|
|
In November, 1979, he was
unmasked as a traitor. It is hard now to reconstruct the
amount of debate that this caused in the scholarly world and
in the newspapers and I am not sure that Miranda Carter, in
her generally well-researched biography, quite does justice to
it. In particular, she alludes to, but does not quote from, a
letter to the Times from former pupils, drafted by Giles
Waterfield, the then director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery,
and Mark Jones, now Director of the V & A whose final
sentence was: "For us he remains a scholar and a
gentleman." This was the intellectual and moral issue
that Blunt’s exposure raised in its most extreme form:
should his eminence and undoubted contribution to scholarship
exculpate him from any blame for having traded secrets to the
Russians? Most art historians were inclined towards lenience.
Now that
Blunt is long dead, remembered at least as much as a spy as an
art historian, his own testament locked away in the British
Library, Carter has taken the opportunity to write a biography
that provides a dispassionate account of his life.
As a young
don, Blunt was converted from the idea of art for art’s sake
as espoused by his friends in Bloomsbury to an intellectual
form of Marxism, which much influenced his critical writings
in the Spectator. The issue as to what made him work for the
NKVD (later the KGB) is necessarily complicated. Some of it
was based on his generation’s intense dislike for the way of
life of the orthodox upper class, its unthinking patriotism.
Blunt had
always been more cosmopolitan than his contemporaries, having
been brought up in France, and seems to have appreciated the
contact that Marxism gave him with European refugees. Above
all, the cell established by Kim Philby in Cambridge in the
mid-1930s appealed to his desire to belong to the same club as
his homosexual friends. How much spying did Blunt actually do?
On the evidence of this book, not much until the war. He was
recruited to recruit others and signed up a number of
undergraduates with left-wing sympathies, including Michael
Straight and Leo Long. In the late 1930s he lost contact with
Moscow and concentrated on his teaching at the Courtauld
Institute, his editorial work for the Warburg Institute, and
his work on Poussin and Italian art theory.
During the
war he was recruited to MI5, which was desperate to abolish
its old-fashioned and amateur character by the recruitment of
academics — Blunt was well qualified, if only as a linguist.
It was then that he was again approached by Moscow to hand
over secrets, which he did conscientiously, but without much
apparent enthusiasm. Later in life, when asked why he did it,
he would describe it as being like a game of cowboys and
indians, suggesting a high degree of intellectual and
emotional detachment from the moral consequences of his
actions.
It is always
possible that he was subject to blackmail. Ironically, his
contact in the Kremlin was suspicious of the amount of
material he was passing over, suspected him of being a double
agent, and, much later, he was described by a KGB officer
(rather accurately) as "ideological shit". After the
war, he slipped effortlessly into all the highest places in
the art establishment, with a flat on the top floor of the
Courtauld Institute and a friendship with the Queen, a distant
cousin. There is no evidence that he ever felt the faintest
twinge of guilt — rather the contrary — but he did fuss
endlessly that he might be found out.
It is possible that he let
his activities be known to the authorities shortly after the
war. He was certainly on friendly terms with Sir Dick White,
the Head of MI5 and MI6, in the 1960s, and they used to spend
Christmas together with Victor Rothschild in Rothschild’s
house in Cambridge. I like to imagine the three of them, the
purple of the British establishment, one of them a former spy,
tucking into the turkey.
|
