Tragic, to be Blunt

Among the last week’s news stories that most captured my attention was the announcement by the British Library that the manuscript of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, deposited there in 1984, has been released to public availability after the twenty-five-year temporal buffer to which the library authorities had agreed at the time they received the document. Such waiting periods are not uncommonly applied to controversial materials that have the potential to cause distress or embarrassment to living persons or even cause legal difficulties for those who publish them. But such arrangements can be unfair in another way. The gossip of a dead man, after all, now beyond all power of direct interrogation, may be more dangerous than that of the living.



Most of us, I suppose, would be more in favor of virtue if we could postpone having to face virtue’s inconveniences, preferably indefinitely. Saint Augustine had famously prayed, “Make me chaste, O God, but not just yet!” Anthony Blunt and hundreds of others have said in effect, “I want to be truthful and straightforward, but of course not right now.”

Blunt was a most distinguished art historian. As director of the Courtauld Institute (the art history department of the University of London, so to speak) he greatly advanced the cause of academic art history not merely in Britain but wherever his many distinguished students extended his influence throughout the world. As the socially upper-crust conservator of the Queen’s own private collection of paintings, a function he performed so satisfactorily as to earn him a knighthood, he was a star of modest magnitude in the BBC’s night sky of television public intellectual luminaries. But Blunt was several other things as well. He was most notoriously a Soviet spy and a traitor to his country.

The Internet is already abuzz with Anthony Blunt, and I presume to add to the chatter only on account of two accidental circumstances. The first is familial, and it suggests that the "six degrees of separation" theory is far too conservative. My brother-in-law John Newman, a distinguished architectural historian and the current editor of the well-known series on The Buildings of England, was for some years Blunt’s junior colleague at the Courtauld Institute in London. He greatly admired Blunt as art historian and academic administrator and was of the view that the public rhetorical violence that followed upon Blunt’s tardy public exposure in 1979—which Blunt in the newly released memoir apparently says drove him to contemplate suicide—was in large measure sanctimonious and unreflective. John’s opinion is not one I would dismiss lightly. Furthermore, among our personal friends is a woman who (I learned many years after first meeting her) is a blood relative of Blunt's. A second circumstance tends in another direction. I happen to be in the process of publishing a book (The Anti-Communist Manifestos, with an official release date less than a month away) in which I touch upon the thought processes that led many able and accomplished western intellectuals to invest their deepest allegiance in the unspeakable tyranny of Stalinist Communism. In preparing this book I had to read literally dozens of autobiographies, confessions, apologies, explanations, or reaffirmations of an unrepentant defiance written by 1930s and 40s Communists. I have of course not yet seen Blunt’s memoir, though it is bound to be in bookshops nearly as fast as computer keyboards can clatter, but from its characterization in the press it appears likely to fall into a familiar self-serving genre.

I mention Blunt in The Anti-Communist Manifestos only in passing. What I say of him specifically comes in a discussion of the social myopia that kept American and British authorities from exposing damaging Soviet espionage in a timely manner. The Cambridge spy ring should have been shut down in 1940 if not before. “Unfortunately,” I write, “one of the spies, Anthony Blunt, a sort of British Alger Hiss, whose extraordinary distinction and public reputation made the very thought of his disloyalty impossible, was one of the foxes overseeing the operations of the MI5 henhouse.”

The parallel between Blunt and Hiss, while imperfect, is apt. Neither man was an open Communist, and Blunt was not a Party member at all. Anyone familiar with the patterns of Communist espionage and front organizations of the period will recognize the practical insignificance of this fact. Communist sympathizers and some actual Communists were often more useful to the Party if their allegiance was not explicitly known. Hiss and Blunt also shared the arts of practiced liars. Blunt lied about his espionage for as long as he could, through several incompetent security inquiries. Hiss continued to lie until his dying day, even after he had been found guilty of lying by a jury of his peers.

A point frequently encountered in histories of the Nazi regime concerns Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, which he published in his late thirties. The point is that all the horrors of the evolving regime, though European observers usually reacted to them as developments wholly unpredictable if not actually inconceivable, are clearly adumbrated in Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf was not an obscure book. On the contrary, it was a huge best seller in German-speaking countries, and widely available in translated form in the other major European languages. Hitler’s plans were quite clearly spelled out in the book, but the foreign service professionals in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay paid no attention to it. The author of such a book couldn't be serious.
During the research for my book I encountered a sort of minor league Mein Kampf published by Anthony Blunt in 1937. Actually, it's only a short essay; but nobody who read it and took it seriously could have possibly been surprised when Blunt turned out to be the "Fourth Man". George Orwell said that there had been more lies published about the Spanish Civil War than any other event in history. That was undoubtedly hyperbole, but it is certainly true that in the late Thirties a lot of famous people published a lot of stuff they later regretted. One well-known example is Auden's poem "Spain", which the poet later spent several years trying wish away or to revise retrospectively. In 1937 the (at that point) Communist poet C. Day Lewis edited a volume of essays entitled The Mind in Chains. The title referred to the supposed state of things under capitalism. Essays by various hands addressed the fields of education, literature, art, drama, cinema, music, and so forth. In a fascinating introduction the editor began with the mythical chains of Prometheus as developed by Shelley and ended with the metaphoric chains of the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win." The authors were not all Communists--according to Day Lewis they represented the full socialist coalition of the Popular Front--but they shared one fundamental assumption. Western capitalist society was either actually dead or near death. Hence the essays followed a roughly similar format: a description of current capitalist sterility, followed by a blueskying projection of a future socialist vitality. What "vitality" seemed to mean to all the writers was the Soviet Union--yes, the Soviet Union of 1937! "The Mind in Chains could never have been written were it not for the widespread belief of intellectual workers that the mind is really in chains to-day," wrote Day Lewis, "that these chains have been forged by a dying social system, that they can and must be broken--and in the Soviet Union have been broken..." Day Lewis seems not to have read or credited Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (1934), in which the ex-Communist editor of the Masses had made an empirical study of the actual state of art and literature under Stalin. As for Blunt, artistic uniformity seemed to be the artistic goal.

Certain changes will inevitably take place in the forms which artists use to express the ideas of the classless society. The conception of a painting as a unique private possession will disappear....The easel painting, which was the particular art-form evolved at the time of the Renaissance when art became essentially private, will become of secondary importance, and instead mural painting will be developed in a form suitable to the decoration of the communal buildings devoted to the culture and recreation of the workers. But it will still, of course, be true that people will want something to decorate the walls of their houses, to which large scale murals are not generally appropriate. This need will probably be satisfied by the creation of what may be called publishing firms of painting, whose function it would be to commission originals in order to have them copied in large quantities by some process of colour printing....By this method the idea of the unique original with great scarcity value would be avoided, and the original itself would probably be kept in the state museum as a help in the training of other artists. In this kind of production much of the process will be mechanical and the same will probably be true of many other kinds of painting. [120-121]

It is fascinating to learn from one of the great art historians of the last century and the future Surveyor of the Queen's Paintings that the art of the socialist consummation so devoutly to be wished for would consist chiefly of post office murals and the polychrome print rack at the National Gallery souvenir shop. When Blunt turned out to be the infamous "Fourth Man" incredulity trumped consternation in the British press, but no one who had read the essay entitled "Art Under Capitalism and Socialism" need have been all that surprised.

Political belief should never be criminalized, even if that belief is invested in the benignity of the international criminal conspiracy that was the Comintern. But ideas do sometimes have consequence, and active participation in criminal conspiracy is not an exercise of a civil right. In what he came to call the greatest mistake of his life, Anthony Blunt became a criminal and a traitor. Like so many others he sought to justify his actions on the basis of high political and moral principle. The political principle was "anti-fascism," the moral principle "personal loyalty to one's friends." He apparently never pondered the incoherence of the two principles.

A certain quotation from E. M. Forster has become de rigeur in discussing the Cambridge spies. Forster was another Cantabridgian, though of one generation older than the spies, another genius, another (with Burgess and Blunt himself) tortured and furtive homosexual. In a provocative essay Forster had written: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." What was already an arresting apothegm later took on an aura of prophecy when it turned out that Anthony Blunt had indeed made that choice. And here was something extraordinary. The same man who in 1937 was articulating a Marxist artistic theory in which the individuality of the artist and the particularity of subject were to be made entirely subordinate to mechanical reproduction and the satisfactions of the "workers" took as his highest moral principle, one that trumped any larger social obligation, loyalty to a coterie of highly privileged personal friends. Here was a tragedy much larger than politics, one that would require a Shakespeare or a Goethe to probe.

Triumph at Baker's Basin

According to one cynical view the two secrets of a happy life are, first, to identify genuinely modest goals and, second, to cultivate very low expectations in their pursuit. In other words, “Dream the possible dream.” From this point of view my past week must be judged a succès fou. I succeeded in having my pickup truck inspected and validated by the State of New Jersey.

The general experience of NJMVD Inspection Station at Baker’s Basin used regularly to be described as an imaginary supplement to Dante’s Inferno. Many residents of the state suspected that the system was secretly controlled by the garage owners’ and auto mechanics’ lobby—there must be one—since many people were willing to pay almost anything for a private inspection that would relieve them of the necessity of a personal visit to Baker’s Basin. My first happy

Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station before recently instituted reforms

surprise was that the place itself had shaped up measurably since I was last there four years ago. The geography is still vestigially infernal. You have to drive around three sides of the Quaker Bridge Mall to reach the station, though if you go early that mainly involves lapping empty parking lots. But once there, things weren’t so bad. In fact, they were pretty good. It used to be like a Black Friday shoe sale. You are now funneled, in single file, into an automated gate, where you pick up a ticket stamped with an accurate time of arrival: in this instance, 9:31.
Baker's Basin (Mercer County NJ) Inspection Station since Jon Corzine became governor. Note coordinated pastels, which invite the motorist to make contact with his/her own inner inspector...

There were fewer than a dozen cars distributed among no fewer than five inspection alleys. By the time I got to the head of my line there was nobody at all in either of the two left-hand lanes. An inspector in one of those alleys beckoned in my direction, but when I started to react he yelled out, “No, not you—you,” pointing to a late model Acura driven by a bejeweled matron behind me. “Your vehicle,” he said, shouting to me again, “is too old for my lane.” Snappy repartee in such a situation is not easy, but I tried. “You sure know how to hurt a guy’s feelings,” I shouted back. I thought the remark had been drowned out by the Acura sweeping around and past me, but he surprised me with a good humored answer: “Sorry about that”.

The purportedly ancient vehicle which I presented for inspection is a 1993 Ford pickup truck. Now something fifteen years-old is, generally speaking, not exactly venerable. For instance, would you really like to have a fifteen-year-old give you a colonoscopy? Would you seek the meaning of life from a fifteen-year-old metaphysician? Would you really be impressed by a firm that boasted that it has been a "purveyor of sweetmeats to the royal household since 1993"? My truck, though fifteen years old, has been driven less than 100,000 miles, and it has been scrupulously maintained from the mechanical and safety points of view. On the other hand, its exterior, especially the bed and tail-gate, naturally display the cicatrices of serious industry. This is of course entirely as it should be.

What a 1993 Ford pickup should never look like (except perhaps in 1993).


What a 1993 Ford pickup should always look like.

The commonly encountered phrase "a beat-up pickup" is a pleonasm. Every pickup should be beat-up. That is what pickups are for. Those grotesquely pristine things you find parked in front of franchise restaurants in shopping malls are not real pickups. But, alas, some folks in New Jersey, and particularly the state inspectors, simply don't get it.

For nearly two decades they have been doing their level best to get "older vehicles" off the road. They say so quite openly. This policy, executed under a bogus claim of ecological consciousness, ministered to the sloth and incompetence of Detroit and the greed of lending agencies, contributing to the results we have recently had cause to deplore. If the vehicles Detroit makes are junk, they soon end up in the junk yard; but it's an ill wind that blows no one some good, in this case the duly certified usurers who loan the motorist the dough for the next expensive piece of junk.

More than twenty-five years ago I noticed a dramatic change on America's highways: the virtual disappearance of the jalopy. The kind of vehicle that most male 'teen-agers of my generation once bought on monthly installments with their paper route money, then lovingly rebuilt, then endlessly drove around the courthouse square of a Saturday

The Joad-mobile from John Ford's version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Soviet authorities arranged for mass showings of this movie in Russia, claiming that it gave an accurate picture of the realities of typical family life in America. They had to abandon the program quickly when the factory workers reacted with amazement and jealousy that an ordinary American family could be so prosperous as to own a car.

night--that vehicle simply no longer exists. The loss to our culture is not slight. In 1936 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published a famous book, The Revolt of the Masses, in which he used a now classic characterization of modernity through the image of the internal combustion engine. Throughout the western world, he wrote, millions of people have become utterly dependent upon a machine whose basic mechanisms are mysterious to them. The point is an excellent one, and truer today than then, especially when we think of the cybernetic sphere; but it was lost on me when I first read Ortega's book because of the ineptitude of the the specific example offered. When I was growing up there wasn't a fourteen-year-old boy in Baxter County who couldn't take apart and reassemble a Chevrolet of the same age. For both sexes erotic initiation involved the negotiation of the steering wheel of an old Plymouth. I was left wondering about whatever could be wrong with little Spaniards. No more. I haven't seen a kid working on his car in about twenty-five years. The video game addict is the unworthy successor to the shade-tree mechanic.

At the inspection station you have to wait in a little bullpen from which you can watch the inspectors at work on your vehicle as it moves slowly down the lane. Mine moved much slower than the others. My guy was nice enough, but he became obviously frustrated by his inability to fail me. Yes, the horn works; the lights all work; the windshield wipers are actually new. If you get a reasonably tuned Ford engine with tight cylinders and correct time, it will not emit culpable emissions whether it was made in 1939 or 2009. Brake equalization is a little tricky, but if it's really out of whack a driver will know it and have it remedied before showing up at the DMV. It just about killed the guy, but at 10:02 am he had to to plaster this on my windshield:


HOW vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays,
While limping numbers tell the score:
Oh seven three, oh four six four.

Uncles and the Present Perfect

We just spent a delicious Fourth of July holiday that turned out, in an unexpected way, to be a nearly complete family gathering. Zvi and Katy arrived a few days ago from Paris, with young Lulu and Cora very much present. (Sophia is for a while at an upscale photography workshop in Ireland—a boondoggle passed off as “preparation for the Bac.”) Luke and Melanie naturally drove over from Philadelphia. This meant that only Richard would be missing. He, I knew, was in Atlanta crating up his photographs, prior to driving to Massachusetts via North Carolina and Brooklyn.

It had not occurred to me, though it had to Rich, that an itinerary indentured to the I-95 corridor would inevitably bring him very near our house. He called with the news that he could make a brief meal stop, and Joan, who answered the phone, conspired with him to double the delight by making his arrival a surprise. At least I had no inkling he would be appearing, nor did his adoring young nieces Lulu and Cora. They had already been given the disappointing news that Uncle Rich would not be there. In fact, since they had asked about this more than once, they had been told more than once.

I don’t know whether the Fourth of July is an official “family” holiday; but ours was at least an informal one, and before it was over I had occasion to meditate on the appropriateness of one of our old national emblems—Uncle Sam. Supposedly Uncle Sam came about because of the importunities of anthropromorphism and the need to fit the pre-existing initials U.S., but there’s more to it than that. Brother Sam, Cousin Sam—they wouldn’t do. In Hamlet’s famous remark about his stepfather Claudius—“A little more than kin, and less than kind”—we are reminded of the double nature of family relationship, in which the ties of blood and those affection are by no means identical. “Of all my wife’s relations,” my father used to say, “I like myself the best.” The primal memory of blood is fossilized in our word cousin, which really means “of one blood” (con + sanguinis), which is why the word is used so often in Renaissance drama of any blood relative, sometimes to our confusion. The distinctive feature of the closest of all relationships, the marital relationship, is that though it is the creator of the blood bond, it is not itself one. In fact many societies have taken elaborate care to keep the marital bond and the blood bond separate. The old Anglican prayer book had an elaborate Consanguinity chart, summarizing the consensus of medieval canon law, allowing marriage between partners at the fifth degree of consanguinity (first cousin, once removed) but no nearer. The old country phrase "kissing cousins" refers to those kinsfolk sufficiently distant to lust after safely.

The animus here is a primitive fear of incest, which exists in most cultures and is immortally enshrined in the western cultural tradition at the very birth of tragedy, in the story of Oedipus. Faithful adherence to the consanguinity charts was intended to obviate the Theban unpleasantness. One of the great lines of world literature is taken from one of these charts: Tom Jones’s horrified realization that unknowingly he may have been in bed with his own mother. “Incest!” he cries out in alarm, “—with a mother!” That is perhaps the most telling indefinite article in all of English literature.

The blood relationships are all different, often in indefinable ways. We all of necessity have a similar pattern of biological forebears. Almost everybody has had the experience of parents, and most of us of grandparents. But we may or may not be brothers or sisters, uncles or aunts, nephews or nieces, cousins. I had brothers but no sister; but I realized how much I had missed only much later when, as a father, I closely observed the interaction of brother and sister within my own house.

My more severe disadvantage has been in the realm of uncledom. I had two terrific uncles, especially my Uncle John, for whom I was named. He was my father’s elder brother, and those two remained close until the end of their lives. Between the two of them they taught me all the arts and crafts of country life, not a few of which turn out to have a surprising relevance in the New Jersey suburbs. The more important instruction was informal; they taught me about brotherhood and friendship.

Before I got married I didn’t think much about what kind of a father I would become, but I spent a good deal of time imagining my avuncularity. Here Fortune dealt me a blow. It isn’t that I have nobody to be uncle to. I have two splendid nieces, one of them an expert in primary education, the other an intellectual property lawyer, both of them as well busy mothers in their own right. But they are Englishwomen, separated from me by a wide ocean, and I was able to make only occasional and usually highly formal appearances in their young lives. There wasn’t much opportunity for me to teach them how to repair a hay-bailer. I was for a time worried that something similar would happen among my own children when they began going international in a serious way, but if you get to be sufficiently international you also make the effort to keep in frequent communication.

The relationship between nephews and nieces and maternal uncle was particularly strong, and it had a special character, in that the uncle was the particular mentor of the nephew and the protector of the niece. This relationship probably developed in early warrior societies in which male mortality was high and widows and orphans numerous. There are many allusions to this situation in our earlier literatures, where it not infrequently is the occasion of irony. In Beowulf King Hygelac, the emblem of the brittle warrior code at the tragic heart of the poem, is the brother of the hero’s mother. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which considerable complicates the narrative situation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, its ostensible source text, turns Pandarus into Criseyde’s uncle. The obvious purpose of this detail is to heighten the awfulness of his sexual treason against her. In one of the most haunting and mysterious of the Troubadour poems, Arnaut Daniel’s sestina Lo ferm voler the strangely rhyming impediments to the lover’s enjoyment are the ongle and the oncle, the metaphoric fingernail of the spying gossip, the watchfulness of the guardian uncle.

Well, the Fourth was a beautiful day. The usual family high jinx were in train, with central headquarters, as always in the kitchen. I was doing a little intermittent, desultory work in the garden when little Cora came running out to me in a paroxysm of excitement. “I have seen Richard,” she blurted out. She did not say “Richard is here” or even “I just saw Richard in the kitchen”. I probably would have intuited the whole plot in an instant if I had heard either of those sentences. But “I have seen Richard” was so formal, so literary, so clearly at odds with the normal syntax of a four-year-old, that I just stood there befuddled for a moment. There is a special dignity in the present perfect tense, a solemnity. “He hath loosed the awful vengeance of His terrible swift-sword.” Now there is an absolutely indispensable hath. It just wouldn’t do to say, “He loosed his vengeance.”

It finally dawned on me what “I have seen Richard” had to mean, and, standing as I was in a garden, I at the same moment realized why little Cora’s sentence was so arresting. Her words were nearly identical to those of Mary Magdalene who had gone to visit a dead body and found instead a living man. “Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news, ‘I have seen the Lord’” (Luke 20:18). She had at first mistaken the risen Christ for the gardener! This beautiful anecdote is the literary source of one of the great subjects of medieval and Renaissance art—the so called “Noli me tangere”.



Although little Cora has already mastered some of the Hebrew prayers for the Sabbath meal, she is not yet truly a Bible scholar. So I do not claim to find here a conscious quotation. What I can and do claim is a very particular love of a niece for her uncle. She was as delighted to see Richard walk into the kitchen as Mary had been to stumble upon her risen Lord. Joy doesn't get much more intense than that.