Isaiah Berlin, Building: Letters, 1960-1975, review

Isaiah Berlin was an intellectual star who published little. His witty letters show the man in full, says Duncan White.

By Duncan White 26 July 2013 • 7:00am

Isaiah Berlin: sitting millions of words Credit: Photo: Wesley Merritt

Isaiah Berlin was one of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century, but he did his best to sabotage his legacy. While he delivered plenty of high-profile public lectures and found fame broadcasting on BBC radio, when it came to getting words down on paper he was a fanatical procrastinator. His friends were frustrated by the way he prioritised his hectic social calendar above real work. They blamed his appetite for gossip and intrigue for his failure to get books out.

Berlin was painfully aware of his shortcoming. “All I produce is little fragments,” he complains in a letter. “I really must try and achieve at least one solid work… and not scatter myself in all these directions all over the place,” he told another correspondent. This was not down to frivolity or laziness: it was an aversion to commitment: “I am content to observe, not interfere, and have all my life been afraid above all of being involved.”

His anxieties were consuming. To get him to finish his first book, a study of Marx published in 1939, Elizabeth Bowen locked him in her house. He gave seven major lecture series and published none of them. His oeuvre was in disarray until Henry Hardy, one of the editors of this latest collection of letters, started to pull it together in the Seventies. Hardy estimated there were a million words of unpublished lectures and millions more in letters. Even published work was hidden in obscure journals.

So a comprehensive evaluation of Berlin and his work was always going to be belated (Berlin died in 1997). Now much has been edited, and the collected works are being reissued this year by Princeton. The third of four volumes of correspondence is published as Building: Letters, 1960-75 and his work is undergoing a renaissance in the academy.

Returning to Berlin’s liberalism is no bad idea when one considers the damage neoliberal faith in free markets has done in recent times. It is not difficult to imagine the disdain with which Berlin, peering through his black-rimmed glasses, would have dismissed the nonsense about liberal democracy signalling the end of history. Berlin believed that human values were ultimately incompatible and that, therefore, the utopian idea of creating a perfect society was a fallacy – hence his implacable opposition to communism. Abstract schemes, he argued, inevitably compromised the individual. Our guiding principle should be the preservation of liberty: Berlin was against the omelette – you paid too high a price by breaking the eggs.

This left him open to charges that he validated the status quo, reinforcing social inequalities – an impression that wasn’t helped by his fondness for hanging out with the aristocracy. Yet he did not believe liberty should come at the cost of social justice, and was a great enthusiast of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As Michael Ignatieff puts it in his authorised biography, Berlin was “more comfortable socially among conservatives” but in his convictions he was “a liberal social democrat”.

His liberalism is a fusion of his English education and his fascination with the 19th-century Russian intelligentsia. Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga, the son of a Jewish timber merchant whose business contacts helped him avoid Tsarist anti-Semitism. When the Berlins moved to St Petersburg, a seven-year-old Isaiah witnessed the Russian Revolution.

The family lived for two years in Lenin’s Russia but fear of the secret police prompted them to flee to London. Berlin adapted quickly and his intellectual precocity took him from St Paul’s to Oxford, where he became the first Jew to win an All Souls fellowship.

During the war he wrote dispatches for British Information Services in New York and Washington. He soon made contacts in the Roosevelt administration and his dispatches were admired by Churchill.

The relationships forged in the war years ensured Berlin remained close to American power even after returning to academia. He was close to the courtiers in John F Kennedy’s Camelot and dined with the president on the first day of the Cuban missile crisis.

All this gave him a wealth of anecdotes. And because his procrastinating took the form of letter writing, many of them have survived. In this latest volume, Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle tell us that they have only found space for a quarter of the transcribed letters (which themselves are only a “smallish portion” of the total). Still, it comes in at a hefty 600 pages. No wonder Berlin described answering letters “as a kind of drug – great relief from real work”.

His epistolary addiction is enriched by the fact that he seems to have met everybody at one point or another. At Oxford he got to know Auden, Ayer, Isherwood, Spender and Waugh. Over the years he met Einstein, Eisenstein, Eliot, Keynes, Nabokov, Picasso, Pound, Shostakovich, Stein, Stravinsky, Woolf and Yeats.

He gave a talk in front of Wittgenstein and went for tea with Freud. He spent a life-changing evening with the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and helped Pasternak smuggle drafts of Doctor Zhivago out of Russia. Greta Garbo once told him he had beautiful eyes.

Churchill consulted Berlin when writing The Gathering Storm and Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion competed for his support in their efforts to found Israel. He met Nehru in India and was invited to Downing Street by Margaret Thatcher. Shortly before his death in 1997, Berlin received a letter from Tony Blair seeking to debate aspects of Berlin’s work.

These letters are compelling. There is wit, charm and effortless erudition, but also a fair amount of thin-skinned kvetching and a delighted bitchiness. He is avuncular and generous, self-deprecating and wry, but on rare occasions one winces as he slips into dubious racial politics or shamelessly plays correspondents off against each other. This is no St Isaiah. The accounts of the incestuous politics at All Souls are tedious but the pen portraits of the great and the good have a pithy perfection.

Here he is on Kennedy: “He is frightened of erosion: one must act: one must perform: one must live carefully & dangerously: life is a war and one must live under continual shadow of death: very romantic, rather terrifying: I see why Joe [Alsop] & Phil [Graham] love him so: to them he is Alexander the Great in a plumed helmet ready for the barbarians. Who has broken through American tedium & is conscious of history, duels, immortal fame. Ben-Gurion is not dissimilar. Nor is de Gaulle. Hemingwayism. An aesthetic heroic-Hellenic view”.

The best material deals with the Cold War. His ardent Atlanticism and hardened anti-communism combined with his perceived equivocating over the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam invited the charge that he provided intellectual ballast for hawks. The letters present a more complex case.

In a memorable attack, Christopher Hitchens quoted a letter in which Berlin was effusive in his praise for Vietnam hardliner Mac Bundy, who was national security adviser to JFK and Lyndon Johnson. Hardy and Pottle point out that Hitchens was indulging in some “intellectual sleight of hand”, as the letter he had quoted referred not to Bundy’s stance on Vietnam but to his role in getting funding for Wolfson College.

The issue that most provoked the New Left, including Hitchens, into attacking Berlin was the revelation that he had blocked the Marxist scholar Isaac Deutscher from getting a job at Sussex University, a subject given forensic treatment in David Caute’s new book Isaac and Isaiah: the Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (Yale, £25).

Sussex University approached Berlin, who was on its academic advisory board, to ask if he thought Deutscher was a suitable appointment as professor of Soviet Studies. Berlin replied that Deutscher was “the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable”. Berlin’s verdict proved decisive.

The idea that Berlin was exacting “covert punishment” on Deutscher, as Caute’s subtitle says, suggests an academic equivalent of a CIA black op. But, as Caute tells it, a complex personal antipathy motivated Berlin. He was close to other Marxist historians and could hardly be accused of blacklisting Deutscher on those grounds alone.

Finding the charismatic, if self-aggrandising, Deutscher ethically unpalatable is hardly damning; Trotsky’s biographer was not uncritical of the Soviets but his unwillingness to face up to the Gulag was reprehensible. Yet Berlin could hardly be considered objective. He bore a grudge against Deutscher for a negative book review of Berlin’s Historical Inevitability (1955). Furthermore, when his role in the affair was exposed, Berlin indulged in some Clintonesque dissimulation. None of this is particularly edifying but Caute, to his credit, is not out to hack away with his hatchet. The success of his book is that he presents Berlin and Deutscher in an empathetic, nuanced way.

There is much about Berlin that is, and will continue to be, disputed: the true value of his work, his politics, the degree of his involvement in the cultural Cold War and his Zionism. The value of his correspondence, though, is beyond dispute. In a letter to the American novelist Mary McCarthy, Berlin explained his “devotion” to the eccentric interior designer Rowland Burdon-Muller. He was, Berlin explained, “the last witness of his age” who had known many influential figures of the fin de siècle. “The story of his relations with Proust is marvellous,” wrote Berlin. Berlin was himself one of the great witnesses of his age and the final volume of his letters will complete one of the most important collections of correspondence of the century.