Treason in Whitehall

MR. HAMISH GLEAVE (316 pp.)-- Richard Llewellyn--Doubleday ($3.95).

On Friday, May 25, 1951, two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, took the 11:45 p.m. boat from Southampton to St. Malo, France, and disappeared in the direction of the Iron Curtain. Last fall Her Majesty's Stationery Office issued the official story of their defection (TIME, Oct. 3). The report's half-truth was accepted as a polite fiction. Now Novelist Richard Llewellyn (How Green Was My Valley) seems to offer some fiction as the impolite truth.

The affair, like the Hiss case, raised the momentous question: What could bring intelligent and apparently devoted servants of the state to defect to the enemy?

The Two Millstones. The official paper spoke of the spies' undergraduate record of Communist sympathy. British Critic Cyril Connolly tried to explain the matter in Freudian terms (father trouble). Lord Beveridge, architect of the British Welfare State, suggested with supreme irrelevance that things might not have been so bad if the British civil-service pension system had been more liberal.

Novelist Llewellyn's version borrows from all these theories, and also differs from them. His disturbing explanation tells of men who betray their country for causes which may be emotionally deep but are intellectually frivolous.

The reader first meets Mr. Hamish Gleave at the Derby. He is suitably dressed-morning coat, top hat--but there is a darn in his sock, and this darn becomes the whole darn thing.

Gleave is head of the Foreign Office's American desk (Maclean's old job). Like many of his kind, he is crushed beneath the upper millstone of parvenu wealth (which he despises) and the nether millstone of the privileged working class, symbolized by a State housing development which will take from him his mortgaged home. Gleave is in the grip of the constant, twitching fear that he and his family will fall into the anonymous abyss of "the proles." His wife has to do the cooking! Gleave is offered a job in commerce at five times his Foreign Office pay, but the offer is made by a "gutter imp" whose wife has the wrong diphthongs and clothes.

Americans, who are less troubled by this particular kind of snobbery, may wonder what it is all about. But Author Llewellyn has lived on both sides of the diphthong curtain (he has been both an enlisted man and a captain in the Welsh Guards), and he plays this theme until a sense of caste becomes a vein of madness as authentic as Othello's jealousy.

How Pink Was My Pally. Most intolerable to Mr. Hamish Gleave are the Americans--the eager-beaver young men from the State Department, who do not wear waistcoats, who take security leaks so seriously, and whose typists earn more than he does. If Novelist Llewellyn is to be believed, the anti-American feeling runs like a psychosis through much of the Foreign Office. Better, thinks Gleave, the Russians than the Yanks with their "sample cases and cigars." Better the naked power of the Soviet, which does not make him bitter about his frayed cuffs.

Soviet emissaries lead him into a web of indiscretion with their caviar, theater tickets, and Paris dresses for his wife. And there is also the Burgess counterpart of this story--Kevin Chalmers--whose chichi accent is cruelly transcribed: "I'd just had about four gallons of a positively toxic firedamp called a Gibson ..." Chalmers is not only a drunk who has been kicked out of the British embassy in Washington (as was Burgess), but a pervert and a brawler. Chance, security officers, and their own folly put him and Gleave in the same boat, headed for anonymity and dishonor in the service of the Soviet.

For all its defects of writing, this book should be set beside Ralph de Toledano's account of the Hiss case, Humphrey Slater's Conspirator, and Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason. It is debatable just how "true" Llewellyn's analysis is. But there is no doubt that Mr. Hamish Gleave points to a serious troubling in Britain's soul. And it again raises the haunting questions which the official report put this way: "First, how Maclean and Burgess remained in the Foreign Service for so long, and second, why they were able to get away."

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