Isaiah Berlin affected me like nobody else I had known; though he was not particularly handsome, I tended to react to him a little as if he were an attractive woman whom I wanted to amuse and please, and this attitude on my part evoked a kind of coquetry on his. (Edmund Wilson in conversation with Stephen Spender, 1954)
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) and Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) were formidable figures in their respective areas, literary journalism and philosophy, who became good friends. As writers they shared a novelistic sensibility. Wilson was the definitive biographical critic, a man of letters who once explained, ‘For me, literary criticism has always meant narrative and drama as well as an establishing of comparative values.’ Berlin was an intellectual historian whose forte was empathy, for taking his subjects’ world view from the inside. In a 1954 letter to Noel Annan, for example, Berlin wrote, ‘I do try to paint the anschauung [views] of these men: & delight in the colours themselves: & try to find out & say what their worlds looked like to them.’
It is doubtless fanciful to wonder if their tendency to personalise a subject might have stemmed from feelings of alienation. Wilson was a privileged scion of Dutch and British ancestry, whose lawyer father had been Attorney General of New Jersey. Yet after attending Princeton (with F. Scott Fitzgerald) he served in a hospital unit in France during the First World War, searching for independence from family expectation and problematic relationships with both parents. Later Wilson, who was habitually underfunded as a result of his strained relationship with his deaf, widowed mother, avoided an academic path and worked variously as an editor, and literary and social critic, establishing an enviable reputation by the end of the 1920s. He later published a brilliant study of the European literary avant-garde (Axel’s Castle, 1931), a portrait of intellectual revolutionary history culminating in the Russian Revolution (To the Finland Station, 1940) and a major survey of American literature in the Civil War (Patriotic Gore, 1962). A man of large appetites for alcohol and sex, he entered into a number of tempestuous marriages and liaisons which he delighted writing about in almost forensic detail in his journals. By the end of his career, Wilson was phenomenally well published, being something of an institution. When Isaiah Berlin first met him he was a little taken aback by facing ‘a thickset, red-faced, pot-bellied figure.’
Sir Isaiah Berlin seemed the antithesis: a clubbable character secure for most of his career in a protective ivory tower from which he published few books, and a bachelor into middle age. However, though it would be impossible to detect from his speaking voice, Berlin was a genuine outsider, coming to England at the age of twelve from a Jewish timber merchant family, after living in Riga (Latvia) and then Petrograd (St. Petersburg) until the October Revolution. He was educated at St. Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Aside from the war years, which he spent largely at the British Embassy, he had a post-war posting to Russia (which led to the famous meeting with the poet Anna Akhmatova) and then a life at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College. A much celebrated public figure, known to the wider public through his writings and radio broadcasts, Berlin was knighted in 1957. Though a prolific writer of essays and reviews (and a translator of the nineteenth-century Russian author, Ivan Turgenev), his published books have largely been the result of the inexhaustible editorial efforts of Henry Hardy.
In his memoir ‘Edmund Wilson at Oxford’ Isaiah Berlin remembered meeting Wilson in 1946, after returning from Moscow to the British embassy in Washington. The war had kept the two apart, despite their mutual friends the Nabokovs, on Wilson’s side because his Anglophobia warned him against being drawn into any pro-British propaganda. The war over, he invited Berlin to lunch at the Princeton Club in New York and they hit it off. Here Berlin captures Wilson’s well documented talking manner: ‘He spoke in a curiously strangled voice, with gaps between his sentences, as if ideas jostled and thrashed about inside him … which made for short bursts, emitted staccato, interspersed with gentle, low-voiced, legato passages.’
Their meeting must have been an auditory wonder, since Berlin himself was also famously singular in his delivery, which was torrential [see the lectures and interviews on You Tube]. As Ian Buruma reported in his essay, ‘The Last Englishman’, ‘Berlin had cultivated the mannerisms of a pre-war Oxford don: the stuttering delivery, the anecdotes, the relish for gossip, the absolute refusal to be to obviously serious.’ Wilson read the influence on Berlin’s delivery – after a comment by a friend of Arthur Koestler’s – as that of a certain type of Talmudic scholar.
A mountain of letters and reminiscences testify to Berlin’s charm as a companion (rivalled only by his reputation as a gossip) and Wilson’s own charm (not least for philandering) was as legendary as were his difficult moods. According to a late remark of Berlin’s, Wilson was a man uncomfortable in his own skin, while Berlin had ‘radiated well-being’, according to his New York Times obituary (which continues, ‘ “He gives everybody the unforgettable feeling of what it’s like to be well in your own skin, of what a sense of health one derives from the intellectual life,” his biographer, Mr. Ignatieff, said in 1996.’)
At their meetings, however, it was the matter of the conversation as much as the manner that pleased them both. On the first occasion they talked of Dante, Pushkin and Russia, where Wilson had undergone a disillusioning visit in 1935 (In fact it was Axel’s Castle and the The Triple Thinkers (1938), which included the essay ‘In Honour of Pushkin’, that had first attracted Berlin’s ‘intense admiration’). Both men also admired the Jewish intellectual and moral tradition. For Berlin the American critic had a fearless quality which sparked his enthusiasm. Of an early meeting, he wrote that Wilson:
told me how ill he thought of the English & French, how well of Russians & Americans. I expect in an obscure way that is why I like his writings so much, the serious nineteenth-century moral approach, the heavy quality of feeling, the absence of polish, elegance, & innate traditional manners & taste. Anyhow I found him very well worth talking with: shy & full of half articulate sentences gurgling upwards … later he thawed & bubbled away very agreeably.
On his part, the bubbling, unpolished Wilson was equally taken with the gossipy prof. He recounted to Mamaine Koestler a visit by Berlin in June 1949 to Wellfleet, Wilson’s home and how:
We spent the whole time talking brilliantly, covering rapidly, but with astonishing knowledge, sure intelligence, and breathtaking wit, an incredible variety of subjects. Since he has left, it has occurred to me, however, that, having hardly known him before, I unloaded on him all the best stories, bon mots, and stimulating ideas of virtually my whole life as if they were new and spontaneous, and that he may have been doing the same thing with me.
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At work, Wilson and Berlin not only reflected brilliantly on a subject; they reflected in it. To take just one instance, from among their Russian writings, they each published a substantial essay on Turgenev, with whose talent but liberal vacillation many contemporary writers feel an affinity. Wilson’s essay was written in 1957, Berlin’s in 1970. In both cases a celebration of a kindred spirit became a testament of their own position. For Wilson, the cosmopolitan Turgenev was like a ‘personal friend’, to Berlin he had become increasingly an alter ego. The source of their identification lay not only in the author’s magnetism but in that impulse to personalise a subject. Wilson analysed Turgenev in terms of the forces that animated his fiction, including the part his own life played in it, while Berlin focused on the historical context and the degree to which the novelist contributed to the issues of his day. Together, they offer biography from within and without.
Edmund Wilson recorded in his diary in 1958 how he has ‘been reading [Turgenev] straight through’ and has ‘never lost my appetite for him’. Doubtless reflecting on his own background, he wondered at ‘the monster Turgenev’s mother was’, attributing the author’s pacific nature perhaps to ‘a case of reacting in the opposite direction’. To another correspondent he reported how Turgenev is ‘soothing and beneficent’ and the author of ‘a more objective picture of Russia than Tolstoy or Dostoevsky – a picture that explains the failure of the Russians since the Revolution to build themselves a modern state.’
Of ‘Turgenev and the Life-Giving Drop’, the essay Wilson produced, his biographer Lewis M. Dabney observed:
Wilson writes, affirming his own intellectual ideal, ‘he sticks to his objective judgement, his line of realistic criticism, his resolve to stand free of movements, to rise above personalities, to recognize all points of view that have any sincerity or dignity, to show Russia how to know herself.’ (Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature)
At the time, in a moment of satisfaction, Wilson wrote to a friend of his ‘feat’ in having sold the 17,000 words to The New Yorker (a feat he later repeated by selling a longer version to Faber for Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences). Isaiah Berlin was not among the admiring. He wrote to friends in December 1957 that he was ducking replying to the essay Wilson had sent because ‘it seems to me on the whole one of the least good things he has done’. He confesses, ‘As always he says some telling and interesting things’ such as locating Turgenev’s talent vis-à-vis Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and his liberalism. ‘But as for the rest he seems to be telling the plots of Turgenev’s novels ‘in his own words’, as one used to do at school – perhaps he is very poor and it is simply a matter of words on a page.’ This last he ‘half withdraws’ for it malice. ‘But somehow the whole article was uninteresting, did not bring out what was fascinating.’ He goes on to suggest Wilson has focused in the fifty-page article on defending the book he was nominally reviewing – Turgenev: A Life, by David Magarshack – against English ‘snobs.’
Thirteen years later Berlin delivered a lecture of comparable length and more substance on the same author. His Romanes Lecture in Oxford, ‘Fathers and Children – Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament’ later appeared in arguably his best book, Russian Thinkers (1978). Although the exiled socialist writer Alexander Herzen interested him more, the identification with the apparently irresolute Turgenev continued all Berlin’s life. To the Polish historian Andrzej Walicki he confessed:
I go on thinking about Turgenev: caught in a situation not all unlike our own, unable, as he said himself. ‘to simplify himself’, constantly attacked by both sides, constantly anxious to please the young and yet, when the crisis comes, unable to commit himself totally, although perfectly able to demean himself before authority and incur the wrath of Herzen and those to the left of him.
Berlin knew his lecture ‘will certainly be regarded as self-reflective and pro domo’ as he indicated in a letter to Nicholas Nabokov, composer cousin of Vladimir. He goes on to assert that this is not the case and then expresses the irony that this is exactly what the Turgenev himself would say. As with the Wilson essay, we see the reflection of the essayist in the glass, most obviously in the lines, ‘Turgenev possessed in a highly developed form what Herder called Einfűhlen (empathy), an ability to enter into beliefs, feelings and attitudes, alien and at times acutely antipathetic to his own’. One thinks immediately of Berlin and Counter-Enlightenment writers like Joseph de Maistre. At the end of the essay Berlin brings the Turgenev predicament up to date, inviting the parallel again: ‘The dilemma of morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute polarisation of opinion has, since his time, grown acute and world-wide.’
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Wilson and Berlin were nothing if not ‘morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men’, though not necessarily always socially. The one occasion on which they really tested the tensile strength of friendship was on a visit to England in 1954, where Wilson almost wore out the then bachelor professor with his predetermined negativity. The version which appears in Wilson’s journal, The Fifties, presents a self-portrait of an eminent American among the charlatans of decaying English academia. In contrast, Berlin’s fond memoir ‘Edmund Wilson at Oxford’ (first published in 1987), describes a disastrous, occasionally hilarious event, with Wilson in an irascible, belligerent Anglophobic mood and Berlin – characteristically anxious to please – on tenterhooks.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Edmund Wilson’s account of London and Oxford, in a journal aimed at publication, portrays the critic as shrewd and balanced in his behaviour, if a little cynical. It is an account without a whiff of alcohol, Wilson’s habitual medium. Reading it, one needs to bear in mind that Edmund Wilson had long held a jaundiced opinion of England: its class system (even more rigorous in his imagination than in life); its fogbound traditions; its flaunting of superiority even amidst austerity; and most potently, in Wilson’s view, its having dragged isolationist America into two World Wars. We might remember his earlier flirtation with Marxism and how, in Europe Without Baedeker (1947), on an immediate post-war visit, he had found in London ‘a certain flavour of Soviet Moscow’, the people ‘irritable’, the upper classes supercilious, imperialist, the ‘new lower middle class’ at the mercy of cultural Americanization, signs ‘mostly stale and depressing’. His irritation had been fuelled by what he described to the philosopher George Santayana at the time as ‘the exacerbated antagonism of the English toward the Americans.’
However, in The Fifties journal, on this particular visit, Wilson recounts how he initially ‘enjoyed London, which seemed almost its old comfortable self’, especially when showing his family around. There he meets up with friends like Angus Wilson, Stephen Spender and, of course, Berlin (‘in his liveliest London form’). Unfortunately events like the Listener party and the New Statesman lunch begin to try his patience, which releases his scarcely veiled hostility, his ‘discreetly aggressive policy’. He prefers subversive figures like Cyril Connolly and accuses others of employing ‘Bloomsbury’ tactics (such as dismissing writers one has not read). In his account Berlin concludes that
It was the aestheticism, the prissiness, the superciliousness, the cliquishness, the thin, piping voices, the bloodlessness, the preoccupation with one’s own emotions both in life and literature – all of which he (no less than D. H. Lawrence) attributed to Bloomsbury – that irritated him. He thought that the whole of English literary life was infected by this.
In Oxford Wilson revels in his iconoclasm. The town itself has deteriorated since his 1914 visit, the buildings being ‘in very bad repair – shabby and crumbling, scrofulous and leprous.’ The room Berlin assigns him is ‘a dismal little cell like a fourth-rate New York rooming house’. It is not long before he determines that a like fate has befallen its academics (regularly the butt of Wilson’s scorn): ‘The intramural spites and grudges, cliques and snobberies, celibate jealousies, rather sickened me – along with the monastic staleness,’ he concludes.
According to his dyspeptic account Wilson is effectively forced by Berlin to meet the biographer Lord David Cecil, who ‘skipped around like a jumping jack, sat down on a footstool, talked in my face’. He is also confronted with the company of other friends of Berlin, Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley, who ‘fatigued and bored me extremely’. (Warming to his disagreeability earlier in the London visit, Wilson had decided that Cecil and Maurice Bowra, the classicist, ‘blackball’ people at Oxford, a view he explains to Cyril Connolly and then attributes it to him by way of authentication.)
There are felicitous meetings, with historians Cecil Roth and then the ‘agreeable and interesting’ A. J. P. Taylor, at which Taylor and Wilson lament the enduring virulence of the English class system. He even enjoys a whiff of criticism about his host and good friend:
I had sometimes felt with Isaiah before, that one feels him at moments scraping bottom when he has sailed into the shallows of his mind, but it is evident that Taylor, in the plain English tradition, cannot appreciate what they call at Oxford ‘the Delphic side of Isaiah’, which is also the prophetic Jewish side.
Berlin’s memoir – later republished in Personal Impressions (1998) – is both a loving act of friendship and perhaps – as a shot of Wilson behaving badly – even an ‘ever-so-polite’ revenge. In his Wodehousian version, Wilson takes Berlin by surprise, virtually phoning from the airport. Hence there is little time to prepare for the visit. Walking the colleges, Wilson observes that most of the buildings appear to be falling down, like much else in England and, ominously, ‘I think your country deserves a bit of this.’ This is just the beginning. ‘He then launched into a sweeping attack on academic life and academic in general as murderers of all that was living and real in literature and art’. Wilson continues in the same vein for some time but insists on dining at All Souls anyway, as ‘he wished to plumb the depths of old, decayed, conservative English academic life in its death-throes.’
At dinner in the Common Room at All Souls College, Wilson sits between Berlin and A. L. Rowse, whom he largely ignores, though he later claims to have been subjected to ‘a flood of British nationalist propaganda’ from the eminent historian. The ‘obvious disaffection’ in the college servants that Wilson relates in his account appears to be manifest in their hurried execution of duties. According to Wilson, Berlin explains, they ‘were acutely class-conscious, hated their masters, wanted to serve them as gracelessly as possible and get away from their hated presence as quickly as they could.’ Berlin almost suppresses his delight in the high comedy of this judgement, being well-aware, as he informs the reader, that these ‘scouts’ are almost caricatures of ‘old retainers’ and among the most conservative of traditionalists.
The stage set for enacting his prejudices, his ‘angry fantasy’, he meets Berlin’s friends, Cecil, Murdoch and Bayley. ‘It was not a happy evening’ is the hapless Berlin’s polite summation, his visitor drowning boredom with whiskey. The next day at Wilson’s insistence he arranges the meeting with Taylor despite, as he explains with impeccable manners, ‘a slight froideur caused by a somewhat disparaging review he had written of a small book I had just published.’
At the end of the day, good friendships tend to weather disasters, even if the gloss wears a little. (In his The Sixties journal it is Wilson who complains testily that without his wife Aline ‘presiding’, Berlin, ‘like all professional raconteurs, talkers … wears you out by his constant demands on you to agree, to approve.’). Yet in their twenty six years of friendship Edmund Wilson and Sir Isaiah Berlin shared that prerequisite of a good relationship: the comfort of relying on a certain common perspective. As Berlin observed finally:
The fact that my prejudices largely coincided with [Wilson’s] own was, of course, an immense source of sympathy and endearment. It was perhaps this more than anything else that brought us together.