Big Talker

On June 11, 1957, two days before the announcement of his knighthood (awarded, so a friend teased, for services to “brilliant conversation”), Isaiah Berlin lunched with the queen. Ignoring frowns from other guests, he insisted on the merits of various books banned for obscenity in Britain, including Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and one by Edmund Wilson. In a letter to Wilson he remembered finding the queen to be quite jolly:

In this second volume of letters, we find Berlin mixing with just about everyone in high society. His work in Washington during the war, preparing dispatches on American opinion for the Foreign Office, had secured his reputation and given him enviable contacts. Despite this, the late 1940s and early ’50s were in many ways a time of acute self-doubt, which (he must have thought) called for long and lugubrious letters. After the war, he returned to Oxford, where he left analytical philosophy for the history of ideas. It was where he wanted to be, but he constantly worried that his intellectual output was insignificant.

The letters are far from dull, however, and frequently the miserable and the jovial sit together on the same page. On the whole the letters are endearingly vivacious, filled with a passion for life and a love of gossip. But there is also a strong undercurrent of guilt, shame, and inadequacy.

Berlin particularly valued his friendship with the “agreeably malicious” Maurice Bowra, whose “immoral front”–standing against the solemnity of Oxford dons–he found liberating. Thanking Bowra, he writes, “Having arrived in England with Russian sentiments & habits, & had a firm, narrow, tidy English uniform clapped on all this, I should, I think, have grown into a ludicrous caricature of English attributes but for this great act of rescue.” He may not have been a ludicrous caricature of English attributes, but he came close with his rapid, upper-class English diction, paradoxically modeled on Bowra.

In his preface to The Book of Isaiah, compiled to mark the centenary of Berlin’s birth, Henry Hardy issues a warning: “This book contains strong laudatory content throughout.” The warning is necessary, for the contributions–written mostly by those who knew Berlin in person–unapologetically champion Berlin, with all the hyperbole that goes with such writing.

And it must be said, the impression from these letters is not entirely agreeable. Jennifer Holmes (who joins Hardy to edit the letters) writes that “while his sympathy for the human condition in the abstract is readily apparent, sympathy for individuals–even his closest friends–is in fairly short supply, and empathy almost non-existent.” His irrepressible disdain for people is relentless. Einstein is regarded as “a genius, but surely a foolish one, with the inhumanity of a child.” The “dreadful” Rebecca West is “obviously sick and mad.” E.H. Carr, a “philistine,” is “worthless.” Kingsley Amis is “revolting.” And so on.

“Can you ever read through your letters? I can’t. But I am always ashamed of them, a little.” You can see why, and now they have been published, his reputation will surely be damaged. These pages depict a cowardly snob, one who was regularly treacherous even to his closest friends.

But while the letters show Berlin’s harshness, they also demonstrate his more obsequious side. “I say what I imagine to be true; I never by any chance think of what reactions this will cause,” he writes; and yet, when the reactions did occur, he would then try to assuage bruised feelings. In truth, he was nearly always thinking about possible reactions. Feeling “a curiously powerful devotion” to Winston Churchill, who had asked for his help with his first volume of memoirs, Berlin wrote a flattering review of the second volume to avoid writing anything that would upset him. Personal considerations about his private life, he confided, outweighed the public interest. Churchill’s reaction to the review (“It’s too good to be true”) highlights the problem of excessive praise.

It was odd that Berlin, a liberal social democrat, felt so devoted to Churchill. It was not just that he felt more socially comfortable among conservatives, as Michael Ignatieff suggests in his masterful biography. In the realm of ideas as well as in his friendships, Berlin oscillated between opposing sides. For example, discussing the “reactionary liberal” Frederick Hayek, he said he had “an inveterate sympathy for traitors in both camps, crypto-reactionary progressives and crypto-progressive reactionaries.”

There was one reactionary, however, who proved too much for Berlin, and that was T.S. Eliot. Their disagreement over the latter’s anti-Semitism is the only time both sides of the correspondence are printed in full. Eliot had complained about being associated with Arthur Koestler in Berlin’s article, entitled “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” in which he criticized Koestler for posing a stark choice for the Diaspora: either full assimilation or emigration to Israel.

Attempting to disassociate himself from this view, Eliot maintained that, for him, the Jewish problem was not a racial problem at all but a religious problem. In reply, Berlin quoted Eliot’s 1934 lecture at the University of Virginia: “Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

The term “free-thinking” could scarcely describe a religious community, Berlin pointed out, and so must have described the Jews as a race. Eliot responded by saying that, instead of race, the word culture would be more appropriate, and anyway, he went on, his emphasis had been on free-thinking–after all, many Jews had abandoned their faith but not their culture. His conclusion was that either the Jews preserve their own culture in their own community or assimilate fully by accepting Christianity. This is barely distinguishable from Koestler, but again for fear of causing offense, Berlin removed the association from future editions of his article.

Berlin was one of those cultural Jews, subscribing to the rituals but not the content of Judaism–and doing so despite the contradiction. He had many other inner conflicts, too–his Jewish, Russian, and British identities, for instance–and had to reconcile his lifelong Zionism with his anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Writing to passionately pro-Arab correspondents, he would try his hardest to find agreement: The creation of a Jewish state had been “at the expense of the Arabs. Of course they mind. Of course they are right to mind.” And it would have been an anathema to Berlin for the justification to come from religious or tribal grounds. It had to come instead from the more utilitarian idea of safety. In January 1958, having been asked by Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who he thought a “peasant leader,” about the status of children from mixed marriages, Berlin made it clear that religious affiliation should make no difference to civil and political rights.

Though Berlin was often an astute political observer, he sometimes felt less interested in politics than in the great questions of philosophy and intellectual history–or the elections of the warden of All Souls, which are excessively covered in these pages. Public engagement with the horrors of the 20th century seemed a burden, and when he did engage publicly, he would soon feel regret, as he did with most of his writings. When he wrote to proclaim his stout anti-Marxism, for example, after being thought a fellow traveler by the New York Times, he later admitted to Alice James that he “felt ashamed of publicly avowing my solidarity with the safe majority.”

In 1949, to Michael Straight, the editor-proprietor of The New Republic, Berlin wrote that he had nothing worth saying about Western Europe, although he was more interested–but even more cautious, for fear of endangering his acquaintances–on the subject of the Soviet Union. He was in a predicament: “where I could talk freely I have nothing to say, where I have something to say I cannot talk freely.” Years later, the “detestable” Straight, as Berlin was then calling him, published, without permission, a false account of his famous meeting with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, putting her in real danger.

The critical night in late 1945 with Akhmatova, an alluring remnant of pre-revolutionary Russian culture, stayed with Berlin for the rest of his life. The relationship is captured well by Anatoly Naiman in The Book of Isaiah. Along with other Russian artists–Turgenev, Tolstoy, Pasternak, all of whom feature regularly in the letters–she taught him the effects of totalitarian societies on culture.

Berlin was a great critic of totalitarianism, although he wrote relatively little on the 20th-century horrors. With its roots in the 18th-century belief that there was one right way for human beings to live, communism and fascism went against his understanding of human nature, derived from his own conflicting personality and convictions. In a lengthy and thoughtful letter to George Kennan in 1951, Berlin explained that conflicting and irreconcilable values are part of the human condition, and if this is denied, people “lose their status as free human beings; indeed as human beings at all.” Nature, then, is irrational, and as he knew from Akhmatova, culture, not uniformity, was the best civilizing force. He could have said, as Sigmund Freud did, that culture exists to protect us against nature.

Berlin may have lacked Freud’s knack for aphorisms, but he remains an important thinker, even if his own (all too human) nature contained faults and contradictions.

There were many who believed Berlin’s fame was undeserved, earned by his personality and not his ability. He readily remarked that his ability was persistently overestimated. “Long may this continue,” he would say.

James Grant is a writer in Glasgow.