Revealed: How Auden may have helped Burgess to flee Britain
Friday, 2 March 2007
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As the author of iconic verse from Funeral Blues to Night Mail, Wystan Hugh Auden is one of Britain's most popular poets. Less well known is his unlikely role as a suspect in one of the most high-profile Cold War defections by a Soviet spy.
Secret documents released today show how the author - loved and loathed during his lifetime by the literary and political Establishment - was closely questioned over the disappearance of Guy Burgess, the famously dissolute member of the Cambridge Five spy ring which passed key secrets to the Soviet Union.
MI5 and the FBI ordered the interrogation of the poet when it emerged that Burgess, who fled Britain in May 1951 with fellow diplomat and double-agent Donald Maclean, had urgently tried to phone Auden the night before the defection. Maclean, who had knowledge of Anglo-American atom bomb research, and Burgess boarded a ferry to France on 25 May before being flown secretly to Moscow. They had been tipped off by fellow Cambridge spy, Kim Philby, who was working for MI6 in Washington, that they were about to be unmasked.
The disappearance of the two men led to a panic in the British government and security services, sparking a Europe-wide manhunt in which Auden became one of those suspected of assisting Burgess, possibly by sheltering him in his Italian holiday home.
The documents, published at the National Archives in Kew, west London, show how MI5 officers suspected Auden was "deliberately prevaricating" when he claimed he could not remember being told about Burgess's phone call.
Following consultation with the FBI, MI5 ordered that his cottage on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples be watched by the Italian security services and declared him a "candidate for interrogation". Their suspicions were increased when Auden arrived at his villa three days after Burgess's disappearance.
The poet may have had good reason to want to avoid the British authorities. He was accused of betrayal when he emigrated to the United States shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War with his literary collaborator and sometime lover Christopher Isherwood. Auden had known Burgess since the 1930s and the pair met frequently after the diplomat was posted to the British embassy in Washington in 1947.
The MI5 file reveals that Auden was also considered by the Security Service to be one of a clique of British "intellectual Communists", albeit with little political influence. One MI5 memo from 1938 stated: "W H Auden was described in a letter to [MI6] concerning [poet and some-time Communist] Cecil Day Lewis as an intellectual Communist of a highly idealistic and literary brand. Harry Pollitt [the head of the Communist Party of Great Britain] was stated to think less than nothing of his value to the Party."
The secret file shows that, in the hours after Burgess's disappearance, MI5 was told that the night before the spy had phoned the north London home of another leading British poet, Stephen Spender, where Auden was staying.
Burgess, who was renowned as a heavy drinker, was "most anxious" to speak to Auden and had also called on 20 May, according to the documents.
The file states that Spender told police he had passed the message on to Auden. But Auden in turn denied any knowledge of being told about the phone calls - raising the suspicion of the Security Service that he was somehow involved in Burgess's disappearance.
Using an unnamed contact, MI5 officers arranged for Auden to be interviewed about his relationship with Burgess. The file stated: "Our object is to get a detailed chronological account of Auden's association with Burgess, a list of their mutual friends and, of course, Auden's views on whether any aspect of their association could have, in retrospect, seem[ed] significant to his disappearance."
It then added cryptically: "The value of the interview may well lie as much in what Auden fails to say as in what he volunteers."
Although Burgess was considered to have been less important to the Kremlin than Philby and Maclean, his disappearance was the first warning that Britain's security services had been penetrated by a Soviet spy ring. Thousands of documents were transferred into Soviet hands by the men and it is likely Burgess was ordered to accompany Maclean to Moscow because it was feared his indiscretion would lead to the unmasking of Philby, who continued to operate for a further decade.
Although Auden avoided the MI5 interrogation by travelling from Italy to America, the file records that the poet later changed his story to an unnamed informant about not being told of Burgess's calls.
A memo from MI5 to MI6 said: "Auden reluctantly admitted that Spender was probably right in saying he had told Auden of Burgess's telephone calls. Auden had been drinking heavily. [Unnamed source] felt it likely that Auden was lying when he previously stated he remembered nothing of Burgess's calls."
Despite recording all visits to the poet's cottage throughout the summer, MI5 decided it was "impossible to substantiate" a link between Burgess's escape and Auden.
For his part, Auden said it was likely that if Burgess had been trying to contact him it would only have been to finalise a visit to Italy the two men had discussed some months earlier.
'Stop all the clocks...': the life and loves of W H Auden
W H Auden, as he was called, was the leading light of the group of British writers known as the "Thirties Poets". The other main members of the group were Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis, all of whom shared Auden's left-wing views.
Born in York in 1907, he was influenced by Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and first made his name at Oxford, where he met Spender and Christopher Isherwood, the writer with whom he would later have a long relationship. He published more than 400 poems and was admired for his technical virtuosity and his ability to write in different forms.
Like many of his generation, Auden embraced Communism as an alternative to the rise of Fascism and served in the Spanish Civil War, but was criticised for leaving England in 1939. With Isherwood, he travelled to the United States where he eventually met his long-term partner, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. In his later years, he divided his time between New York and Austria, dying in Vienna in 1973.
There has been renewed interest in his poetry in recent years, culminating last month in the centenary of his birth. One of his poems, "Funeral Blues", was memorably read during the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. After September 11 2001, his poem "September 1, 1939", with its message of individual love triumphing over war and suffering, was widely quoted, particularly in the United States.
Terry Kirby
