High jinx.

High Jinx

WM. F. BUCKLEY JR.'s new spy novel is set mainly in Britain in the early 1950s against the backdrop of the internecine post-Stalin "war of the Kremlin succession,' which temporarily ended with the execution of the loathsome murderer and KGB chief Lavrenti Beria by his comrades. High Jinx is most assuredly entertaining, but it is not merely an entertainment. However urbane, Mr. Buckley is an evangelist, and his good news is, first and foremost, bad news: In season and out, he preaches the importance of knowing and meditating on the nightmarish history of the world since 1914, a period whose events are in such horrifyingly stark contrast to the expectations that had mounted from the hopes of Bacon in the early 1600s to the status of the religion of collective progress by 1900, when Swinburne could write, "Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things!' Our century has been unkind to such flatulent blasphemy and self-delusion.

The fictional foreground of Mr. Buckley's novel lights up the factual background of this stunning history, an understanding of which is the indispensable precondition of sanity, wisdom, and even survival in our time. Not that the makes heavy going of it. High Jinx has an exciting, suspenseful plot and some interesting characterization, and Mr. Buckley is willing enough to use the catnip of a little sin, the dollop of sexuality that is de rigueur in contemporary fiction. Yet essentially Mr. Buckley is haunted --like Solzhenitsyn, Silone, Chambers, Muggeridge--by our century's history, and, however light or witty, all his writing attests to this ghastly memory.

High Jinx reflects not only Mr. Buckley's own memory but also Andrew Boyle's great study of the Cambridge spies, Climate of Treason, which is not only about Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Sir Anthony Blunt, and their generation, but about the moral nihilism of our century and the trahison des clercs that is a part of it. Mr. Buckley's creation of Sir Alistair Fleetwood is to me the finest thing in the book, a delineation of a certain subversive Cambridge mentality--cerebral, aristocratic in manner and sensibility, Communist in loyalty, often homesexual in "affectional preference'--so well embodied in real life by Sir Anthony Blunt: eminent art historian, Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, haughty aesthete, fastidious homosexual, Soviet spy and recruiter.

In High Jinx Sir Alistair Fleetwood is an eminent physicist and inventor who enjoys all the perks of a senior Cambridge professor in college, but who also serves as a Soviet spy. Like Blunt, he is a classic case of what Michael Polanyi called "moral inversion,' a hyper-moralistic mentality rooted, contradictorily, in a thoroughly naturalistic view of reality. This kind of moralism is always focused indignantly and simplistically on large social and political issues. The pleasures of moralism are thus preserved while the pains and sacrifices of personal ethics are altogether avoided.

Of course, all this lies more in the background than in the foreground of this story, which is appropriately gruesome and exciting. Someone in London has broken the top-secret level of Anglo-American defense intelligence and security and is providing the Soviet Union with devastatingly destructive information. This security breach, its cause, terrible effects, and ultimate remedy are ingeniously described, and their plausibility is only increased by a knowledge of the real characters and "accomplishments' of the spies Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt.

Mr. Buckley is clearly fascinated and horrified by this chapter of often sophisticated intellectual treason, by the way bluebloods and pampered intellectuals served the red flag. This is why his portrait of the Cambridge don and spy Fleetwood is detailed, interesting, and convincing, as are the portraits of Bertram Heath and Fleetwood's spy mistress, the American expatriate Alice Goodyear Corbett (cf. Anna Louise Strong?). Relatively few non-Marxist members of the intellectual haut monde in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties realized or stated how deeply Marxism had bitten into their illustrious brethren and how high their duplicity could go--as high as Philby, as high as Blunt, as high as Hiss.

Interestingly enough, the three main ones in the English-speaking world who did understand were all Christians, and deep ones: Herbert Butterfield in Cambridge, T. S. Eliot in London, and Reinhold Niebuhr in New York. The views attributed to or implied in Mr. Buckley's character Rufus, the American intelligence chief, seem to represent, however gingerly, the realization that if there is no God, everything is permitted, and history is only a nightmare with, as Niebuhr put it, the demon of vengeance (Marxism) in murderous pursuit of the demon of hypocrisy (capitalism).

In conclusion, there are some lovely, small points or references in the novel that are associated with the springs and sources of Mr. Buckley's own loyalty. Part of the spy action ironically takes place in the Farm Street Jesuit Church, near Grosvenor Square, London, the great converts' church (e.g., Evelyn Waugh) and one of the love-liest "modern' churches in the world. And Fleetwood has a treacherous rendezvous in Robertsbridge, East Sussex, a place that might be thought sacred to Tory Christians and anti-Communists: Not only is Kipling's home at Burwash nearby, but the old pub at Robertsbridge was beloved of Belloc and Chesterton, and for many years the village has been the home of that quixotic Christian, anti-Communist, sage, and wit, Malcolm Muggeridge, who has memorably described that claimate of treason of which Mr. Buckley writes so entertainingly.