I FIRST MET FELIX FRANKFURTER in, I think, the first or second week of the autumn term of 1933 at Oxford in the rooms of Roy Harrod in Christ Church, where I called one afternoon in October, in order to return a book. I was followed into the room by Sylvester Gates, then a lawyer in London, whom I knew; he was accompanied by a small, neat, dapper figure, who was introduced as Professor Frankfurter. His name, I am ashamed to say, was then scarcely familiar to me: I vaguely connected it with the New Deal and Roosevelt, though in no clear fashion; but this may merely be evidence of my own provincialism and lack of acquaintance with world affairs. I do not know whether the impending arrival of Felix Frankfurter as visiting Eastman Professor had caused a stir in the Law Faculty at Oxford, but I can testify to the fact that his visit was otherwise unheralded. Visits by eminent professors from foreign universities were not unusual at Oxford, then as now; and no matter how distinguished, such visitors were not, and are not, lionised; indeed, at times too little notice is taken of them. (Whatever the sociological explanation of this phenomenon, it is one that brings relief to some and much chagrin and disappointment to others.) At any rate, when I was introduced to Frankfurter, I wondered about his identity and attributes. I knew Gates to be a man of exceptionally fastidious taste – indeed, one of the cleverest, most intellectual, most civilised men I had ever met. He had brought a friend – a professor of law, doubtless distinguished in his own field – and that was all. Within five minutes, however, a conversation sprang up, about politics, personalities, Mr Stimson (whom the professor evidently knew well), Sir John Simon, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Manchurian invasion, President Lowell and his behaviour to Harold Laski, to all of which the unknown professor contributed with such vivacity, and so extraordinary and attractive a mixture of knowledge and fancy, that although I had not intended to stay, I listened (although I am, by nature, liable to interrupt) in a state of complete and silent fascination. After an hour or so an urgent appointment did finally force me to leave, without giving me an opportunity of enquiring about who this remarkable personage might be.
A few days later he dined at All Souls, which was my own college. His host on this occasion was, I think, Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, and one of the most influential political figures in England in his day. By this time I had discovered the identity of the remarkable stranger; nor was there, at All Souls, any way of avoiding this knowledge: Dawson and his circle (he had invited guests and got his friends to do so also) looked on Frankfurter, as I perceived, less as an academic figure than as a man of influence in Washington, an intimate friend and adviser of the President of the United States, and a man whom it was for obvious public reasons evidently desirable to cultivate. He responded to this treatment with the greatest naturalness and lack of self-consciousness. I do not suppose that he disliked being made an object of such attention – it was not surprising at All Souls, which, at that time particularly, was a meeting-place of a good many persons prominent in public life, among whom there were some very powerful men – but he did not display the slightest sign of grandeur, did not pontificate, did not speak in that measured and important fashion which often characterises the speech of one eminent person conscious of discussing affairs of State with other, equally weighty figures.
He talked copiously, with an overflowing gaiety and spontaneity which conveyed the impression of great natural sweetness; his manner contrasted almost too sharply with the reserve, solemnity and, in places, vanity and self-importance of some of the highly placed persons who seated themselves round him and engaged his attention. He spoke easily, made his points sharply, stuck to all his guns, large and small, and showed no tendency to retreat from views and political verdicts some of which were plainly too radical for the more conservative of the public personages present; they were hailed with the greatest approval by the majority of our generation of fellows – then very young – who formed the outer circle of Frankfurter’s audience, and were divided from most of their elders by irreconcilable differences of view on most of the political and social issues of that day – Manchuria, the ‘bankers’ ramp’, Fascism, Hitler, unemployment, slumps, collective security (Abyssinia and Spain were still to come).
After something like two hours of talk on grave issues, Frankfurter cast a sharp look round the room and decided to make a break for freedom. Fidgeting visibly, he rose from his chair and made as if towards the table on which decanters of whisky and brandy and small chemist’s bottles of seltzer water stood in rows. But long before he reached it – he was evidently in no need of artificial stimulation – he almost literally buttonholed a junior fellow who looked lively and sympathetic, and engaged him in frivolous conversation of some sort. Dawson, Simon, Lionel Curtis and other mandarins tried to bring him back to great Anglo-American issues. In vain. He would not be detached from this junior fellow – I think it was Penderel Moon, who was afterwards to play so original, fearless and admirable a part in India – and insisted on involving himself in some purely intellectual controversy that was clearly of no interest to the statesmen. Presently he drifted over into the corner of the room where the junior fellows were talking among themselves. Here he behaved with so gay, childlike and innocent a warmth of feeling, and talked with such enjoyment of, it seemed, everything, that the young men were charmed and exhilarated, and stayed up talking with him until the early hours of the morning.
Whenever I met him at dinner elsewhere in Oxford, I observed the same phenomenon: a certain amount of firm cultivation of him by those who felt it their right and duty to be talking to him as a representative of influential American circles in the law or government; the same polite but unenthusiastic response by the Eastman Professor; apparent unawareness on his part that some people were much more important than others; and affectionate familiarity in his dealings with everyone, which lightened the atmosphere in the most portentous milieux and delighted those who were young and observant.
Oxford in the 1920s and early 1930s was stiffer, more class-conscious, hierarchical and self-centred than it is now (it may, of course, be only because I was young that I think so – but there is, I believe, a good deal of objective evidence for this too), and Felix Frankfurter had an uncommon capacity for melting reserve, breaking through inhibitions, and generally emancipating those with whom he came into contact. Only the genuinely self-important and pompous resented this, and they did so most deeply. I heard Maynard Keynes, who was himself a famous and merciless persecutor of pretentiousness and humbug, and a considerable expert on the subject, accord recognition to Frankfurter as a master of this craft: indeed, he said that he placed him first among Americans of his acquaintance in this respect, although he supposed that Holmes had been even more formidable and less inclined to mercy.
Indeed, Frankfurter had his blind spots. He was a genuine Anglomaniac: the English, whatever he thought of their public policies, individually could do little wrong in his eyes. It needed a great deal of stupidity, wickedness or personal nastiness or rudeness on an Englishman’s part to arouse unfriendly sentiment in Felix Frankfurter’s breast. In general, he liked whatever could be liked, omnivorously, and he greatly disliked having to dislike. Everything delighted him: the relations of one ex-military fellow of a college to another; C. K. Ogden’s attitude to London restaurants; unequal success in the wooing of their academic hosts achieved by various German exiles then in England, and the socially ludicrous consequences of this; Salvemini’s deflation of Harold Laski’s rhetorical homage to Burke; his own progress in London and Oxford. His sense of the ridiculous was simple but acute, his enjoyment of incongruities irrepressible. He was not what is known as a good listener: he was too busy; like a bee, carrying pollen from an unbelievable number of flowers (and what seemed to some mere weeds), he distributed it and caused plants which had never been seen to do so to burst into sudden bloom. The short memoranda, several lines long, scribbled in pencil, and often accompanied by cuttings or offprints, stirred pools that had not been known to move before; this social gift he displayed to the point of genius.
But to return to Oxford. Those who were sensitive to status, and suffered from fears that their own might not be adequately recognised, and dreaded irreverence in all its forms, complained of the Eastman Professor’s unseasonable frivolity, his lack of taste, his noisy laughter, his childishness, his Americanisms, his immature enthusiasm, his insensitivity to the unique qualities of Europe in general, and Oxford in particular – a lack of gravitas, a deliberate defiance of the genius of the place – and so on. These strictures were certainly groundless: our guest did not practise irreverence for its own sake. He admired Oxford, if anything, too deeply and devotedly, and with a sensibility that exceeded that of his critics. He understood what there was to understand. If he struck sharp notes occasionally, he did so intentionally, and they were not discordant in the ears of most of those who turned out, in the next quarter of a century, to be the bearers of the central traditions of Oxford, and of much of the intellectual life of England both before and after the Second World War. I do not know what impact he made on Oxford lawyers or the undergraduates who went to his lectures. So far as I and my friends were concerned, his genius resided in the golden shower of intellectual and emotional generosity that was poured forth before his friends, and liberated some among them who needed the unlocking of their chains.
Whenever, during his first and subsequent visits, I met him at dinner in colleges or private houses, the same phenomenon was always to be observed: he was the centre, the life and soul of a circle of eager and delighted human beings, exuberant, endlessly appreciative, delighting in every manifestation of intelligence, imagination or life. He was (to use the phrase of a man he did not like) life-enhancing in the highest degree. No wonder that even the most frozen monsters in our midst responded to him and, in spite of themselves, found themselves on terms of both respect and affection with him. Only the vainest, and those most ‘alienated’ (a term then not in common use) from their fellow men, remained unaffected by his peculiar type of vitality, or positively resented it. Attitudes towards him seemed to me a simple but not inadequate criterion of whether one was in favour of the forces of life or against them. I do not intend this as a moral judgement, or a judgement of value at all: there are moral, aesthetic and intellectual qualities of the rarest value which seem incompatible with a positive attitude to life; I mean this distinction only as a statement of fact.
He came to us twice again, once on a purely private visit, once to receive an honorary degree, and the welcome in each case from his friends and the friends of his friends was justifiably rapturous. I recollect no particularly memorable observations or epigrams by him, or about him, then or at any time, but two occasions stand out in my recollection as characteristic. One was a dinner party in Christ Church. I cannot now remember who was host – perhaps it was again Roy Harrod. All that I recollect is that a charade was acted by some of us after dinner, and such was the degree of vitality infused by the guest of honour that the acting (if I remember rightly, it had something to do with a jealous eighteenth-century French marquis and his peccant wife) became passionately expressive. I shall not reveal the identities of the actors; they have all attained to celebrity since. Felix applauded the performance and egged the actors on until the realism of the actors reached a maximum degree of intensity. I do not think I shall ever forget the expressions on the faces, the gestures, the inflections of voices on this extraordinary occasion. For Oxford dons – the most self-conscious, inhibited human beings in an already intensely self-conscious and inhibited society – to have broken out of their prisons to such a degree was something that only the most potent force could achieve – an elixir powerful enough to break through the most sacred spells. This liberating power seems to me evident in all Felix’s dealings, from the most intimate to the most public, ever since the beginning of his career. Oxford, made by nature and art to be the greatest possible obstacle to this force, proved it indeed to be literally irresistible.
The second occasion is one that he mentions himself in his reminiscences: a dinner party held by him and his wife1 at Eastman House, then situated in Parks Road, attended among others by Sylvester Gates, Freddie and Renée Ayer, Goronwy Rees, Maurice Bowra and one or two others, including, I think, the famous expatriate Guy Burgess, who was then staying in Oxford, and was pursuing a profession about which we were not clear – I think he published a city letter of financial advice, or something of the kind – at any rate, he was excellent company and, in those days, a friend of mine and of several of the others present.
It is always difficult to convey to others what it is about a particular occasion – particularly a private one – that makes it delightful or memorable. Nothing conveys less to the reader or (rightly) nauseates him more than such passages as ‘How we laughed! Tears rolled down our cheeks’, or ‘His irresistible manner and his inimitable wit drew gusts of merry laughter from us all! How happy we were then, so young, so gay, such high spirits! How little did we see the shadows gathering over us all! How sad to reflect on the subsequent fate of XYZ! What a summer it was, etc.’ The evening terminated, as Felix himself reports a little inaccurately, in a bet between Freddie Ayer and Sylvester Gates about whether the sentence of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ‘Whereof one may not speak, thereon one must preserve silence’ [‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen’] occurs once or twice in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Freddie said that he could have said it only once. He was then sent in a taxi to consult the text in his own flat in the High Street, and came back to report that Wittgenstein had indeed, as Gates maintained, said it twice, once in the preface1 and once in the main body of the text, and paid ten shillings’ forfeit.
Why was this so memorable? Only because the mixture of intellectual gaiety and general happiness generated at this and other dinner parties was too uncommon in so artificial an establishment as the University of Oxford – where self-consciousness is the inevitable concomitant of the occupations of its inhabitants – not to stand out as a peak of human feeling and of academic emancipation. Courage, candour, honesty, intelligence, love of intelligence in others, interest in ideas, lack of pretension, vitality, gaiety, a very sharp sense of the ridiculous, warmth of heart, generosity – intellectual as well as emotional – dislike for the pompous, the bogus, the self-important, the bien pensant, for conformity and cowardice, especially in high places, where it is perhaps inevitable – where was such another combination to be found? And then there was the touching and enjoyable Anglomania – the childlike passion for England, English institutions, Englishmen – for all that was sane, refined, not shoddy, civilised, moderate, peaceful, the opposite of brutal, decent – for the liberal and constitutional traditions that before 1914 were so dear to the hearts and imaginations especially of those brought up in Eastern or Central Europe, more particularly to members of oppressed minorities, who felt the lack of them to an agonising degree, and looked to England and sometimes to America – those great citadels of the opposite qualities – for all that ensured the dignity and liberty of human beings. That which has sometimes been taken for snobbery in Felix Frankfurter – a profound if possible misreading of his character – was, in fact, precisely this. His feeling for England was subjected to strain during the troubles in Palestine: he was a stout-hearted Zionist, and his conversations in Oxford on this topic with Reginald Coupland – the principal author of the Royal Commission’s report, which to this day is the best account of the Palestine issue of its time – are still unrecorded. Coupland frequently remarked that Frankfurter had taught him more on this subject than the officials instructed to brief him, and had doubtless made enemies by the courage and candour of his views. His part in this, like his contributions to the law, his influence on the policies of the New Deal, his work in United States government departments before he became professor, his advocacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, his public life and influence in general, may be worthier of comment and commendation than the personal qualities upon which I have dwelt here. But it is these last, and not the attributes which made him important to the leading political men in England by whom he was assiduously entertained, that made their deepest impact upon the academic community in Oxford.
No one had ever captivated so many unlikely and resistant members of an apparently forbidding fortress so swiftly. Obituaries often refer to the deceased’s ‘genius for friendship’. Not the dubious quality indicated by this cliché, but an unrivalled power of liberation of human beings imprisoned beneath an icy crust of custom or gloom or social terror – this seems to me to be Felix Frankfurter’s rarest single personal gift. It was this that penetrated our defences – ramparts that have kept out and needlessly frustrated many a good and interested and intelligent and well-intentioned man.
1 I have said nothing here of Marion Frankfurter. This is a deliberate omission: her distinction in every respect was too great to be treated in what would inevitably have been a marginal manner. That she deserves a full-length portrait to herself, none of those who were admitted to her friendship would, I think, deny. I have proceeded on the principle that a blank is better than an unworthy sketch.
1 [Though here ‘reden’ appears in place of ‘sprechen’ at the end of the main text. IB took Ayer’s side in the bet, and also paid a forfeit.]