Goronwy Rees: GUY BURGESS' "most intimate friend" flew too close to the sun

By Meurig Williams

Welsh born Goronwy Rees, a brilliant academic, is best remembered for his close friendship with notorious cold war Soviet spy Guy Burgess (member of the Cambridge five), which ruined his career and his life. Burgess' attraction to Rees was clear - Rees, as a young Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a central part of the English Establishment, had access to military secrets. Rees' attraction to Burgess has remained an enigma until now. The author interprets it in terms of Rees' poorly developed sense of identity, of which he was fully aware, and found compensation for it in Burgess' stronger personality of charm, brilliance equal to his own, and polished Etonian manipulation. In addition, they both had in common a need for a high level of risk, expressed in different ways, which made them feel alive, but also led to their downfall. Burgess' disappearance in 1951 caused Rees considerable anguish. He replaced the risk of involvement with Burgess with the risk of accepting the Principalship of the University of Wales, where he felt the need to impose the progressive values that were appropriate in the London/Oxford literary scene upon the nationalistic Nonconformist culture of the provincial university. When Burgess surfaced in Moscow in 1956, confirming his traitorous activities, Rees overreacted by publishing a series of articles in a national newspaper in which he attempted to separate himself from Burgess by denigrating his character and personality in extreme ways. He lost his Principalship. Rees' involvement in espionage remains uncertain. In an autobiography his lengthy prevarication on whether he had believed Burgess' confession of being a spy when they first met was inconsistent with the otherwise remarkable intellectual honesty of his writings, casting doubt on his veracity. He died almost friendless, having denigrated both Welsh and English sensibilities. But one admirer wrote "If he had not held pleasure to be his first principle, he might have suffered dismaying attacks of responsibility and ambition, in which case he could not have given so many of us such delight in his company."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1978491395
• ISBN13: 9781978491397
• Release Date: November 2017
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"