offers us in
Barbary Shore
would consort but poorly with Goronwy's
friend on Bentinck Street or with Burgess's scholarly associate, Sir
Anthony Blunt.
Other than his continuing readiness to accept each day as
independent of what lay either behind or ahead of it, there was little to
connect the author of
Barbary Shore
with the Mailer we introduced to
