Some years ago I lent a copy of Isaiah Berlin’s volume of essays on his contemporaries, Personal Impressions, to a friend and neighbour, the psychiatrist Bob Gosling. When I later asked him what his own personal impression was of the book and its author, he confessed: ‘I did get rather tired of all that praise.’ There is certainly a lot of praise in that collection, and it is no doubt partly a matter of taste how one responds to the kind of sustained enthusiasm for humanity in all its teeming multiplicity that was one of Berlin’s hallmarks. But Gosling’s response also misses a point. The prominence of praise was quite deliberate. Berlin much preferred celebration to denigration,1 on the whole, and his main purpose in the pieces that make up that volume is to see the point of each of the very various people he writes about – to ‘accentuate the positive’, as the song has it2 – and to convey it to the reader, which he duly does, often to spellbinding effect.
Editor’s Preface, The Book of Isaiah3
THIS IS THE THIRD EDITION of one of seven essay collections which appeared under my editorship in Isaiah Berlin’s lifetime. In these volumes I brought together, and prepared for (re)publication, most of his published essays (apart from those which had previously been made available in a collected form), as well as several unpublished pieces.1 Until then his many published writings had been scattered, often in obscure places; most were out of print; and only half a dozen essays had been collected and reissued.2 The new collections (which, as Berlin generously recognised, transformed his reputation), together with seven posthumous volumes,3 in a number of which I published further previously unpublished work, made his oeuvre much more accessible than it had been before.
The essays in the present volume are tributes to or memoirs of twentieth-century figures whom, with the exception of Roosevelt and Einstein, the author knew personally; four autobiographical pieces not focused on specific individuals other than Berlin himself; and a chapter, specially written for the first edition, on the author’s meetings in 1945–6 and 1956 with Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and other Russian writers in Moscow and Leningrad, where he was working in 1945–6 for the British Embassy (in 1956 he was a visitor; he also touches on Akhmatova’s visit to Oxford in 1965).
Four pieces written after the first edition appeared were added (with Berlin’s approval) to the main text of the posthumously published second edition, together with the epilogue, ‘The Three Strands in my Life’, which was included at the last minute, in response to Berlin’s death. In a postscript to my preface I wrote:
Isaiah Berlin died on 5 November 1997. The book had by then been passed for press, but not actually printed. No changes have been made to the body of the book, but the opportunity has been taken to add, as an epilogue, a slightly shortened version of the address Berlin gave in Jerusalem in May 1979 when he received the Jerusalem Prize for his contribution to the idea of freedom. This moving and perceptive piece […] has always seemed to me, and to others whom I have consulted, to belong in the book, since it is in effect an autobiographical personal impression. I suggested to Berlin more than once that it should be reprinted in this natural context, but he always gave the characteristic reply that it seemed to him too personal, perhaps too self-regarding, to reappear in a collection in his lifetime; thereafter, however, I should do what I thought best. To my bitter regret, I am now free to add this finishing touch to the volume.
In this third edition I have added ten further pieces, also all written after the publication of the first edition. These too all seemed to me to earn their place in the book, which therefore now contains all the pieces in the relevant genre that I believe to be most worth collecting in this more permanent form. Also new to this edition is Hermione Lee’s foreword, in deference to which Noel Annan’s introduction to the first edition has been placed last as an afterword. And in addition to illustrations of the new subjects (and their friends), several illustrations have been added to ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’.
I should add that the latter essay has, since its first publication, achieved classic status, and has attracted much commentary. I cannot attempt to summarise this here: instead I should like to quote from a letter written to Berlin by Joseph Brodsky (in English) on 26 March 1980, after he had read a draft of the piece sent to him by Berlin:
Your memoir simply made me weep. […] If it made crying me, a well-tempered Russian Jew, I can imagine the way it will do in the American + English public. It’s like Romeo and Juliet played by a royal family. […] the whole piece is just heart breaking. It has to do, I suppose, with the incongruity of this grave subject-matter with the dignity of your narrative. It’s as though Emperor Valenti[ni]an himself was compiling a report on the way it feels to be flayed. […] I think She would be pleased with the way it’s done.1
Not included here are several other pieces in the same genre, mostly shorter than or overlapping with the pieces in this volume. Their principal subjects are Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, Stuart Hampshire, Jacob Herzog, Teddy Kollek, Yishayahu Leibowitz, Arthur Lehning, Yehudi Menuhin, John Plamenatz, Jacob Talmon and John Wheeler-Bennett; full details of these and a number of other shorter items can be found at ‹http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/index.html›.2
Instead of the roughly thematic running order of the previous editions, I have here printed the essays in chronological order of first publication, except that ‘Meetings with Russian Writers’ remains in pride of place at the end of the main text, and ‘The Three Strands in My Life’ continues to serve as an epilogue.
Original publication details are as follows (items marked * were added in the second edition, those marked † in the third):
‘Winston Churchill in 1940’ (with ‘Felix Frankfurter at Oxford’, one of only two pieces published in the lifetimes of their subjects): as ‘Mr Churchill’, Atlantic Monthly 184 no. 3 (September 1949); as ‘Mr Churchill and FDR’, Cornhill Magazine 981; as Mr Churchill in 1940 (London, 1964: John Murray; Boston/Cambridge, n.d.: Houghton Mifflin/Riverside Press).
‘Hubert Henderson at All Souls’: in a supplement, devoted to Henderson, to Oxford Economic Papers 5 (1953).
‘President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’: Political Quarterly 26 (1955); as ‘Roosevelt Through European Eyes’, Atlantic Monthly 196 no. 1 (July 1955).
‘Richard Pares’: Balliol College Record, 1958.
‘Chaim Weizmann’, the second Herbert Samuel Lecture (London, 1958: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
‘Felix Frankfurter at Oxford’: in Wallace Mendelson (ed.), Felix Frankfurter: A Tribute (New York, 1964: Reynal).
‘Aldous Huxley’: in Julian Huxley (ed.), Aldous Huxley (London, 1965: Chatto and Windus).
‘L. B. Namier’: in Martin Gilbert (ed.), A Century of Conflict, 1850–1950: Essays for A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1966: Hamish Hamilton), and Encounter 17 no. 5 (November 1966).
‘Maurice Bowra’, the address at Bowra’s memorial service in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in 1971: as Sir Maurice Bowra, 1898–1971 (Oxford, [1971]: Wadham College); reprinted as ‘Memorial Address in St Mary’s’ in Hugh Lloyd-Jones (ed.), Maurice Bowra (London, 1974: Duckworth).
‘J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy’: in Sir Isaiah Berlin and others, Essays on J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1973: Clarendon Press).
‘John Petrov Plamenatz’, the address at Plamenatz’s memorial service in the University Church, of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, in 1975: John Petrov Plamenatz, 1912–1975 (Oxford, [1975]: All Souls College).
‘Auberon Herbert’: in John Jolliffe (ed.), Auberon Herbert: A Composite Portrait (Tisbury, 1976: Compton Russell).
‘Einstein and Israel’, the major part of an address given on 14 March 1979 at the opening of a symposium held to mark the centenary of Einstein’s birth: New York Review of Books, 8 November 1979; full address in Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (eds), Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, the Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem (Princeton, 1982: Princeton University Press).
†‘Where Was I?’: contributions to Sandra Martin and Roger Hall (eds), Where Were You? Memorable Events of the Twentieth Century (Toronto etc., 1981: Methuen)
†‘Maynard and Lydia Keynes’: in Milo Keynes (ed.), Lydia Lopokova (London, 1983: Weidenfeld and Nicolson).
†‘Nahum Goldmann’: as ‘Nahum Goldmann (1895–1982): A Personal Impression’, in William Frankel (ed.), Survey of Jewish Affairs 1983 (Rutherford/Madison/Teaneck, 1985: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London/Toronto, 1985: Associated University Presses).
†‘Memories of Brief Meetings with Ben-Gurion’: Jewish Quarterly 33 (1986) no. 3 (123).
†‘Martin Cooper’: as ‘Martin Cooper: In Memoriam’ in programme for memorial concert by Lindsay String Quartet, 29 June 1986; reprinted as Foreword to Martin Cooper, Judgements of Value: Selected Writings on Music, ed. Dominic Cooper (Oxford, 1988: Oxford University Press).
*‘Yitzhak Sadeh’: Midstream 39 no. 4 (May 1993). I constructed this piece at the author’s request from two shorter pieces he had written on Sadeh, one previously unpublished, the other, ‘On Yitzhak Sadeh’ (a short talk broadcast on the English-language service of Israeli radio), published in Hebrew translation in Davar, 5 September 1986.
†‘Adam von Trott’: as ‘A Personal Tribute to Adam von Trott (Balliol 1931)’, Balliol College Annual Record, 1986.
*‘David Cecil’: in Reports for 1985–86 and 1986–87; List of Fellows and Members for 1987 (London, [1987]: Royal Society of Literature).
*‘Edmund Wilson at Oxford’: Yale Review 76 (1987).1
*‘Memories of Virginia Woolf’: as ‘Writers Remembered: Virginia Woolf’, Author 100 (1989).
†‘Alexander and Salome Halpern’: in Russian translation in a Russian collection, Mikhail Parkhomovsky (ed.), Jews in the Culture of Russia Abroad: Collected Articles, Publications, Memoirs and Essays, vol. 1, 1919–1939 (Jerusalem, 1992: M. Parkhomovsky), 229–41; reprinted in Mikhail Parkhomovsky and Andrey Rogachevsky (eds), Russian Jews in Great Britain: Articles, Publications, Memoirs and Essays [Russian Jewry Abroad, vol. 2] (Jerusalem, 2000: Mikhail Parkhomovsky); ‘Mrs Salome Halpern’, which appears as an appendix to this essay, is from The Times, 17 May 1982, 12.
†‘Jewish Oxford’: as ‘The Early Years’, in Freda Silver Jackson (ed.), Then and Now: A Collection of Recollections (Oxford, 1992: Oxford Jewish Congregation).
†‘Herbert Hart’: in Sir Isaiah Berlin and others, Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart 1907–1992: Speeches Delivered at Memorial Ceremony on 6 February 1993 ([Oxford, 1993]: privately printed); reprinted in Jenifer Hart, Ask Me No More: An Autobiography (London, 1998: Peter Halban).
†‘Corpuscle’: in Brian Harrison (ed.), Corpuscles: A History of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Twentieth Century, Written by Its Members (Oxford, 1994: Corpus Christi College).
†‘Stephen Spender’: contribution to ‘Remembering Stephen’ (a tribute to Stephen Spender), Index on Censorship 25 no. 5 (October 1995).
‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’: in the first edition of this volume; shortened version, ‘Conversations with Russian Poets’ (given as a Bowra Lecture on 13 May 1980), The Times Literary Supplement, 31 October 1980, 1233–6, and (with additions, as ‘Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak’), New York Review of Books, 20 November 1980, 23–35.
*‘The Three Strands in My Life’: as ‘Upon Receiving the Jerusalem Prize’, Conservative Judaism 33 no. 2 (Winter 1980); reprinted under its present title, Jewish Quarterly 27 nos 2–3 (Summer/Autumn 1979).
Apart from necessary corrections and the addition of references, the reprinted essays appear here essentially in their original form. As in the second edition, I have in this new third edition made a few further corrections and added some missing references and some other editorial observations.
Since this new edition has been reset, its pagination differs from that of previous editions. This may cause some inconvenience to readers who wish to follow up references to one edition in another. A concordance of all the editions has therefore been posted at <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/>, so that references to one can readily be converted into references to another.
I remain grateful for all the help I received in preparing the first edition thirty-five years ago. Then, as always, Isaiah Berlin patiently answered my queries and Pat Utechin, his secretary, gave indispensable aid. Virginia Llewellyn Smith assisted me with ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’. I should also like to thank Zvi Dror, Henry Near and Yoram Sadeh for help with ‘Yitzhak Sadeh’; Helen Rappaport, Rowena Skelton-Wallace and Will Sulkin for help with the second edition; and Shlomo Avineri, Al Bertrand, Meir Chazan, Joshua L. Cherniss, Arie Dubnov, Hermione Lee, Martin Liddy, Tatiana Pozdnyakova, Nigel Rees, Anita Shapira, Robert Skidelsky and Norman Solomon for help with this third edition.
Henry Hardy
Oxford, June 1980, November 1997
Heswall, February 2014
1 See in this connection Noel Annan’s remarks at 441 below.
2 ‘Accentuate the Positive’, 1944 song by Johnny Mercer (lyrics) and Harold Arlen (music).
3 The Book of Isaiah (xv/3), ix.
1 The present volume was first published in London in 1980, and in New York in 1981. The other volumes are Russian Thinkers (London and New York, 1978; 2nd ed., 2008), co-edited with Aileen Kelly; Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 1978; New York, 1979; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013); Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London, 1979; New York, 1980; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013); The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London, 1990; New York, 1991; 2nd ed., Princeton/London, 2013); The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997); and The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London, 1997; New York, 1998; 2nd ed., London, 2013), co-edited with Roger Hausheer, a one-volume selection drawn from the other volumes listed in this note (except for The Sense of Reality), and from their predecessors (see next note).
2 Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York, 1969) and Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New York, 1976). These two collections are now incorporated in Liberty and Three Critics of the Enlightenment respectively (see next note). Other collections had appeared only in translation.
3 The Roots of Romanticism (London and Princeton, 1999; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013); The Power of Ideas (London and Princeton, 2000; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013); Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (London and Princeton, 2000; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2013); Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (London and Princeton, 2002; 2nd ed., Princeton, 2014); Liberty (Oxford, New York etc., 2002); The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (xxii/1); and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (London and Princeton, 2006; 2nd ed, Princeton, 2014).
1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 214, fol. 48.
2 The people I have listed here are the subjects of items 153, 262, 129, 173a, 181a, 140, 203, 193, 171a and 147 respectively.
1 Cf. Lewis M. Dabney’s interview with IB, ‘Isaiah Berlin on Edmund Wilson’, Wilson Quarterly 23 no. 1 (Winter 1999), 38–49.