Linking the lonely lives of Britain's aristocrat spy
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It's a strange thing to read a book about a traitor and hear a voice in the back of your mind murmuring ... poor Anthony Blunt.
The turncoat at hand is Blunt, British art historian and spy, the subject of Miranda Carter's insightful new biography, "Anthony Blunt: His Lives" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30). "Lives" is the operative word here. An acquaintance once said of Blunt: "He was the most compartmentalized man I ever met."
Blunt was the infamous "Fourth Man" among a group of bright, incorrigible, upper-class men recruited as students at Cambridge in the 1930s to spy for the Soviet Union. Books on the other three — Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby — have filled up their own shelves. While Blunt did less damage than the others, his life, in its quiet, repressed intricacy, is just as fascinating.
Carter's book makes for vivid reading in part because it amounts to a walk through 20th-century British intellectual life. The actor Michael Redgrave, poet W.H. Auden, economist John Maynard Keynes, even Queen Elizabeth, all crossed paths with Blunt, unwitting that he led a double life.
Blunt was the bright, beautiful son of an English vicar. Packed off to boarding school early, he quickly learned that he didn't fit the English gentleman's mold. The monolithic culture of the so-called "public" (high-class private) schools provoked its own antithesis: "a questioning and subversive attitude and a profound distrust of authority, necessary for any intellectual class and vital to the manufacture of an artist, writer or spy." At Cambridge, thin, raffishly elegant Blunt joined a group of men drawn to communism, a prospective cure for fascism and the worldwide desperation caused by the depression of the 1930s. These ideologues were recruited brilliantly by the Soviets.
Despite its length (500 pages), this book compels because of Carter's insight into the psychology of Blunt's conversion: Blunt had the academic's arrogant belief in his own ideas, untainted by any real political experience, plus the homosexual's anger at a society that "tried to change them and told them they were criminals." And the vicar's son had a "religion-shaped hole" inside him — childhood faith was supplanted by a belief in the world-changing power of Marxism.
Blunt went to work recruiting for Soviet intelligence, never faltering, even after Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact. The Cambridge spies all worked their way into the British intelligence apparatus. Blunt, whose fluency in French, German and Italian was sorely needed on the eve of World War II, joined MI5, Britain's intelligence service, in 1940. According to the Russian intelligence archives, Blunt passed 1,771 documents to Russian intelligence between 1941 and 1945.
Postwar, Blunt stopped spying but kept his corrosive secret as he achieved career success, famous as a superb lecturer, a considerate teacher at (and later director of) the Courtald Institute, and an artistic adviser to the queen (he even ran secret missions to rescue royal-family art from postwar Germany). He was knighted in 1956.
Unmasked by British intelligence in the 1960s, his secret was suppressed for 15 more years by an intelligence service shamed by its blindness. Britain's bluest bloods had found "it almost impossible to credit that anyone from the heart of the English upper classes could be anything other than basically loyal to the institutions which they had been raised to serve."
Why is this archetypal tale, retold so many times with so many variations, so compelling? As a 25-year addict of spy literature, here's my thought: We all have parts of ourselves that we have to compartmentalize, driving them underground for survival. We all know the cost. Anthony Blunt's secrets finally made him an exceedingly lonely man. He retreated ever further into the study of French artists and architects, enduring his disgrace with a kind of stoic calm when he was exposed by the press in 1979. He died of a heart attack, working at his desk in 1983.
In that, he seemed almost lucky. His long-time lover, John Gaskin, threw himself under a train and died in 1987. And his friends bore the burden of his betrayal long after his passing:
Carter notes that her biography became possible only decades after Blunt's death. It took his friends that long to bring themselves to talk about him, as they came "to forgive or to comprehend or to put in context his spying, and became willing to talk about their memories of him."