If, like me, you live with the constant anxiety that you’re snookering your brain with booze, you’ll have a sick shiver hearing this extract from a letter from Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West – his wife – in 1950:
I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and acute minds I knew. Now his is just an imitation (and a pretty bad one) of what he once was. Not that he was actually drunk yesterday. He was just soaked and silly. I felt angry about it.
Guy Burgess spied for the KGB before, during and after WWII. At the time of Nicolson’s letter, he was one year pre-defection to Russia and about a decade pre-death. He was, around this time, living in the US with Kim Philby, who was forced to babysit him on account of his propensity to disgrace himself at every opportunity:
“Darling. Please. Really.”
I am ardently fascinated by Guy Burgess. A little bit I love him. It’s that chutpah, and the idealism. Perhaps I shouldn’t feel like that; he was a traitor of course. But the Cambridge spy ring hated Hitler and loved the commies – and their ideological children were still alive and thriving well in to the 80s. I was one of them, in my childishly pretentious way. I bought Socialist Worker and tried to pretend I was working class. Then there’s his funnyness and gayness, of course – funny gay men go hand and hand with the womenfolk. And I get the thirst, the love of alcohol and drunkenness and silliness. What secrets he had, what motivation to get soused, to block and tackle the constant paranoid mummerings.
I think they need a new movie. Cambridge Spies wasn’t very good – too lovey & actory.
