The Charmed Life of Sir Berlin

Book reviewed: Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff

I’d wanted to read Isaiah Berlin: A Life, Michael Ignatieff’s biography of the eminent British thinker, for quite a while. I’d greatly enjoyed Berlin’s essays (Russian Thinkers, an anthology of writings on Russian 19th-century thought, is a personal favorite), and I also knew Berlin had lived a very rewarding life socially. Certainly the story of a man who spent a night with Anna Akhmatova (though not doing what you might think they were doing), exchanged confidences with Boris Pasternak at the writer’s dacha, and hobnobbed with heads of state, should be an interesting one to read. I have now consumed Ignatieff’s biography at last, and though this well-written book has enriched my understanding of Berlin the man, I was left feeling vaguely underwhelmed. As I will explain later, that is not the biographer’s fault.

Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then a provincial Baltic city in tsarist Russia. Given his background (unadulteratedly Jewish), things could have turned out quite tragically for him, as they did for millions of people born under a similar constellation. But, in a pattern that would define his entire life, Berlin lucked out. His father, a prosperous timber merchant, was prescient enough to evacuate the family to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) as the Germans approached during the First World War, and to pack up again once the family had had a taste of the nascent Bolshevik state. Had the Berlins decided to stay in the Soviet Union, Isaiah’s life would have played out quite differently. Instead, they bolted to England. The rest, for the young Berlin, was not so much history as a fairy tale. I am exaggerating — but only slightly.

He was an exceptionally fortunate man. His life would span most of the 20th century, yet Berlin would manage to sidestep just about all of its vicissitudes. Though rather unprepossessing in appearance (“A noble rather than a handsome face,” Ignatieff diplomatically writes of Berlin’s bookish mien), Berlin was highly cerebral and intelligent; more usefully, he was a gifted raconteur who could charm his way into any setting. If we are to accept the shopworn adage that what matters is not what you know but who, Berlin used what he knew to meet the people it was worth knowing. Enrolling at Oxford, with which he would enjoy a lifelong association, Berlin went on to become a fellow at All Souls, the first Jew to have been so honored. As an All Souls fellow, he led a nearly enchanted existence, writing about Marx while (a bit incongruously, yes — but Berlin was a past master at managing the incongruous) spending weekends with Anglo-Jewish families so wealthy they were, as Ignatieff puts it, unsnubbable. How many university students can boast of being sent home on a light plane owned by the Rothschilds after complaining that the commute back to the school is too long? Not that Berlin boasted — although he adored and sought out distinguished company, he seemed to wear his good fortune rather lightly.

The Second World War put an end to this academic idyll, and in 1940 Berlin traveled to the US to help in the war effort. His final destination was in fact the British Embassy in Moscow, but a misunderstanding prevented him from completing his journey, and he found himself in New York “high and dry.” Not for long. He quickly adapted himself to his new milieu, and while the war raged on the other side of the ocean, Berlin shuttled between New York and Washington, writing reports for the British government and cultivating a network that included such grandees as Katharine Graham, David Ben-Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann. Not exactly a hardship tour, then. But it could be hard all the same. Though perfectly assimilated and mostly secular, Berlin still identified with his roots, a situation that inevitably led to a conflict of identity and, in his circumstances, a conflict of interest. As a British national, his job was to drum up support for US involvement in the war; as a Jew, he felt obligated to represent Jews persecuted by the Nazis and, trickier still, Zionist ambitions to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, then under British control. It was an impossible situation. As Berlin wrote in one of his best essays, “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity” (I am convinced the piece was as much an attempt to grapple with Berlin’s own identity issues as with those of Disraeli and Marx), such situations produce suffering, even if the suffering is occasionally accompanied by genius. He tried to resolve the conflict as best as he could. In practical terms, this meant that unless Berlin felt the Jews faced an existential threat, his loyalty to England superseded all other considerations.

The reports Berlin dispatched to London were so well written they eventually landed on Churchill’s desk. The prime minister was sufficiently impressed to inquire after the author’s identity, and Berlin would later be one of the individuals consulted on fragments of Churchill’s memoirs. After the war was over, Berlin was sent to Moscow — making it to the Soviet Union after all — to put his native language and writing skills to good use. Berlin’s job was to form an impression of Soviet life, which amounted to little more than preparing weekly digests of the press. He got his own desk at the Chancery but spent little time at it; the best work was done elsewhere. His good fortune had followed him to the USSR; within days of arrival, Berlin was schmoozing with Korney Chukovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Lina Prokofiev, and other mavericks of the Soviet intelligentsia. These connections opened more doors. His new acquaintances, impressed with a Brit who not only spoke Russian but appeared to think like one, were instrumental in helping him establish contact with writers blacklisted for their putative political unreliability. He had fruitful meetings with Boris Pasternak and ran into Mikhail Zoshchenko in a bookstore. But it was with the poetess Anna Akhmatova, by then living in a state of semi-purdah, that Berlin had his legendary encounter. He’d managed to wangle an invitation to her communal apartment in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and the two stayed up all night talking about literature. There was plenty of mutual attraction, but at different amplitudes. Akhmatova was old enough to be Berlin’s mother, and he could not have regarded her as anything other than the grand dame of Russian poetry. For the poetess, however, the tête-à-tête was invested with a much deeper meaning. It is possible Berlin might have caused Akhmatova’s ageing heart to palpitate (she would never forgive Berlin for getting married a decade later), though we can’t know for sure. The fact remains that Akhmatova was so captivated by her British guest that he would make it into her verse; in fact, she would later claim their nocturnal rendezvous had more or less precipitated the Cold War. If this seems a touch megalomaniacal, consider that, unlike the peripatetic Berlin, Akhmatova eventually had to deal with the consequences of his visit. Soviet citizens were not supposed to consort with foreigners, and certainly not if said citizens had already been unpersoned by the government. Akhmatova’s brief intellectual dalliance with a British national was ultimately used against her.

Upon the completion of his Soviet assignment, Berlin abandoned his career as a government official, if that’s what it was, and returned to doing what he was best at — imparting knowledge and moving in high society. He wrote, taught, gave a series of highly popular radio lectures, and made a name for himself. Although he had no personal life to speak of during the first half of his life — Ignatieff hints that Berlin’s was a case of a forty-year-old virgin — once he decided to end his asceticism, the gods smiled upon him yet again. After a false start or two, he ended up successfully wooing Aline Halban, the daughter of a Russian-born French-Jewish baron. No one could believe it. The bride’s mother, upon hearing the news, exclaimed, “Mais il est inépousable!” Thus the baroness on her future son-in-law. Even the bride (who, unlike Berlin, had had a good deal of matrimonial experience) seemed to have doubts; as Halban later said, in a rather uncharitable acknowledgement that their alliance was morganatic, she was Western Europe, while Berlin represented its eastern half. The Rue du Faubourg versus the shtetl, that sort of thing. The marriage took place all the same, and Berlin moved into his wife’s manor, where he was doted on by her servants. Though they had no issue (Halban was already a mother by her two previous marriages), the union was by all accounts a cloudless one, and the couple would spend the rest of their lives together. In 1957, Berlin was knighted for his work — one of the numerous awards he received throughout his life — and became Sir Isaiah Berlin, an improbable honor for the Riga-born son of a Jewish timber merchant. The next several decades were marked by more prolific writing, academic work, and continued success. Berlin died in 1997, widely admired and venerated.

Ignatieff’s biography is an authorized one, and the author was given unfettered access to both Berlin and his inner circle. To Berlin’s great credit, he took care to make sure the book did not become a hagiography. It was stipulated that Berlin would not read the manuscript and that the book be published posthumously. As Berlin’s biographer, Ignatieff certainly tries to be as objective as a man who spent years working with his subject — and seems to have greatly enjoyed the company — possibly can be. Ignatieff demonstrates much tact; his treatment of Berlin is candid but free of any muckraking (not that Berlin’s life lent itself to any). While the result is certainly not a hagiography, Berlin comes across as mostly lovable — even in situations when he is not. He is quite unlike the Berlin we meet in Edmund Wilson’s The Sixties — a gossiping, garrulous prima donna capable of talking anyone to death. But by the 1960s, Wilson was, by his own admission, drinking more than a sailor and flinging ashtrays at people. So: a hard man to please. A more interesting text is Norman Podhoretz’s takedown in Commentary. The dissenting piece is concerned entirely with Berlin and draws heavily on Ignatieff’s biography. After introducing Berlin as an “extraordinarily brilliant man” with whom he wishes he’d spent more time, Podhoretz proceeds to dismantle what he feels is, on the whole, an inflated reputation. It is not only the corpus sustaining Berlin’s reputation that Podhoretz questions, but also his personal qualities — specifically, the charge of cowardice that plagued Berlin throughout his life. Ignatieff, for his part, does not shy away from addressing either one, though in this enterprise he is, first and foremost, Berlin’s attorney.

On the subject of Berlin’s alleged lack of courage, I find Ignatieff’s defense of him persuasive. Berlin was a committed liberal in the classic sense of the word: he believed one ought to share space with those who thought differently. This is a precept many modern liberals have forgotten. Ignatieff recounts a dinner that Berlin attended in the US sometime in the 1940s. During the dinner, Berlin was upbraided for socializing with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a cousin of the US president, because of her supposed reactionary views (she only happened to be a vehement opponent of the New Deal). Berlin rejected this attempt at what we would now call cancel culture; he saw no reason why he shouldn’t associate with people of opposing views. A genuinely liberal world entailed not a plurality of echo chambers, but one of opinions and moral systems. This was not insipid relativism. Berlin recognized there were universal evaluations common to all societies. But if societies tended to punish the same things, they did not necessarily embrace the same virtues. This was a fact of life, and to be liberal was to acknowledge this reality. Berlin’s openness to understand the Other informed his work; he was fascinated by ideological archenemies and wrote extensively about men like Joseph de Maistre, a reactionary figure with a violently dark Weltanschauung. This latitudinarianism, however laudable, did not endear him to those with a Manichaean or black-and-white view of the world, who thought a man ought to be judged strictly by the company he kept. As they saw it, Berlin hunted with the hare and the hounds.

Though certainly a man of clear political beliefs (on the traditional political compass, Berlin was positioned left-of-center, even if he mostly socialized with conservatives), he was usually not one to take positions or “speak out.” He avoided weighing in on hot-button issues and entering frays, and seemed in his Zen-like detachment to be above it all (as Ignatieff himself admits, Berlin’s trademark equanimity is easy to cultivate when you live a life of unmitigated privilege). This led others to believe he lacked courage; Berlin’s affinity for the Russian writer Turgenev, who was rumored to have behaved rather ungentlemanly on a steamboat that had caught fire, was seen as confirmation that he was keenly aware of his own cowardice. Berlin, after all, had even translated a Turgenev story in which the writer fictionalized the steamboat episode — no doubt to address the lingering rumors — and read it on BBC Radio. But, as Ignatieff argues on behalf of Berlin, men should not be held up to romantic standards of heroism, which are only a form of moral tyranny. To be valiant is not to risk losing one’s life, but to avoid losing one’s head when everyone else is losing theirs. For Berlin’s critics, this argument is a cop-out; I am not so sure. People of Berlin’s sophistication understand that the world is a complex place where easy solutions are few and far between; aware of their fallibility and endowed with a heightened awareness of their intellectual limitations, they constantly vacillate and second-guess themselves. They remain noncommittal not out of fear, but out of fear that they might err; sadly, that is not how things are seen or interpreted by others.

The question of the scale of Berlin’s achievements is more problematic. When Berlin was knighted, an old flame congratulated him for his “services to conversation.” A witty barb, but writing earlier about Berlin’s knighthood, I realized that I wasn’t quite sure what it was that had got Berlin the peerage. Curiously, Ignatieff doesn’t provide details either. Berlin is often described as a philosopher, and Ignatieff attempts to uphold this reputation, claiming that Berlin had original ideas of his own. If so, they were lost on me. To be sure, Berlin thought of himself not as a philosopher but as a historian of ideas — an apt way to put it since he occupied the noetic hinterland between philosophy and history. Though he has gone down in history as a writer, he curiously did not enjoy writing and dictated his texts instead. But what marvelous texts! He left behind a number of first-rate anthologies that include excellent essays on Machiavelli, de Maistre, Herzen, Vico, and others, along with the classic “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” The latter is noteworthy not only for its subject (an examination of Tolstoy’s historiosophy), but for what it reveals about the author’s personal preoccupations. Borrowing a line from the Greek poet Archilochus (the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing), Berlin attempts to demonstrate that Tolstoy was a fox who always wanted to be a hedgehog. Apparently, so was Berlin. Ignatieff writes that Berlin was forever haunted by the idea of writing a defining work that would guarantee his legacy, his crowning masterpiece and magnum opus, his one big thing. Alas, it was the one thing the gods denied him. He was not a creator but an interpreter, an intermediary, a Kulturträger destined to feed off others’ ideas. To use Archilochus’s metaphor, Berlin was a fox forever feted as a hedgehog — that, I think, is the primary objection of his detractors. It’s not that the emperor was naked, he just didn’t wear what everyone claimed he did. Perhaps. Personally, I find the question of whether Berlin is overrated as a thinker, or historian of ideas, or whatever it is he was, unimportant. His writings have filled my hours with pleasure and were a source of inspiration. For me, that is quite sufficient.

If Ignatieff’s biography feels incomplete or lacking in some way, which it did to me, it is not because Berlin’s actual legacy fails to stack up to his reputation. The problem is that he lived a life too charmed. As someone says in a Thackeray novel, the best thing one can be sent is a little misfortune. Misfortunes are like the change in seasons — we might prefer clement weather all year round, but an eternal summer can turn us into indolent lotus-eaters. Life is best experienced in its variety. I recognize this is scant consolation for those who have to deal with misfortunes, and I doubt I would be especially receptive to panegyrics on suffering in the face of misfortunes of my own. I don’t have a martyr complex and am very much anti-hardship. It is certainly a very good thing that Berlin’s life was serene and prosperous, and much of the criticism lobbed at Berlin surely contains an admixture of envy. But men of true genius are rarely very happy, and I wonder if it was Berlin’s life, so well-rounded and complete, that stood in the way of his becoming the hedgehog he longed to be. Complete lives don’t always make for complete biographies.