DIANA TRILLING
also at the debate; the ghosts of the six million dead in Dachau and
Sachsenhausen and other extermination camps, listening to the same
voices which had cheered and jeered and abused them as they made
their way to the gas chambers. For the fundamental thesis advanced by
the supporters of the resolution, and approved by the majority of the
Third Committee, was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to
be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of
the human race.
41
Recently, I spent an evening with British friends who were visiting in
New York. Because I had already begun this remembrance of Goronwy
and he was much in my mind, I brought up his name.
It
was unwise of
me. Fifteen years after his death, nothing had changed in the way the
mention of him was met. These friends of mine had
all
been acquainted
with the Reeses; one of them had known them far more intimately than
I.
They spoke of Goronwy dismissively, almost derisively. There was a
considerably younger woman in the party. She had known Goronwy
when she was growing up in London and she seemed to be made un–
comfortable by the unkind tone in which they were speaking of him. In
an aside to me she murmured, "He was always very nice to me ." And she
added, "He was the most attractive man I have ever met." I smiled at her
use of these familiar words. I felt a quick £lash of affection for her.
My English friends had no criticism of Margie Rees. They were
agreed that Margie was a dear, a darling. And what she had had to put
up with, married to that scoundrel! There was of course also no word
of criticism of Burgess or Blunt or any other member of the Cambridge
ring. I was unable to keep an edge of anger out of my voice as I
brought the talk back to what, as I saw it, was a crucial omission. "And
Burgess? Or Blunt?" I asked. "What about them? They weren't
scoundrels, just our everyday garden-variety spies?" This was met by a
short second of silence among the company, like an intake of breath,
before our host smoothly turned to his neighbor and broached another
topic of conversation. I and my notions of spies and spying, of honor
and dishonor, of proper and improper loyalties, were not to be given a
further hearing. Ever. For my uncongenial views and for the bad manners
they bred in me, I was written out of the lives of these friends.
In his
Encounter
column, Goronwy linked his censure of the United
Nations with his warm commemoration of Lionel. Celebrating him as
an individual, Goronwy also spoke of him as an American and a Jew. "It
was an essential part of the pleasure of his friendship," he wrote, "that he
remained always and unmistakably an American ." The point of his
American identity has not often been made of Lionel and, making it
