by Simon Schama
Though I’m not sure he would have welcomed the classification, Berlin was, in his way, an anthropologist of cultural allegiance; prepared to engage seriously with precisely the kind of ideas which ought to have repelled him: those which were the least cosmopolitan, the least rational, the least amenable to easy resolution through agreed ends. It would have been easy enough for him to write about Voltaire or Benjamin Constant. Instead he gave Counter-Enlightenment anti-rationalist writers like Joseph de Maistre and J. G. Hamann their full due. It was the airy thinness of mechanistic Enlightenment rationality, its failure to speak to the deeper impulses of memory, language and mythology, which, however alien to his own cast of mind, Berlin recognised as potent epistemological facts and which sent him to Vico and Herder. Those exasperated by the reluctance of Sunni Iraqis to be reasonable and take their coming electorally rendered punishment on the chin could do worse than to read Berlin on the tenacity of social magic in the allure of tribal nationalism.
Not that the message would be cheering. Early on in his stay in the United States, where he arrived first in 1940, hoping to move on to Moscow (via Japan), Berlin realised that his sceptical, tragic view of history made him a cultural misfit. In both New York, where Berlin was employed at the British Press Service in Manhattan, and in Washington, where he became Head of the Political Survey section at the embassy, he blinked at the sunlit intensity of American optimism. Though he genuinely admired American energy and forthrightness, the mistaken conviction that exhaustive iteration was the same thing as understanding depressed him. Ultimately he thought that the national passion for the unequivocal could only be sustained through an exercise of eye-shutting make-believe akin to a children’s party game; the conversion of the world from what it was to what America wished (fingers crossed and scarlet slippers clicked) it would be. If not actually inhuman, this optimisation of the world, he thought, was nonetheless a willed self-deception about the reality of human behaviour, namely that there were no conflicts which, with the application of enough goodwill, money and robust determination, could not be resolved.
But for Berlin, even then, it was the beginning of public wisdom to accept that there were indeed a multitude of evils which, in fact, were not open to resolution since arguments of persuasively equal validity could be made for each side. Hello Belfast, hello Jerusalem. Accordingly, the job of statecraft was not to liquidate those differences (for that would seldom happen), but to contain them; to find a space in which acceptance of irreconcilability would not require mutual annihilation. However unarguable as historical fact and however timely for our own instruction, this, it need hardly be said, is not the kind of message likely to feature in American inaugural addresses. Better the vacuous uplift of the inspirational nostrum than the sobering descent of the incontrovertible truth.
Not surprisingly, then, there is some mischievous Berlinian ambiguity to the title that his exemplary editor, Henry Hardy, has given to this book of letters. ‘Flourishing’ was Berlin’s habitual communiqué to his parents, Mendel and Marie, to calm their perpetual anxieties about his health and fortunes. In these repeated reassurances he was the touchingly dutiful Jewish son; so much so that, on occasion, Isaiah actually reproached them for not writing, cabling, calling. But sometimes, especially from New York, he signalled ‘flourishing’ when he was anything but. Stuck in his British Press Office on the thirtieth floor of the Rockefeller Center, appointed to liaise with American Jews and Labour Organisations, Berlin missed the banter and gossip of his Oxford friends so desperately and became so despondently guilty about the triviality, as he then saw it, of his contribution to the war effort that at one point his feelings turned suicidal. On another occasion, discovered by his parents to have been hospitalised with pneumonia while sending off yet another ‘flourishing’ letter, Berlin protested that in fact he had flourished before he hadn’t, and that, in any case, a New York hospital bed was an enviable idyll: terrific food, nothing to do but read, no one bothering him.
Yet of course Isaiah Berlin did flourish, not just in the sense of thriving as Mendel and Marie Berlin hoped, but in the sense of delivering a bravura passage of brass in the reedy plainsong that was philosophical Oxford in the 1930s. Though he happily plunged into a post-Wittgensteinian ethos, drunk on the over-excited discovery that language and the unstable apparatus of cognition might constitute the only available reality, Berlin – who hardly lacked for speech-acts – registered his presence substantively, not just rhetorically. When Isaiah was in a room, no one needed to ask, in the E. M. Forster parody of J. L. Austin, yes, but how do we know he was really there? Not that the pleasure he had in being ‘Shaya’ made Berlin in any sense a flâneur. He detested narcissism almost as much as philistinism. And in some aspects of his life, not least his early relationships with women, he could be brutally self-protective: happier as their non-stop cuddly talking bear than as their lover.
As the letters make plain, the epicurean jauntiness came early. The headlong rush of talk on which the equally fast flow of ideas would be borne; the exhilarated delight in gossip as art form; the long steeping in music, especially Mozart, the composer who, for Berlin, ideally married hard-edged classical brilliance with passionate sublimity; the voracious pleasure taken in food, all the indulgent wallowing in the small quotidian happinesses of life like a hippo in warmly gurgling mud, aligned him with his hero Alexander Herzen who believed (along with at least half of Tolstoy’s brain) that the point of life was the daily living of it.
He was, in fact, that unlikely thing: a seriously happy Jew. It may well be, as some biographers have suggested, that the eight-year-old Isaiah was afforded his pessimistic view of history, and his aversion to immediate misery inflicted in the name of a proclaimed future good, by witnessing the 1917 revolution in Petrograd. But there’s little sign that the triangulation of his personality between its Russian, Jewish and English components ever made him uneasy about the wholeness of his identity. Identities, he would have scoffed, are seldom whole, not the interesting ones, anyway. It may be, as it seemed to Guy de Rothschild, that he ‘floated inside his clothes’, but there’s no doubt that Isaiah Berlin was perfectly comfortable in the solid suiting of a middle-class, north-west London English Jew. The synagogues he attended with his parents, in Bayswater, Hampstead and Golders Green, were, architecturally and socially, testaments to the determination with which bourgeois Anglo-Jews staked their claim to a stable place within the institutions of late-imperial Britain. The interiors were (and are) oak-panelled; the windows neo-Victorian stained glass; the ‘yad’ pointer for the Torah readings made from Hatton Garden sterling silver; and the synagogue’s official notables, the ‘wardens’, dressed in black silk top hats and seated in their very own closed pew, the ‘box’ – solemnly opened and shut each time one of them emerged to mount the steps to the ark.
There was no reason, then, for Isaiah, or his parents, to suppose that doors would be barred against him, provided, that is, he was sensible about which to knock on. So no Eton or Winchester for Isaiah, but the day-school of St Paul’s, in London, itself an intense forcing house of intellectual distinction; then Oxford, but not the aristocratic preserves of Christ Church or Magdalen, but Corpus Christi, neither the most dazzling of the colleges nor the drabbest. After graduating (first in Classics ‘Greats’; then in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, both with Firsts), Berlin moved smoothly to a lectureship in philosophy at New College. Although in later life he would often say (usually when he was out of Oxford) that he was never happier than in academic life, like many of the most gifted, he paused at the crossroads, not least because he thought New College a depressingly dull place and also because he was tantalised by what seemed, for a while, to be a job offer on the Manchester Guardian. When, to his acute disappointment, the job failed to materialise, Berlin took the bull by the horns and entered the notoriously stiff fellowship examination for All Souls, the only Oxford college with no students. No Jew had ever been elected to All Souls, and Berlin’s own fathe
r attempted to cool his son’s expectations by telling him it would be a miracle if it happened. It did. The Jewish Chronicle heralded the achievement as another hurdle vaulted; the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Dr Herz, a famous pillar of the conservative establishment, sent congratulations (albeit addressed to ‘Irving’ Berlin).
Isaiah was already The Phenomenon: unstoppably voluble, eloquent; notoriously ardent; playfully poetic rather than drily cerebral in his intellectual enthusiasms. No wonder so many of his earliest, best friends were Irish: the Lynd sisters, Sigle and Maire, daughters of a writer whom Berlin had met when they had been living in the Warden’s Lodge at New College. They were clever, fine-boned, fair-haired, wistful, sardonic, playful; with a good deal of steel beneath the rain-soft complexions. (Both Lynd sisters ended up in the Communist party.) How could the owlish, portly, intense young Jew not fall? He did. Sigle was the first of his real passions, though apparently not so much as a touch passed between them. Her younger sister, Maire, became a lifelong intimate: someone more than a friend and less than a lover; someone to whom Berlin could pour out the contents of his heart as well as his head from time to time. That Maire liked to be known as ‘B. J’ – for ‘Baby Junior’ – gives an accurate sense of the circle in which Isaiah felt happiest in the mid-thirties: teasing, faux-worldly, companionable; a fizzing cocktail of chummy brilliance laced with a dash of backbiting bitters at the expense of those judged Not Really Us: among them the relentlessly self-promoting historian A. L. Rowse; the blustering, bullying Richard Crossman, not yet a Labour party politician, whom Isaiah hated and later diagnosed as a ‘left-wing fascist’.
His letters at this time occasionally give the uncomfortable impression of playing to the gallery: I Say, I Say-er doing his turn as Entertaining Pet Hebrew (‘my dear, you know how frightfully clever they all are’):
Dear John,
Not a breath passes here where all is very still. I am about to write a tractate on God chasing his own predictions for you but am so idiotically busy that I haven’t been able to find a cool hour yet . . . The only piece of really stimulating gossip there is the unmentionable fact [do be careful] that the President being weak and dying demands blood. The Fellows gallantly offered theirs . . . Hardie was found to have none to offer. Pidduck and Phelps though something was running furiously in their veins were discovered in its not being blood but some sharper, inferior liquid.
But this was June 1933 and through the rest of the decade, ugly political reality kept breaking into the glaring brightness. When Adam von Trott (later executed as one of the July 1944 Rastenburg bomb plotters) defended the Third Reich against charges of persecuting the Jews, Isaiah was at first incredulous and then indignant. On one of his summer pilgrimages to Salzburg he ran into his first authentic Nazi: ‘a great corpulent creature in the official brown uniform, with a red & black Swastika on his sleeve, & wearing a small black demi-astrakhan hat with silver symbols embroidered thereon: he was very drunk, rolled into my café, and was led out by 3 waiters’. Yet there is still a disconcerting lightness to his tone when he writes of such things. (Von Trott is given a mild reproof; the brownshirt treated as an amusing curiosity.)
But the acutely observant Berlin is nonetheless beginning to sharpen his focus, both about those at whom he looked as well as himself. In Palestine he described the kibbutzniks to Felix and Marion Frankfurter as ‘the old 1848 idealist type of person who somehow do work the land by day & read poetry by night without making it seem impossibly arty and affected. I like them better than I’ve ever liked any body of men, tho I couldn’t live among them, they are too noble, simple and oppressively good.’ Much of the surliness of British officials (neither malevolent nor benevolent) towards the Jews, Berlin diagnosed as stemming from a resentment of their usual imperial role of Kulturträger to the natives having been usurped by dentists from Cracow, demoting the pukka pashas to the status of glorified traffic cops. Hence the romantic eagerness of the British to adopt the role of protector of the noble Arabs against the pushily disruptive Jews and their Mitteleuropa culture of coffee, cake and Kinder.
The Frankfurters, whom Berlin met in Oxford, were among the correspondents who provoked him to take the letters to an altogether different plane than that of mercurially entertaining tongue-wagger. For the young Stephen Spender, Berlin became an acute and ruthlessly honest literary critic (not least of Spender’s own work), nailing Aldous Huxley’s disingenuousness at contriving sinister moments:
we are used to war horrors, consequently he produces a scene in which the mangled remains of a terrier plop down from an aeroplane on two lovers naked on a roof & spatter them with blood. Quiet horror is a speciality of the French in the last century but whereas Baudelaire and Huysmans do so for purely artistic reasons & standing aloof from it present it without comment, Huxley, a puritan moralist makes a sort of propaganda of it & merely lowers & sordidifies [sic] the scene. One is touched or nauseated or pierced in some way but not moved or at all profoundly affected or made capable of seeing something or understanding anything save abstract general propositions.
No one brought out the best in Berlin’s letter-writing as consistently as the Anglo-Irish novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, whom Isaiah first met when, on one of his trips to Ireland with his Anglo-Irish Oxford girlfriends, he was taken to her house in County Cork. Much later, Isaiah would himself contribute to the deflation of Bowen’s reputation by claiming that he had always found her novels unreadable: a doubly unbelievable disclaimer, since at the time he waxed feverishly enthusiastic about The House in Paris and Death of the Heart (‘your novel robs me of sleep at nights; it is colossally absorbing’) and with good reason for they are two of the strongest books Bowen ever wrote, glittering with precisely the kind of gritty physical characterisation and unflinching psychological insight that Berlin admired.
So when he wrote to Elizabeth Bowen, he raised his own writing to Bowenite heights, often producing literary scene-painting that resembled some of the more confessionally autobiographical moments from Tolstoy or Svevo. Extracting himself at the Paris zoo ‘opposite the Python’ from the pathetically attached Rachel ‘Tips’ Walker, a former pupil, whom Isaiah had very definitely Led On, he wrote to Bowen with self-dramatising candour:
We went on aiming at each other, missing mostly, with desperate gravity. Dear me. I can’t possibly marry her. She thinks I can. We should be miserable at once. The last scene in which I forced myself to be sensible & pedestrian & analyse the situation calmly & declare that I must stop was awful beyond words. I always found I had to begin afresh & talked almost of the weather, to begin with. Then a silence. Then I would get up & make as if to go. We both felt that something had to be said. We gulped and floundered & I felt unscrupulous & a cad. The climax was reached when she inquired how far my recent declarations resembled my final end with Sigle Lynd? It was past all bearing.
The women Berlin most admired were the opposite of poor ‘Tips’ (who ended in a mental hospital): strong-minded; unabashed; verbally quick on the draw, like ‘B. J’ Lynd; Bowen (whom, Isaiah believed, could hold her own with doubtful types in London and Dublin pubs), Virginia Woolf, who intimidated him with what he thought was the most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life; and Gertrude Stein, who took the smirk right off the face of Oxford undergraduates by telling ‘them what was wrong with their lives, asked them what schools they were at, embarrassed them, trampled on them and winked a great deal at Alice B. Toklas’. Bowen’s Court improbably became a kind of home from home for the Russian-Jewish Oxford philosophy don, who got into his wellies and even onto a horse to trot along the ‘violent green’ lanes. It was there in the summer of 1938, while Neville Chamberlain was shuttling back and forth to Berchtesgaden, that Berlin finally completed his short book on Marx, commissioned five years earlier by H. A. L. Fisher for the Home University Library. In the intervening years the work had become an ordeal since Berlin was simultaneously mesmerised and repelled by Marx himself: aghast at recognising traits of single-minded fer
ocity combined with thin-skinned sensitivity that he acknowledged in himself; deeply alienated by Marx’s determinism at the same time as he was in awe of the adamantine coherence of the philosophical edifice he had constructed. For summers on end he procrastinated his way around Europe: the south of France; Dublin; Venice (‘so delightful and silly to go in a gondola through a fairly squalid canal & realise this is like a v. second rate novel & then suddenly hear Chopin played from the window of a not very beautiful palazzo & realize that one is part of a sentimental and ridiculous film set’), conspicuously not polishing off the manuscript. But while evading the hairy, chilling presence of Marx somewhere over his shoulder, Berlin fired off volleys, usually to Elizabeth Bowen, of dead-on observations about almost everything else – the problem of defining a highbrow when only highbrows did; Stuart Hampshire’s affair with Freddie Ayer’s wife Renée; his thrilling discovery of Herzen (who functioned as a kind of anti-Marx for Berlin through the Russian’s ironic ‘gentlemanliness’ and ‘unsqualid disillusionment’); the ultimately alienating quality of Henry James’s characters, ‘all jittering because their private world may be taken away from them (the ultimate tragedy is when it is)’; James’s unwitting reinforcement of the stereotype that ‘we – the intellectuals, the sensitives, the observers, the persons who discuss – are all cripples; able to peer from all sorts of unusual angles . . . but thereby we deprive ourselves of the right of life which James vaguely accords to the rare normal figures who occur at the edge of his world . . . Everything he [James] says is true, piecemeal, so to speak but false in the aggregate.’
The odd thing is that Berlin was, finally, buckling down to his Marx book while so many of his friends were, perforce, choosing sides; Stephen Spender joining the Lynds in the British Communist party; others taking the Spanish Civil War as a litmus test of allegiance. But Berlin thought and wrote about Marx as if he was encountering him in the middle of the nineteenth century. This had the intellectual virtue of not anachronistically projecting back on to Marx everything that had been done in his name, but it gave the book – which appeared after the war had begun – an inevitable air of over-detachment from the monstrous historical drama that was being played out in Europe.