◆ SpookStack

- WV 1 the case of Otto John, the st Ger- man intelligence chief who disap- peared eastward last summer, The connecting link is Guy Burgess, who ~ worked on “highly confidential as- Jignments” on the BBC foreign. propagdnda deck as well as for the Foreigh and War Offices between 1944 and 1946, when Otte John held jobs with the same organizations in the same departments. Four other worked at the time in the same team! under Burgess, left the’ West to ac- cept high positions behind the Iron Curtain-—Baron von und zu Putlitz, Kart von Schnitzler, Eberhard Knoe- bel, Doctor Honigmann. The people who might be able to tell us more -abaut the connections hetween Mr. Burgess, Dr. John and the other members of the British propaganda team evidently choose to remain * silent. Sao OTT AE any rate the details of Mace Lean’s and John’s disappearance are q strikingly alike. Both men held high } and confidential Government posi- tions. Both made no secret of their 4 opposition to the policies of their 4 governments. Both were highly in- telligent and emotionally un: able, > with-tendencies toward homosexual- _ ity and frequent public intoxication. ' Both Jeft with a casual farewell to their wives. MacLean said: “f am not going far; I shall be back soon.” John said: “I am just going down for a quick beer.” Both took no docu- ments with them but their passports. Both were accompanied by men now known as Communist agents: Mac- Lean by Burgess, John by Dr. Wolf- ~~" sang Woblgemut. Both bought relurn-tickets before their departure. The list of such parallels could be extended, ’ The tentative explanation of the 4 ~~ MacLean case offered hy Mr. Hoare is appagently identical with that of ‘the Johp case at which this reporter arrived while covering the case, Both men, it would seem, had been in- volved in Communist. underground activities, but in the course of a nervous breakdown (which happened Aprit 4, 1955 Gerinan refugees besides John, who ; Y to both with the same symptor ; threatened to be useless, if not dan- gerous, to the Commounists. At this moment, a Communist. agent ace quainted with each, pressured or Dlackmailed him into going east. There remains another mystery which has not been solved, and which Mr. Hoare hardly seems to explore: What happened to ME 5, the famed British Intelligence Service? Accord- ing to Mr. Hoare’s report, Mr. Mac- Lean’s past and present Jeanings. actiona and associations of a personal and political” nature: would have made him a security and loyalty risk in this country; in England, there was apparently ‘not the slightest sus- _Picion against the wan. The inystery is: Has the British Intelligence Serv- ice also disappeared? The long list of disappearing experts—from Bruno Pontecorvo dowa to Burgess and Maclean—makes one wonder, Stendhal’s Self-Portrait ‘The Private Diaries of Stendhal. Ed. and trans. by Robprt Sage. Doubleday. 570 pp. $450. There ts something’ so artless and engaging about Stenflbal’s diaries that ene reads them glmost without drawing a breath, Begun in 1801, when Marie-Henri Reyle was only 18 (and long before he had completed the inetamorphosis which was to hing forth the novelist Stendhal), they are an odyssey of self-discovery hy a youth who grasped at life with eager hands, For fourteen years, these notebooks traveled with him everywhere, and he poured into them his impressions of evetything he aid, his canuments on tha countries he visited, his designs gn the women he desired or loved. hfs exit the buoks he read, thd plays he saw. adding every now ahd again per- spicacious critical evaluations of his own successes and lunders. It is all there, down to the! past most_int sate “detail. Tho setf-partrait wah emerges is certainly not a flattering one, bat, wis of here is the maa as he was and saw hinsell: thicksét, impeceably dressed, living on credit, intelligent, analytical, but also impetuous, self- ish, conceited, insecure, grasping, frivolous. and often downright silly. Young Beyle wrote his journal for himself alone: “It is an anatomical work... solely for my enlighten. ment. I was born violent; in order Reviewed by - Héléne Cantarella tw mend my ways, I have been coun- seled to kuow myself.” Through this analysis of his own.“intimate eons sciousness,” he hoped also to gather the data on the human heart which he felt he needed to become a comic hard and “successor to Moliére”—-an ambition he was never to realize. Never above pulling strings to gain advancement, Beyle used his friends and relatives to obtain cozy little sinecures in the Napoleonic ad- ministration. The impact of Italy on the naive Henri, fresh from the constricled provincial Jife of his native Grenoble where he had long chafed under the regime of “that bastard” his father, was permanent. Italy gave him what he had always sought: new sensations in love and art, a new awareness of music. Wherever he traveled—and he served in various official eapavities in many of the major cities of Eu rige--he observed intently the pea- ple about him, drew portraits in acid of those who disliked hit, voraciously aud widely, discussed endlessly, spent almost every eve- ning in some theater or opera house. courted, seduced and lost innumer- able women, and evolved “heylism,” his personal system of philosoph based on the “pursuit of happines through love, work and energetic read COMTMYED OX NEVE PALF Ww