The Making of an American

W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet By Charles Osborne

Harcourt, Brace, 336 pp., $17.50 In a recent Time essay on the roots of the Anthony Blunt scandal, Malcolm Muggeridge—who was himself in the British Intelligence apparatus during World War II a colleague of such Soviet spies as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean—has some harsh things to say about the climate at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s when “homosexuality and leftish opinions tended to go together.” He asks why revolutionary causes and espionage appealed to the gays. “Spying … is a kind of acting . . . the inevitable exclusion from the satisfaction of parenthood gave them a grudge against society and therefore an instinctive sympathy with efforts to overthrow it.” Muggeridge is talking not only about spies “who saw fit to betray their country, their culture, and their class in order to advance the power and the influence of the most ruthless, philistine, and materialistic autocracy the world has ever known,” but also of homosexuals like Keynes and Strachey, whose contributions to subverting the morality and the economy of the pre-totalitarian world were more fundamental: and of E. M. Forster, “who provided putative traitors with a serviceable formula for justifying their treachery by insisting that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.”

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W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet By Charles Osborne

Harcourt, Brace, 336 pp., $17.50 In a recent Time essay on the roots of the Anthony Blunt scandal, Malcolm Muggeridge—who was himself in the British Intelligence apparatus during World War II a colleague of such Soviet spies as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean—has some harsh things to say about the climate at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s when “homosexuality and leftish opinions tended to go together.” He asks why revolutionary causes and espionage appealed to the gays. “Spying … is a kind of acting . . . the inevitable exclusion from the satisfaction of parenthood gave them a grudge against society and therefore an instinctive sympathy with efforts to overthrow it.” Muggeridge is talking not only about spies “who saw fit to betray their country, their culture, and their class in order to advance the power and the influence of the most ruthless, philistine, and materialistic autocracy the world has ever known,” but also of homosexuals like Keynes and Strachey, whose contributions to subverting the morality and the economy of the pre-totalitarian world were more fundamental: and of E. M. Forster, “who provided putative traitors with a serviceable formula for justifying their treachery by insisting that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country.”