There must now be a risk of Berlin-fatigue setting in. This is the fourth large volume of his letters, and it comes on the back of seven collections of essays and other occasional pieces assembled by Henry Hardy before Berlin’s death in 1997, plus a further seven since. Berlin recognised that it was the devoted Hardy’s efforts that “have suddenly converted me from someone who has hardly written anything into an almost indecently prolific author”. There have also been a biography, at least two series of interviews, several full-length studies, and two Festschriften. It seems doubtful whether his writings on liberty and on value pluralism would, by themselves, have merited such a small industry of attention had he not also known everybody who was anybody. Rare is the memoir or biography of a leading intellectual or cultural figure in Britain who flourished between the 1930s and 80s in which Berlin does not make some kind of appearance. As a result, his personality may have come to seem more important than his intellectual achievements. As he cheerfully confided when about to receive yet another honour: “I do not complain; to be overestimated is not the most painful of states.”
As a historian of ideas, Berlin was wide-ranging, even learned in an eccentric way, but that way was far removed from the contemporary academic model of specialised “research”. He moved easily in the company of the thinkers from the 18th and 19th centuries who most interested him – figures such as Vico, Herder and his great hero, the Russian liberal Alexander Herzen. He understood the outlook of such writers, drawing on a kind of intellectual empathy to reanimate their ideas for later generations, but he did not build up a thickly textured context of lesser minds or grub around in archives. Though he was well informed about the intellectual history of the period from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, he found it much less congenial, regarding it as, at best, a silver age, at worst a thin epilogue to the main action. As he confessed to one correspondent: “I feel firmly tied to the values of the 19th century.”
That allegiance could make the famously genial Berlin a surprisingly dyspeptic observer of the late 20th century. He was 66 at the start of this volume and 88 when he died. It is sad to see him mistaking his own declining energies for an objective cultural diagnosis and so falling into an ungenerous cultural pessimism: nobody is now doing good work, “there is mediocrity everywhere”, the life of the mind is nearly finished, “part of the general decline of intellectual standards in England” and so on. This disparagement extended to the wider world. “Dear me, now I am talking like a White Russian,” he smiled at the end of one tirade. It was meant as an endearing piece of self-mockery, but that didn’t make it untrue.
Those who are already Berlin’s fans will find much to enthuse over in this final volume of his letters; those who are his settled critics will likewise not lack for further materials with which to support their indictment. All his usual topics are here – the irresolvable conflict of fundamental values, the dangers of monistic theories of history, his continuing fascination with all things Russian, his deep commitment to Israel, his passionate absorption in music. In addition to warm, funny letters to old friends, there are glimpses of his keen desire to move among the highest circles of the traditional elite. A couple of letters to Prince Charles are simply excruciating, as are some confidential assessments, for the benefit of the “senior courtier” who handled these matters, of who did or did not deserve to be awarded the Order of Merit. Reading these, with their sublime insiderish confidence in judging the comparative merits of this scientist as against that historian, or of this painter as against that musician – mostly cases where his views could be, at best, second-hand or dependent on hearsay – simply made me wish I lived in a different country.
But there is a more serious case against Berlin, which the availability of his letters both strengthens yet also partly counters. He repeatedly says exaggerated or misleading, or even downright untrue, things in private letters, and he is then left in a mess of squirming denial when some of these opinions become public. This volume contains a sobering number of illustrations of such evasiveness as the truth started to catch up with him. For a long time, he simply lied about his part, while working in the British embassy in Washington during the war, in preventing the publication of a joint British/US declaration on the future of Palestine which he feared would be prejudicial to Zionist interests, but by the 1980s a persevering journalist was beginning to unearth evidence that contradicted Berlin’s account. Nonetheless, he stuck to his story: “The impression you give of some kind of double-dealing on my part is, I assure you, false.”’ But it wasn’t false, as he had to admit at the end of his life.
Even more characteristic was the pickle he got himself into over Noam Chomsky. In 1986 the journal Index on Censorship published an article by Chomsky arguing that the ardently pro-Israel views of the bulk of the US media constituted a form of de facto censorship. Berlin, a committed if critical Zionist, wrote privately to the chair of Index, Mark Bonham-Carter (whom he knew well) to protest and to ask that his name be removed from the list of recipients of the journal. His somewhat sophistical case was that the journal should confine itself to identifying actual instances of censorship rather than discussing allegations of bias in a “free” country. This letter, which contained some distinctly unflattering characterisations of Chomsky’s journalism in general, was leaked, and Berlin had to embark on a damage-limitation exercise, writing to Chomsky (with whom he had hitherto had friendly relations) to insist that the leak gave a “highly misleading and hostile account” of what Berlin had actually written. But by then Chomsky had seen the contents of Berlin’s original letter, and he was understandably severe on what even Hardy terms Berlin’s “underhand mode of expressing criticism”, recognising its roots in Britain’s too-cosy establishment culture. The two men never communicated again.
Berlin’s admirers are prone to say that there is mean-spirited, reverse snobbery at work in criticisms of his constant hobnobbing with the rich, powerful and well-connected. But the justifiable charge against him here is not that he liked the company of such people: it is that his cultivated intimacy with such circles habituated him into thinking of himself as being on the inside, able to pull strings and to drop a word in the ear of those with one kind of power or another without having to mount a properly argued case in public, which might then have been open to challenge. He enjoyed his insider status and he liked his opinions to have influence, but he hated to have to acknowledge them publicly or to be drawn into controversy over them. He undeniably possessed a streak of deviousness or even cowardice, and his genuinely liberal principles were often in tension with his equally deep need to be liked and admired.
Although the items collected in this volume are, technically, private letters, in reality some of them were clearly conceived as semi-public statements. Berlin knew that his life and thought were already subject to divergent interpretations, and so in response to inquiries and critiques he devoted considerable effort to expounding and polishing his views. Part of the problem facing future intellectual historians who may write about Berlin is what evidentiary status to give to these documents. They certainly illustrate his expressiveness, his verbal ebullience and his habitual adjectival excess. Whether they always represent definitely held views, or indeed whether they are in some cases evidence of conscious duplicity, may be harder to say. He remained almost comically eloquent to the end, but he was increasingly unreliable about his memories and his judgments (Hardy, to his great credit, does not refrain from drawing attention to some of the more egregious lapses).
Perhaps the injunction he sent to a young man who had written asking for guidance about life points to a fundamental characteristic of Berlin as a letter-writer: “Do not do anything that bores you.” Writing dull, cautious letters would have bored Berlin, and his exaggeratedly colourful epistolary style can be seen as part of his habitual way of making life more interesting, at least for himself. He was famously, if not altogether flatteringly, described as “the Paganini of the lecture-hall”, and one can hear his much-imitated, Oxford-inflected, downhill gobble in the letters – hardly surprising, given that they were dictated.
“I love talking: I do not think of what I am saying when I am talking; I do not think beforehand of what I shall say nor after of what I have said, and once it is over I would rather not see the result. I live from moment to moment … Plauderei [chat, gossip] is my natural medium, and whatever I know or think certainly enters it quite naturally, for better or for worse.”
Even this declaration, however winning, has to be treated with some caution – he often thought very carefully indeed about what he would say and certainly worried afterwards – but it should also serve as a warning. In reading these letters we are eavesdropping, and eavesdroppers have no right to complain if the Plauderei they overhear sometimes turns out to be discreditable to the gossiper as well as his subjects.
Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? is published by Penguin.
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