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Isaiah Berlin was the most popular don of his time. While Maurice Bowra boomed, and David Cecil giggled and Trevor-Roper intrigued, Berlin talked his way into the hearts of men — and women. If you were at a party and he entered the room, your spirits rose. If he chose to sit near you, it was bliss. Some found his delivery too rapid, and occasionally a lecture of his turned into an incomprehensible disaster. You had to get firmly on to his wavelength. Once there, the warm wave of talk enveloped you. It was like lying on a sunny beach, waiting for each successive rhetorical roller to saturate you with wit, information, high-level gossip and precious wisdom. Not that he was a monopolist. He listened too. ‘Like all Russians,’ he wrote, ‘I like conversation better than anything else in the world.’
There was no Boswell, alas. Reminiscences of the Superdon, put together by his colleague at Wolfson College, Henry Hardy, do not bring him to life. They are mostly high-minded waffle by grandee mediocrities like Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams. The only exception is a superb pen-portrait by one of his amanuenses, Serena Moore, who provides fascinating details about her boss in sharp, close focus. Bowra envied Berlin ‘his handsome girl secretaries’. This essay shows that one at least had brains too: it is deeply perceptive. If un-Boswellised, however, Berlin was a constant letter-writer, of exceptional vigour. He would dictate letters deep into the night, sometimes for six hours at a stretch (‘Isaiah never goes to bed,’ said Bowra). He also wrote countless letters in his own hand. His handwriting, says Moore,
was a joy to work with … a clear, plain, stable, harmonious and at times ‘painted’ hand, with a very high form level. A ‘painted’ script has a printed, unlinked look, often indicating deep thought and a sense of word order and flow; and a light overall pressure is commonly seen in the writing of those who dislike physical force. It is not a fast, driving hand but a considered and polite one [with] an unmistakable sign of high originality — the letter ‘s’ always written upwards.
The first volume of Berlin’s letters took him to the end of the war. This goes up to the 1960s, and is richer, even funnier, packed with insights of the great, ‘as one mounts the ladder of importance’, as he puts it. He was not a letter-writer of the genius class, like Byron or Charles Lamb. But he is high up in the second rank, alongside Creevey, for instance, or Macaulay, giving you masses of precious information about people and events.
He also revealed himself, his fierce critical powers turned inward. ‘I am too silly and frivolous.’ ‘As you know, I never read a book’ (but he was a skimmer of genius). ‘I hear myself chatter’. ‘I suffer from the deepest contempt of everything I have ever written.’ ‘I have a great desire to meet celebrities.’ ‘I talk and talk, as you know, heedlessly.’ ‘I am the worst coward you know, believe me.’ But his shafts also flew off in all directions, pinning the living and dead. Wagner: ‘I am bored stiff by his most eloquent moments.’ Berenson: ‘The toughest human being I have ever met.’ Greta Garbo: ‘Goodness, she is dumb.’ (But did she really say ‘Ooh, la, la!’?) Evelyn Waugh was ‘thoroughly un-English … lower middle class.’ Hayek was ‘wicked’, and, with Popper, ‘two reactionary liberals who have somehow put on sheep’s clothing.’ George Weidenfeld had ‘an incorrigible taste for the bogus’. Bronowski gets stick too (‘it all comes to obviously nothing’). So does Rebecca West (‘a dreadful woman’), A. J. P. Taylor (‘not in any sense serious at all’), E. H. Carr (‘worthless … a philistine and cheaply political’), Kingsley Amis (‘revolting … hateful’), Gladwyn Jebb (‘cold as ice’), Lady Astor (‘the most detestable woman in England’), J. B. Priestley (‘an awful man’), Philip Toynbee (‘stupid’), Isaac Deutscher (‘cunning, dishonest and cheap’), the Duchess of Westminster (a good-time girl’), Diana Cooper (‘likes cosiness with a touch of tarnish’), Sartre (‘detestable’) and Cocteau (‘a cocotte … small and embarrassing’). It surprises me Berlin was cool about the delicious Lauren Bacall and critical of Evangeline Bruce, the queen of the embassy wives.
Normally, Berlin was well disposed to hostesses, whether English, like Pamela Berry, or American, like Alice James. Some of his best letters are to Lady Anglesey. He was not a howling snob, more a smiling one. There is a letter to Margot Fonteyn which positively simpers. Meeting Picasso, he drooled. His highest admiration was reserved for Toscanini. Indeed music was the most important side of his life. He had little aesthetic sense and was totally uninterested in nature, animals and sport.
How serious was he? He was more a visiting professor than a tenured one. He was not really a philosopher, and confessed freely he had never been able to understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, despite many attempts. Professionally, he was a historian of ideas (a soft option), but even there he never wrote his long-projected magnum opus about political ideas from1789 to1848. His most famous work, The Hedgehog and the Fox, was a bit of a fluke. He was an essay man. It is no accident that his academic friends tended to be poor performers at book-writing, like Bowra, or non-performers, like John Sparrow. He warmed to Trevor-Roper, who had a similar inability to write the great book that was in him. Berlin was unsure of himself in some ways, often finding it hard to make up his mind, or stick to it. When Trevor-Roper ran Harold Macmillan as Oxford Chancellor, Berlin said, ‘nothing would persuade me to vote for him’ — then did exactly that, and later wrote a comic account of the battle.
There was a darker side to him. He could be hard on servants and inferiors. Serena Moore ‘witnessed several occasions’ when he was quite unaware of that definition of the gentleman as ‘someone who never speaks harshly or contemptuously to a person who is in no position to answer back on an equal footing’. He pursued a (to me) incomprehensible vendetta against his All Souls colleague A. L. Rowse. Of course ‘Leslie’ was irritating, but nothing worse: a kindly soul. Berlin envied him his huge productivity and his courageous rise from working-class poverty. For many years Berlin was unofficial adviser to the crown on academic honours, and successfully prevented Rowse from getting anything at all. Yet to Rowse’s face, Berlin was obsequious. This volume prints a letter he wrote to Rowse of such consummate hypocrisy that it ought to be a prize item in any anthology of humbug.
Serena Moore thinks he was ‘subtly handicapped’ by an ‘undeveloped response to women’. An only child, devoted to his possessive parents, he remained a virgin till over 40. And his first full encounter was an accident. Driving himself furiously, especially in social life, his late hours often led to a bout of exhaustion, when he would take to his bed. On one such occasion, he was visited by Jennifer Hart, wife of the Brasenose philosophy professor. She quickly slipped between the sheets, and that was that. Later he ran off (if that is not too energetic an expression) with another professorial wife, and married her.
As these wonderful epistles (some of many thousand words) show, Berlin was a great entertainer in academic showbiz . He was so because he knew so much. He loved knowledge. He could say with Dr Johnson, ‘There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it, than not.’ Once, lecturing to a North London audience on Jewish history, I was astonished to see Berlin in the front row, eager, attentive, his face uplifted, eyes alight. He was prepared to learn even from me. He conveyed his vast knowledge with grace and wit. In a snatched moment in the Gare de Lyon, Paris, he wrote: ‘In the end nobody … will quite know what to say about me; did I produce anything worthwhile, ever?’ The answer lies in this hefty tome of letters, with more to follow, thanks be to God.
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