Michael Straight's Listless Ambition
Terzian, P.H.
P.H. Terzian MICHAEL STRAIGHT'S LISTLESS AMBITION It turns out he betrayed both country and friends. Two lonely, rather pathetic old sodomites have died in their respective apartments in the past...
...Presumably they led to some small measure of understanding...
...However, along with this comes his rather offhand admission that he knew traitors, knew what they were doing, and may even have understood something of the consequences of their activities...
...Efficiency...
...Yet he counted his personal devotion above the collective good-a revealing lapse...
...WRITE TO CONTINENTAL TELECOM, INC., DEPT.952,,245 PERIMETER CENTER PARKWAY, ATLANTA GA 30346...
...To betray one's country in the interests of ideology has human, not rhetorical, consequences...
...He has written more manifestos, initialed more memoranda, founded more emergency committees, and toured more cooperatives than he can ever hope to describe, or comprehend...
...But this is also the liberal sensibility at work: privilege is wrong, present company excepted...
...Terzian is an editor at the Los Angeles Times...
...The serpentine Blunt offers a clandestine apple...
...idle play and ideology, has brought him to the dead end from which he began...
...And turn them in he did-but for what...
...One rough-hewn friend exhorts him to join him in martyrdom in the Spanish Civil War...
...Let Burgess and Maclean, let Blunt and Philby and Straight lash themselves into a frenzy of expiation-but leave the rest of us alone...
...It was not until the reflection turned to Narcissus that Straight saw things clearly...
...Straight is momentarily moved, and yet-and yet-such misgivings are puzzling...
...but with a traitor it is difficult to say whether such things as honor and self-esteem-as we understand them, anyway-are qualities to be earned and lost...
...In one of those curious paradoxes that have dogged his career, it was the Nixon Administration in which he served his country to some respectable degree...
...Architects of telecommunication...
...Of course, in those days, Cambridge was the citadel of academic leftism, and in the midst of the Soviet "experiment" and the rise of Hitler, it is perhaps inevitable that he should have fallen under its spell...
...There Straight was deposited, and from there in time he moved on to the London School of Economics and to Trinity College, Cambridge...
...Ambition is a terrible thing, but it is the righteous who scorch the earth...
...Straight also remembers that in the midst of his leftist passion he was afflicted by occasional doubts-vague, unarticu-lated doubts, to be sure, assisted by hindsight: points of contention on economic plans, tinkering questions about trade unionism, perhaps, or college campaign tactics...
...By contrast, Blunt's treachery was not uncovered until many years after Maclean had fled England, and it was not known to the public until he was an old man...
...Pragmatism...
...His father, who founded the New Republic, died young-perhaps too late...
...We can all draw differing conclusions about disloyalty...
...Even Anthony Blunt knew that of all the boys in the Cambridge band it was Michael Straight who would turn them in...
...By the end of the decade, 100% of the system will be stored program computer controlled...
...It is painful to read that, in the middle of the Korean War, Straight encountered Guy Burgess qn a Washington street...
...It is odd how class distinctions can be malignant one moment and benign the next...
...His heiress mother, her blank mind fortified by an endless supply of blank checks, married again, repaired with her English husband to Britain, and established one of those cathedrals of the century of the common Big Switch: A complex, widely dispersed telephone system demands the best of its managers...
...He does not offer an explanation for this, only a continued furrowing of the eyebrow...
...Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Michael Straight is settling into a troubled old age...
...shunned the few Americans," he recalls...
...Perhaps better known is his penchant for reading about himself and telephoning his solicitor...
...In truth, Michael Straight has failed at every turn: as a Communist, an erstwhile revolutionary, journalist, diplomat, politician, novelist, and now autobiographer and clarifier of recent history...
...By the relative standards we must apply in such cases, Maclean had the more squalid end and Blunt the greater luck...
...From telephony to satellites...
...I felt . ashamed," he remembers, "of the privileges that the students took for granted.'' Naturally, his indignation took the most convenient form: "I told my gentleman's gentleman that I could not keep him any more...
...It should be added that he seems to have been vulnerable to a more personal sort of hypnosis, too...
...Am I charging too much?' he asked...
...He had seen his last cherry tree," Straight guffaws in recollection, "hung with bloom along the bough...
...Really, the question is not so much what Straight knew or whether he chose to pass it along the line to Moscow, nor is it even whether his willful indiscretions brought fresh misery into the world...
...If, as Straight believes, causes are better served by faith than nations, how could he have failed to distinguish a cause that is a nation...
...He talks at some length about his academic triumphs...
...I was paying him four dollars a week...
...And then he died...
...Presuming that Straight's ancestry was significant, Blunt wished him to penetrate those capitalist recesses that were impervious to the standard mole...
...This is a journey along an intellectual cul-de-sac...
...It is an easy step from the undergraduate salon to the underground, but the weaponry is worlds apart, and the bodies are really dead...
...The spirit was willing and the flesh was weaker in the capital...
...Straight and his friends liked to repair to his room in the middle of the night and sing the "Internationale...
...If that is not treachery it is at least misprision...
...Anthony Blunt's scholarship is interred with his bones...
...His lifetime of earnest endeavor, of wheeling and dealing in the shadow land of *After Long Silence...
...I say "blindness" to be charitable...
...Michael Straight was born into a world of half-educated privilege...
...published a book called Make This the Last War in which he envisioned the "affirmative society," an unholy blend of Quaker idealism, United Nations dogma, anti-imperialism, social service, adult education, and universal well-being: a European federation that would be "a union that is a vision for the rest of the world," and under the leadership of what Union we need hardly guess...
...It is a mystery to himself, he claims...
...He was deprived of his knighthood, it is true...
...In 1944, he Even Anthony Blunt knew that of all the boys in the Cambridge band it was Michael Straight who would turn them in...
...He tapped his cane on Straight's ceiling, but ''we never paid the slightest attention to him...
...Having betrayed his country, his class, those few institutions to which he owed allegiance, his patrons and his acolytes, he finally betrayed his friends...
...And he knew that while he felt no loyalty-much less affection-for his homeland, he would be received by the Roosevelts in the White House and handed a sinecure in the State Department...
...Blunt died unrepentant and, it is safe to assume, comparatively self-satisfied...
...It was not for Straight to save the lives of whatever people were endangered by Burgess's intrigues...
...We did not pause to mourn him.'' Meanwhile, as he struggled in vain to study, Straight was disturbed by the sounds of an aristocratic Sunday breakfast, catered by college servants...
...some of the blame has been properly assessed...
...This was much to the annoyance of "an old recluse" who had the misfortune to live on the upper floor...
...Housman...
...And most of all, a willingness to pioneer...
...it remains a mystery to us...
...Another first...
...It is less mysterious that he should have repaired to Washington rather than his assigned place on Wall Street...
...Flexibility...
...He must know, even if he cannot bring himself to admit it, that the prosaic dreams he dreamed as an Anglo-American undergraduate at Cambridge will never come true...
...Whatever vision of the future he shared with Blunt, Maclean, Philby, Guy Burgess, and the whole odious brotherhood has not come to pass-and, if we are more fortunate than we deserve to be, will not come to pass so long as Straight is held in the sort of contempt his memoir* must certainly bring...
...For that matter, once Blunt issued his marching orders, and the questions went unanswered, Straight fell quickly into formation...
...Part of the truth is known...
...and that while his patron Blunt may have dispatched him to America with espionage in mind, he, Straight, engaged in no such thing...
...And the answer, I fear, is the curse of wealth...
...In time, the tapping of the cane grew fainter...
...That is obtuseness raised to the level of moral principle...
...By solving problems on a small scale, we have broken through in a big way...
...He was a university celebrity, and yet he walked away from it like a somnambulist...
...It is curious that, having defended his integrity against the entreaties of the party faithful, Straight should have found Blunt so persuasive...
...and for the sake of argument, I am prepared to believe him...
...Very well...
...justice is to be meted out, not endured...
...Only the horrors of history are left: the dead witnesses and barbed-wire testimony to a foolish treachery that was plotted in a university town, half-a-century ago...
...But sir, if young gentlemen like you don't employ us, what's to become of us?' 'I don't know.' " And indeed he didn't...
...Having chosen to follow E.M...
...Forster's famous dictum that it is better to betray one's country than one's friends, Straight cannot take that banality one logical step further: he cannot understand that, by sparing one's "friends," a great many strangers are made to suffer and die...
...and if there is no statutory foundation for condemning what he has done, there must be at least an ethical revulsion at his blindness...
...Nor could he imagine that his social illusions fell into deeper, peril for all the ammunition delivered to Moscow by his friends...
...the prospect of a presidential appointment was dangled before his eyes, and the confessor's stall could scarcely contain him...
...Exile in Moscow is a poor version of the warrior's Valhalla...
...However, what we do not expect is to suffer the atonement for their sins...
...To which we might ask, how is it thus...
...Two lonely, rather pathetic old sodomites have died in their respective apartments in the past few months: Donald Maclean in Moscow, and Anthony Blunt in London...
...Straight wisely declines the invitation...
...Of course, the details of Michael Straight's wayward path-to the extent that we know them all-are too well known to recount in much detail...
...Moreover, in the years to come, they appear to have evaporated...
...For example, he says that while he may have been a Communist in spirit he was never a spy in practice...
...His prose poems in homage to a gallery of radical poseurs make lurid reading, and suggest a weakness for style as well as what passed in those circles for substance...
...In 1976, Continental Telecom's Telephone Group became the first American telephone company to apply digital switching to the network...
...This seems quite natural to Straight...
...The question is loyalty itself...
...Norton, $17.50...
...Maclean was beginning the fourth decade of his Soviet exile, a down-at-the-heels diplomatic bureaucrat, a drunk on Moscow rations, still following the cricket scores in the newspaper and, perhaps, still thinking of the wife who had left him for the bed of his fellow traitor, Harold (Kim) Philby...
...Today, Contel is still "more digital" than any other phone company in the nation...
...Still, a certain crude justice obtains...
...Nor is it sufficient to serve the cause of righteousness...
...Small wonder...
...I just don't believe in being waited on,' I said...
...Two stories describe the education of a comfortable radical...
...Of course, Straight knew better...
...He was not prosecuted, nor even made to reveal very much except what his interrogators undoubtedly knew...
...it was A.E...
...The obloquy which he surely deserved was great but mercifully brief...
...He knew that his presence could only mean more subversion, and that Burgess's depravity knew no bounds...
...Indeed, the information that he passed along to his Soviet agent friend in Washington may well have presented his personal view, may not have been classified, and may have been of no value as intelligence...
...We expect very little from a ruling class in the twentieth century...
...man: a progressive school...
...He obtained his security clearance, and joined the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Michael Straight's silence is broken, and his ignominy is complete...
...He had become the thing he despised the most...
...Ambition, of course...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
