42
PARTISAN REVIEW
here, Goronwy may well have been thinking of his own Welsh identity
and the part it must surely have played in the shaping of his life. Rees the
Oxonian, Rees the Londoner, Rees the man of the world had never for–
gotten - had perhaps never been let forget - his Welsh origin. To
consult the documents surrounding his life, not least of them Elizabeth
Bowen's
Death of the Heart,
is indeed to have the realization freshly
imposed upon one of the extent to which the hostile judgment passed
upon Goronwy after the Aberystwyth episode was due to his being
outside the social fold - Bowen's novel makes it clear that even where
he might seem to be warmly welcomed among the author's own kind,
he was the object of their social condescension. England, as it was then
viewed by its literary and intellectual establishment, belonged to those
who by birth had their designated place in its ruling social order. And
while Goronwy himself never raised the question of whether Burgess's
treason would have been condoned as it was if Burgess had been the
product of a grammar school rather than of Eton, or whether he,
Goronwy, would have been condemned as he was for his Aberystwyth
disclosures if he had been an Etonian rather than the product of a
Cardiff grammar school, his memoir clears the ground for just such
speculation.
Well before Goronwy was a patriot of Britain, he was a patriot of
Wales and it forever suited his temperament to cherish this complication.
It
is said of him that he was lacking in loyalty to his friend Guy Burgess,
but it can never be said of him that he lacked in loyalty to his parents or
to the circumstances of his birth, whatever the distance he traveled from
the confining influences of the "Calvinistic Methodism" of his
upbringing. It was as if, because he wasn't born to the society in which
he found himself at Oxford and after Oxford and therefore didn't finally
belong to it, he could suppose himself to be free of its dictate. He could
violate its proprieties and transgress its borders. We may not know what
led Burgess to his preference for the disreputable associations which he is
said to have enjoyed on Bentinck Street, but Goronwy's readiness to
join in this company is, I think, readily explained by his sense of himself
as someone who by birth bore the ineradicable taint of the outsider.
I should like to suppose that Goronwy would have been pleased by
Jenny's biography of him, but I am not certain of this. I am not sure
that he would have appreciated it as it deserves. It was my impression of
Goronwy that he was lacking in parental involvement and pride; the fact
that Jenny fails to indicate this is testimony to the generous spirit of her
