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Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960
Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (Chatto & Windus, £35)
Will Isaiah Berlin’s reputation survive the publication of these letters? This may seem an extraordinary question. Berlin is widely considered one of the leading liberal thinkers of the mid-20th century. This second volume of his letters covers his greatest years: the post-war period when he wrote the essays on political philosophy, on Russian 19th century thought and literature and on the history of ideas which were to prove the basis of his reputation. It offers a front-row seat to one of the most acclaimed intellectuals of his generation developing the ideas which made him famous.
Yet the book is often troubling and exasperating in turn. Writing immediately after the war, Berlin had little to say about the recent experience of Nazism and Stalinism, and he was curiously uninterested in those who did. In a book of almost 900 pages there is one reference by Berlin to the death of Stalin. On most of the important political issues of the time he sat on the fence and too often he was more interested in Oxford gossip. There are pages and pages about what John Sparrow thought about Maurice Bowra’s knighthood and whether AL Rowse should be Warden of All Souls College. Worse still, Berlin is revealed as unctuous to the great and the good but malicious to friends behind their backs. And even his intellectual reputation will take a hit. The gaps in his reading and interests are surprising, even in his chosen area of political thought and the history of ideas.
The early years of this period were for Berlin, years of choice. England or abroad? Oxford or the outside world? Philosophy or the history of ideas? Berlin is often thought of as very English, at home in its elite institutions, from St Paul’s School and Oxford to the Garrick and the British Academy. Michael Ignatieff’s biography begins in Berlin’s apartment in Albany, off Piccadilly; the best essay written about Berlin, by Joseph Brodsky, is called “Tea at the Athenaeum.” And yet, after the war, Berlin was clearly tempted by offers to teach in America and to work for the new state of Israel. In 1947 he was offered a job at Harvard, “at something like 4 times my Oxford salary & with about 1/10 of the work.” He had had an exhilarating time in Washington during the war, making lifetime friends among the New Deal east coast establishment, and many of these letters are to these friends.
The new state of Israel raised the same issue more starkly. Berlin was a lifelong Zionist. A leading Jewish intellectual, with experience of the real world from his wartime years at the British embassy in Washington, Berlin was offered attractive jobs in Israel. He later told his biographer, “I knew then that it was absurd… I thought I would be torn to pieces….” He could not admit this to Weizmann or Ben-Gurion and was consistently evasive.
Berlin remained in Oxford. But it is during these years, after the war, that he made his break with academic philosophy and moved to the history of ideas: The Enlightenment, Romanticism and 19th century Russian literature and thought. In 1950 he announced “a considerable shift of interest in the field of my studies.” It was a brave move, perhaps the bravest move he ever made. Belinsky, Vico and Herder were hardly central figures in the canon. Yet, amazingly, it paid off. Berlin not only found his voice as an intellectual. He also found an audience, both as a broadcaster on the new Third Programme and, on both sides of the Atlantic, as an essayist.
During these years Berlin was frequently asked for his opinion or advice on political matters. Ben-Gurion asked his advice on how to reconcile secular and religious values in the new state of Israel. Victor Gollancz asked him to sign a petition attacking capital punishment. His east coast liberal friends assumed he would agree with them over Alger Hiss and McCarthyism. What is striking in these letters, however, is how often he fudged. He either couldn’t commit to one side or he told different things to conflicting parties.
The most shocking instance came in 1956, with Suez. Berlin wrote to his old friend Clarissa Churchill, now married to the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. “[The prime minister's] action seems to me very brave very patriotic and – I shd have thought – absolutely just.” Eden, he goes on, “has behaved with great moral splendour.” Yet, a week later, he writes to his stepson, “That the British Government has committed a blunder cannot seriously be doubted.” And he adds, “To do what he [Eden] did behind America’s back, behind the Empire’s back, was childish folly.” Berlin was considered one of Britain’s leading political thinkers. He wasn’t just an academic: his wartime reports from Washington were read at the highest level. Eden might reasonably have valued Berlin’s advice. But Berlin simply wanted to please.
These letters frequently reveal Berlin as both unctuous and feline. He was concerned about his “excessive anxiety to please” but it was something he couldn’t control. He wrote to Leonard Woolf that Virginia was “the most beautiful and the most divinely endowed human being I had ever met in my life….” To TS Eliot, “your erudition, as well as your wisdom, are far profounder than mine will ever be.” To Mrs de Rothschild about her late husband, “I adored absolutely everything about him…” To Bernard Berenson, “[I] went away, my head in a great whirl with all the ideas, images, glimpses of persons & relationships, forms of life which if you will allow me to say so, you scatter with so prodigal & unreckoning a hand.”
But there was a nastier side too. Louis MacNeice, back in the 1930s, had written a poem in which he distributed gifts among his Oxford friends, including—for Isaiah—”a dish of milk.” Twenty years on, Berlin’s feline malice was undiminished. He wrote to Violet Bonham Carter, “I am truly devoted to you… I really love you very much.” Two days later, he described her to another friend as “a queer inhuman distinguished clever cerebral monster.” Felix Frankfurter was one of his oldest friends and he wrote to congratulate him on how he had written with “great vividness” and “read with the greatest possible pleasure your account of that splendid evening….” Behind his back, however, he wrote, “the vulgarity of the whole thing is exceedingly depressing. [...] the book has given me nothing but acute embarrassment….”
Sometimes this was more than just gossip. This book contains Berlin’s famous exchange with TS Eliot in 1952 about the poet’s alleged anti-semitism. This is one of the central moments in the book. Berlin had just written his articles on “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation” in The Jewish Chronicle and had questioned Eliot’s attitude towards Jews. Eliot wrote to complain. The context is crucial. Berlin was one of Britain’s best-known Jewish intellectuals. Eliot’s anti-Semitism was a serious issue and in both his letters during this exchange, he makes some astonishing remarks (”From a Christian point of view the Jewish faith is finished,” “Theoretically, the only proper consummation is that all Jews should become Catholic Christians. The trouble is, that this ought to have happened long ago…”). Berlin could have taken Eliot on. But he avoided confrontation. The implication is that he did so because Eliot was one of the great and the good. Unfortunately, this is part of a larger pattern of dubious references to Jews by Berlin himself. On a sea journey to Israel, for instance: “All round us a roaring ghetto… All round us a tremendous Sholom Aleikhem world is going on….” Amidst the many disparaging remarks made to his fellow-intellectuals, it is usually the Jews who come off worst.
In these letters, Berlin often worries about his cowardice. But he doesn’t worry very much. And his snobbery doesn’t seem to bother him at all. Altogether, for someone who is so self-preoccupied (”I must stop talking about myself”), he is not terribly introspective. He is full of self-doubt, terribly anxious about giving lectures and writing, found it almost impossible to write books, but doesn’t ask himself why. For someone so curious about others, he is not very curious about his own motivations.
This is part of a larger pattern of absences and silences. He wasn’t just uninterested in his own psychology, he wasn’t very interested in psychology tout court. He met Freud, but didn’t have much time for him—and there is only one reference to Jung (”a charlatan & a Nazi”). Berlin wasn’t interested in sociology or the social sciences either. There is one reference to Max Weber and none to Durkheim, Mannheim or The Frankfurt School. There are a few passing references to Arendt (whom he loathed), Raymond Aron, Hayek and Heidegger, but not enough to suggest any real engagement. For such a passionate anti-Communist it is curious that he never refers to contemporary classics like Milosz’s The Captive Mind or Darkness at Noon. By contrast, there are almost 100 references to the classical scholar and Warden of Wadham College Maurice Bowra, and almost 50 to the barrister and Warden of All Souls, John Sparrow.
Contemporary writers don’t register much either. There is much about his beloved Russians, especially Pasternak and Akhmatova, but nothing about Beckett, Miller or Bellow, Golding or Greene or Camus. His passion for music and opera stopped in the 19th century, apart from a magnificent description of Shostakovich and his admiration for Stravinsky.
More puzzling are the great political thinkers who are missing or just pass by. These are the years when Berlin was producing his most famous essays on liberty and freedom, and yet there is nothing to speak of on Locke or Adam Smith, Bentham or Hobbes. Nor does he write much about the state of political thought in general. Just a few passing references.
For the first 150 pages, in fact, you might wonder whether the author of these letters was much of a thinker at all. There is an awful lot of gossip and tittle-tattle about Oxford dons and society hostesses. Not much reflection on the terrible war that had just taken place, no substantial attempt to make sense of Nazism, Communism or Totalitarianism. Berlin’s relatives in Riga were murdered, he still had family in Stalin’s Moscow—and yet there is little attempt to engage with the dark times of the mid-20th century, or with those writers like Orwell and Milosz who were trying to do so.
And then, around 1949-50, something happens. The gears shift and he starts producing a series of letters about theories of history, liberty, Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov. Some of the letters are written to famous contemporaries : George Kennan, Edmund Wilson, and later, on freedom, to Spender and Karl Popper and on historical causality, to EH Carr. It is exhilarating to read—and tells us something interesting about Berlin. He has no interest in covering issues systematically. It is all about the sudden insight. Letters dawdle along and then suddenly erupt from nowhere: we’re off on a fascinating riff about the new religious writing in the 1950s or why computers will be more important than atomic energy, on Hegel and political philosophy or on ends and choices.
Perhaps that is why the questions of canons and traditions didn’t bother him much. So what if Belinsky or Vico weren’t considered major thinkers? He found them fascinating. Perhaps he should have been more interested in Hobbes and Locke but he liked quirky and eccentric thinkers and writers regardless of where they came from or how important everyone else said they were.
And then there are the extraordinary vignettes. He doesn’t have anything very interesting to say about Raymond Aron as a thinker, but then he describes meeting him: “a most intelligent, sad, shrewd, sympathetic realistic disillusioned Jew: 100% Jew+ 100% French, detached as only a Jew can be, & with a hard, subtle, quiet intellect, the most impressive political observer … I’ve ever met.” In the same letter he adds a PS: “I met Einstein: a genius, but surely a foolish one, with the inhumanity of a child.” In 1958 he meets Shostakovich: “small, shy, like a chemist from Canada (Western States), terribly nervous, with a twitch playing in his face almost perpetually – I have never seen anyone so frightened and crushed in all my life…”
In 1956 Berlin met Stalin’s notorious henchman Kaganovich and they discussed philosophy. If you only had one passage to sum up the thuggery of Stalinism, this is as good as it gets, and is worth quoting at length:
[Kaganovich] said to me, “What are you?”
I said, “I teach philosophy.”
“Idealist or materialist?”
I said, “These distinctions become rather blurred in the West.”
“Now, now! … Don’t run away!” – this kind of thing. “Materialist or Idealist?”
I said, “Well…”
He interrupted me and he said, “What do they read in your University? Kant?”
“Yes.”
“Idealist.”
“Gegel?”
I said, “Not much.”
“Idealist. What else?”
I said, “Hume.”
“He was not a philosopher, he was a historian. What else?”
God knows what I said. “Mill.”
“Stuart Mill? He was not a philosopher, he was an economist. I know what you are, you’re a creeping empiricist…”
Put it next to the Shostakovich description and you have the essence of what Berlin felt about Soviet Communism.
Finally, there is the humour. Berlin was a famous raconteur and a very funny writer. He describes an academic conference: “rather like talking to early Victorian Utopians who believe that everything can be cured by beetroot or that the number 3,742 is what we must all cling to forever.” Writing to Bowra, Berlin describes the new president of Harvard: “He looks like a touched up photograph of an idealised Rhodes Scholar, kept in cellophane in an icebox.”
But the final image must be Berlin himself. “As for me,” he writes in January 1951, “here I sit with half my books in New College and half in All Souls, trying to write about the sources of Tolstoy’s queer theory of history and French reactionary philosophers, and reviews of books about Russia, and to brace myself to begin a serious book.” He never wrote it and never wondered why he didn’t. These letters suggest that gossip, chat and self-doubt got in the way. But thanks to his editor, Henry Hardy, we have the essays that Berlin did write, and thanks to Hardy, Jennifer Holmes and their dedicated team, we now have the letters, warts and all.
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