Anthony Blunt: His Lives. (Briefs).

Mitzel, John

by Miranda Carter

Picador. 590 pages (illustrated), $18.

Cambridge-educated, gay as a handbag, and a Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt rose high in the art world, even becoming curator of the Queen's household paintings. British intelligence knew Blunt had been a Soviet spy since being told by Michael Whitney Straight in the early 1950's, but it was kept quiet until the hideous Dame Thatcher, minutes after becoming Prime Minister in 1979, publicly exposed him. It seems it was Guy Burgess who brought Blunt around to supplying the Soviets with information. The political culture of Marxism at the great English universities had a certain appeal, and Blunt was duly enrolled, though not, it seems, for hard ideological reasons. As one English reviewer noted--and this book has gotten a lot of press in the UK--Blunt was a privileged, English queen in the most refined aesthetic professions working for a brutal regime that crushed types like him. Seems odd, doesn't it? Why did he do it? More intriguing is the question of why the public so hankers for gay villains. The Gay Villain rem ains a stock character in the popular imagination--and big, bad Blunt fills the slot nicely. In Anthony Blunt: His Lives, Miranda Carter traces Blunt's transformation from young member of the Bloomsbury circle, to left-wing intellectual, to camouflaged member of the Establishment. Until his treachery was made public, Blunt was celebrated for his ground-breaking work on Poussin, Italian art, and the Old Masters. The layers of secrecy upon which his life depended are here stripped away for the first time, thanks to the personal testimony of those who knew Blunt but who have kept silent until now. Carter also used documents discovered in the archives of the former Soviet Union, including a secret autobiography Blunt wrote for his Soviet controllers.