A new television drama recalls the era when a clutch of Cambridge students took up espionage, writes John Banville
The story of the Cambridge spies, which begins as a drama on BBC2 this week, might have been written by one of the more fanciful of the English novelists of the first half of the 20th century. The central quartet of conspirators, gilded in youth and tarnished in age, could have stepped out of the pages of an adventure yarn by John Buchan or a satire by Evelyn Waugh, or even a P.G. Wodehouse farce. Yet when, between 1951 and 1979, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt were successively unmasked, they were regarded as some of the worst traitors England had ever produced, men who, during the second World War, had betrayed Allied secrets to the Soviet Union and who, after the war, had continued to spy for the USSR, the West's most dangerous enemy.
The four are larger-than-life figures, less plausible and far more compelling than any hero in an espionage novel. Would John Le Carré have dared to invent a double agent who, like Blunt, was an international authority on art, director of the Courtauld Institute, a knight of the realm and surveyor of the queen's pictures, a position he was allowed to continue in long after he had confessed to having been a Soviet spy? Would we have credited a Graham Greene protagonist who, as second secretary at the British embassy in Washington, spent his days driving about the Virginia countryside, drunk, in a pink Cadillac and his evenings in the bars under Capitol Hill, confessing to anyone who would listen that he was a Russian agent, as Burgess did? Len Deighton would have considered Philby too colourful to be believed, and Maclean would have been too tormented and unstable to carry the plot for a Robert Harris or an Alan Furst.
Yet Blunt had spied successfully for the Soviets from the 1930s until at least the 1950s; Burgess had recruited a cadre of Soviet agents from among his friends and lovers; Philby betrayed Western secrets to the Soviet Union for decades; and Maclean was arguably one of the people who, by passing atomic secrets from Washington to Moscow, made the Soviet nuclear weapons programme possible.
A large part of our seemingly inexhaustible fascination with these agents rests on the fact that they were quintessential English gentlemen of the old school - Cambridge, that is - and at the same time doctrinaire adherents of a totalitarian ideology, the aim of which was to smash the political system upon which British society, and the societies of Britain's allies, were founded.
How could these privileged young men, scions of solid, upper-middle-class English families, devote their lives and their very considerable talents to betraying all that they held dear? For hold it dear they did. Their England may have been more the England of cold champagne and low jinks in the quadrangle than of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but they were just as patriotic in their way as any latter-day Little Englander. When Mrs Thatcher stood up in the House of Commons in 1979 to denounce Blunt as a spy and a traitor, no doubt Sir Anthony, as he was then but would not be for long, took wan comfort from the thought that she was a grocer's daughter while he was a cousin of the Queen Mother. They were great snobs, these champions of the proletariat.
The question of motive is inextricably tied to the question of ideology. How communist were they? Of the four - a fifth, John Cairncross, with his Glaswegian accent and class resentments, was an effective agent but never wholly accepted as one of the elect - it was Burgess, rather surprisingly, who had read the texts and thoroughly absorbed the ideas. Born in 1910, the son of a naval officer, he was educated at Eton and the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
He claimed he was already a socialist when he arrived at Trinity College in Cambridge at the beginning of the 1930s, but it seems likely he did not become a communist until rather late, probably in the autumn term of 1933, when communism had suddenly become all the Cambridge rage.
Encouraged by Marxist dons, such as the economist Maurice Dobb, Burgess was recruited as a spy probably by Arnold Deutsch, the famous "Otto", an agent of the NKVD - later to become the KGB - who was working underground in England. Otto had already recruited Philby and would control most of the spies at Cambridge and elsewhere. (Ironically, the NKVD had developed an interest in Philby not because of his passion for the party but out of the mistaken belief that his father was in British intelligence; young Philby's first task for his Soviet masters was to spy on old Harry St John Philby.)
If Burgess was a late-blossomer as a communist, as a homosexual he had been something of a child prodigy. He declared that he had been put off heterosexuality the day in his boyhood when his mother called him to her assistance after her husband had died of a heart attack in the midst of love-making.
Burgess made the incident into one of his more outrageous stories, telling in grisly and hilarious detail how he had to roll the body of his large, dead father off his half-suffocated mother. It is the kind of experience that would impress itself on a lad's sensibility. He never had any doubts as to his sexual orientation and throughout his life had an uncanny skill for spotting queer potential in even the heartiest or most fastidious of his straight acquaintances.
It is all too tempting to link homosexuality, and the subterfuge and secrecy it involved in those pre-Wolfenden days, with the attraction so many of these young Cambridge men felt towards the other underworld of spying. True, Burgess was as adept at identifying likely candidates for agents as he was at getting boys into bed, but not all the undergraduates who joined the Comintern were also members of the Homintern. Kim Philby was a notorious, energetic and extremely successful womaniser. There were other differences.
Cambridge Spies, as Peter Moffat's version of their story is called, is an honourable, handsome and entertaining attempt to dramatise an intricate byroad of English history, but there are passages, particularly in the early episodes, in which it presents the story of Guy Burgess & Co as something like the adventures of Bob Cherry & Co crossed with Hollywood's Young Guns. In fact, the Cambridge spies were never as close to each other as we might expect, given their shared convictions. Philby was certainly something of an outsider, although not by choice. Blunt, in particular, found him less than compelling company. As Miranda Carter puts it in her sympathetic and convincing biography of Blunt, he "did not warm to Philby's slightly desperate, relentless need to charm".
One of the perils of writing about the Cambridge spies is the ease with which one can fall into cheap Freudianism. It is possible, for instance, to present Philby as a man driven entirely by father fixation. Most biographical dictionaries devote shorter entries to Philby than to his father, an Arabist and explorer who led the British Political Mission to Central Arabia in 1917 and the following year crossed Arabia by camel; later, in 1931, he made an even more famous and daring journey through the Empty Quarter. Quite an example for a son to try to match.
Kim Philby was born in India in 1911 and educated at Westminster School before going up to Cambridge. There he also fell under the influence of Marxist teachers such as Dobb, a fellow of Trinity, and as early as 1931 he joined a student communist society, of which he was treasurer. As with the other Cambridge spies, except Burgess, it is hard to know for certain just how committed a Marxist Philby was. Blunt said of him, with a characteristic edge of disdain, that "he only ever had one ambition - to be a spy". If Philby père could ride across the Empty Quarter disguised as a Bedouin, Philby fils would outdo him by living a whole life in disguise, allied to a great cause and following the tenets of an ironideology.
What larks.
And perhaps, in the end, what they were all after was larks of one kind or another. Following his exposure, in 1979, Blunt was asked by a friend why he had become a spy. "Oh," Blunt replied ruefully, "cowboys and Indians, cowboys and Indians." For the young in the 1930s, of course, the choice was stark and, so far as it went, simple: communism or fascism, Hitler or Stalin. In all the vituperation that over the years has been directed at the Cambridge spies, nobody ever seems to have stopped to consider that, whatever the enormities committed under its rubric, Marxism was founded on one of the most compelling humanitarian polemics ever formulated; the manifesto of the Communist Party is, even yet, a wonderfully stirring clarion cry to the poor, the downtrodden and the dispossessed, and a programme for revolution far more radical than anything put forward by the middle-class Jacobins on 1789. In the face of Marxist ideology, fascism was nothing more than the posturing of louts and bully boys.
There were anomalies, of course. For instance, how was an aesthete such as Blunt to square his reverence for high art with the imperatives of the revolution? What is Poussin to the proletariat? In his early art criticism - he was writing a weekly column of reviews for the Spectator magazine while still at Cambridge - he performed some remarkable critical handstands. Although plainly an aspirant toward the ivory tower, he doggedly insisted that art for art's sake was bad art and that the artist must have direct contact with life. Herbert Read, a far greater critic than Blunt would ever be, ridiculed this view in a letter to the Spectator: "I can only suspect that by 'contact with life' your correspondent means something like 'contact with a political party' or 'contact with a particular section of the workers'." Carter sums up the ambiguity of Blunt's position with her usual conciseness and restraint: "Blunt was far from unaware that there was a gulf between what he thought he should think and what his personal preferences were."
Blunt was born in 1907 and spent much of his childhood in Paris, where his father was chaplain at the British embassy. His love of art developed in the French capital. "My earliest recollection connected with works of art," Blunt later wrote, "is that I can just remember going to the Louvre before the 1914-18 war."
Returned to England after the war, Blunt attended Marlborough College public school, where he initiated a passionate friendship with the Irish future poet Louis MacNeice. In 1926, he started at Trinity College. There he met Burgess, who took the place in his affections formerly occupied by MacNeice, who had gone to Oxford. Before long, Blunt was converted to the left-wing cause, and he and Burgess had found their way into the Apostles, the famously fascinating secret society presided over by John Maynard Keynes.
Whether Blunt was ever Burgess's lover is debatable. Certainly, in later years the fastidious Blunt would likely have kept a physical distance from the disreputable and dirty Burgess, who exuded a mingled reek of garlic, semen and worse.
It has been widely accepted that the Apostles was a hotbed, literally and figuratively, of illicit activity and that Blunt and Burgess used it as a recruiting ground for both spies and bedfellows. In fact, the records show that Blunt did not take a great deal of interest in the society's doings - in the space of a year and a half around 1933, he attended only two Apostles meetings. As for its attraction for Marxists, neither Philby nor Maclean was a member. More important for them was the student socialist club, affiliated to the British Communist Party, which they joined in 1931. Maclean, son of Sir Donald Maclean, a Liberal cabinet minister, was recruited, probably in 1934, by Philby, who in turn had been recruited by Otto.
Although the least colourful of the Cambridge spies, Maclean would turn out to be one of the most effective. He joined the diplomatic service in 1935 and was posted to Paris, Washington and Cairo. After he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1950, the Foreign Office, in its wisdom, appointed him head of its US department, from where he was able to pass to the Soviets vital documents on the Americans' atomic bomb project and details of the Marshall Plan for postwar European reconstruction.
By now he and Burgess were falling to pieces from the effects of stress and excessive drinking. In 1951, they fled to Moscow, where, later, poor Maclean lost his American wife, who left him to marry . . . Philby, after Philby himself had defected.
How far off it all seems now, the great Cambridge betrayal, in our post-Cold War age of untrammelled communication, unceasing wars of peace and the presumed end of history. No more are there the stark choices that faced the youth of the 1930s. No longer are men of good breeding hauled before the courts for misdemeanours in public urinals. We have a gay community now, old spies write their memoirs and appear on talk shows, and Western businessmen rub their hands at the thought of all that untapped oil under the Caspian Sea. To those old enough to remember the bitter furore that followed Blunt's unmasking, or the fewer who can recall the shock that greeted the defection of Burgess and Maclean, in 1951, Cambridge Spies, for all its pleasures, will be about as accurate a portrait of those Cold War years as Brideshead Revisited was of the England of the second World War.
Surely Hegel has something to say somewhere about how the struggles of the past become the entertainment of the future.
A footnote. The story is told of a visit by Queen Elizabeth to a public art gallery housing among its collection the painting by Poussin that had been owned by Blunt. The gallery director, fearing the sight of it would stir unwelcome memories, nervously tried to usher Her Majesty past the picture, but the good queen stopped, gazed, sighed and said: "Poor Anthony." It might be an epitaph for them all.
Cambridge Spies begins on BBC2 on Friday at 9 p.m.
John Banville is author of The Untouchable, based on the life of Anthony Blunt
