ISAIAH BERLIN

Translation of Ivan Turgenev,

First Love

1956 AND 1982 EDITIONS

AS A CHILD, my mother lived in one of the apartments of 54 Avenue d’Iéna, a handsome house close to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and Aline de Gunzburg lived in another. First as girls, then as adults, the two were the closest of friends. By the time I came up to Oxford in 1956, my mother had died, Aline had married Isaiah Berlin, and the two of them were as good as family to me. I was always welcome at their house in Headington, a typical English gentleman’s residence built in stone in a setting of lawns and old trees. A manservant, usually Portuguese, opened the front door. The ground floor rooms were spacious, and Aline’s classical good taste and beautiful possessions made the most of them.

To the right of the hall was a study for Isaiah, a room of organized untidiness in which he sat for hours dictating letters that kept selected friends up to date with his news and views, his anxieties and hopes, and since his death they have been edited and published in four hefty volumes. He was generally supposed to be working on a book, even a series of books, about the political and philosophical ideas that have made the world what it is. That huge and self-perpetuating correspondence exhausted his time and his energy, and excused the missing masterpiece.

Isaiah wore heavy old-fashioned suits, and out of doors an old hat of brown felt, giving him a conventional appearance. The expression on his face was one of amusement and curiosity. I couldn’t help thinking he looked like the hero of a cartoon by H. M. Bateman and something quizzical or funny in every sense of the word was about to happen to him. His rapid-fire conversation suggested that he couldn’t quite keep up with his thoughts. Fluent in Russian, Hebrew and German, he held his own in French and Italian.

Up to Headington came André Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Teddy Kollek, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, the great and the good visiting one of their number. I once asked him if he attributed greatness to anyone he’d met, and after a moment’s hesitation he came up with Virginia Woolf (who hadn’t reciprocated). Anyone with intellectual aspirations would certainly be familiar with his characterization of people as either Hedgehogs or Foxes, and they will also have understood from him that desirable ends are often incompatible. It used to puzzle me that he accepted social recognition such as knighthood, the role of first and foundational President of Wolfson College, the Order of Merit, and yet spoke lightly and even dismissively about these achievements. This might look like false modesty, but the real driving force, I think, was the timidity inherent in his Jewish identity. An inner spirit warned him that it was all too good to be true, that critics were disguised Cossacks and that clever Jews like him had to pay the price. Backing carefully into the dangerous limelight, he could hope to be all things to all men, and get away with it.

Hitler and the Holocaust were issues that he left to specialists. Several times I heard him say that, all things considered, Stalin was worse than Hitler. He might have been a Sovietologist as influential as Leonard Schapiro or Robert Conquest, but limited himself to anecdotes, for instance about his meeting in Leningrad with Anna Akhmatova or his trip out to Peredelkino to spend a day talking to Boris Pasternak about Doctor Zhivago. Zionism was the one and only firm commitment in his life, and every year around Christmas he and Aline would escape to Israel.

Even so, he kept to his standards as well as his compromises. When he found himself in a hotel lift with Menachem Begin, he refused to talk to a man who had resorted to terror in the cause of Zionism. In London, he lunched regularly with Eric Hobsbawm, who not only remained an apologist for Stalinist mass murder to the very end but held that the state of Israel ought to be liquidated. Isaiah also practiced the same double standards with Richard Wollheim, a professor of aesthetics who so dreaded being identified as Jewish that he denied there was any such thing as anti-Semitism and meanwhile refused to leave a long-distance flight that had landed at Tel Aviv for fear that his feet touch “imperialist” soil. I also heard him say quite often, perhaps out of unacknowledged competition, that Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was a bad book whose opening sentence contained two mistakes. Had he used his gifts and his experience to write a comparable post-mortem of contemporary ideology, he might have exercised the kind of definitive moral and political influence in British national life that Raymond Aron enjoyed in France.

All allowances made, it was entertaining and often a surprise to be in Isaiah’s company. Once when I was staying with the Berlins in their flat in Paris, the three of us went with Nicholas Nabokov, the musician and cousin of the novelist, to a cinema in the Champs-Élysées. The tough hero of the film was supposedly an Oxford don. The whole audience was then obliged to listen to Isaiah and Nicholas discussing at full blast which Oxford don could be the model for the lead in this film. The manager loomed up to ask for silence. The film’s theme music, the two of them went on to speculate, had been lifted from some other composition, and they started singing to identify the original, whereupon the manager threw us all out into the street.

“Liberty, efficiency and democracy, three beautiful but incompatible ideals. Discuss” was a question that candidates for an All Souls Fellowship one year were invited to answer. Jeremy Wolfenden, a contemporary of mine at Eton and Magdalen College, had written a paper consisting of a brief series of aphorisms, so brilliant that Isaiah was keeping it in his room. We read them. At least I knew before everyone else that Jeremy would have the Fellowship. On another occasion, I had lunch at Headington with Isaiah and Roy Jenkins, then the university’s Vice-Chancellor. They discussed who should become Provost of Worcester College, a position vacant at that moment. The name of the historian Hugh Thomas was in the air. Basing themselves on personal stories nothing to do with scholarship or proficiency, those two establishment fixers agreed that Hugh “really would not do.” On the other hand, when two friends of mine, William Miller and Paul Thompson, published an article in an undergraduate magazine about eavesdropping on Soviet radio traffic during their national service, I told Isaiah that they were to be tried at the Old Bailey for breaching the Official Secrets Act, and he immediately contributed ten pounds to their defense fund.

Isaiah sponsored me for a Harkness Fellowship and for entry into the Foreign Service, both times in vain. He argued against any involvement in the Hungarian revolution of 1956 or its aftermath, because the harm I might do to myself was greater than any possible reward. He also argued that I shouldn’t write Next Generation, a book about Israel, because I was a public schoolboy educated to think that Israel’s qualities are mistaken and its mistakes are intentional. One day in February 1974, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had just been expelled from the Soviet Union, I happened to be the guest of Aline and Isaiah in the royal box at Covent Garden, where he was a director. The Times had published an article by a professor with the thesis that this expulsion had nothing to do with Communism but was another episode in the historic debate in Russia between Westerners and Slavophiles. Isaiah had better qualifications than anyone to expose this pernicious nonsense but refused to do so because, he kept saying, the professor had his credentials, and I couldn’t get him past this evasion. A couple of years later, my book about Unity Mitford and other English fans of Hitler met with some residual pre-war fascism and anti-Semitism from Oswald Mosley and his supporters. A few telephone calls from Isaiah, and perhaps an article, would have been enough to stop the scandal. By chance, I was invited at the time once again to the royal box. Isaiah offered to lean out and make a speech to the opera-goers in the stalls below spelling out how badly I’d been treated. Such an exhibition of himself was inconceivable. This was his way of ducking out.

On a Saturday in June 1989, I opened the Times and discovered that Roger Scruton had written an article about Isaiah on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Publication of this piece was in itself quite enough to rattle Isaiah, but there was much more. Apart from one paragraph of incomprehensible speculation about Isaiah’s personality, Scruton’s line was clear, his tone regretful: thanks to the Cold War, Britain and its democratic values were under sustained assault and Isaiah had not taken his due place as champion honoris causa of right-thinking people. That Sunday, I dined with friends in London and one of them must have denounced me for saying that, alas, I did think that Isaiah lacked civil courage and therefore didn’t do justice to himself or his convictions. On the Monday, Isaiah telephoned to say that he had heard I agreed with Scruton, and could this be true? A long typewritten letter followed. In his words, the article was absolutely odious, deeply offensive, loathsome, making false accusations, reminiscent of the kind of accusation right-wing liberals in pre-1914 Russia had to put up with from the Black Hundreds, also Goebbels-like. My response was upsetting, he said, because he had known me for so long and held me in such affection. I felt obliged to point out to him that Goebbels would have stopped him writing and excluded him completely from public life, while Scruton wished him to write more and be more active in public life. One must carry on as before, he concluded in his letter to me, adding in ink, “so be it” – and so it was. He made sure that I knew I had done wrong. Noel Malcolm, later a fellow of All Souls and therefore a colleague of Isaiah’s, reviewed The War That Never Was, the book I wrote about the implosion of the Soviet Union. I happened to run into Isaiah at the time and he said, “If Noel Malcolm finds that you have written a good book, then you have written a good book. I shall not be reading it.”

One evening Isaiah was one of ten guests at a dinner given by Mary and Sir Nicholas Henderson, generally called Nico, a public figure after a career as British ambassador in Warsaw and Bonn, Paris and Washington. Another guest was Lady Falkender, who had been Harold Wilson’s private and political secretary in Downing Street throughout his time as Prime Minister. When Isaiah was put on her left at the table, he said to Nico, I can’t possibly sit next to Lady Falkender, you’ll have to change the placement. The room was small, we could not help overhearing him, and then we had to shuffle around the table, elbow to elbow. During the meal, Lady Falkender hardly spoke and then left as soon as she could. What was that about? asked Nico. It turned out that the Times had serialized Lady Falkender’s diary, and in one passage she described an interview with Radji Parviz, the Shah of Iran’s ambassador in London from 1976 to 1979. Entering his study, she had found him reading something Isaiah had written. According to her diary, Lady Falkender had reacted, perhaps broken the ice, by saying, Isn’t Berlin some sort of charlatan? You see, Isaiah concluded, there could be no question of sitting next to someone who thinks me a charlatan.

Surviving Isaiah by many years, Aline sold Headington and moved to London. From time to time, I called on her. She liked to recall old days in the Avenue d’Iéna, and how my mother had been like a sister to her. Aline had spent the war in New York, and gave me copies of evocative letters my mother had written to her from London in those years. She might mention Isaiah anecdotally, but in my hearing never referred to the way I had upset him.