The Meaning of Recognition (52 page)

Sexually inoperative but incorrigibly flirtatious, he loved the high-born ladies, who loved him right back, although his paucity of physical response – a desert under the ocean of talk
– led several of them to despair, and one of them to the mad-house. On this evidence, his appeal was no mystery. Clever young beauties with hyphenated surnames found themselves being adored
for their cleverness as much as their beauty. A single letter to Cressida Bonham-Carter is peppered with references to Beethoven, Tolstoy, Kafka, Racine, Henry James, Debussy, Proust, Bartok, Berg
and St John of the Cross. It probably went down a storm. Certainly she didn’t ask him to lay off the erudition, because his next letter to her mentions Diderot, Balzac, Maupassant and
Turgenev, while commending her for agreeing with him about the attractions of his admired Herzen, whom Berlin himself had discovered only recently, while researching his monograph on Karl Marx.
Herzen’s magnanimity – in such sharp contrast to Marx’s vengeful rancour – had bowled him over. (‘There is no writer, & indeed no man I shd like to be like, &
to write like, more.’) These letters to Cressida were written in 1938, by which time it must have been obvious to him that the old world he had already seen coming apart was showing few signs
of putting itself back together. Clearly he thought, as Herzen did, that it could be put back together spiritually, in a
convivio
of civilized minds favoured by the seemingly unshakeable
social cohesion of Britain, his land of exile.

It hardly needs saying that there were plenty of intelligent native-born people at the time who thought that the social cohesion was bound for well-deserved ruin. But he noticed that they were
almost all well connected. To join the Communist party, he observed, was mainly a way for guilty liberals to feel serious. A more serious liberal than that, he firmly recommended, not least by his
behaviour, the inherited political stability that enabled subversive opinion to be expressed safely in the first place. If his success as an adornment of grand dinner tables looks a bit cosy in
retrospect, we should not forget that he had small reason to question the impenetrable exclusiveness of a social structure’s upper works if they were penetrable and inclusive enough to allow
his own ascent to favour. He was the living proof of what he proposed as a necessary condition for liberalism: hang on to what works,
pas de zèle,
no root-and-branch solutions for
the problems of a civil order that was something far more complicated than a tree. Left-leaning intellectuals who thought that society was on the point of ceasing to work altogether had good reason
for despising his attitude as a voluble incitement to do nothing. So it was, but it arose from an acute apprehension of what might happen if the wrong things were done.

From this distance, the apprehension looks like a perception. There were many intellectuals of comparable status who could not accept until many years later that the society they already lived
in was the only reliable source of any alterations that might improve it. Berlin took that for granted: so much so that he didn’t write much on the subject. Professionally, he didn’t
yet feel obliged to. His little book on Marx was a one-off, although its attendant prodigies of research would serve him well in his post-war future. Throughout the thirties – and indeed
right up until the famous wartime Atlantic crossing when he had his change of heart in the unpressurized belly of a bomber – he was nominally a philosopher, not an historian of ideas; and the
philosophers of the day were already well set on the hermetic course that would separate their
métier
from any obligations to interdisciplinary wisdom. But significantly, he
didn’t write much on the subject in his letters either. Not only was society unquestioned: so were its questioners. Stalin gets only a few lines of the index, and Hitler fewer still. There is
a whole column for Maurice Bowra. (‘on Forster as bore, 104;’ ‘hates Connolly, 142;’ etc. and
ad inf
.)

Apart from Berlin’s sharply expressed objection to his aristocratic friend Adam von Trott’s apologetics for the Nazi legal system – a system that would later reward von Trott
by hanging him from a hook – the paucity, in the letters, of Berlin’s written reaction to the global disaster that emanated from Hitler’s Germany would be continued after the war,
when, no longer a formal philosopher, he began producing the long string of lectures, broadcasts and essays that gave him his enduring lustre as an intellectual. Hardly any of his public writings
impinged directly on that subject; an omission we can safely postpone examining until after taking account of the considerable amount he wrote about the Soviet Union, because there would also be an
omission in that, and one that might provide a generally applicable clue. Some of the later letters in the book evoke his celebrated meeting with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in 1945. It was one of
the key episodes in his life, and, indeed, in Akhmatova’s. (Understandably self-obsessed after years of mental torture, she thought that her meeting with Berlin – ‘the guest from
the future’ – was the cause of the Cold War.) His correspondence on the topic presaged the post-war wealth of his writings about Russia in general (to be found in the 1978 collection
Russian Thinkers
) and the Soviet Union in particular. To a certain extent they had been presaged by his book on Marx, but by now he knew that Stalin was the man to contend with.

In
The Soviet Mind
, the latest posthumous collection of Berlin’s dispersed papers, it’s Stalin who gets the whole column in the index. Maurice Bowra gets a single mention,
and there is nothing frivolous even about that. Bowra, an early translator of some of Akhmatova’s poems, had spoken of her as someone not heard of since World War I. When Berlin found her
still alive at the end of World War II, he made a lot of it. Her beleaguered career under the Soviet Union is at the heart of the book. There is reason to believe that her survival led Berlin to a
false conclusion, but there are plenty of true conclusions to consider first. In 1957 he wrote that Stalin’s repression of ‘ideas as such’ had had a destructive effect even on the
sciences, whether pure or applied. He could have taken this line further, and certainly much further back: Solzhenitsyn took it as far back as the fate of the engineers when Stalin first came to
power. But at least the point takes care of what happened to Russian genetics under Stalin’s pet crackpot Lysenko, a triumph for charlatanry which ensured that anything left of Soviet
agricultural expertise after the ravages of collectivization was reduced to a terminal impotence. Berlin was capable of assessing the effects of Stalin’s dead hand in fields other than the
arts, so when it comes to the arts it is no surprise to find him being acutely sensitive to the desperate position that the serious Russian writers were in, at a time when prominent Western writers
still felt no shame about accepting invitations to Moscow so that they could spend the blocked roubles of their royalties. Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak emerge from these pages as giants harried by
swarming pygmies. It turns out, from Berlin’s text and the editor’s notes to it, that when Zhdanov, in 1946, infamously characterized Akhmatova as ‘half whore, half nun’, he
was lifting a tag that had already appeared in the
Soviet Literary Encyclopedia
in 1930, and was not new even then. The party apparatchiks had always had boundless powers to suffocate the
creativity of their intellectual betters. The ability to pick which head merited the application of a pillow was a kind of intellectual qualification in itself. (Solzhenitsyn said it was called
‘the Moscow talent’: the talent to frustrate talent in others.) There was never any danger that Berlin would regard such persecution as a mere cultural quirk. He clearly loathed it. But
what he says about the Mandelstams makes you wonder if he really took in all the implications.

In her two great books
Hope Against Hope
and
Hope Abandoned
, Nadezhda Mandelstam was talking about a lot more than personal losses among the intelligentsia. She was talking
about an impersonal bloodbath: in that regard, her writings rank her with Evgenia Ginzburg and Shalamov, and join her with Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest in tracing the whole catastrophe all the
way back to Lenin. For her, the death of her husband was at the centre of a far bigger story. Berlin, too, was appalled by Osip Mandelstam’s fate. But one of the points Berlin made about him
in the 1965 essay ‘A Great Russian Writer’ is oddly conciliatory towards the regime that murdered him. ‘No socialist society has (or at any rate, should have) anything to fear
from unfettered powers of creation . . . Perhaps like other
maîtres cachés
he too will be allowed to emerge into the light of day.’ It could have been that Berlin, with
Stalin safely out of the picture, was tempering his opinions in the hope of the essay being read in the Soviet Union and having a helpful effect. It even might have done so. Mandelstam’s
poetry, like Akhmatova’s, was indeed officially republished while the regime was still running. But again like hers, it was in a censored edition. Pretty in its blue binding but devoid of an
historical context, the Mandelstam volume was a Potemkin Village in printed form, with no hint in its supposedly scholarly introduction that the poet had fallen victim to much more than an
unfortunate accident. Compared with the three-volume collected works that had already been published in the West, it was an insult added to an injury. Certainly it did nothing to contest Josef
Brodsky’s resonant opinion that true lyricism, which embodies the ethics of a language, is always intolerable to a tyranny. Strangely enough, Berlin elsewhere seemed to be of the same mind:
he traced Stalin’s repression of the independent intellect back to Napoleon’s belief that all critics, of anything, should be silenced, lest they start criticizing him. But Osip
Mandelstam wasn’t just silenced: he was murdered. Berlin talked about him as if he had lived on in spirit – which was true – but made much less out of the recalcitrant fact that
he was dead. And in general Berlin preferred to talk about the Russian writers who had stayed alive, almost as if they had done so by will power. Nowhere in this book can he be heard going quite so
far as the opinion attributed to him by Ignatieff, who says that Berlin learned from Akhmatova that ‘history could be made to bow before the sheer stubbornness of human conscience’.
(According to Ignatieff’s footnote, Berlin said something like this in a letter to his friend Jean Floud, which we will probably be getting in the next volume.) But he did seem to believe, or
want to believe, that the hounded artists could somehow choose to resist. The facts, however, say that the only choosing was done by Stalin, who chose whether they would live or die.

As Berlin learned later to his horror, his meeting with Akhmatova put her in danger. Her few remaining privileges were revoked and she even ended up losing her union card, which meant that she
was no longer, from the official viewpoint, a writer at all. But there had been scores of moments since the Revolution when she might have lost her life, like her husband, or been locked away, like
her son. She stayed alive because of Stalin’s arbitrary decision, which could just as easily have gone the other way. Among the artists, it had gone the other way many times. Frantic to get
her son out of the Gulag, Akhmatova eventually wrote poems in praise of the regime. Her subservience was obtained in the same way that Bukharin’s confession had been obtained in 1938. (They
didn’t have to torture him. All they had to do was threaten his children.) And there had never been any time when, if her existence had been thought useless, it would not have been ended.
After the regime fell, Isaac Babel’s confession was found in a filing cabinet in the Lubyanka. There was dried blood on it. That was the extent to which history bowed before his stubborn
conscience: no extent. Babel’s fate gets precisely one mention in this book. Meyerhold’s gets two. But even had Berlin talked at length about them and about many other artists and
intellectuals equally unfortunate, he would still have been a prisoner of his illusion that the regime’s powers of repression were actuated by some variety of rational logic, however
ruthless. Yet there was plenty of evidence that the whole thing had been irrational from the beginning. The evidence had been pouring out of the Soviet Union since before Stalin even came to power.
After he did, his arbitrary decision went the other way millions of times. Berlin should have seen the sufferings of his living artists in the context of a multitude of less important people
– more than all the people alive in Australia when I was a boy – who were dead for no good reason, or even for a bad one. Some of his living artists tried hard enough to tell him, but
somehow he didn’t get it. It’s the somehow that should concern us.

The anomaly may well have arisen from Berlin’s fondness for seeing history always in the context of ideas. For him, political propensities, up to and including the propensity for mass
murder, arose out of the ideas leading up to them. He rarely considered that the ideas might have been preserved, and given lip service, only to serve the propensity. In ‘Soviet Russian
Culture’ (1957) he correctly noted that under the Soviet Union the Russian intelligentsia had been reduced to ‘silence and total submission’, but he added a revealing sentence.
‘Mere intimidation, torture and murder should not have proved sufficient in a country which, we are always told, was not unused to just such methods and had nevertheless preserved a
revolutionary underground alive for the better part of a century.’ Even at the time, when Khrushchev himself, who had been an energetic participant in the slaughter, had just finished
pointing out that there had been nothing ‘mere’ about it, Berlin’s proposed continuity between the relatively selective barbarities of Tsarist absolutism and the Soviet
Union’s unrestricted warfare against its own population should have struck him as a touch glib. There was, however, an even more revealing sentence to follow. ‘It is here that one must
acknowledge that Stalin achieved this by his own original contributions to the art of government.’