VILE, TO PUT IT BLUNTLY :

Biographer of an Art Historian and Spy Finds Duplicity a Fascinating Subject (MEL GUSSOW, July 9, 2002, NY Times)

Her curiosity about Blunt was aroused in conversations with her mother, who worked at the Tate Gallery in London. She told her daughter about people who had studied with Blunt and cried when he was revealed as a spy. Then one day, sitting in a pub with her husband, the novelist John Lanchester, Ms. Carter brought up the possibility of writing a biography of Blunt. At first, she had serious misgivings, but became increasingly tantalized by the ambiguities in the case, as she said, "the drama between good boy and bad boy, crime and remorse--or lack of it."

Although John Banville had written a novel, "The Untouchable," about Blunt, and Alan Bennett had made him a character in his play "A Question of Attribution," the field was still clear for a biography. After writing a long proposal, she signed a book contract and won the cooperation of John Golding, Blunt's executor, who gave her access to Blunt's papers. She then spent an intensive six years on her project.

During the first six months of research, Blunt remained a distant, elusive figure, she said. People who had worked with him for 30 years said they
never knew him well. "But I kept persevering and persevering," she said, "and gradually this portrait built up. I would get these tremendous
contradictions. Some thought he was the coldest, chilliest man they ever met. Others found him extraordinarily generous." Her conclusion was that
there were many truths about Blunt.

This is a very bad book. Ms Carter portrays Blunt as a man of extraordinary complexity, who lived several different, wholly compartmentalized and contradictory, lives.  She labors mightily to make the duplicity that defined his character seem unique and fascinating.  It is anything but.  It is fitting that Blunt's name will always be tied to those of men like Burgess because, despite inevitable individual peculiarities, they were all of a type : drawn from the privileged classes of a privileged nation, educated at the best schools, communist, homosexual, amoral, etc..  Ms Carter speculates that the fact that homosexuality was illegal in Britain may have made Blunt especially prone to duplicity, but here is how the writer Andrew Sullivan describes the formation of the gay male character generally in his fine book, Virtually Normal:

The homosexual learns to make distinctions between his sexual desire and his emotional longing--not because he is particularly prone to objectifications of the flesh, but because he needs to survive as a social and sexual being.  The society separates these two entities, and for a long time the homosexual has no option but to keep them separate.  He learns certain rules; and, as with a child learning grammar, they are hard, later on in life, to unlearn.

It's possible, I think, that whatever society teaches or doesn't teach about homosexuality, this fact will always be the case. No homosexual child, surrounded overwhelmingly by heterosexuals, will feel at home in his sexual and emotional world, even in the most tolerant of cultures.  And every homosexual child will learn the rituals of deceit, impersonation, and appearance. Anyone who believes political, social, or even cultural revolution will change this fundamentally is denying reality.  This isolation will always hold.  It is definitional of homosexual development.

Given this perspective, Blunt's distinctiveness quickly evaporates into sameness and we are left with the fact that where most gay men apparently have little trouble remaining loyal to their countries, even serving them with honor, Blunt and his cronies chose to betray theirs. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2002 11:04 AM