DIANA TRILLING
35
Rees. For the Mailer I knew and read, life was not an accretion of
experience; it was a progression of unlinked happenings, without any
necessary or integral sequence or consequence. His skewed notion of the
existential might well have this as its source. The Mailer who wrote
Barbary Shore
had long since yielded place to a newer Mailer, a creature
of the newer day. It was his lack of a footing in history that made
Mailer so much a man of his own country and century: life was for him
always of the present moment, never the total of its moments.
But nothing could have been more the opposite of Goronwy and I
wondered if the two men had intuitively recognized this difference
which divided them and which, while it allowed them the pleasantest of
passing encounters, could promise no future friendship. The British
Goronwy was a captive of history. He had no present other than as a se–
quence or consequence of the past and a foretaste of the future. Like no
American life I have known, his was a life heavy with history, tragic with
history.
Guy Burgess fled England in 1951. (In
A Chapter of Accidents
Goronwy incorrectly dates his disappearance as 1952.) Before his flight,
he phoned Rees at home. Rees was out; Margie took his incoherent
message. He was about to do something peculiar, Burgess told her
agitatedly, which only Goronwy would understand. In the next days,
Goronwy concluded that Burgess had defected to the ' Soviet Union.
More than twenty years later, he records in
A Chapter
oj
Accidents
that it
was at this point that he came to realize that Burgess had been telling
him the truth when he had confessed to being a Communist agent.
Throughout the war and after, Burgess had continued his service to the
Cornintem.
Even the most authoritative studies of British espionage are a
confounding tangle of inconsistencies and of trails which are not pursued
to their proposed ends. Although Goronwy regularly makes his
appearance in these works, relative to the celebrity of such figures as
Blunt or Burgess or Philby or Maclean he remains essentially an illusory
figure. The historical literature leaves wide gaps in the narrative of his
life, casts a shadow which is never fully defined. A shadow it nevertheless
is. Goronwy himself of course complicated the public record of his
career by his need to disguise his own role in Soviet espionage. He gives
us, for instance, two versions of the days following Burgess's flight from
England, his story in
A Chapter of Accidents
and the story he told Andrew
Boyle a few years later, nearing the end of his life, which Boyle re-
