Book Review

The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Elite Intellectual Secret Society, by Richard Deacon. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986, 214 pp., $19.95.

Interest in The Apostles, a secretive club of Cambridge University dons and undergraduates, was aroused after the exposure of Anthony Blunt as leader of a Soviet spy ring that included Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (who defected to the Soviet Union in 1951) and also the infamous H.A.R. (Kim) Philby. Their point of connection was Cambridge, and a further connection was The Apostles, to which Blunt and Burgess belonged, and to which it was alleged Maclean belonged (although Richard Deacon finds nothing to suggest he did). Blunt’s and Burgess’s homosexuality also figured into the luridness of the reports: what was this cenacle of sodomites and traitors?

As Richard Deacon makes clear, The Apostles—the Cambridge Conversazione Society—was both more and less than this. In the atmosphere within which it existed at Cambridge, heterodoxy and homosexuality flourished more or less openly. Cambridge had long been hospitable to the evangelical or low-church wing of the Church of England, and had sided with the Puritans during the English civil war. The Calvinist doctrine of election (the notion that certain individuals are predestined to be saved) easily metamorphoses into gnosticism (the concept that an elect or elite can have a special and superior insight into the purposes and ways of Deity) and antinomianism (the belief that individuals so filled with grace are above the ordinary laws and manners of society). It has a fondness for compulsory righteousness, as evidenced by the rule of Calvin himself in Geneva, Cromwell in England, and the Puritans in Massachusetts. Such views are tailor-made for the encouragement of arrogant self-anointed elitism.

Single-sex environments such as those involuntarily present in prisons and (in the past) on shipboard, encourage homosexuality faute de mieux; environments that are rigidly single-sex by choice (as the recent scandals in the Roman Catholic church show) attract those who are homosexual by preference. Even though Protestant in theology, the great English universities retained well into the nineteenth century their monastic/clerical character, and were such environments. Fellows of colleges (dons) were typically in holy orders, and it was not until 1882 that Cambridge fellows were allowed to marry. Deacon describes an atmosphere of misogyny which found open and ugly expression amongst many homosexuals, who justified their behavior on the grounds that men were superior to women, hence the love of one man for another was a superior form of love to that of man for woman. Much classical learning has been adduced to this point (see the twelfth volume of the Palatine anthology). This constitutes the “Higher Sodomy” to which Deacon devotes a chapter of his book. Conservative proponents of classical education and single-sex schooling might well take cautionary note!

Communism had many adherents at Cambridge, even in the late nineteenth century, and reached an apogee in the between-the-wars period. British universities until quite recently drew exclusively from the upper and upper-middle classes, amongst whom trade and commerce were scorned as unworthy of the attentions of gentlemen. Marxist hostility to capitalism found an oddly congenial fit with this aristocratic disdain for business as an occupation. It also fit well with Cambridge’s low-church enthusiasm for reforms involving shaking up the social order and chucking out forms, manners, and institutions that persisted out of longstanding custom. Santayana, speaking from the experience of a proper Bostonian upbringing, remarked that liberalism was what remained after Christianity had been excised from Calvinism, leaving only the latter’s fanaticism. Such was the background of university leftism at Cambridge.

The Apostles refined and concentrated the expression of attitudes widely present in the larger setting of Cambridge. To be sure, there were many Apostles who were neither Communists nor homosexuals. Certainly very few were Soviet spies. But those who were, were entirely predictable products of their surroundings, nurtured and encouraged by the closed society of the Apostles.

I discovered this book because of my interest in elites and their institutions. Much that is in print on these subjects is conspiracy-theory claptrap, typically from the point of view of one or the other political extremes. Judeo-Masonic, Illuminati, Satanic plots abound in the screeds of right-wing authors, while evil collusions amongst rich WASPy denizens of the Bohemian Grove and Skull and Bones, who grow richer at the expense of the working class, characterize the polemics of the left. Richard Deacon’s book fits neither mould, realistically describing a secret society the members of which influenced world events in a genuinely collusive fashion. Unlike the participants in Bohemian High and Low Jinks, the Apostles did not meet for just a few days each year, they lived together in a collegiate setting. Unlike the Yalies of Skull and Bones, the Apostles numbered amongst their active ranks numerous fellows (i.e., faculty members) as well as undergraduates, some of whom were artists or intellectuals of the first rank, like Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or John Maynard Keynes. Ideas and their consequences, rather than crude fraternity stunts and pranks, were of real interest to them.

Deacon’s book is sometimes ill-digested and repetitive. Also some of its obiter dicta raise fascinating unanswered questions. The papers delivered by members are said to be placed, with formal ceremony, in a trunk called the Ark. Christopher McIntosh, in his book The Rosicrucians (one of the few sane treatments of that subject) says that in sixteenth-century Germany there existed an Orden der Unzertrennlichen whose members stuidied alchemy. “[t]he results of successful alchemical experiments were recorded and placed in an ‘Archa,’ a secret chest whose contents were continually being added to.” The resemblance is striking, and it would be interesting to know how much farther back than the nominal foundation of The Apostles in 1820 its customs and practices really go.

—Michael S. Swisher