The Sixth Man

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 40, 1 January 2007, Page 65

lan Fraser

The Sixth Man

So, what team was Paddy Costello the sixth man of? 1 These days it is de rigueur for an English football club to have a Russian proprietor. Cold War rules of engagement were different. So, was the Fifth Man—the one before Costello—Sir Roger Hollis, Director General of MIS until 1965 and allegedly a Soviet spy? That would make Anthony Blunt the Fourth Man—and the first, second, and third men, Burgess, Philby, and Maclean. That’s the team Graeme Hunt claims Costello was playing for in his recently published Spies And Revolutionaries: A History of New Zealand Subversion? Attacking almost wholly by assertion, in hyperventilating prose punctuated with more ‘probably’s’ and ‘suspectedly’s’ than I’d be prepared to tolerate in a psychic reading, Hunt claims that Costello ‘was to become the most important New Zealand spy recruited by the Soviet Union’. His spy master, Hunt alleges, was ‘probably’ Anthony Blunt. Well, we shall see.

James McNeish makes the point that his The Sixth Man is not a book about spying. Though it deals with spying. But the team of which Paddy Costello is actually the Sixth Man is that extraordinary group of New Zealanders James has already brought vividly to life in his Dance of the Peacocks— five young New Zealanders, mostly Rhodes Scholars, in exile in the time of Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. 3 James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, lan Milner, John Mulgan—ranked in alphabetical order rather than in order of achievement. All of them had a feeling for history and language and a social conscience. They leaned to the

Left. And rather than learning the trick of standing upright here —‘Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year’ 4 —they were anxious to escape the suffocating conventions and monotony of their New Zealand background. So they went away and flourished away, and most of them didn’t come home.

Costello is a secondary figure in Dance of the Peacocks but never a negligible one. He creates vibrations. He has a presence in other places, too. A pale presence in Vincent O’Sullivan’s biography of John Mulgan, where he appears as ‘the legendary linguist who, since they last saw each other in Auckland, had taken a degree at Cambridge, become an ardent communist and was now intelligence adviser to Freyberg, replacing Geoffrey Cox’. 5

In her novel Firebird, Natasha Templeton evokes the famous occasion when a group of high-ranking Russian officers, led by a General, pay a visit to Freyberg’s Division on the Sangro. They are shown around by a prodigy —an officer who speaks fluent Russian. This is Costello, and the meeting later becomes the occasion of one of Alistair Mclntosh’s dry jokes. The father of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Geoffrey Cox: ‘lt struck me that if a man could crack Russian jokes, he might participate effectively in the New Zealand-Russian Joke Number One—namely, the establishment of a New Zealand post in Moscow.’ 6

Costello is Tom O’Dwyer in Dan Davin’s novel For the Rest of our Lives and, later yet, an enigmatic presence in Karl Stead’s novel Talking About O’Dwyer.

Costello is much more than a secondary figure in Keith Ovenden’s wonderful biography of Dan Davin. 7 He is a protagonist in A Fighting Withdrawal, because Davin’s friendship with Costello was a defining one. Ovenden writes that ‘the relationship between them was so intense that sometimes it had more the quality of affair than of friendship: similar but opposite, separate but inseparable’. And he observes: ‘Unlike Paddy’s other friends and relations, many of whom were also Marxists, Dan saw in him and treasured the humanist and the raconteur, the singer and convivial companion, who also saw the realm of the heart, its joys and deep discomforts.’

Costello is unlike the other Peacocks in some important respects. Unlike them, he left behind him no monument of unageing intellect. No novels, no major works, no imperishable reporting for the top papers, no poetry. Just a lot of letters and some reports written so staggeringly well that the magnitude of the missed opportunity becomes apparent.

He didn’t go to Oxford, as they did, but to Cambridge. And England was never ‘home’ to Costello. Landing in England in 1932, he made his priorities clear by heading straight for Ireland and the company of his Irish relatives. I don’t think it’s fanciful to discern in Costello traces of the divided self—you could go as far as to say, the divided loyalties —of some Irish and Anglo-Irish experience.

Which makes his war so interesting. Costello had a brilliant war. Like several of the Peacocks, particularly Davin and Mulgan and Cox, the War is the central,

towering experience of his life. And while the War engaged his anti-fascism, you have the feeling sometimes that for him the War was an existential end in itself. A Homeric display of prowess. It would seem that no urgent loyalties drove him to volunteer. Not his commitment to the Russian people—he enlisted after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Not his commitment to the so-called Great Powers—he held the Americans in contempt, seems to have regarded the Brits with a distant, wry tolerance, and thought New Zealand should have a foreign policy independent of the Great Powers. A deracinated but not denatured New Zealander, as McNeish observes, the War gave him the opportunity to become a New Zealander again, at least for the duration. But there is nothing to suggest his war was a patriotic crusade or, indeed, that he was a patriot at all in the conventional meaning of that term—for all that he may have been a fervent nationalist.

For a sense of how it was, perhaps, for Costello, I reach for Yeats—lines from his poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death :

I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; [•••] Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

In any case, Costello was a natural soldier, an intelligent military analyst and a formidably brave man. Was he also a spy?

Well, he was certainly and openly and aggressively a Marxist. He seems to have left New Zealand all but a political neuter. Then, politicised by the events and currents of the 1930s—Auden’s Tow, dishonest decade’ B—he 8 —he becomes a communist. He develops a deep affection for Russia, its culture, and its people. He goes to Cambridge and studies at Trinity where the First, Second, Third, and Fourth men were also students. We see all the apparatus of guilt by association assemble itself, reinforced by Costello’s own radicalism and too frequent indiscretion. That seems to clinch it for Graeme Hunt and for the legion of Costello’s accusers. But not for me.

I’ve tried to read The Sixth Man, as one should, with an open mind. At the end, I agree with McNeish that when you look at the charges and supporting evidence raised against Costello and you set against that the full record of his words and deeds, the conclusion to be drawn, to quote the book, is that ‘the arsenic of treachery is not there’.

Spies are meant to be expert at hiding their true convictions. Costello thrust them in your face. Introduced by Alistair Mclntosh to Peter Fraser in London, Costello says ‘l’m afraid I’m a bit left-wing, sir’. ‘That’s all right’, the Prime Minister replies, ‘We can do with one or two communists in Moscow.’

By 1945, he is confessing to losing his faith—in the Soviet Union if not yet in the full box and dice of Marxist doctrine and analysis. The God, at least in its Russian incarnation, seems finally to be failing him, too. Not least, he points to a censorship of literature in the USSR that is stricter than it was in fascist Italy. And, of course, he edits the Oxford Book of Russian Verse— properly, but wilfully, including poems by the great dissident poets of Russia: Akhmatova, living destitute in Leningrad; Mandelstam, whose poem The Stalin Epigram (that short, savage masterpiece of excoriation) proves the straw that breaks the camel’s back—Stalin sends him to the gulag where he dies; and Tsvetaeva, who commits suicide. This suggests a man whose personality and tastes are too heterodox and discriminating and individual to make either for doctrinal rigidity or successful spying. I think McNeish has it right when he calls him ‘a man of intellectual integrity who is unwilling to compromise; a man whose allegiance is primarily to himself. A man who travels alone: the single rider’.

Costello’s fate was a product of the temper of the 19505. In Keith Ovenden’s elegant phrase, this was a time when events, more often than not, were observed ‘in the hall of mirrors where cold warriors seek security’. To which you could add that the mirrors were, more often than not, fun-house mirrors, and the soundtrack tended to overdub genuine perception with rumour, hearsay, unsubstantiated gossip, and spite. You could make jokes about Cold War assumptions if you were game enough—like Mort Sahl: ‘Why don’t we sell all our nuclear secrets to the Russians? Then they’d be ten years behind.’ Or Tom Lehrer: ‘lt’s great that we get to believe in something genuinely positive —like Anfz-Communism’. But the realities on the ground could be chilling.

lan Cross, interviewed about his new memoirs in the Dom Post a week or two back, noted: ‘McCarthyism went on far longer in New Zealand. We had innuendo and personal attacks put about that denied some of New Zealand’s finest brains jobs that would have benefited everybody. It was orchestrated.’

So, as some of you will remember better than I, the paranoia of the McCarthy years resonated powerfully in Wellington. Paddy Costello (among others, but he was the most eminent) fell victim in the end to a purge. The purge was set in motion by the intelligence agencies of the United States and Great Britain but loyally promoted here by our own intelligence service, such as it then was. James McNeish refers to ‘a whispering campaign in the early 50’s which deprived Alistair Mclntosh of some of his best men and at a certain point threatened to undermine his entire department’. He continues: ‘About a dozen of Mclntosh’s staff had their loyalty questioned in this way. Four resigned.’ Parenthetically you have to marvel at the

optimism that would characterise the Stupid Party as it then was, as an ‘intelligence service’. But there you are. We seem to lose none of our optimism.

Does any of it matter? Does Costello matter? I believe he does. He lived in interesting times and he had some influence on them. His story adds to our sense of what it means to be a New Zealander, with a proper recognition of our past, including its shattering climaxes and not excluding its warts and carbuncles. Moreover, he is a fascinating and often incandescent subject—soldier, scholar, force of nature, lover of the arts. His story deserved to be told and James McNeish has done him proud. I’d launch this book in the conventional way by breaking a bottle of champagne over it, but Costello was a whisky man, and whisky —alas for him, for he was a great drinker—was to be drunk, not wasted on pretty, meaningless gestures.

Turnbull Library Record 40 (2007), 65-69

References 1 lan Fraser’s address to launch The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello, a book by James McNeish, published by Random House, New Zealand. The event was held at the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, Thursday, 13 September 2007. 2 Graeme Hunt, Spies and Revolutionaries: A History of New Zealand Subversion (Auckland: Reed, 2007). 3 James McNeish, Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile at the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse Tung (Auckland: Random House, 2003). 4 From Allen Curnow’s poem ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch'. 5 Vincent O'Sullivan, Long Journey to the Border: a life of John Mulgan (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 241. 6 James McNeish, The Sixth Man, p. 146. 7 Keith Ovenden, A Fighting Withdrawal: the Life of Dan Davin, writer, soldier, publisher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8 From W. H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’.