The Life of the Mind (Page 3)

Although British reviews have celebrated these letters as fine examples of the art, for the most part they are not. The prose is effluvial, a stream of thoughts and half-thoughts (sometimes too obviously passing), delivered in scarlet-waistcoated style. (Perhaps the finest example of his epistolary craft, and a sound model of etiquette should one ever be in a similar predicament, is a hilarious letter written to his hostess after a party, confessing to the unintended thievery of a silver matchbox.) For one who was initially regarded as a philosopher, there are few signs of an instinctive fascination with philosophical problems. Berlin considered himself a failure as a philosopher (though a happy failure), and by the standards of twentieth-century professional philosophy, he was. He was interested in dimensions of life that resist systematization: original thought, literature, politics, conversation, friendship, statesmanship, judgment. In the course of these letters we see him coming to a realization that he did not want to pursue formal philosophy any further. Instead, he allowed himself to be pulled in different directions by his various interests: His intellectual life was by invitation ("hailed like a taxi," as he put it)--this was how his major project of these years, a biographical study of Karl Marx, came about.

A large chunk of this volume contains letters written while Berlin was living in America--he went there for the first time in the summer of 1940, to join the British Embassy. America utterly depressed him. "There is no social mystery, no special social mazes which in principle cannot be represented by a definite plan, as eg Oxford, Cambridge, Bloomsbury," he wrote to Mary Fisher, "...everything is stated. If you omit, you are politely but relentlessly pressed for it.... I passionately long to [come] home," while to another friend he gave a still gloomier picture: "That America is hateful I hardly have to tell you. The inhabitants have no souls, only hearts at the most. Everybody is enormously relentlessly boring in a sense which extends the concept of the activity. They are all guilty, uneasy, frightened, brazen, stupid, muddled and generally intolerable.... I...have the reputation in America--you won't believe it--for melancholy & neurosis." At best, he could assure his parents that "Mother would like America v. much: open, vigorous, 2x2=4 sort of people, who want yes or no for an answer. No nuances. Food is superb everywhere." Yet he slowly came to appreciate the "brimming vitality" of the Americans, and to his surprise developed an avid interest in American politics, which he explained to his parents "must be because American political life is very personal in quality. Institutions play a far smaller part than individuals, and relations between individuals, the pattern of which is so strongly laid in Oxford itself, has, of course, always fascinated a gossip-loving character like me."

Berlin is now a canonized saint of the liberal intelligentsia, but it was never entirely clear just what sort of liberalism he stood for. His horror of "yes or no" went deep, and the letters fully indulge a habit that stayed with him: an intellectual evasiveness, an unwillingness to settle--or to be seen to settle--a position. That was part of his charm, a sign of his cultivated sense of the many-sidedness of the world. Yet it was also characteristic of Berlin to append his vortex of subordinate clauses to sharp dichotomies and alternatives. Hence the paradoxical effect often produced by reading him: the proximity of philosophical profundity to political simplicity.

The event that defined Berlin's political views was not the Holocaust or Nazism but 1917, which he saw as nothing but a world-historical catastrophe. Berlin's own cold war began then and continued for him till his death in 1997--unconnected to actual history. The great political subjects of the day certainly enter into these letters: The war and the fight against Nazism revealed to him that "the private world has cracked in numerous places," and while in America he was drawn into circles of Zionist argument. And yet they have a remote quality. "I don't understand world movements, & everyone seems to be blandly discussing the imminent collapse of European civilization, though I cannot see what can possibly be meant," Berlin confessed in 1935.

In fact, in political terms his liberalism consisted entirely of a deep antipathy toward totalitarianism--a position that at certain moments in the twentieth century required a degree of pluck (though perhaps less so in the senior common rooms of Oxford or the committee chambers of the British Academy) and reflected good character traits, but was hardly an intellectually difficult one to hold. Unlike some of his fellow European intellectual émigrés to Britain--Hayek, Popper, Gellner--Berlin remained entirely uninterested either in economic questions (what relationship might exist between capitalism and the variety of liberty he defended?) or in wider concerns about the nature of the social order. These letters abundantly display Berlin's intelligence and charm, but they also presage the limits of his political horizon. His natural milieus were seats of power--intellectual, cultural, political--and his later life was to be spent gliding between Oxford and his rooms at the Albany Hotel in London. Easy with power, beloved by its wielders, he would not be its critic.

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