CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Praise for Flourishing

List of Illustrations

Chronology

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

A Call for Letters

Preface

A Personal Impression of Isaiah Berlin

Abbreviations

Family Trees

THE LETTERS

LONDON

OXFORD

NEW YORK

WASHINGTON

MOSCOW

LENINGRAD

WASHINGTON (reprise)

Picture Section

Supplementary Notes

Appendices

Freedom

Reports for Faber & Faber

Dispatches from Washington

Zionist Politics in Wartime Washington

Index of Correspondents

General Index

Select Biographical Glossary

Copyright

About the Author

Isaiah Berlin was born in the Baltic city of Riga in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and its Betrayal, Liberty and The Soviet Mind. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited a number of books by Berlin and other authors, and is the composer of Tunes: Collected Musical Juvenilia (2003).

For more information about Isaiah Berlin visit http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

Praise for FLOURISHING

‘Unstoppably clever, perceptive, serio-comic … a great letter-writer – as almost every page of this fascinating book will show.’ Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

‘This is a substantial achievement and a contribution both to our understanding of Berlin’s life and thought, and also to the history of ideas.’ John McTernan, Scotland on Sunday

‘Brilliantly chronicling the growth of a mind … edited with devotion, scholarship and verve.’ Roy Foster, ‘Books of the Year’, Times Literary Supplement

‘Both as a social document and for intellectual insights this is worth the money.’ Eric Christiansen, ‘Books of the Year’, Spectator

‘Berlin’s correspondence has the wit and flow that friends prized in his conversation … It gives us the inimitable voice of a generous, magnanimous intellect.’ Edmund Fawcett, New Statesman

‘Full of insights about everyone and everything. He was an alpha-level gossip, the genius kind … a conversation of wit and substance that you never want to end.’ Michael Pye, Scotsman

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CREDITS

Unless stated otherwise, all images are from The Isaiah Berlin Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, © The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2004. Where items in the following list contain an oblique stroke, the photographer precedes the stroke, and the owner of the photograph or object follows it.

Letter to Chesterton: British Library, BL Add. MS. 73232A, scanned by the British Library Invitation to Bella Schalit’s party lent by Judy Sebba

Maps

Hampstead: detail from Hampstead 1915 [Old Ordnance Survey Maps, London Sheet 27] (Consett, [2002]: Alan Godfrey Maps)

Oxford: from E. A. Greening Lamborn, Oxford: A Short Illustrated Historical Guide (Oxford, 1928), reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press; scan by Oxford University Libraries Imaging Service, © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, from their G. A. Oxon 8° 1056(3)

Manhattan: from Manhattan, New York (New York, 1946: Hammond and Co., Inc.), copyright Hammond World Atlas Corp. # 12605; scan by the Library of Congress from their G3804 .N4: 2M3 1946 .H 31

Midtown Manhattan: reproduced by permission of the British Library from Nester’s New York City Maps ([London, 1952]: Nester House Publications); scanned from their Maps 34.a.1.(4.) Central Washington: detail from Esso Pictorial Guide to Washington, DC, and Vicinity: 1942 ([New York, 1942]: Standard Oil Company of New Jersey), copyright General Drafting Co., Inc., 21 West Street, New York, NY; scan by the Library of Congress from their G3850 1942 .G4 Central Moscow: scan of detail from ‘Mil.-Geo.-Plan von Moskau II (Stadtkern)’, in Militärgeographische Angaben über das Europäische Ruβland, Map H: Moskau (Berlin, 1941: Generalstab des Heeres, Abteilung fur Kriegskarten und Vermessungswesen [IV. Mil.-Geo.]) by Oxford University Libraries Imaging Service, © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, from their C40 e. 1/H*

Central Leningrad: detail from Plan Leningrada 1939 g. (‘Plan of Leningrad 1939’) ([Leningrad, 1939], Lenizdat); scan by the Anna Akhmatova Museum, St Petersburg, from their copy of the map

Photographs

CHRONOLOGY 1909–1946

Compiled by Serena Moore and Jennifer Holmes

For Jenifer Hart

FLOURISHING

LETTERS 1928–1946

ISAIAH BERLIN

Edited by Henry Hardy

Assistant to Henry Hardy · Serena Moore
Archival research · Michael Hughes
Additional research · Jennifer Holmes, Kate Payne
Consultant Russianist · Helen Rappaport

The compleat explanation of an author not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not be expected from any single scholiast.

Samuel Johnson [see here]

лаντа аγаν

Isaiah Berlin, aged 16^fn1

Nimiety – that’s your weakness!

John Sparrow^fn2

Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle.

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand^fn3

A CALL FOR LETTERS

THIS IS an earnest entreaty, addressed to any reader who possesses, or knows of, any correspondence with Isaiah Berlin that I may not have already seen, to tell me of it.

I have been collecting Isaiah Berlin’s letters, with this edition in mind, since late 1990, when I left my post at Oxford University Press to begin full-time work on editing his unpublished writings. Although I have pursued a great many leads, sometimes with an obsessive persistence that must have irritated those exposed to it, there are bound to be letters that I have not tracked down, of whose existence, indeed, I am unaware. Berlin’s correspondents were so numerous that I must be ignorant of a large proportion of them; those who have died may have passed their papers to members of their families or to institutions without leaving clues that I have been able to find; letters may have ended up in unpredictable hands, or may still lurk unseen wherever they were first put aside.

My hope is that the publication of this volume will stir memories, so that future volumes can be more representative, and so that further letters which fall into the time-span of this volume can be added to its future impressions, or prefixed to the next volume. Hence this request for letters and information. Berlin did not keep copies of his handwritten letters, and his secretaries did not always keep copies of those in typescript; even when they did, there were often additions to and corrections of the top copy that were not recorded on the duplicate. So I am dependent on the generosity of owners for the chance to select from the widest possible range of letters, and to use their final texts (when these survive).

I undertake to treat whatever I am shown with due discretion; and I should naturally respect any wish on the part of correspondents that particular letters or passages should not be quoted or published at all, or not within a particular time-limit. I should be glad to receive (and cover the cost of) photocopies of letters if their owners prefer not to lend originals. Any originals sent on loan can be copied and returned quickly.

A second motive for this request is to accumulate as complete a collection of Berlin’s correspondence as possible, now, before it is too late; and to deposit additional items (with suitable embargoes if necessary) alongside the archive of his papers now housed at – and owned by – the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Already, with the passage of time and the death of some of his correspondents, many of his letters have been lost or destroyed.

I take this opportunity of saying that I should also be grateful for other archival material – for example, photographs, and (tape recordings or transcripts of) interviews or lectures not listed in the catalogues of such items in The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library,^fn1 and anecdotal information about Berlin that may supplement what is already known to me.

My postal address is Wolfson College, OXFORD, OX2 6UD, UK; my email address henry.hardy@wolfson.ox.ac.uk.

H.H.

PREFACE

Drinks before dinner

I am always disappointed when a book lacks a preface: it is like arriving at someone’s house for dinner, and being conducted straight into the dining-room. A preface is personal, the body of the book impersonal: the preface tells you the author’s feelings about his book, or some of them. A reader who wishes to remain aloof can skip the preface without loss; but one who wants to be personally introduced has, I feel, the right to be.

Michael Dummett^fn1

I FIRST BROACHED the publication of his letters with Isaiah Berlin after lunching with him in All Souls in the late 1980s. Over coffee, we were discussing my possible departure from Oxford University Press to work on his papers, and when the question of his letters came up I said that publication would have to be selective. I had in mind the large quantity of material, the likely views of publishers about what the market would stand, and the fact that some letters were less interesting than, or repetitive of, others, and so did not merit inclusion, at any rate in an edition intended for a general readership. His response, which came without any noticeable pause for reflection, surprised me, since it was so unlike his reliably self-deprecating reaction to suggestions about publishing his academic writing. He brushed aside my instinct for selectivity and said that, if the job was to be done, it should be done thoroughly. The edition should be ‘full-bottomed’, free of half measures.

Broadly speaking, I have since been guided by that clearly stated preference, though it would have been unwise to follow it too literal-mindedly. All the reasons for selectivity just cited do indeed apply, even if they can be followed with a lighter or a heavier hand. A heavier hand would have fashioned the one-volume selection that some publishers argued for, but that outcome would have been unfaithful not only to Berlin’s wishes, but also to the quality of the material. Even the present degree of selection has required strong doses of self-denial.

The present, provisional, plan is that there should eventually be three volumes. The foundation of Wolfson College in 1966, or perhaps Berlin’s retirement as President in 1975, is likely to provide the break between the second and third volumes. But all options remain open until the time comes. Indeed, this first volume was originally to have ended when Berlin left England for the USA for the first time in July 1940, but the preference of all publishers for fewer volumes than I at first envisaged, together with the more rounded impression of Berlin that emerges if his wartime output is included with his pre-war letters, led me to extend its coverage.

CORRESPONDENCE AND CORRESPONDENTS

[Berlin] was internationally significant not only for his own achievements as philosopher, intellectual, teacher, writer and public figure, but also because he moved in so many different circles, corresponded with so many of the leading figures of his day, participated in so many momentous political and cultural events, was a beloved friend and mentor to so many others.^fn2

Berlin, it hardly needs saying, was one of the most notable intellectual figures of the twentieth century. A leading liberal thinker of his time, indeed one of the most renowned English thinkers of the post-war era, he continues to be the focus of widespread interest and discussion, and the subject of conferences, books and other publications in many languages – not only because of his important ideas and the distinctive essays in which he recorded them, but because of the manner of man that he was. This is not the place to retell the story of his life – a biographical sketch giving the main details appears below,^fn3 and Michael Ignatieff’s perceptive authorised biography^fn4 has already done the job splendidly – but something should be said about the correspondence.

Berlin was a prolific as well as an incomparable letter-writer throughout his life, and a very large number of his letters survive, which makes possible the publication of a selection fully representative of his multiple epistolary topics and personae. The first extant letter known to me was written in March 1928, by an eighteen-year-old St Paul’s schoolboy, to G. K. Chesterton, asking him to contribute to a new school magazine, and the last at the end of October 1997 to Anatoly Naiman, Anna Akhmatova’s friend and (latterly) secretary, less than a week before Berlin’s death.^fn5 Spread through the almost three score years and ten between, there are thousands of other letters, covering all aspects and stages of Berlin’s long, active and productive life: his time in Oxford as undergraduate, researcher, teacher, lecturer, professor and founding President of Wolfson College; his many visits to North America, Europe, Palestine/Israel and beyond; his work during the Second World War in New York, Washington and Moscow; his activities as administrator, author, critic and broadcaster. Running through the correspondence are several recurrent themes: these include his relationship with his parents, especially his mother, until their deaths, and from the 1950s with his wife Aline; his enormous and diverse network of friends and acquaintances; his love of gossip and anecdote; and his increasingly numerous interchanges with students and critics of his work. The correspondence spreads far beyond Oxford and academe into many other worlds, especially those of the arts and politics, in many countries.

The list of his correspondents includes a roll-call of men and women prominent not only in academia, but in politics, journalism, society, literature, music and art: Joseph Alsop, Noel Annan, A. J. Ayer, Lauren Bacall, Cecil Beaton, Max Beloff, Violet Bonham Carter, Elizabeth Bowen, Maurice Bowra, Alfred Brendel, E. H. Carr, Noam Chomsky, Winston Churchill, Sibyl Colefax, Emerald Cunard, Abba Eban, T. S. Eliot, Margot Fonteyn, Felix and Marion Frankfurter, Stuart Hampshire, Jacqueline Kennedy, Teddy Kollek, Harold Macmillan, Yehudi Menuhin, Nicolas Nabokov, L. B. Namier, Karl Popper, Anthony Powell, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, John Sparrow, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. P. Taylor, The Prince of Wales, Ava Waverley, Chaim Weizmann, Bernard Williams, Edmund Wilson and many more. But often it is the most unremarkable correspondents who receive the most remarkable letters: Berlin was scrupulous and generous in answering letters, no matter what their source; and of course he relished, above all, writing to his closest friends.

The vein of social comedy that runs through the letters and (hundreds of) postcards truthfully displays Berlin’s ebulliently positive temperament: he was good company, a virtuoso in conversation, an essentially happy person, a lover of life in many of its various manifestations. Nor is he a stranger to self-mockery: ‘I have always been prone to coloured descriptions of unimportant phenomena.’^fn6 What he writes is rarely drily academic: there is, if anything, more about people – his supreme interest – than about ideas and events, especially in this first volume. Above all, he gossips: ‘life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends’,^fn7 he once wrote; ‘destroy this letter’, he often directed, but, fortunately for us, the injunction was usually ignored.

During this initial period Berlin moved from St Paul’s School, then in the London borough of Hammersmith, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he took firsts in Greats in 1931 and in PPE in 1932.^fn8 He took up a post as Lecturer in Philosophy at New College in October 1932, and soon afterwards won a Fellowship by Examination (or ‘Prize Fellowship’) at All Souls – he was the first Jew to be elected to the College. In 1938, after completing the biography of Marx that primarily occupied him at All Souls, he became a Fellow of New College. In early July 1940 he left for America with Guy Burgess, intending to proceed to Moscow, but stayed in the US, apart from visits home and his famous trip in 1945–6 to the Soviet Union, until early April 1946, at which point this volume closes.

The pre-war letters are handwritten, but in America he learns to use a secretary. The secretaries had to learn to work for him, too, as these extracts from letters written in 1952 by one of them, Lelia Brodersen,^fn9 to a friend testify:

He has an Oxford accent, a lisp, an inability to say r,^fn10 & the most inconceivably rapid “delivery” that I have ever heard outside of a patter song […] On Tuesday, typewriter in hand & despair in heart, I arrived at the Deanery, where he is staying. […]. I took his letters directly on the typewriter, which forced him to make pauses, since the noise of the machine forced itself upon him; he is happy to have things struck over, x’ed out, etc., & will sign literally anything; his letters are charming & occasionally pathetic; & he is movingly shy, polite, helpless, & apologetic. And – on Thursday, when I went again, & he was shortly called to the telephone, I started to read a reprint which he had lying on his desk “Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism.”^fn11 I was at once caught up into it; & when he came back I asked him if he could spare it for a few days. “Oh, take it, take it,” he said, fumbling madly among his papers. “I have them to send to people – take it – keep it.” So I did, & when I had finished it I settled once & for all into the impression that here was a near-great, if not a really great man. […]

I have grown curiously fond of him. I won’t be sorry to conclude the secretarial part of it, but I will be sorry to see him go. There is a peculiar sweetness & charm there which grows upon one half-imperceptibly. It has really been quite an experience altogether.

THE BUILDER AND THE BUTLER

I can’t get used to your servant’s manner […] he behaves as if he’s on equal terms, he makes conversation …^fn12

It is utterly impossible to persuade an Editor that he is nobody.

William Hazlitt^fn13

Hazlitt had a point. Nevertheless, there is sometimes a constructive role for this irritating parasite, so long as he remembers his station. What this station is varies considerably. Indeed, the notion of an editor is so capacious that one sometimes wonders how useful it is. What does the Editor of The Times who thunders on world issues have in common with the editor who establishes the text of Aeschylus, or the publisher’s editor who tinkers with commas? Fortunately, context usually determines roughly which part of the wide editorial terrain is in question, though further particulars of the specific brief in operation are usually helpful.

Two rather different metaphors tend to come to my mind when I reflect on the peculiar editorial role that has fallen to me personally; between them they seem to me to capture many of the most important features of what I do, at any rate as I see it. The first metaphor is that of the stonemason slowly assembling a great building, perhaps a cathedral, from blocks of stone that are provided for him, some cut to size, some needing adjustment to fit into place. The other is that of the butler silently lurking behind the green baize door, his vision narrowed by its confinement within the household he serves, but also sharpened by its concentration on his restricted domain.

The mason is not (at any rate today) the architect of the cathedral; yet the architect’s vision is realised through the sympathetic work of the builder’s hands on the materials he is given. The blocks may be prepared in advance, but they have to be exactly placed, and sometimes adjusted when unforeseen problems occur; the mortar for the joints between them must be well mixed in the right proportions, and the blocks must be carefully pointed, with no gaps. When the mason is done, the finished structure stands, if he has done his work well, as a monument not only to the artistic conception that made it a possibility, but to the workmanship which gave that conception physical form. Another builder could have done the job as well or better; but the building that stands for all to see was made by this one.

The butler operates from below stairs, which gives him a privileged but distorted view. He sees or hears of most of what goes on in his master’s house, except for the most private episodes, but he is so myopically focused on the details of his microcosm that he finds it difficult or impossible to relate it, at any rate in a balanced or informed way, to the wider world. He knows every nuance of procedure at the social functions at which he officiates, but is tempted to believe that this is what all such functions are like, since he does not witness those in any other establishment. He is an unrivalled source of information about the minutiae of his employer’s doings, but sees them out of context and out of proportion, and can therefore be naïve and unperceptive about their implications, resonances and overtones. Once again, too, he is replaceable in a way in which his employer is not; but it is at his hands that the household’s infrastructure is kept in some kind of working order.

The editor, then – this editor, at any rate – is essentially a lieutenant, a number two to the author whose work is under his care. When on duty, he does not wish to put himself forward too stridently; for this is not the purpose of the exercise. That purpose is to construct an edifice that realises the implicit vision of its designer, even if some of his plans were left in a fragmentary and ambiguous state at his death. It is to manage a social occasion that best displays the host’s personality, not to distract the guests by obtrusively self-advertising antics. The glasses must seem to fill themselves. Who welcomes a waiter who interrupts his customers’ conversation, still worse seeks to contribute to it, except in the most tangential and un-argumentative fashion? Who asks a builder for a lecture on architecture, or invites a butler to run a course on domestic management?

This is the rationale – sheer incompetence apart – for the absence of a strong directing critical hand in this edition. Some might seek, for example, by way of introduction, a scintillating vignette of Oxford life in the 1930s, or a résumé of the sociology of wartime America. Even if such aids were desirable, I am not the one to provide them, not being a social historian, or indeed a historian of any kind.^fn14 Besides, Berlin himself has well described the background of his wartime work in two pieces that I reproduce here as appendices, and the letters themselves clearly bespeak the worlds from which they emerge, as they do the personality of their author. In any event, I should not wish to interpose a particular set of spectacles between the text and its readers, as if I could tell them how to read Berlin’s words. My aim, as explained in a little more detail below, has been to free readers (in Berlin’s own terms, and in his spirit) negatively, not positively, to make what they pluralistically will of what he writes, by providing them with the minimum of factual information that they need in order to understand what is being said, and then to react to it as they see fit.^fn15 What is offered here is raw material, not a pre-processed critical package.

THE ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION

There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others, have shaped human history in the twentieth century. One is the development of the natural sciences and technology, certainly the greatest success story of our time.

Isaiah Berlin^fn16