Anthony Blunt: His Lives
By Miranda Carter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
590 pgs. US$30/C$47

The mysterious spy

By Steven Martinovich
web posted January 28, 2002

It's a testament to Miranda Carter's skill that a figure so publicly
restrained and insular as Anthony Blunt, equally best known for
his work in art history and his spying on England on behalf of the
Soviet union, that she was able to complete as detailed an
investigation into the man that she has managed. Despite the
close proximity, however, it may be impossible for anyone to
know why Blunt betrayed his nation especially since Blunt
himself may not have known.

Until November 1979, Blunt was known to world as one its
finest art historians, specializing in his beloved 16th century
French painter Nicolas Poussin. To his friends, Blunt was a
mysterious figure with a murky past. Known was his friendship
with Guy Burgess, the British spy who along with Don Maclean
defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, his homosexuality and his
Communist past. Many other rumors swirled around the man
throughout his life, including secret missions on behalf of the
English Crown at end of the Second World War.

"The factor which most persistently kept Blunt a mystery ... was
his own fundamental mysteriousness, the fact that even to his
friends he was an enigma. They were well aware that there were
many things they didn't know about them," Carter writes early
on. "'I worked with him for thirty years, but I never felt I really
knew him,' his deputy director at the Courtauld Institute of Art,
George Zarnecki, said later."

Carter's account of Blunt's life begins in his early years, including
his time at truly brutal public school, one that Carter writes
spurred "a questioning and subversive attitude and a profound
distrust of authority" and traces a life that included being a
member of the Bloomsbury group, a leftist collection of
intellectuals that included John Maynard Keynes, and a secret
Cambridge debating group known as the Apostles. Out of
school, Blunt served with MI5 during the Second World War
and it was in 1941 he began passing documents to the Soviet
Union.

As history relates, Blunt was a member of the infamous
Cambridge Five spy ring, one that included Burgess, Maclean,
Kim Philby and John Cairncross. Along with passing along
sensitive information to the Soviets, Blunt also served as a
spotter of new recruits for Moscow. While hysterical claims that
Blunt's work was responsible for the deaths of several western
spies in the Soviet Union were ultimately disproved, the extent of
the damage he inflicted upon the West may never be completely
known until the Soviet archives are completely investigated.

Of course, MI5 knew of all of this in the 1960s. After a break
thanks to, of all things, a Kennedy Administration appointment to
the National Endowment for the Arts, British Intelligence finally
turned their suspicions of Blunt into an active investigation.
Blunt's treachery, however, was hidden because of the
embarrassment it would have caused both the British
establishment and the intelligence community.

Throughout her account of Blunt, it's fairly clear that Carter is
sympathetic to the man who betrayed her nation, though the
biography's one weakness is that she doesn't make it very clear
why she believes he deserves this sympathy. True, the last years
of his life were filled by manic efforts by the press to find out
more about him, efforts frustrated by his careful work to insulate
the private man from the public one. Though his hatred of
fascism was laudable, his actions were no less reprehensible
because his spying for the fascist world's greatest enemy. Blunt
was born the lower middle class son of a clergyman and was
educated by the best the British Empire had to offer. He
managed to rise to a position of trust in the British Establishment
and the world and did much good academic work. He also
betrayed his nation without much of an explanation. The two fail
to balance each other out.

Carter even states at one point that Blunt would never have
become a spy had not been for Burgess, a claim that may be true
but also irrelevant. Blunt was a spy by his own choice whether or
not Burgess manipulated him. By portraying him as a man easily
led by his friends, Carter's defense of him turns Blunt into a more
pathetic figure than sad. Blunt was a complicated man who
managed to compartmentalize his life to an amazing degree and
lapsing into simple answers to explain his motivations is a
regrettable error for Carter to have made.

Despite that, Carter's work is exceptional in its painstakingness
and thoroughness. Even Blunt's many friends were never quite
sure what demons drove him but her work gets as close to the
man behind the news accounts as is probably possible. Though
we may never know the Blunt that the man thought or hoped he
was, Carter has given us a marvelous view into his world and the
circumstances he lived in and allowed us to form our own
judgments.

Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.

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