The British Library has given up a 25-year secret as stipulated by its donor, and so Anthony Blunt's memoir - penned in sunny exile in Rome after Blunt's public exposure/disgrace of 1979, and given to the BL in 1984 - is now available for inspection. Guess what? Having suffered the frightful indignity of surrendering his knighthood and his fellowship of Trinity College, Blunt was moved to write that passing state secrets to the Soviet Union had been 'naive' and the 'biggest mistake of [his] life.' Apparently he had got himself caught up in something far bigger than himself: 'The atmosphere in Cambridge was so intense...' Golly. I bet.I don't imagine there is anything finer to read on the subject of Blunt than George Steiner's magisterial, annihilating 'The Cleric of Treason', first published in the New Yorker in 1980. The Google Books entry on The George Steiner Reader seems to offer the browser a chance to read this essay in full online, and - per the previously noted online availability of Susan Sontag's 'Notes on Camp' and the hope that other such classic pieces of cultural commentary be open to inspection and exchange over the web - this seems to me a reason to rejoice. As for Blunt, the best verdict is in Steiner's imperishable last line...
2 comments:
I just saw your posting. The Steiner piece in not in the Steiner Reader but in a later book, George Steiner at the New Yorker, the magazine the piece was written for.
Further, if you ever watched Alan Bennett's teleplay about Blunt, A Question of Attribution, when it was first shown on Masterpiece Theatre, Alistair Cooke actually references the Steiner piece as a rebuttal to Alan Bennett's defense of Blunt.
Thanks for dropping by. Perhaps it's a different US edition of the 'Steiner Reader' that I linked to? 'Cleric of Treason' is certainly in the UK edition that I picked up back in the late 1980s. Yes, I remember the Bennett play from its BBC broadcast. Nice of Alistair Cooke to add some textual cross-reference...
RTK
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