How Burgess and Maclean managed Auden

The TLS commemorated the centenary of W. H. Auden’s birth in February with an appreciative article by Nicholas Jenkins (February 9), who subtly dismantled some of the “fables and half-truths, many of them originating with” Auden himself – about his early political and cultural attitudes, his love life, even his short-sightedness – that “enshroud” our understanding of the man and his poetry. He also touched on the damage that was done to the poet’s reputation by his departure for the United States in 1939. Three weeks after the article appeared, on March 2, a new cloud settled on Auden when fifty-year-old government documents on the escape of the two spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, were declassified. British dailies picked up the story; the headline “REVEALED: HOW AUDEN MAY HAVE HELPED BURGESS TO FLEE BRITAIN” was typical of their accusatory tone. Auden was back in the dock as the “sixth man”, a traitor, no less.

The background is well recorded. In May 1951 the security services’ net had tightened around the two Foreign Office spies. Burgess was not in imminent danger. Maclean, in a state of alcoholic breakdown, was. Kim Philby, the “third man” (then in Washington), warned that Maclean must soon be retired: if only to protect himself and the fourth man, Anthony Blunt. Burgess (who was more expendable) knew his fellow homosexual Auden socially. The poet, who had recently acquired a holiday home on Ischia in the Bay of Naples, had apparently suggested that Burgess was welcome to visit him there. En route to Italy from New York, Auden stayed, as usual, with Stephen and Natasha Spender in London.

On Thursday May 24, Burgess’s behaviour was noticeably erratic. That evening (after visiting his former history teacher, Sir Robert Birley, now headmaster at Eton, with “something important” to discuss, which turned out to be a proposed biography of the third Marquess of Salisbury), Burgess phoned Auden at the Spenders’ home; Natasha Spender took the call. She informed Burgess that Auden wasn’t there, but “he might be at the other number”, in the flat round the corner, which Stephen used for work. Burgess duly called the other number. Auden wasn’t there either, Stephen informed him. Burgess then went on to say, at length, how much he had enjoyed Spender’s recently published autobiography, World Within World. Spender found the praise “strange”: it was the first conversation he could recall having with Burgess in five years. When Auden came home late that night, Spender told him that Burgess wanted him to call back. “Do I have to?” Auden drawled, “he’s always drunk.” He did not call back. Auden, as Natasha Spender recalls, was himself tight.

The next day, Burgess learned that Maclean was to be interrogated the following Monday. The escape plan had to be carried out immed-iately, and that evening the two men left London. (Maclean’s pregnant wife, Melinda, was kept in the dark.) Burgess’s initial intention was to accompany Maclean to Southampton – chosen as a port that was known to be lax about checking passports. When it became clear that Maclean was incapable of managing the journey alone, Burgess accompanied him across the Channel, effectively blowing his own cover. Moscow prudently instructed that both men must come in from the cold. They travelled to Prague, and thence to lifelong exile in the USSR.

Auden left that same weekend for Ischia. The Spenders, too, left for their summer holiday in Torri del Benaco, by Lake Garda. Mysteriously, Burgess’s Thursday phone calls to Auden had become common knowledge. Mysteriously, too, as Auden told Spender, “some lady . . . thought she saw la B in the train on his way to Ischia”. Before leaving, Burgess had misleadingly informed his mother by telegram that he would be holidaying in the Mediterranean. In Italy the Spenders and Auden were besieged by English reporters and plain-clothes men, convinced they were either hiding the spies, or concealing information about their whereabouts.

Both Spender and Auden were interviewed, separately. Auden at first denied all knowledge of Burgess’s phone calls. When informed that Spender had insisted he had passed on Burgess’s messages, Auden changed his story: he (Auden) must have been too drunk to remember. MI6 concluded that “either Auden or Spender is deliberately prevaricating”. Quite possibly Auden really had forgotten. But
Richard Davenport-Hines, in his biography of the poet, offers the more likely hypothesis that Auden was nervous about being connected with the notoriously indiscreet Burgess. Homosexual acts were still illegal; witch-hunts were in prospect.

Years later, in his journal for March 1982, Spender wrote:

Blunt, Burgess and Maclean all treated me with near contempt when I met them. I don’t know whether this was because I was an ex-communist, or as a Liberal, or an innocent – what they all had was the arrogance of manipulators who thought they could manage other people.

There is no reason to suppose that Auden wasn’t in the same “useful idiot” category as Spender. Burgess, who was trained in spycraft, must have started the “holiday in the Mediterranean” story as a red herring. If the authorities were hunting for him in Italy, he could slip through the net in Central Europe. The unidentified “woman” who saw him on the train may have been a Soviet plant; or just a convenient accident. What seems wholly improbable is that Auden participated in the escape plan. He was, as Spender puts it, “managed”. If Auden did indeed “help Burgess to escape
Britain”, it was as an unwitting dupe. But, as Lenin liked to point out, they too have their historical uses.

_________________________________________________________

John Sutherland's biography of Stephen Spender appeared in 2004. He is the author of How to Read a Novel: A user's guide, published last year.