38
PARTISAN REVIEW
come out with her charge? And in what way did his concealment of his
activities as an agent differentiate Rees from the spies whom she failed to
indict?
The fact is that throughout the Thirties Rosamond Lehmann was
herself an ardent fellow-traveler, as who among the left-wing writers and
intellectuals of her circle was not? When her husband, Wogan Phillips,
came into his title and as Lord Milford took his seat in the House of
Lords, he was an avowed Communist. A few days after Margaret
Thatcher acknowledged Blunt's treason in Parliament, Blunt gave a
lengthy interview in which, his moral confidence unshaken, he told the
British press that, yes, in the mid-Thirties he had chosen "political con–
science against loyalty to country." He could have been speaking for
most of his intellectual generation. Throughout the Western democracies
at this time, it was by its tolerance of Soviet Communism that political
idealism defined itself and its opposition to the regressive forces of capi–
talism.
In 1956, Burgess and Maclean appeared on television in Moscow
and Goronwy's conviction that Burgess had fled to the Soviet Union
was unarguably confirmed. Burgess was Lehmann's friend, too, as was
Blunt. Rosamond Lehmann might similarly have guessed what had been
Burgess's destination when he disappeared from his own country. When
Burgess emerged on Moscow television, a weeping Blunt all but con–
fessed to Lehmann that he was also a Soviet agent. It is doubtful that she
needed to have the political connection between Blunt and Burgess or
their connection with the Comintern spelled out for her.
I met Rosamond Lehmann only once: on a visit to London in the
early Seventies, Lionel and I were invited to dinner with her at the home
of a London doctor, Patrick Woodcock. The only other guest was
Christopher Isherwood. Dr. Woodcock was not a writer but he had
many literary friends. I was delighted to meet Isherwood. As a fiction
critic many years earlier, I had reviewed his novel
Prater Violet.
It was a
small book but it had towered over most of the novels which came to
my desk.
The literary reputation which Lehmann had earned with
Dusty
Answer
had steadily faded with the years and the celebrated beauty of her
young womanhood had dramatically vanished - it was in fact difficult to
imagine that it had ever existed. I had been warned that she had gained
an extraordinary amount of weight but I could not have been prepared
for her altered appearance: at Dr. Woodcock's, she all but overflowed
the little sofa in his sitting room. So radical a change in appearance was
not to be explained as simply the depredation of time. For my sake, for
