Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Ayer and Hampshire went off to war. Berlin, who had always been an unequivocal and impassioned anti-appeaser, was rejected as physically unfit for military service and chafed at the unreality of donning endlessly on (more Kant, more Locke) as one country after another fell to the Blitzkrieg. He soothed his frustration somewhat by recording, Waugh-like, witty reports from the ivory battlements. ‘Maurice (Bowra), if in a lower-keyed register, is still making the same jokes as before . . . He is in charge, I believe, of some 160 postal workers. So our mails are safe at any rate. David Cecil still runs in and out with a voice like a crate of hens carried across a field.’ Striking in the letters of this time is the total absence of any sort of apprehensiveness, much less panic, as Britain was finally left alone to face the apparently invincible Third Reich. To American friends like the Frankfurters he insisted that England was absolutely not done for, and let those like Auden (who had scuttled away while pretending some act of cultural diplomacy) have it:

  Personal survival is no doubt a legitimate end; one fights while one can & then one either dies or escapes. I am not a soldier & can’t be one and am in certain respects highly exposed, if only because I am a Jew & have written on Marx: I shd do my best not to be caught: if I could induce some institution in the US to invite me I would. But cold blooded flight is monstrous. And indifference to a conflict on the outcome of which all art and thought depend, repulsive and stupid . . . I perceive that I am being violent and unusually public minded. That is perhaps a genuine change. The private world has cracked in numerous places. I should terribly like to help in the great historical process in some way.

  The way, however, proved elusive. Berlin, usually nobody’s fool, was comprehensively suckered by one of British history’s flashier wicked jesters, the amoral, bibulously charismatic Guy Burgess, already in the stable of Soviet intelligence (along with Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean, whom Berlin also knew without any suspicion that they were communists, much less agents). Eager to get to Moscow himself, Burgess concocted a scheme by which he and Berlin would go together, the latter as a Russian-fluent press attaché-cum-local-expert who might report back to the Foreign Office in London, perhaps on the prospects of detaching the Soviet Union from the non-aggression pact. For Berlin, this seemed just the ticket, and talks with other acquaintances in the Foreign Office in London were encouraging enough for him, paradoxically, to book a passage west to Washington from where, it was said, the trip to Russia would be arranged. In the event, someone smelled something not quite right (Burgess’s notorious intimacy, not with the NKVD, but with the whisky bottle perhaps) and Berlin’s own credentials were compromised along with his dodgy friend. Instructions came from London. Do not, repeat, not send B and B.

  The ignominious collapse of his Russian mission left Berlin stranded, first in Washington, then in New York, and much chastened in temper – both by the starkness of the world crisis in 1940 and 1941, envisioning the flames of the Blitz at home, and feeling guiltily fretful about his distance from it. His sparkly correspondents dim and disappear into the night of the war; no more letters to Stephen Spender or Elizabeth Bowen. Overwhelmingly, the letters that survive throughout Berlin’s war years in the United States are to his parents and, after the habitual reassurances of his continuing to flourish, assume a graver, more straightforward tone. They also, quite often, tell pardonable whoppers (as children will do) about his true state of mind, which was deeply homesick for England and often sharply alienated from the America in which he found himself. It was not only his parents whom he benignly misled. To Marion Frankfurter, in August 1940, Berlin drew a contrast between Anglo-French over-sophistication and American directness wholly flattering to the latter. ‘I am myself a little disturbed by this terrific [American] clarity and emphasis,’ he conceded, ‘where nothing is taken for granted, everything is stated in so many unambiguous terms, no secret seasoning is tasteable . . . But it is superior to the nuances and evasions of England and France. Aesthetically inferior but morally superior. It destroys art but conduces to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ To one of his old Oxford pals, Shiela Grant Duff, however, he wrote more candidly that ‘I cling to the English desperately. I passionately long to come home. England is infinitely preferable to the best discoverable here.’ More poetically telling, Berlin often compared himself to a melancholy holdover from the eighteenth century, confronted with the raw factual world of the nineteenth, unable to withhold his admiration for its iron grip on the future, yet at the same time deeply repelled by a version of mankind which somehow had edited out precisely the weaknesses and contradictions that were, for him (as for Turgenev and Herzen), the essence of being human.

  Which is to say, of course, the essence of being Isaiah. For both the views expressed to Marion Frankfurter as well as those to Shiela Grant Duff were authentic Berlin. The inability to reconcile these two halves of his cultural personality, or to have one prevail over the other, and, finally, his hostility to any reason why one or the other should triumph, marks not only Berlin’s liberation from his long captivity, toiling in the dense and gloomy woods of the Marxist dialectic, but also an early inkling of what would become the hallmark of his own prudentially pessimistic pluralism. The fact that Berlin would go on to articulate a prescriptive philosophical ethic born of his own autobiography does not, of course, necessarily weaken its claim to truth; just the contrary, as the obstinately Romantic half of him would doubtless insist.

  This did not mean, though, that the ‘daily living’ of these contradictions was, for Berlin, especially easy. A brief period of leave in England in 1940 (‘the happiest months of my life’) only made the distance between British and American values seem more oceanic than ever. Returned to New York, to the job with the British Information Service, Berlin acknowledged that since ‘I wish to help with the war’ he had no choice but to apply himself to the job at hand – of enlisting American Jews to use their influence in assisting FDR’s undeclared war – he nonetheless declared himself to Maire Gaster as ‘nearer to dissolution in my life than ever before’.

  More than anyone else it was Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organisation (and Manchester University chemist), who arguably saved Isaiah from a more serious crack-up and who exemplified, to a degree that Berlin came to find heroic, the historical necessity of suppressing the pangs of Weltschmerz and Just Getting On With It. On first meeting Weizmann in England, Berlin was curiously unimpressed. Perhaps the Zionist was too much the unreconstructed Russian Jew, relatively (compared to Isaiah himself) unvarnished with the patina of Oxford Common Room cleverness, for Berlin to warm to him right away. However, witnessing Weizmann’s inexhaustible determination to make the aims of the Allied war effort congruent with the establishment of a Jewish national homeland; his relentless campaigning and the infallible passion and eloquence he brought to it; the shrewdness of his pragmatism sustained without compromising the nobility of his ideals, Berlin inevitably became lost in admiration. Here was, he thought, an indisputably great man, someone out of the nineteenth century, with the looks of a ‘very distinguished, rather tragic camel’, but the charisma of a Mazzini or a Garibaldi. Most of all Berlin saw in Weizmann – whose cautionary gradualism was born of an intense devotion to Britain, which in no way diluted his commitment to Jewish self-determination – the perfect exemplar of the man of felicitously mixed feelings. Well before the war was over – and those mixed feelings became precisely the reason why Weizmann would become marginalised by more militant nationalists like David Ben-Gurion – Berlin was defending him against their impatience. Anti-British policies that seemed to have the virtue of urgency, Berlin thought, would, in the end, turn out to be more damaging than beneficial to the long-term interests of Jewish Palestine.

  Pearl Harbor made the work of championing the cause of British survival to American-Jewish opinion redundant. Berlin was moved to the embassy in Washington with the reverse commission of explaining American policy and politics in weekly reports sent to
the Foreign Office (and sometimes, as it transpired, to Churchill). His style – and reputation for brilliant candour – was set in July 1942 in a justifiably famous early report, listing in twenty-three paragraphs just what it was about the British which, notwithstanding the hero-worship of Churchill and the near-universal admiration for their behaviour during the Blitz, made his countrymen so unappealing in some quarters of American opinion. Berlin’s talent for cultural summary, deployed for the good of the alliance, was on brilliant display here, especially penetrating when it cut to the quick of English cultural snobbery. Contradictions being, of course, at the heart of every stereotype, Americans managed to dislike Britain for being both trapped in a rigid class structure and for ‘going red’; for being both too ‘adroit for simple, honest Americans’ at the same time that they were rigid in their defence of obsolete empire. The British were both nervously reserved about ‘treading on American corns’ and yet too free with ‘over-civilised English accents’, aggravating the American suspicion of being patronised by a country that supposed itself culturally superior.

  And so on. Just what policy-makers were supposed to do with these insights, of course, was another matter. Nonetheless, the incisiveness of Berlin’s weekly reports became legendary in London and the reason for the famous conversation at lunch at Downing Street, in which Churchill quizzed the understandably startled Irving Berlin on his views about American politics and the state of the world in general. Disabused of the mistake, Churchill dined out on the story and Isaiah himself thought it wonderful, the wonderfulness decreasing every time the British Ambassador, Halifax, repeated it, sometimes forcing Berlin to tell the tale himself.

  In Washington Berlin settled into a routine, much of which was using dinner parties as a listening post, the gleanings from which would be converted into his reports. Provided he actually got to the dinners (a hilarious letter of apology to a Brazilian diplomat chronicles an evening of unparalleled haplessness at failing to find her address), Berlin revelled in his lionising as the wittiest, smartest fellow in town. No wonder, for only Isaiah Berlin could dispel exaggerated fears that Harold Laski was the éminence rouge at the heart of a sinister socialist Jesuitry by telling Americans that Laski was merely ‘a harmless megalomaniac’.

  As the war wound to its end, Berlin’s reputation for analytical acuity made him in demand for a post-war job in government. Arnold Toynbee, whose historical outlook (not to mention his anti-Zionism) was the polar opposite of Berlin’s, offered him a place in the Foreign Office Research Department: a prospect which he rejected right away as an existence toiling in ‘the sunless cave of inhibited professors’. Towards the end of 1945 he finally got his wish to go to Russia, where, in Leningrad, he had the encounter with Anna Akhmatova, sexless (for she was no longer the startling, bird-like beauty of earlier years) but nonetheless love-struck, a meeting which changed both their lives and to mark which Akhmatova inscribed a poem for Isaiah.

  The letters from Russia, though, are the only major disappointment in the book: entertaining on the antics of Randolph Churchill, but strangely silent on almost everything that mattered. On the social and material ruin of Leningrad after the siege, there is little; of the enormity of Soviet tyranny, then playing out the spasms of its most insane cruelties, nothing at all. Akhmatova herself appears more an item of cultural tourism than the heart-stopping epiphany their meeting actually was.

  But then Isaiah Berlin’s future had been set, and it was not going to be in America or Russia (though he was now uniquely placed to write something of global significance about the fate of British culture between the two colossi). It was in that bomber, going back to England in 1944, forbidden to sleep ‘because there was some danger of falling on the oxygen pipe and so suffocating’, that he found his true vocation. ‘There was no light and therefore one couldn’t read,’ he later told Henry Hardy, in one of the interposed spoken commentaries which wind beautifully through the book like a twist of silk, ‘one was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing – to having to think, and I had to think for seven or eight hours . . . from Canada to England.’

  What Berlin thought, above all, was that ‘I really wanted to know more at the end of my life than at the beginning’ and that pure philosophy ‘which taxed the intelligence of man to the highest degree’ was not somehow for him. ‘I didn’t want the answers to these philosophical questions with that degree of urgency with which a true philosopher must want them.’ Instead he had discovered that he wanted to reconstruct how social and political ideas became generated in a particular place and time and then how they operated in the flesh-and-blood world of history.

  And he also knew, with the decisiveness that his immersion in history had brought, that the last places such illumination would be yielded were in official research departments, where humane intelligence toiled for the powerful. He would, then, go back to Oxford.

  And there Isaiah Berlin stayed for the rest of his life, unrepentant of the decision, dismissive of the view that in so doing (to the chagrin of Weizmann among others) he had somehow turned his back on real political engagement. For Berlin, the academy would never be a site of mere cultural gaming. It was, rather, the place where liberty – defined as freedom from any sort of coercion – could be lived; and where the challenge of choosing between life’s contradictory impulses could be faced with clear-eyed courage.

  J. H. Plumb

  Foreword to The Death of the Past, 2003

  The past may or may not have been dead when J. H. Plumb pronounced its obsequies, but to those of us who were taught by him in Cambridge in the 1960s, the author was unforgettably, alarmingly, alive. Whatever stereotypes those of us arriving at Christ’s College in 1963 might have had about history dons, a first encounter with Jack Plumb in his rooms – a small man with a perfectly round, bald head, seated in a big armchair, nattily dressed in a three-piece, crisply tailored suit, a high-coloured Jermyn Street striped shirt and bow tie – swiftly saw off the cliché of tweeds and amontillado. Display cases poured brilliant light on to Sèvres porcelain in kingfisher blue and rose pink. The walls were filled with Dutch still-life and genre paintings: a young man with a weak chin and get-me whiskers; a mournful bar-girl with too much sallow cleavage; an arrangement for hock and lemons. Not a bottle of sherry to be seen, but decanters of Château Figeac, often. When Plumb spoke, and especially when he chuckled, as he often did, the effect of Voltaire in the Fens was complete. But there was, however, a serious price to be paid for all this epicurean dazzlement bestowed on clever but slightly stunned youth: intellectual survival under intense and unsparing fire.

  Plumb was famously, tigerishly, combative; though also affable and witty, his conversation punctuated by bursts of laughter at the follies of humanity past and present, of which academia itself, he made clear, offered the richest trove. His temper was naturally quizzical, sardonic, gleeful. But it was impossible, amidst the gales of irony that swept through the room on the subject of some hapless figure, not to be nervous that one might be next for the Treatment. The slightly exophthalmic eyes, glittering from behind his spectacles, would fix steadily and expectantly on whomever a Plumb question, joke or challenge alighted. Abashed thoughtfulness was not a possible response, nor was any sort of laboured earnestness. Anyone suspected of Being Serious About Religion was subjected to a philosophical barrage of teasing which could sometimes turn punishingly picador. Most of the wounding, though, happened in the intense hour or so of history supervisions in those rooms, when we read our essays, our hearts sinking to our boots should Jack begin to fidget ominously in the yellow-upholstered armchair. When it went well, the praise was fulsome and went straight to our giddy heads like champagne. But for some, it seldom did go well. Come six in the evening, the remains of large undergraduates (for this was then a rugby college) could be seen collapsed in trembling exhaustion in the College Buttery after an unhappy hour with Plumb, dosing themselves with healing pints of Watneys, repenting solecisms uttered on the Merovingians (for Plumb
loved teaching outside his speciality) and swearing never to go through it again.

  But of course we invariably did. There was, for a start, always the prospect of the occasional magical supervision, when he would spend half an hour analysing the form, as well as the content, of a paragraph or two; juggling, like the nimblest editor, with the rhetorical structure of the essay, suggesting how it could gain more punch and conviction were paragraph four to have been the opening, and so on. Towards the end, sometimes over those hard-earned glasses of claret, an encyclopaedic range of bibliographic suggestions would tumble out, many of them eccentrically original. A tentative essay on the cultural backwash of the discovery of the New World drew from him amazement that I had read neither Redcliffe Salaman’s History of the Potato, nor Geoffroy Atkinson’s Nouveaux Horizons de la Renaissance française, the latter a book which lived up to the winning peculiarity of its author’s name by tackling Montaigne and the Pléiade via a lengthy discussion of the implications of Indian nudity for the theology of the Catholic reform movement.

  Our own trials by fire culminated in the ritual of the Plumb after-dinner seminar. The seriousness of the event was marked by its being convened, not in the sitting room, but on the other side of the stairs of ‘O’ staircase, in Jack’s dining room. A Sheraton table, the polish high enough for us to see our fretful faces embarrassingly reflected, was laid with a tall Paul de Lamerie silver candelabrum. Silver bowls brimmed with fruit, including a strangely incongruous banana. Two decanters of claret rested on the sideboard which, once the speaker had finished his paper, would be brought to the table to do the rounds. For forty minutes or so either Roy Porter, Geoffrey Parker, Andrew Wheatcroft, John Barber or I would hammer and stammer through our stuff, each of us using whatever kind of rhetorical persuasiveness we could muster amidst the intimidating antiques. Roy’s speciality was jokes at which he’d be the first to chortle (and they were usually very funny). Geoffrey Parker fortified himself with armour of unassailable and esoteric scholarship. Schama, as usual, depended overmuch on adjectival overload and overwrought atmospherics to conceal the shakiness of his hypotheses. (Plus ça change.) In the candle-lit glow one always knew if things were going well. JHP’s not twanging an elastic band, for instance, was definitely a good sign, as was his not turning his chair sideways to commune with the smirking likeness of Sir Robert Walpole on the wall.