TLS on Isaiah

Isaiah Berlin, the Dictaphone don

Berlin was a brilliant talker, sparkling essayist and champion of liberty – but the letters he dictated for fourteen years leave a nasty taste

by A. N. Wilson
Isaiah Berlin’s best work is contained in the form of essays and lectures on the history of ideas. Many will have read his short monograph The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), a book which has some of the qualities of good conversation. It takes as its starting point a Greek fragment by Archilochus (quoted to Berlin by Lord Oxford) which states that “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Berlin then sweeps off into one of his favourite devices – the list. Thinkers or writers who were obvious hedgehogs, he believed, were Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. Shakespeare leads the foxes in to bat, with an impressive team of Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and, a little oddly, Joyce. But which was Tolstoy? Tolstoy, according to Berlin, was a fox who spent his life wishing he was a hedgehog.

The Hedgehog and the Fox survives as an after-dinner game more than a serious theory. If it is read slowly, it comes apart at the seams. It would perhaps have worked if it had been delivered in person by Isaiah Berlin himself in his speedy staccato voice, in part modelled on that of his great friend Maurice Bowra. About halfway through the essay, the hedgehog-fox theme is forgotten and we get to something much meatier: Tolstoy’s debt to the French neo-Thomist Catholic Royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre, who was in St Petersburg for a decade during the Napoleonic era. Berlin shows that at several important moments of War and Peace, characters are actually quoting Maistre. Prince Andrey at Austerlitz, for example, says “We lost because we told ourselves we lost”. This is Maistre, says Berlin. Even some of the anecdotes in Maistre’s letters – such as a description of an old man shifting from bedroom to bedroom when he cannot sleep – are used by Tolstoy to flesh out his novel. (The reader will remember the insomniac Prince Bolkonsky moving beds in his country estate, Bald Hills). Maistre, says Berlin, was an ur-Fascist. We can trace a line in his thought to Nietzsche and to d’Annunzio. Perhaps there was even a part of Maistre in Berlin, when we read that Maistre “possessed considerable social charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, [and] made a great impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished courtier wit, and a shrewd political observer”.

read more

It was slightly disconcerting when, towards the end of Berlin’s life, as his friend and former colleague Henry Hardy began to gather up his Remains, he published a series of essays under the title of The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990). Here was the Maistre essay again, rechauffé under a new title but saying more or less what was contained in the volume of forty years before. It gave one the sense that perhaps Berlin – charming, witty, urbane, brilliantly talkative as he was – had not exactly done much with the intervening years. This sense is quickened by the publication of his voluminous letters. Before turning to these remarkable documents, I should like to stay for a moment with Berlin’s intellectual interests and with his heroes. Chief of these was undoubtedly Alexander Herzen. In his delightful essay on Herzen – in the volume entitled Russian Thinkers (1978) – Berlin painted another little self-portrait when he wrote, “Herzen is detached from party, detached from doctrine”. Young Revolutionaries (of 1860) attacked Herzen for “being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort, for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round them was squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice”. Yet Herzen, sybaritic and lazy as he appears, had been clever enough not to be bewitched by doctrine when many others had been; and therefore he was able to see clearly. “Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to perform an act of human sacrifice.”

Berlin left Riga as a child, the son of a brush manufacturer. This unglamorous fact was one which he lived down by a somewhat obsessive social climbing. But if it explains his more venial weaknesses it also gave him his greatest intellectual strength as a figure on the public stage from the 1940s to the 1970s. He was never for an instant taken in by the bogus claims of socialist collectivism, either in the propaganda of the Soviets or in the dreams of Western intellectuals. He knew where it led – not merely to the ruin of brush salesmen, but to the enslavement of the human race. His great friend David Cecil used to say that only second-rate minds are afraid of the obvious. In our generation, it is obvious that Churchill was right about the Nazis; and that the liberal Western powers were right to denounce Soviet totalitarianism. Such things were not obvious to many Western intellectuals and Berlin’s pro-Churchill and anti-Soviet stance does him credit. We must feel that as far as the big picture of what was going on in the world during his lifetime was concerned, he got it right.

As an intellectual historian, his status is perhaps more debatable. If Herzen was the Russian writer he loved best, the scholar he aspired to emulate was the Swiss historian of culture Jacob Burckhardt, who left his native Basle to study in the German capital with von Ranke, the future historian of the Renaissance Popes. The great German Hedgehog tried to persuade the Swiss Fox to immerse himself in learning so as to produce a grand project. But Burckhardt did not take the advice. He went off to Italy, and after short but intense study, and brilliantly close observation of what he saw and read, he produced what was, in effect, a series of interlinked essays which brought to life the whole culture of the times he had studied. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien influenced three or four generations of art historians and historians. It barely sold. Burckhardt was almost always a poor man, compelled (in order to finance his visits to Italy) to teach in the grammar school at Basle while being Professor of History at the University.

Was Isaiah Berlin destined to be the Burckhardt de nôtre époque, lighting up the past by a series of brilliantly condensed essays? Perhaps such a thing was once on the cards. But something else happened. While Burckhardt taught Swiss schoolboys, Berlin was only too happy to abandon his teaching post at New College, Oxford, and sink into the palatial splendours, first of rooms at All Souls, and then of his wife’s house in Headington. While Burckhardt saved up for another trip to Rome, Berlin accepted offers to lecture at Harvard and Bryn Mawr and, more refreshing to his spirits, to stay with the rich in New York and meet Greta Garbo. At home, Clarissa Eden beckoned. To one of his correspondents he wrote, “Did you know that ‘grammar’ is the same word as ‘glamour’? It proceeds via ‘grimoire’”. He knew that he was “not of a too profound nature”. He had tried to be an analytical philosopher like his contemporary A. J. Ayer, and Ayer had beaten him at the game. He settled down to be a “historian of ideas”, but the great book never got written. He accepted the role of being a sort of Samgrass from Brideshead Revisited, the don at the rich man’s table, the brilliant chatterer, who moved among bright worldly people who had not read as much as he had, so were impressed by the idea of someone who had heard of, let alone read, Maistre:

The dinner party consisted of the Queen Mother, the diva \[Maria Callas\], Lady Fermoy (in waiting), Lady Rosebery, Mr Anthony Gishford (late of Boosey and Hawkes, who used to edit Isis when I was an undergraduate, slightly disreputable and quite nice), Mr David Webster, and the Harewoods. I sat between the QM and Lady Rosebery and enjoyed myself.

These are hardly the circumstances in which a new Die Kultur der Renaissance comes into being.

Some half a century after Burckhardt died, the Swiss publishing firm Schwabe and Co began to publish his letters. The enterprise began in 1949 and was brought to completion, with the tenth volume, as late as 1986. Not to be outdone, the faithful Henry Hardy is now engaged in editing Berlin’s correspondence. This is the second volume (the first was reviewed in the TLS, September 3, 2004) and there are others to come. We are told that there were so many letters that it was necessary to be “far more selective for this volume than for its predecessor”.

Hardy and Jennifer Holmes admit that “concision did not come naturally to him” and the inordinate length of some of the letters here is explained by Berlin’s purchase, in 1949, of a Dictaphone. Anyone who remembers Berlin’s extraordinary manner of speech must find something ludicrous about the thought of his sitting up into the small hours dictating streams of malice about his academic colleagues, in these accounts of tedious lecture tours in the United States, these narratives of college squabbles – chief among them, the election to the Wardenship of All Souls – and these triumphant boasts of a social climber when he shouts to the sherpas down below and plants his flag on some distant precipice. Particular pleasure is derived from the failures of other dons who were pursuing comparable Alpine peaks:

I have seldom enjoyed an event more than Trevor-Roper’s inaugural lecture, it was amusing in itself – I must send you a copy – but what was funny were the preliminaries; he had hoped for a large incursion of smart persons from London and deputed Lord Furneaux and Chips Channon’s son – he wrote them that he gathered that they were socially-minded and would know the faces of Cabinet Ministers and Ambassadors – to act as ushers. He caused four rows of the School to be kept empty for “the quality”; it was terrible to see aged dons and white-haired ladies rudely pushed away from these empty places which were waiting to be filled by elegant persons from London. In the end, apart from the Duke of Wellington and about eight members of the Astor family and his own wife and her sister Doria nobody came and the seats were filled by plebeians in the end.

The editors plainly hero worship Berlin, but they have done him a questionable service by revealing his blatant treachery. “He was never sneaky or malevolent”, says Noel Annan in The Book of Isaiah. The letters, alas, do not bear out this kind judgement. Bowra and David Cecil are supposedly among his closest friends, but Berlin, an intellectual as well as a social snob, who despises what he calls the “upper middle brow”, is only too anxious, when corresponding with American academics, to deplore Cecil and Bowra’s publications. To Arthur Schlesinger he cringingly says that he would swap Edmund Wilson for David Cecil “any day”. He tells an American “pansy friend” (Roland Burdon-Miller) that he finds Bowra “rather philistine and uninteresting”.

The 800 pages are peppered with malice about poor A. L. Rowse (a more interesting man than Berlin and ultimately more intellectually distinguished). Rowse “grows more and more impossible and awful daily”. Rowse’s absence is “a source of happiness”. Rowse is “more Malvolio like than ever”. Yet to Rowse himself, Berlin writes an Iago-like letter in which he says, “One cannot live for twenty years on and off with someone as wonderful & unique as, if you’ll let me say so, you are & not develop a strong and permanent bond”. It is hard to like the author of this letter. The whole volume, indeed, fills the reader with a gloom which was surely not intended by the editors. If the reader, and even more the conscientious reviewer, who has read each page with notebook in hand, feels that the exercise of reading was a waste of time, that only half explains the misery that the exercise provokes. Reading the book, after all, takes only a week. But writing these tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters took fourteen years of a clever man’s life. While he was writing them, and regurgitating the same old thoughts about Maistre, Herzen and co, A. L. Rowse was producing those readable, well-researched volumes The England of Elizabeth, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, The Early Churchills, The Later Churchills, etc. Berlin’s repeated jokes about Wittgenstein, likewise, seem counterproductive on the page. “Nothing is more terrible than religious Wittgensteinism”, he writes – merely making this reader think that the author of The Hedgehog and the Fox was not worthy to lick the boots of the author of Philosophical Investigations.

Berlin guarded his reputation fiercely. One of the more absurd letters in the volume, and one which leaves a very nasty taste, is one he wrote to Anna Kallin, a fellow Russian Jewish émigré who was a producer of talks on the Third Programme. Kallin got Berlin to record eight hours of spontaneous, unscripted lectures on European thinkers for the radio. These were in turn advertised in Radio Times. The fact that they were spoken off the cuff was mentioned. “Mr Berlin is renowned for his fluent and witty expositions of abstract ideas. He has a reputation as a conversationalist which extends far beyond Oxford.” The self-importance with which Berlin savaged Kallin for this little advertisement is breathtaking. He sees it as “revolting”. Even in his apoplectic rage, he turns to the formula of the list. “I cannot understand why it was allowed to appear: after all, the R.T., would not or at least has not said things like that about Alan Pryce Jones or Eddie Sackville West or David Cecil or Stephen Spender”. Then he adds, “Don’t distress yourself about this letter. I cannot help writing it”.

Where did the vulnerability spring from? Was it from being an exile in a foreign land? (He once said to me that he could never forget arriving at Croydon airport with a little cardboard suitcase.) Or was it, as I now suspect, because he could see in Radio Times’s description of him as a witty talker a suggestion that he was nothing but a witty talker? Did he realize that he had frittered away his talents, talked them away at dinner tables? “He was particularly sensitive”, writes Jennifer Holmes in The Book of Isaiah, “to being regarded as a licensed clown, a mere jolly and garrulous vulgarisateur”. He was sensitive about it because that was what he chose to make of himself.

The Book of Isaiah is edited – again – by Henry Hardy and is a collection of essays from those who knew Berlin. Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, a don from Krakow, contributes an essay titled “One of the Giants of the Twentieth Century”. If this phrase is used about Berlin, what do we have left for Gandhi, Picasso, Churchill, Nelson Mandela? Noel Annan praises Berlin’s “detestation of cruelty” – but who, apart from the Marquis de Sade and perhaps Robert Mugabe does not detest cruelty? Though all the essays speak affectionately of the old boy, none of them advances the case for Berlin as anything other than a chatterbox and vulgarisateur. “Who”, he asks, “save the saints & the mechanical & dead is not” a snob?

A further point about the letters – they are not very well edited. There are plenty of explanatory notes, but like the words of the Prayer Book they leave undone the things they ought to have done and do the things they ought not to do. For example, Berlin rightly accuses himself of “logorrhoea as Mr Joyce once called loquacity”. The note explains what many of us knew already, that “James Augustine Aloysius Joyce” was an Irish novelist. It supplies us with his dates. But it does not tell us where he uses the word. The phrase “saeva indignatio” is translated but we are not told where it comes from, still less whose grave it adorns. The biographical information about the more obscure figures in the story is only given once: blink and you will miss it. When Yitzchok Samunov dies, for example, on page 189, I had a quarter of an hour’s hunting before I identified him as a boring-sounding uncle by marriage who had ended his life in Tel Aviv.

The letters are not worth the effort required of them. There is not one which comes anywhere near being a good letter, and nearly all of them are thunderingly boring. Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s biographer, writes that “he had a particular talent for imagining other lives”. If so, this talent was not on display as he gabbled into the Dictaphone. “Miss Garbo prefers Chesterfields to Camels (or the other way) – she can’t tell the difference, but may be there is one – then a tinkling laugh – the words Oo la la – it is a nightmare”. This does not convey to me what it was like to meet Garbo – nothing about her appearance, nothing about her voice, and he has not spotted the lesbianism. None of the people in the book comes to life, except, very flickeringly, young academics he is recommending for posts. Then, the quality of their minds – as in the character sketches of John Lucas, Brian McGuinness and Tony Quinton – is what is observed. But, much as I happen to like these three people, who is going to pay £35 for a character sketch of three academic philosophers aged thirty? If these letters had not been published, I should have gone on thinking of Berlin as a very jolly diner out who wrote some delightfully well-turned essays about European thinkers and writers. He did for Belinsky and Herzen what Bowra did for Homer and David Cecil did for Lord M: that is, made them accessible to intelligent student audiences and general readers. As it is, the hyperbole of the encomia in The Book of Isaiah, combined with the malicious, snobbish, boastful, cowardly, pompous loghorrhoea of the Letters leave a far less pleasing impression.

Isaiah Berlin
ENLIGHTENING
Letters 1946–1960
Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes
844pp. Chatto and Windus. £35.
978 0 701 17889 5

Henry Hardy, editor
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH
Personal impressions of Isaiah Berlin
336pp. Boydell Press. £25 (US $47).
978 1 84383 453 3





A. N. Wilson’s recent books include a novel, Winnie and Wolf, 2007, and Our Times: The age of Elizabeth II, 2008.