Prodigal Son

Michael Ignatieff has written a charming life about a man who lived a charmed life. A young Jewish boy from Riga was born into the anti-Semitic Russian Empire in 1909, and the forceps delivery that “yanked him into the world” left him with a permanently deformed elbow. Isaiah’s father, Mendel Berlin, a timber merchant with a keen eye for the British trade, took the family to live in Petrograd during World War I and the Revolution, extricated them from the corruption of Lenin’s regime in 1921 and moved them to London where he ran his business from the other end. Many of the relatives the Berlins left behind died in the Holocaust, but, like his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, the 11-year-old Isaiah faced only the inquisitions of an elite English boys’ school, with little more grasp of the language than the words of the old music hall song, “Daisy, Daisy.” (As so often, Isaiah’s account of the problems of his life dissolves, in retrospect, into infectious laughter.)

This seems an unlikely beginning for a man who, until his death in 1997 at 88, moved among the grandees of the world, not least the “marshals” of John Kennedy’s entourage--his word--and won the love or the confidence of “the great and the good” in the United States, Russia and Europe, as well as in his chosen England: Chaim Weizmann and Winston Churchill, Anna Akhmatova and Alfred Brendel, George Kennan and Katharine Graham.

We are tempted to ask, “How did he do it?”, and he would have answered, “I didn’t do it: It was luck.” But this was a preeminent case for the old motto, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” A gift for friendship and unfailing good humor, a diary that was always full, but never too full for another engagement, an overflowing fountain of marvelous insights and wonderfully witty stories: These are the ingredients that made Isaiah Berlin the Best of Oxford.

“It is ironic,” writes Ignatieff, “that the voice which two generations of British radio listeners took to be the voice of the Oxford intellect should actually have been a Riga Jew’s unconscious impersonation of his English contemporaries.” Even Berlin’s shortcomings became assets. The elbow injured at birth was an element in his rhetorical style. The stiff left arm, sawing to and fro as he spoke, blended unforgettably with his machine gun delivery, and the fact that his English was hard to follow forced the hearer to concentrate on the subtlety and precision of his ideas.

This still leaves one amazed at the slice of luck that took him to New York in 1940 on a journey that ended with his becoming the channel of information, impressions and gossip about American opinion that Churchill and his ministers came most to trust. Or that which led him to a Leningrad bookshop in 1945, to an unforeseen meeting with Akhmatova that was a pivotal event for them both: “Their encounter was one of those events which never ended, which spilled out consequences to the end of their lives.” Or that which led him to knock on the wrong door in a New York hotel and find himself face to face with David Ben-Gurion. (Berlin might have become a leading figure in the creation and organization of the new state of Israel, but he came to recognize himself as “a life-long Zionist who had no place in Zion.”) And so it goes on.

At last, in this biography, the truth shines through. The charm that protected Berlin throughout his life in the face of all obstacles was his emigre personality: full of un-English vitality, driven by an anxiety expressed through a commitment to the art of conversation, which swept aside the reticences and hesitations of 20th century life--English life, above all--and opened all doors. He was the first Jew elected to All Soul’s College, Oxford’s institute of advanced study which prime ministers and other grandees visited to spend weekends in intellectual chat. (To call it the “Bohemian Club” of England would be an exaggeration, for the goings-on were somewhat more sedate.) He ended as Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin, O.M.--a historian of Russian ideas and philosopher of liberal social thought. (His distinctive position was to criticize most liberal theory for ignoring the inevitability of tragic choice.) He also became president of the British Academy, master of the newly founded Wolfson College, trustee of the Covent Garden Opera and a member of the Order of Merit--one of two dozen exceptional scholars, artists and public figures named by the queen to form the Parnassus of British cultural life. It was a long way from Riga.

It was not always clear that this recognition would come. When I taught at Oxford in the early 1950s--Isaiah helped put me in line for the job--there was little to show to the larger world of the brilliance his friends and colleagues knew. No one claimed that the commissioned book on Karl Marx he worked on in the 1930s was a major success. Otherwise there was a handful of lectures, and Isaiah was growing increasingly out of sympathy with the un-historical aspects of Oxford analytical philosophy. “In England,” he insisted, “the History of Ideas is a non-subject.”

His friend and colleague Stuart Hampshire, Ignatieff writes, “urged him to impose an ‘economy of spirit’ upon himself: to rein himself in, channel his energies, stop dissipating it in a thousand directions. Berlin was aware that being an intellectual entertainer for the rich was a trap into which Jews were especially liable to fall.” If Isaiah was to be remembered as more than a Shakespearean joker, “he would have to secure his reputation by more unequivocal means than talk.”

There has always been a place for brilliant talkers. Their conversation circles--the Algonquin Roundtable, FDR’s inner group of New Dealers or Jack Kennedy’s “marshals”--are parts of cultural and political history, but the names of those who were involved as individuals fade into the background. (Who still remembers what ideas the Victorian wit Sidney Smith talked about so brilliantly in England?) Yet the way in which Isaiah faced the challenge was not free of compromise. The habits of spontaneous conversation that he learned at Oxford were more powerful than his desire to write. So his reputation today is largely because of pressure from friends who urged him to edit his best lectures (for example, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” and “Historical Inevitability”) for publication and to the devotion of his student, Henry Hardy, who from the mid-’70s assembled his disordered archives and shaped them into the books we have read over the last 15 years.

From 1955 on, however, the most significant change was one in Berlin’s personal life. After a prolonged bachelordom, which had come to appear permanent, his marriage to Aline de Gunzburg Halban gave him the kind of support he needed for the rest of his life. The story of this courtship is romantic in ways possible only in our own times, and Ignatieff handles it with deftness and candor.

Rarely were biographer and subject better matched. A dozen years before he died, Berlin began recording a series of conversations with Ignatieff, whose personal links to Russia made him a responsive partner. Ignatieff--a Canadian writer who lives in London--is known to Americans for a couple of novels and two remarkable books on racial conflict (“Blood and Belonging” and “The Warrior’s Honor”), but most of all for a moral sensibility rare in the social sciences or journalism. I see him as a philosopher but one who avoids the generality and abstraction of academic philosophy. Everything that he writes, such as “The Needs of Strangers,” he feels on his pulse, so there is a fine discretion in the way he handled Berlin’s invitation to be the confidant to whom he could open both his heart and his papers.

As a result, a man who sometimes said that he lived his English life “on the surface” proved, on a deeper level, to have kept the strongest links with his Russian and Jewish roots. (When the phone rang in his New College rooms in the late 1940s, I recall, he replied in Russian as often as English.) During his work in Washington between 1942 and 1945, his dealings with the Jewish leader Weizmann took him at least once across the line that divided the British civil servant from the Zionist, yet the most demanding episode in his life was the time working in the Moscow Embassy in 1945-46, when he met again those relatives who had--so far--survived the war and the lunacies of Stalin’s last years. So Ignatieff shows us much more of the Russian in Isaiah’s personality than was visible to those of us who knew him only in his role as an English academic.

His time in Russia in 1945 and ’46 is notable for the meetings with literary dissenters--particularly, Boris Pasternak--but it culminated in a remarkable series of encounters with the poet Anna Akhmatova. To Isaiah, Akhmatova was a totemic figure: a dogged survivor of a pre-revolutionary literary world, whose work he knew by repute rather than firsthand. But for Akhmatova, Berlin’s unheralded appearance out of the West was an epiphany: a gift to Russians of the European culture from which they had for so long been cut off. They talked on and on through Leningrad nights, while Isaiah exhumed his Russian soul, and Akhmatova felt the love for him that shines out of the five stanza “Cinque” in which she memorialized their meetings. As she noted later:

He will not be a beloved husband to me

But what we accomplish, he and I,

Will disturb the Twentieth Century.

The KGB was soon bugging her apartment on the Fontanny Dom, and Stalin, who kept a sharp eye on all dissenting groups, was said to have commented on the KGB’s reports to the party boss Andrei Zhdanov: “So now our nun is consorting with British spies, is she?” “Isaiah,” Ignatieff writes, “had never calculated the consequences of his visits, either to her or to his family in Moscow, but as the years passed he began to realize how terrible these consequences were to be. . . . In April 1948 his friends in the Moscow embassy advised him that anti-foreign xenophobia was running so high that any attempt to make contact would only endanger her further.”

Still, his visit to Akhmatova remained for Isaiah “the most important event in his life,” and it helped him keep a steady compass for the remaining 50 years: “He came away from Russia with a loathing for Soviet tyranny, which was to inform nearly everything he wrote in defense of Western liberalism and political liberty thereafter. His fierce polemic against historical determinism was animated by what he had learned from her, namely that history could be made to bow before the sheer stubbornness of a human conscience.”

As the Slavic scholar Saul Morson likes to insist, only Dostoevsky foresaw how fearful the history of 20th century Europe would be. Isaiah Berlin, in whom, as Ignatieff shows, the three ingredients of Jewish family loyalty, English toleration and Russian emotional life were blended, was specially equipped to steer a course through its horrors.