DIANA TRILLING
43
book. In the first year that Lionel and I knew Goronwy and Margie,
their twin sons attended the same school in London as our son. Now
and then we would speak, as parents inevitably do, of the errors or defi–
ciencies in the way our children were being dealt with. Goronwy con–
tributed his customary good sense to these conversations but he spoke as
from an emotional remove: his children were not in the forefront of his
feeling or thought.
Jenny's volume is painstakingly thorough; it could scarcely be more
objective and balanced. Clear-eyed, she is also deeply respecting of her
father. Chapter by chapter, she traces his family background, his university
career, his literary associations and professional undertakings. She situates
his story in the public domain and, as much as possible, keeps herself out
of it. Although she mentions Rees's womanizing, she regards it as outside
the proper province of her investigation. Her Mr. Nobody is a public
person, even a public issue.
I'm troubled by the title ofJenny's book,
Looking Jor
Mr.
Nobody;
I
feel that it is misleading.
It
seems to me to suggest that Jenny is writing
about someone who , in Henry James's happy phrase, fails to rise to the
level of appearance. Actually, it refers to the fact that Goronwy felt of
himself that he was without "character." He had no
"1."
At Oxford,
well before the distractions of his friendship with Burgess, he read
Hume's
Treatise oj Human Nature
and found in its pages on personal
identity the phrase which he would later use in self-description, "a bun–
dle of sensations." Jenny recalls a rhyme which her father frequently re–
peated to his children:
As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
I wish that man would go away.
While I do not entirely comprehend what Goronwy meant by his lack
of identity, I take it that he was speaking of his lack of a discernible in–
tention or direction in his psychological make-up rather than of a
pathology of depersonalization or of the small space which he may have
supposed that he filled in the universe.
The purpose ofJenny's book is clearly stated: she wishes to solve the
mystery which always hung over her father's life. More specifically, she is
determined to find out whether or not her father was ever a Soviet
agent. In 1993, in their volume,
Deadly Illusions,
Costello and Tsarev had
named him as a co-conspirator with the Cambridge spy ring. This had
never been said in Costello's previous volumes but by the time Costello
