A CHARMED LIFE

A philosopher by training who later became an historian chiefly of political ideas, a figure and fixture at Oxford, where he spent the better (and best) part of his life, Isaiah Berlin was an international intellectual celebrity. He had a way of showing up in the best places — not least among them, in the indexes of books by or about Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Evelyn Waugh, Joseph Alsop, and Katherine Graham. “I know the difference between Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin,” the public relations man and consummate name-dropper Ben Sonnenberg Sr. said, “and I know them both.”

Berlin’s chief form was the biographical essay in which he traced the course of ideas through the lives of such writers as Vico, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others. (His one continuous book, a slender volume on Karl Marx, is disappointing.) In other, more purely political essays, his tendency was to argue against single-idea or “Great System” thinkers, and he became the philosopher of political limitation: against historical inevitability, for the liberty of the individual against that of the state, of two minds about the quality of progress represented by the Enlightenment. Liberals, he felt, were insufficiently impressed by the tragic quality inherent in life. Among his most often used quotations was Kant’s remark: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

The labels “philosopher” and “political thinker” never seemed quite the right fit for Berlin. His talent, his propensity, and his instincts always seemed at least partially artistic. His biographical essays are those of a man who seeks to understand life as an artist does — which is why many of the essays have a continuing life and can be read, with intellectual profit, more than once.

Until the middle 1970s — when he acquired the services of a highly conscientious volunteer editor named Henry Hardy who offered to round up Berlin’s various essays and lectures and see them published in book form — one had little notion of Berlin’s writing constituting a genuine oeuvre, a body of work coherent within itself and carrying cumulative meaning.

I wrote that the essay was Berlin’s chief form; more precisely, his true form was the extended, impressive, torrential schmooze. One of the most interesting revelations of Michael Ignatieff’s biography is that Berlin did not write his essays — he dictated them to a secretary, polishing them later. People who spent time with Berlin have remarked on the striking similarity between his speech and his prose. Garrulity in speech, verbosity on the page, these, Berlin half-recognized, were his weakness.

Some among his critics felt this verbosity not an amusing but a serious flaw. A. J. P. Taylor told Edmund Wilson that when Berlin couldn’t get into his subject, he “tried to carry things off ‘with a burst of words.'” This quality in Berlin, subordinate clause lashed to subordinate clause, triplet after quadruplet of adjectives, gives many of his essays a shapeless quality, a feeling of overload, depriving them of the economy that is central to the essay.

All who knew, met, or merely heard Isaiah Berlin felt the need to describe him in verbal action, like so many pilgrims fresh from viewing one of the natural wonders of the world. “The first thing that everyone noticed about him,” Berlin’s friend Maurice Bowra wrote, “was the rapidity of his speech, which matched an equal rapidity in his thought. Some of us talked fast enough already, but Isaiah talked even faster, and at times I found it hard to keep up with him.” Robert Wokler recently wrote that Berlin “was profligate with words; his knighthood, it was suggested, having been bestowed on him for services to conversation.”

It was a show that no one, once having witnessed it, soon forgot. It swept people up; it conquered, it captivated. Edmund Wilson noted in his diary: Isaiah Berlin affected me like nobody else I had known; though he was not particularly handsome, I tended to react to him a little as if he were an attractive woman whom I wanted to amuse and please: and this attitude on my part, evoked a kind of coquetry on his.

If Berlin seems to have given so much pleasure to friends over a long life, his own pleasures were seen to from the beginning of his life. Michael Ignatieff cites four significant facts connected with his birth in 1909: It followed that of an earlier, stillborn sister; he was the boy his parents longed for; he sustained a permanent injury to his left arm when the delivering physician too vigorously used the forceps on him; and he was to remain an only child. He was born, a Jew in Riga, Latvia, to a lumber-merchant father who was sufficiently successful for the family to be able to move to St. Petersburg. His mother had a livelier mind than his father, and her love for her son was unstinting. The young Isaiah seems to have grown up under the reign of that “family egotism” in which, as Tolstoy put it, “parents decide that the rest of the world can go to hell as long as all is well with our little Andrei.”

Although they survived the Russian Revolution, Berlin’s father in 1921 wisely transported the family to England, where he had business connections and had stored up some £ 10,000. The money eased the exile, though there must have been difficult moments as what Michael Ignatieff describes as this “plump, unprepossessing Jewish child in a Gentile school, a bookish boy with a foreign accent and limp left arm” sought to win people over. But Berlin was to prove the consummate assimilationist, able to slide himself easily into any social circle he desired.

His entree, all his days, was his intelligence and his charm. The former was first put to service in gaining entrance to the best English schools. At St. Paul’s his reputation as a charming talker — as a non-stop, talk-for-its-own-lovely-sake talker — began. He won through talk what others might win through athletics. His oddity seems never to have been held against him. Nor, apparently, was his Jewishness. His mother kept a kosher home, and Berlin throughout his life observed Passover and Yom Kippur as a matter of allegiance, though he seems to have been a skeptic, and religion scarcely figures in his writing.

Berlin was very smart very young — smart and savvy and subtle. In an essay on freedom written at St. Paul’s at eighteen, he declared, “it hurts no man to conform if he knows that conformity is only a kind of manners, a sort of universal etiquette.” There was never any question of going into his father’s profitable business; one of the things such a business makes possible, after all, is the maintenance of brilliant sons such as Isaiah. After failing to win a place at Balliol College, Oxford, he won a scholarship at Corpus Christi. He developed a love for the long, looping Victorian sentence — an early addiction was to the prose of Macaulay, another lord of loquacity — and tutors criticized his essays for rattling on at too great length.

Berlin’s was the generation that entered Oxford just as Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton, and the other “Children of the Sun” (as Martin Green called them) were leaving. The great names of his own generation included Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, A. J. Ayer, R.H.S. Crossman, and Stuart Hampshire. Bowra, a rebel in those days, was known as leader of “the immoral front.” Berlin, though part of Bowra’s circle, was able to make himself welcome wherever he wished, without deeply committing himself to one faction or another. He had the reputation, rare among talkers, of actually listening, of expending genuine sympathy on the problems of others, of being able to put himself into the minds of others, which would later become one of his important traits as an analyst of the writings of men with whose ideas he disagreed.

Berlin considered careers in journalism and in law. But he was also a most gifted student — gifted enough to win election to a coveted fellowship at All Souls College. Nothing could have suited him better, for he disliked the grind of teaching, and All Souls, a precursor of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, had no students. It also carried enormous prestige. He was the first Jew ever to win a fellowship to All Souls. His election made him something of a celebrity within wealthier Jewish circles in England, and he found easy access to such homes as those of the Baron de Rothschild.

Berlin had an instinct for meeting important people. In 1938, he met Freud and, soon after, Chaim Weizmann. He became friendly with Elizabeth Bowen. He impressed Virginia Woolf, but not enough for her entirely to shed her anti-Semitism: “a Portuguese Jew, by the look of him, Oxford’s leading light.” Berlin himself was a man without the least xenophobia. In Oxford, he was thought an insider, maybe an insider’s insider.

Berlin gradually drifted away from philosophy to do the history of ideas, for which he thought himself better equipped, if only because it was less open-ended. His line had been analytical philosophy, and he played the game well enough to give a lecture at Cambridge that apparently did not entirely bore Wittgenstein. Of his standing as a philosopher, Berlin said, “I knew I wasn’t first-rate, but I was good enough. I was quite respected. I wasn’t despised. I was one of the brethren.” He also thought the logical positivism he had been practicing an intellectual dead end. “I gradually came to the conclusion,” he would later say, “that I should prefer a field in which one could hope to know more at the end of one’s life than when one had begun.”

Berlin’s own mind tended toward the historical, the exceptional case, the idea or cluster of ideas operating within a given time. He was not a pure thinker, but a reactive one who did better rubbing up against the ideas of others. Historical context became another crucial element in his thought. Stuart Hampshire thought all this so much twaddle, “period talking” he called it, vague and neither quite logical nor very positivistic.

Soon after England’s entry into World War II, Berlin found himself in New York, where he had traveled with the Communist spy Guy Burgess (who planned to go on to Moscow, with Berlin serving as his unwitting cover). In the event, Burgess was called back to England, and Berlin stayed on in the United States. The British Embassy availed itself of his services in helping to get America into the war by influencing trade unions, black organizations, and Jewish groups to take up pro-British, anti-German positions. “America was,” as Michael Ignatieff writes, “the making of him.” With his talent for insinuating himself with important figures, Berlin soon became friendly with Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, Charles Bohlen, Joseph Alsop, and the ineluctable Alice Roosevelt Longworth. He seemed naturally to gravitate toward power, toward establishments.

Liking Americans though he did, he found their talk dull. They found his own talk scintillating. The Americans he encountered took great pleasure in his ironic descriptions of their country, delivered, as Ignatieff puts it, “in his rapid-fire semi-Martian vernacular.”

Part of Berlin’s job was to send back to England summaries about America’s readiness to enter the war. These were read by a very select audience, including the King, Winston Churchill, and Anthony Eden. He might have been described as an English purveyor of American gossip on the state of the world — for which years of Oxford gossip seem to have served him well. His audience sometimes found his dispatches too colored — a bit “too perfervid,” said Churchill; perhaps, added Eden, with “too generous [an] Oriental flavor” — but they lent him cachet as a bright man with a penchant for making the best connections in the highest of places.

These dispatches were also responsible for a famous comic anecdote about the confusion between Isaiah and Irving Berlin. In the anecdote, Winston Churchill, at a dinner party, mistakes Irving for Isaiah. He asks the songwriter his advice on a number of political questions — when does he think the war will end, will Roosevelt run again — to which confusing answers are forthcoming. He then inquires what Mr. Berlin thinks is the most important thing he has written, to which the unhesitant reply is: “White Christmas.” The story was too delicious not to get around — Churchill, when he discovered his faux pas, himself told it to his cabinet. As Ignatieff notes, Isaiah Berlin gained a celebrity through the story without having to do anything to earn it. But then things had a way of dropping into his lap.

Berlin also had a knack for historical timing. He meets David Ben-Gurion as the state of Israel is forming. After the war, he travels to the Soviet Union and is put in touch with Boris Pasternak, who later asks his help in smuggling out Dr. Zhivago. Twice on trips to the Soviet Union, Berlin visited Anna Akhmatova, then in internal exile under Stalin. A great poet, she had a correspondingly great talent for self-dramatization, and lent to her two meetings with Isaiah Berlin great historical import. He felt himself utterly mesmerized by her, thought himself in love with her. She wrote a poem, “Poem Without a Hero,” in which he figures as “the guest from beyond the looking glass.”

This connection, too, added to Berlin’s prestige in the social as well as intellectual realm. By his late thirties, Lady Sibyl Colefax, Lady Emerald Cunard, and the American Marietta Tree sought him out for their parties; he became a social collectible. Churchill asked for — and apparently accepted — his literary advice on The Gathering Storm, his memoir of the 1930s. Einstein was pleased to meet with him. Chaim Weizmann wanted him to write his biography; Ben-Gurion offered him the directorship of the Israeli Foreign Office. His annual pilgrimages to the United States became events among the more socially advanced American intellectuals. His became a good name to drop.

Berlin entered the sexual fray rather late in life. He was never greatly enamored of his looks or physical gifts; he had, from quite early in life, what seemed to be the gift of perpetual middle age. He thought he might live out his days celibate. In an otherwise handsomely proportioned biography, Michael Ignatieff reports in perhaps more detail than required his subject’s rather inept sexual coming out at the age of forty-one. Berlin showed a small talent for picking the wrong women. But here, too, his good luck held, and in 1956, at the age of forty-seven, he pursued a married woman, the (eventually divorced) wife of a colleague. She was a woman with wide tolerance for his settled ways and sufficient wealth for him never to have to work again. Once more he had landed nicely on his feet.

The last twenty years of Berlin’s life, his biographer reports, were the happiest. Talks delivered over the BBC made his reputation as a dazzling lecturer grow even greater. He was appointed head of Wolfson, a new Oxford college for the study of social science, a position he much enjoyed. He was elected president of the British Academy. Honorary degrees, festschrifts, literary prizes rolled in. He was awarded the Order of Merit, which somehow set the seal on his self-doubt. He lived out his days in good health, surrounded by music (his great passion), conscientious servants, an admiring family. After his death at the age of eighty-eight, Isaac Stern and Alfred Brendel — friends, of course — played at his memorial service. In Michael Ignatieff, he has found a sympathetic and properly suave biographer. A charmed life.

Yet even into the most charmed of lives, a measure of doubt must fall, and in Isaiah Berlin it was a fairly large measure. As an intellectual, Ignatieff reports, Berlin wished to occupy a firm middle ground. “He was looking for a path between heavy-going engagement and mandarin detachment. He wanted to be serious without being solemn, to defend beliefs without being dogmatic and to be entertaining without being facile.” This is nicely formulated, and Berlin seems to have achieved it. Still, it wasn’t, one suspects, quite enough.

Berlin had won the regard of the world of the New York Review of Books, but, at the next rung up the intellectual ladder, among the serious players, his accomplishments were viewed more skeptically. Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, the men whom he must have looked upon as his true peers, were not quite persuaded by Isaiah Berlin, not quite ready to grant him the serious intellectual status he craved, even though he shared many of their core beliefs.

Though a political philosopher, Berlin preferred not to speak on particular political questions. Instead he wrote on the need to tolerate a pluralism of human views and values — a pluralism, he rightly insisted, that did not need to dwindle into an empty relativism. He tried to keep his idealism in equipoise with strong skepticism, something he much admired in Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual exiled to London, who was one of his great heroes. But in Berlin it didn’t quite come off, perhaps because he was too chary of taking positions that might make him enemies.

In attempting to formulate Berlin’s politics, Ignatieff at one point calls him “neither a conservative nor a laissez-faire individualist, but a New Deal liberal.” At another point he writes that Berlin “was a liberal social democrat, but he was more comfortable socially among conservatives. He tried to have it both ways.”

Ignatieff tells of Berlin’s admiration for “Toscanini, Churchill, Weizmann — men whose vices he excused because they did not include a fatal eagerness to please.” Ignatieff puts the best possible face on this apparent eagerness to please, writing that “all his life he was to be reproached for the freedom of his friendships, for his capacity to be relatively indifferent to someone’s views, providing they had other redeeming virtues.” One has to applaud this, if true, for no one should be reduced to and judged upon his opinions merely. Yet issues arise in which one is bound — almost as part of being engaged with one’s time, almost as part of being human — to take stands and positions, to risk enmity.

Ignatieff reports that Berlin despised Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt for their loftily theoretical and ultimately cold-hearted views about the nature of the German death camps. (Nor did he like professional Holocausters.) But he kept his contempt to his correspondence, never speaking out publicly. He had no difficulty in announcing himself anti-Communist, was even skeptical about the “thaw” that was said to set in with Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. But my guess is that even here he might have found overly strong anti-communism a bit excessive — that is to say, vulgar. He cannot have approved the student depredations upon the universities, both in England and America, but here, too, he was silent. “One of the last things that Berlin said to me, not long before his death,” Ian Buruma recently wrote in the New Republic, “was that he wanted to fly to Israel just to shake the hands of his liberal friends who continued to believe that Palestinians no less than Jews had a right to feel at home and be free.” I do not doubt he said this to Buruma. That he himself would have said it publicly is all but inconceivable.

The most revealing Berlin essay is the one adopted from his Romanes Lecture on Turgenev. It is about the great Russian novelist’s inability, reflected in the murkiness of Fathers and Sons, to declare which side he was on in the struggle for Russian destiny. The left thought Turgenev created his young nihilist, Bazarov, to be mocked, while those on the right thought he was mocking the Russia of tradition and aspirations toward European culture. “But it was the attack from the left,” Berlin writes, “that hurt Turgenev most,” and later in the essay, he adds: “He found the scorn of the young unjust beyond endurance.” Finally, Berlin justifies Turgenev, implicitly rating him above Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky by crediting him with greater subtlety and appreciation for complexity:

His very gifts, his power of minute and careful observation, his fascination with the varieties of character and situation as such, his detachment, his inveterate habit of doing justice to the full complexity and diversity of goals, attitudes, beliefs — these seemed to [his enemies] morally self-indulgent and politically irresponsible.

Anyone who has followed Berlin’s career will find no difficulty in replacing Turgenev’s name in this passage with that of Isaiah Berlin.

But was Berlin’s thinking too complex for taking any determined position on the issues of his day at all? Or might it instead have been the all-too-cautious instincts of the outsider who has succeeded beyond all dreams in beautifully assimilating himself in the socially closed world of smart society, the reward for which was a lifelong fear of making waves?

Michael Ignatieff asked the eighty-five-year-old Berlin what had most surprised him about his life. “The mere fact,” he answered, “that I should have lived so peacefully and so happily through so many horrors.” He neglected to mention that there is an art to achieving this — the art of careful detachment.

Yet detachment, too, has its limits. Without intellectual courage, even the most charmed of lives lose their allure; unwilling to declare their beliefs, even the most brilliant of men are in the end divested of their gravity. In a 1967 letter to his friend Jean Floud, Berlin wrote: “I always want everybody to be satisfied: the wolf, as the Russian proverb says, to be satisfied and yet the sheep to remain uneaten: which, I dare say, cannot be done in this world.”

But his problem with speaking his mind may have run deeper. Perhaps more than any other figure of his age, Berlin forces one to consider the significance of intellectual courage in the life of the mind. In Isaiah Berlin, alas, it ran to short supply.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.