The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  When under the lash of depression Kennan wrote copiously in his diary, and what depressed him above all was the want of influence of his ideas on those in power. Other reasons for his depression are what he refers to as his “weaknesses”: his garrulity, his philandering impulses, his unsteady temperament. Anger works its way into the diary at what he takes to be steady decline of America’s manners and mores, the nation’s heedless technological advance, its coarse politics, and a great deal else.

  The only people for whom Kennan expresses affection are the Russians, not the Soviet leaders but the people forced to live under their systematically brutal regime. “I sometimes feel that I would rather be sent to Siberia among them (which is certainly what would happen to me if I were a Soviet citizen) than to live on Park Avenue among our own stuffy folk,” he wrote. He remarks on his mystical link with St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, that

  I know that in this city, where I have never lived, there has nevertheless, by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—been deposited a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion, in other words of my own life; and that this is something which no American will ever understand and no Russian ever believe.

  Alone again, as the song has it, naturally.

  “I suppose I am a literary person myself, slightly manqué,” Kennan noted in his diary. At one point he planned to write a biography of Chekhov. With the exception of Dostoyevsky—“there is not one reasonably normal, decent soul among all his characters”—he was enamored of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a key book for him. Difficult to think of anyone other than Kennan in the State Department or in government generally who could have read and appreciated Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James. More than once in his diaries he expresses the wish to write fiction. His prose, always fluent and confidently cadenced, is notable for succinct formulation.

  The darkness in George Kennan, which grew and deepened with age, was there from the beginning. Kennan was a misanthrope. One of the chapters of Around the Cragged Hill is titled “Man, the Cracked Vessel.” The cracks come from man’s impulses and urges, his vanity and egotism. Kennan saw these cracks in his countrymen as if through a microscope. Returning from a trip to Mount Vernon, he notes the “shapeless, droopy people,” and remarks that “it was never clearer that man is a skin-disease of the earth.” All technology was to him malevolent unless proven otherwise. He saw the world filled with “people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures”; and in later life he allowed that he would trade in the American space program for a decent national telegraph system and efficient railway. Visiting southern California, he found there “that tendency of American life which it typifies . . . childhood without the promise of maturity.” In California, generally he finds “an immanent sterility for which no cure is apparent.” Later he will note that “the white man” made a mistake settling the place.

  In 1942, writing in the third person, Kennan asked whether “the conviction that when in a depression he was nearer to reality, to a certain tragic and melancholy reality, than at other times. It was, in other words, not the depression which was abnormal, but the irrational hopefulness, which prevailed at other times.” In his case, depression was lightly admixed with megalomania. He quotes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII on his own fall from power:

  I have touched the highest point of all my greatness;

  And from that full meridian of my glory,

  I haste not to my setting; I shall fall

  Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

  And no man see me more.

  He claims to have had “no real successes, and I dare not hope for any.” Later he adds: “I must regard my role in the public life of this country as played out. My future is purely private life.” Private life meant a life of scholarship, and he did turn out a few works of diplomatic history: The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (1979) and The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (1984). But it wasn’t enough for a man who had known the heightened glories of public success. “Life,” he writes in 1963, “consists principally of waiting to die.” Departing the planet at 101, George Kennan had a long time to await that event.

  Irony of ironies, the further out of power he was, the greater his popularity seemed to grow. He claimed to receive more than five hundred invitations to give lectures and talks every year, and he accepted a fair number of them. “My reputation follows me around like a shadow or like a mask I am obliged to wear.” When he came out against American participation in the Vietnam War, his popularity grew even greater. He campaigned for Eugene McCarthy against Lyndon Johnson. He was the go-to guy when the New York Review of Books needed a strong piece against the errancy of American foreign policy. During the years of the Vietnam War, he was a heroic figure for the American left.

  Yet no one more loathed hippie culture and war protesters than he. “They say we are both Americans,” he writes in his diary when encountering hippies abroad, “but you are stranger to me than the Hottentots. Benevolently, and with no reaction more negative than a slight shudder, I consign you to your various delights, thankful only that no one compels me to share them with you.” At one point he thinks perhaps of writing about domestic affairs, but finds himself unable to do so “when one of the greatest of the problems is the deterioration of life in the great cities and when one of the major components of the problem this presents is the Negro problem, which is taboo.” He detests the standard left-wing thinking that equates poverty with virtue, affluence with wickedness. He remarks on the tawdriness of the media and the deep humorlessness of the universities. He lambasts the entertainment industry and the dreadful use it

  makes of its near monopoly, not merely the low intellectual level but the shameless pornography, the pathological preoccupation with sex and violence, the weird efforts to claim for homosexuality the status of a proud, noble, and promising way of life. . .

  Were its author alive when The Kennan Diaries was published, the Political Correctness Police would soon enough have knocked on his door.

  Instead the world rained prizes down upon him: Pulitzers, National Books Awards, the Albert Einstein Peace Prize, the Reith and the Jefferson Lectures, honorary degrees, the Medal of Freedom, everything but the Nobel. He felt his fate was to be a prophet, but he was perhaps a prophet too much honored. As he wrote, he was “probably the most honored [person] outside the entertainment industry and the political establishment in this country. How could this have happened? And how to put it in its proper place?” Part of the reason, he believed, was that “there is not much competition.” Another part, surely, was that he was too careful a caretaker of his career to go public with his dark views on America and the world, confining them chiefly to his diary.

  None of his prizes and awards brought him the least contentment. He never relinquished the hope for power and influence. “I have the curious experience,” he wrote, “of being probably the most extensively honored private person in the country and, at the same time, the person least heeded when he speaks.”

  Nor did he ever have any doubt about the correctness of his views on foreign policy. He is confident that the views expressed in Around the Cragged Hill “have been major contributions to the development of political philosophy in our age, and to have this go wholly unrecognized is a bitter disappointment.” At the age of eighty-seven he asks: “Is there not a grotesque anomaly between the esteem bestowed on the person and the scant regard for his views?” When in 1989 Soviet Communism crumbles, owing chiefly to a policy of heating up the arms race in direct opposition to his own views, his diary is silent, expressing little pleasure in the eradication of the most humanly wasteful regime in the history of the world.

  In his chapter on government in Around the
Cragged Hill, Kennan writes of the human thirst for authority and power, and of the distortions in character that attaining them can cause. He cites Henry Adams on this point:

  The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends in killing the victim’s sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.

  Quoting Adams, poor George Kennan might have been describing himself.

  Isaiah Berlin

  (2016)

  “What are you? You call yourself a thinker, I suppose.”

  —R. H. S. Crossman to Isaiah Berlin

  Prolixity, thy name is Isaiah, last name Berlin. So one feels on coming to the last letter in the four-volume collection of the letters of Isaiah Berlin, edited with sedulousness and unstinting devotion by Henry Hardy. A former editor at Oxford University Press, Hardy, not long after meeting Berlin in 1972, took it upon himself to gather together Berlin’s various writings, which today, nearly two decades after his death, fill up no fewer than 17 books, including 10 reissues of his older books. He has now come to the end of editing these letters. No writer or scholar has ever been better served by an editor than Isaiah Berlin by Henry Hardy.

  I write “writer or scholar,” but it is less than clear whether Berlin was one or the other, or for that matter if he were either. Berlin began his university life as a philosopher, in the age of British analytic philosophy, which, though he recognized its usefulness, he found too arid for his tastes, altogether too dead-ended. He gradually came to the conclusion that he wanted a subject “in which one could hope to know more at the end of one’s life than when one had begun.” He turned to traditional political philosophy, which led him to his ultimate general subject, his passion: the history of ideas.

  As for his own contribution to this history, Berlin is credited with formulating the useful distinction between negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty covers that part of life—private life, chiefly—not covered by coercion or interference by the state, allowing freedom to act upon one’s desires so long as they don’t encroach upon the freedom of others. Positive liberty is that entailed in choosing one’s government, which in turn determines in what parts of life interference and coercion ought to be applied to the lives of citizens in pursuit of what is deemed the common good. Much has been written about this distinction by contemporary philosophers, not a little of it disputatious.

  The other idea associated with Berlin’s political thought is pluralism, sometimes denoted “value pluralism,” holding that useful values can be, and often are, in conflict. Berlin was opposed to the notion that the central questions of human life can have one answer. Wallace Stevens’s “lunatic of one idea” was not for him. In a talk called “Message to the Twenty-First Century,” read on his behalf at the University of Toronto in 1994, three years before his death, Berlin wrote:

  if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. . . . My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . . may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

  “The Hedgehog and the Fox” is Berlin’s most famous essay, taking off from an epigraph supplied by the 7th-century BCE Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The essay is on the intellectual travail of Leo Tolstoy—a natural fox in Berlin’s reading, who, in his search for the unifying principle controlling the multiplicity of human actions, longed to be a hedgehog. The temptation of hedgehoggery was never one to which Berlin himself succumbed.

  Fructifying as these ideas have been, it is not as a political philosopher that Berlin is chiefly of interest. He was instead that less easily defined phenomenon, a flâneur of the mind, an intellectual celebrity in three different nations, England, America, and Israel, a personage, no less—yet perhaps not all that much more. As for his reputation in England, the 27-year-old Berlin, anticipating his own career, recounts telling Maurice Bowra “that in Oxford & Cambridge only personalities counted, & not posts, & that striking and original figures always overshadowed dim professors etc.” He was himself nothing if not striking; it is only his originality that is in question.

  In many ways Berlin, as he would have been the first to say, led a charmed life. Born in 1909 in Riga, Latvia, the only surviving child of a successful Jewish lumber merchant, he and his family, after a brief stay in the Soviet Union, departed in 1921 for England. A tubby boy, with a lame arm caused at birth by an obstetrician’s ineptitude, a foreigner in a land not without its strong strain of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the young Isaiah Berlin carefully negotiated his way up the slippery slope to eminence. He gained entrance to St. Paul’s School in London, thence to Corpus Christi, Oxford, and thence to an early fellowship at All Souls, the first Jewish fellow in the history of that college. He waited until his mid-forties to marry Aline Halban, née Gunzbourg, a woman whose substantial wealth allowed him to live out his days in great comfort, amidst costly paintings and servants, and putting him permanently out of the financial wars.

  Gregarious and charming, Berlin met everyone: Sigmund Freud, Chaim Weizmann, Winston Churchill, David Ben-Gurion, Felix Frankfurter, Igor Stravinsky, Jacqueline Kennedy, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak . . . the list goes on. Less a Casanova than a Mercurio, he found his way into the select circles of such women as Marietta Tree, Sibyl Colefax, and Emerald Cunard. Before long, Berlin himself became a name others wished to add to their own lists of social and intellectual collectibles.

  Awards and honors rained down upon him: the presidency of the British Academy, honorary degrees, festschrifts, doctoral dissertations written about his works, an Order of Merit, international prizes, headship of Wolfson (a new Oxford college), all this and more—and yet none of it was sufficient to convince Berlin that he was a figure of the first quality. Self-deprecation is a leitmotif that plays throughout his letters over nearly 70 years. “I am quite clear that such career as I have had was securely founded on being overestimated,” he wrote to the archeologist John Hilton toward the end of his life.

  One might suspect this to be false humility on Berlin’s part. From the evidence abundantly supplied by his letters, however, he genuinely felt himself, as a thinker, a scholar, a writer, and a Jew in England, a nowhere man. Berlin kept no diary; he wrote neither autobiography nor memoirs, though he produced a book, Personal Impressions (1980), of portraits of friends and famous men he had known. His letters are the closest thing of his we shall have in the line of introspection. They are a gallimaufry, a jumble, an extraordinary mixture of attack, sycophancy, resentment, confessions of weakness, gossip, exaggeration, generosity, kindliness, superior intellectual penetration, and character analysis.

  Although the four volumes of Berlin’s letters run to more than 2,000 pages, these published letters, Mr. Hardy informs us, are a selection merely and scarcely all of his letters. These letters give us insight into Berlin’s character that Michael Ignatieff’s biography, Isaiah Berlin (1998)—researched while its subject was alive and published at his request posthumously—fails to give. The letters emphasize Berlin’s doubts and failings and are far removed from Ignatieff’s hero worship.

  The letters make plain why Berlin never wrote the great book every serious intellectual with scholarly pretensions hopes to write. “I really must try and achieve one solid work—say a study of [Vissarion] Belinsky [the 19th century Russian literary critic]—and not scatter myself in all these directions all over the place,” he wrote. In 1981 to Joseph Alsop he confesses: “Occasionally I wonder how many years I have left,” and “will I be able to write a big book in the years left to me, and does
it matter whether I can or not?” He never did.

  Other impressive intellectual figures in Berlin’s generation failed to write the masterwork everyone thought was in them, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Edward Shils among them. Why these extraordinary men failed to do so remains a mystery, but in Berlin’s case it is clear that he talked and dawdled and scribbled it away in correspondence. Even his prodigious letter writing, he claimed, was a form of stalling. “Answering letters, in fact, is a kind of drug,” he wrote to one of his stepsons, “great relief from real work.”

  The letters themselves tend to be vast rambles. To a lifelong correspondent named Rowland Burdon-Muller, Berlin writes: “Forgive me if I do not write you a long letter,” and then proceeds to write him a long letter. To Margaret Paul, an economics tutor at St. Hilda’s College, he writes: “By nature I like to say too much, to exaggerate, embellish, inflate.” In this same letter he goes on to do just that. To the novelist Elizabeth Bowen he writes: “Please forgive me. I write on & on as I talk, & how tiresome that must often be. . . . I really must not go on and on.” To Felix Frankfurter: “God knows why I go on—maundering like this.”

  Everyone who ever met Isaiah Berlin remarked on his rapid-fire, glittering, torrential talk. Edmund Wilson, in his journal, writes that Berlin showed up at his, Wilson’s, London hotel and talked uninterruptedly for nearly two hours.

  He won’t, where the competition is easily overpowered and he can get the bit between his teeth, allow anyone else to talk; you have to cut down through his continuous flow determinedly, loudly and emphatically, and he will soon snatch the ball away from you by not waiting for you to finish but seizing on some new association of ideas to go off on some new line of thought.