Personal Impressions

"This book has been considerably enlarged in its latest (third) edition to take in many more pieces that he wrote after the first two editions appeared. It displays very well his ability to put himself in the shoes of a person whose view on life, whose values, whose attitudes might be significantly different from his own, and, indeed, very different from one another’s. So what you get is empathetic pen portraits of a wide range of startlingly different people. In that way he was very unlike those writers who tend to mine other thinkers and writers, and indeed people, for things that they can co-opt for their own agendas: they are always looking for things to agree with, and things to disagree with, so that everything is filtered through their own world view. What Berlin was very good at doing was emptying himself of his own preconceptions and standing in the shoes of these other people who are describing the world from their point of view. It’s a breathtakingly impressive capacity, and not only useful in sheer human terms in yielding a rich understanding of other living human beings – which you see in his Personal Impressions – but also in the more theoretical sphere, because it makes him an excellent historian of ideas. To understand another thinker fully, you need to deploy this kind of capacity and his capacity, in this regard, was second to none. Yes, it does. If you like, you can see the essays of Personal Impressions as a series of case studies in pluralism. This doesn’t come out much in Personal Impressions because, as he described it, it was a collection of éloges – funeral orations or obituaries or appreciations of people that he admired – so you don’t get so much of the cattiness there. But you do get a lot of the caustic remarks in the letters – that can’t be denied. He was very hard on people whose moral personality he disapproved of. He himself displayed very richly a capacity which he often attributed to others under the label ‘moral charm’, which I can’t really define further, other than by naming it. But when he found that other people manifested lack of integrity or moral failings of one kind or another that he disapproved of, he was very free – at least in private letters – with his criticism of them. He was willing to judge people negatively. He always said that you should understand before you condemn – which, of course, I hope we would all agree with. But some people felt that he was too ready to condemn without understanding. He was occasionally liable to a sort of visceral antipathy to certain people, which appeared to proceed not from an intellectual assessment but from some instinctive level – people like Hannah Arendt. It’s difficult to account for it in rational terms, but he had a small panoply of hate figures, undoubtedly. The most striking piece – and I think everybody who has read it would agree with this in some way – is his memoir of his meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, the latter in particular, in 1945. Everybody who knows anything about Berlin knows the story of how he went to Russia at the end of the Second World War and was based in Moscow. He visited Leningrad for a fortnight and when he was there he went to see Anna Akhmatova, the great poetess, and talked to her right through one night until the middle of the next morning. His account of that and its effect on him and her is extremely moving and brilliantly written. It’s the longest piece in the book and, I think, the best. It is a sort of love story, yes, but at an intellectual level, or at least on a level that was unexpressed physically. He always said that people assumed that they had an affair because he was there all night, but he always insisted – and I believe him – as he put it: ‘Nothing is further from the truth. She sat in one corner of the room; I sat in the other and we never even touched. I didn’t even kiss her hand.’ But still, there was a very intense bond created on that occasion and he came to be a deeply symbolic figure for her – often occurring in her poetry from that moment onwards. When he later married, she was obviously very hurt. Not that she wished to marry him herself, but he’d obviously betrayed some kind of mystical union which she thought that they had with each other. “He was a genius at being a human being.” Music was one of the most important things in his life, more important than his own academic work. He would often say that personal relationships were the most important thing in life – ‘People are my landscape’, as Karl Wolfskehl put it – and I would have thought that music would come a close second or indeed an equal first. There is a piece on the music critic Martin Cooper in the book, but he also knew a number of musicians and composers, including Stravinsky, and had a rich life of listening to music. He claimed to have listened to more music of more kinds for more hours than anybody else. He was on the board of The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and knew a great deal about opera – not only the operas themselves, but the people who performed and sang in them. He had quite an influence on the repertoire of the Royal Opera during the years that he was there, for example engineering a production of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron . Music was deeply important to him, but not in an esoteric way. His favourite radio channel – people are sometimes surprised to know – was Classic FM, not Radio 3, because it played more of the core of the musical repertoire that he loved."