by Simon Schama
Neither Tom nor John ever married. After his father died, the centre of John’s personal life was his older brother Geoffrey, a philosophy professor and, by all accounts, an accomplished cellist. But Geoffrey Clive was also a diabetic who suffered a brutally withering form of the disorder, going blind before dying in 1975. I don’t mean to make crass analogies here between John’s devotion to Geoffrey, which in any case I only knew of as part of his memory, and Macaulay’s almost operatic possessiveness towards Hannah and Margaret. But it seems to me inconceivable that the closeness of the brothers did not, to some degree, enrich the compassion and depth of understanding that John had for Macaulay’s own intense sibling relationships.
At the heart of that relationship, John makes clear, was the overgrown boy Tom’s craving to find a domestic nest that would give him the emotional and even physical succour that the bleak righteousness of Zachary and Selina’s Clapham virtue had denied. With Hannah (whom he even rebaptised as ‘Nancy’) and Margaret, he was able to do all the prohibited things: joke, caper, confess weakness; show off; preen himself on his brilliance, chastise himself on his inadequacies, and, both on paper and in person, talk on and on and on, mostly on the subject of Tom, without fear of interruption or contradiction. The bonds which attached his sisters to his own life were, then, intensely selfish. Macaulay felt that his entertainment value, the reflected light that shone from his own political and literary brilliance, and his repeated utterances (all perfectly sincere) of passionate and undiluted love, were enough recompense for all they were supposed to do for him. But those kindnesses and services comprised a long list: from tending his political wounds, humouring his caprices, invariably endorsing his prejudices and, not least, keeping house.
Self-conscious to the point of obsession with what he thought was his ugliness and corpulence (neither of which appears especially off-putting in any of the known likenesses), Macaulay decided, fairly early on, that he would eschew a sexual or conjugal relationship. Those energies that might be dangerously compromised by such tangles would instead be harnessed to the drive of his political and literary career. And as for love, of which he truly possessed a natural abundance, that would find expression in what he imagined to be the purest possible form: that of a brother for his sisters.
It is quite impossible for a modern reader to take in the elemental passion of many of those letters and not find them, at many points, implicitly incestuous. Macaulay’s tone to both of them is, in the idiom of the time, that of a lover who goes well beyond the norms of brotherly affection. When Margaret became engaged, his response (expressed to the other sister) was one of jealous outrage and hurt.
For the most part John’s biography surveys these storms and stresses with humane precision, often allowing the extraordinary correspondence to speak for itself. In fact at times authorial intervention seems almost excessively suppressed, given the drama unfolding in the letters. In 1834, for instance, Macaulay decided that he would have to accept the post of one of the Secretaries-in-Council to the Governor-General of the East India Company in Calcutta, for purely financial reasons. Announcing this fact to the remaining single sister Hannah (his ‘Nancy’), he also asks her to go with him to India, a request that was in fact an act of outrageous selfishness and which was initially greeted with horrified disbelief. Of course, Macaulay couches his request in such a way that it would be possible for her to deny him, but only at the prohibitive price of reneging on her own loyalty and love. All in all, the letter is a classic of moral blackmail.
The biographer refrains from saying anything like this. Perhaps he knows full well that Macaulay would be punished many times over for his selfishness when Hannah finds her own husband in Charles Trevelyan, one of Tom’s colleagues in the civil administration in Calcutta. Moreover, the letter he sends on this occasion back to Margaret in England, full of despairing (if belated) self-knowledge about the futility of the idyll he had created for himself, unmarried sisters ministering for ever to the needs of their genius brother, is so tragically dark as to make any editorialising gratuitous. But is it possible, also, that John, who lived his life in a series of surrogate families, who was virtually adopted by them as an honorary brother and uncle, ate at their table, sang to their children, watched ball games and movies with them, was fed and cared for by them, understood this heavy loneliness at an emotional and psychological depth that could not be registered in the conventions of an historical biography?
Though Margaret’s death in 1835 threatened for a while to throw Macaulay into an abyss of depression, this is not a story of unrelenting sorrow – the sad face beneath the public mask of Victorian good cheer. Macaulay never recovered the gregariousness of his Holland House days in the 1820s when he had been the toast of Whig Westminster. But much of his life, until his death in 1852, was spent in the domestic circle of Hannah and Charles Trevelyan and their children to whom he was the irrepressibly high-spirited uncle, regaling them with poems and stories and outings and treats. At one point Macaulay even attributed his ability to make history popular to the fact that he spent so much time talking to small children. That he could do this with a magically assured touch, utterly without condescension, was because there was always a large, overgrown child in the adult Macaulay himself: greedy for affection and praise; easily stung and wounded; just as easily delighted and excited; lavish with his emotions and wicked with his literary nose-thumbing.
John never got to write of this Macaulay: the ‘Uncle Tom’ whom his first biographer George, when still little ‘Georgie’ Trevelyan, had no idea was in any way famous or distinguished beyond the fact that he now and then wrote books. But my own children got to know and love their ‘Uncle John’; to hear his poems, and stories, and songs; laugh at his jokes; humour his rituals; tease him with the threat of his most detested foods (a long list that included honey, olives and any vegetables unknown to his mother’s kitchen in the Berlin of the 1930s). Once when I attempted to cook him his favourite dessert, Salzburgernockerln, an impossibly oxymoronic confection of ice and hot custardy interior, I saw my daughter Chloë catching John in an expression of shut-eyed rapture and later asking me, ‘Daddy, what did you put in that?’ For them he was utterly memorable; a child-man; a walking explosion of affectionate and wonderfully uncoordinated humanity.
One of his very closest friends and colleagues has noted that John had a great genius for friendship. And though we who still bitterly miss him understand this first of all as something he added to our personal and domestic lives, it might be argued that that gift actually had powerful and positive consequences for his historical writing. In one of the most dazzling essays in his last book, ‘The Great Historians in the Age of Cliometrics’, he has Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle, each in their own manner, discuss the cutting-edge issue of correlations between sibling numbers and the incidence of baldness among Ohio clockmakers. The pastiches are realised with deadly precision. But as hilarious as they are, they could only have been produced by someone who had become an affectionate familiar of the great men; had listened carefully to the mannerisms of their diction; whose impersonations would then be marked by loving attentiveness.
In another essay in Not By Fact Alone (1989) John does his best to give cogent intellectual reasons why we should go on reading the great historians: as exemplars of narrative, tacticians of argument and so on. But in the end he always reverted to the sheer pleasure of their company. Burckhardt, Michelet, Parkman, Henry Adams, Tocqueville and even Marx made up this precious Stammtisch of great historians, along with the British writers. The delight with which he samples them, follows their moves, relishes their ingenuity, wallows in their eccentricity, basks in the warmth of their vitality, was much the same as the unalloyed happiness he exuded at a table of eloquent, gabbling, laughing friends. By the same token he would roll his eyes in despair when banal monotony engulfed any sort of institutional meeting, which meant that there was a good deal of eye-rolling from his corner along with a peculiar gesture of taking off his
wristwatch and dangling it by the strap, as if he could see his life ticking away in inconsequential tedium.
Yet there was much more to this than a kind of intellectual epicur-eanism. For at heart John believed that historical wisdom only deserved to endure if it had a proper quotient of wit, force and literary power. That was why he was so depressed by the vast cargo of drab, congested and hectoring prose that he thought weighed down the learned journals. By contrast there was obviously something irresistibly joyous even in the most outrageous adolescent crowing of the young Macaulay who announced a new publication (The Etonian) thus:
Some of us have no occupation, some of us have no money, some of us are desperately in love, some of us are desperately in debt; many of us are very clever and wish to convince the public of that fact . . . we will go forth to the world once a quarter in high spirits and handsome type and a modest dress of drab with verse and prose criticism and witticism, fond love and loud laughter . . . Our food shall be of the spicy curry and the glistening champagne – our inspiration shall be the thanks of pleasant voices and the smiles of sparkling eyes.
When I arrived at Harvard in 1980 I myself thought John’s reverence for these past masters exaggerated and his determination to pass on their legacy to his students, a gently old-fashioned kind of work, canonical and aesthetic, not at all in keeping with the vogue for cultural history done by those roaming the jungles of symbolic anthropology. How callow and obtuse I was! For even before he died, and certainly ever since, I can think of nothing more important than to convey the enduring power and wisdom, form and substance of the great masters. Far from cramping the style of students, direct contact with the immense range of creative imagination inscribed in their texts liberates them for any and all possibilities of historical expression. To my belated delight I have found that most undergraduates would gladly trade all the dense theoretical discussions of ‘narrative strategy’ and ‘cultural methodology’ for a few pages of the seductive gossip of Herodotus or the dazzling mischief of Edward Gibbon. For as long as this matters, historians and many others will read John Clive with huge pleasure and instruction.
Isaiah Berlin
Review of Isaiah Berlin: Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946,
edited by Henry Hardy, New Republic, 31 January 2005
In February 1942, Isaiah Berlin, thirty-two years old, sat in a Jewish religious court in New York City, listening intently to the case of a one-legged octogenarian schnorrer whose amputated limb had gone missing after surgery. This, as Berlin recognised, was no joke. Unless the leg was buried in hallowed ground, preferably close to the rest of the old boy, come the return of the Messiah, it could not be reunited with the rest of him. A while without his leg, he said, he didn’t mind; fifty years, say, okay, even 100, 200 maybe, but to go around on a wooden leg for all eternity? Understandably bemused, the judges (one of whom Berlin noted was called, sublimely, Justice Null) wondered out loud what the court could do about it. ‘That’s what I want to know,’ the schnorrer replied. After deliberation the rabbi and the justice came up with a solution. A token piece of the old man – a fingernail, say – would be buried with due solemnity declaring that, in the unavoidable circumstances, it would stand in for the leg. On the day of resurrection, the Almighty, surely impressed by the judgement of the court, would accept the substitution, and the reassembled man would, with any luck, stride off into the everlasting.
In the letter to his parents, back in solid Hampstead, Berlin, famous for his relish of the human comedy, described the scene without a trace of condescension, much less farce. ‘The thing was really most pathetic,’ he wrote, using that last word literally. ‘A man condemned to wander about on one leg for eternity, unenviable even in Paradise.’ But what touched Berlin was not just the plight of the old man, but the inspired improvisation of the two judges, faced with an apparently impossible request. Short of the ideal solution – the recovery of the missing leg – their task was to find some way in which the pain and fear of the sufferer could be eased, and this they satisfactorily accomplished. By Berlin’s lights, this was humane intelligence operating exactly as it should; authority applied to its supreme duty: that of minimising suffering.
If reading this glorious collection of Berlin’s letters is, predictably, a heady experience, it is also hearty. Not in the British sense of cheery muscularity (definitely not Berlin’s thing), but in the sense that the letters reveal an intellectual sensibility in which uncompromising analytical clarity was uniquely married to an unshakable faith in the moral instincts of humanity. Abstract ideas, free-floating in their own rarefied sphere of discourse, unmoored from historical place and moment (the philosophical fashion when he arrived in Oxford in the early 1930s), became, for him, a kind of high intellectual aesthetics. In the hands of its nimblest practitioners, like J. L. Austin, the performance was a marvellous thing to behold, but in the end, as Berlin realised while crossing the Atlantic in the belly of a bomber in 1944, it was play, not work; at any rate not his kind of work. So while Flourishing, packed with letters which, on top form, put Isaiah Berlin in the same rank of epistolary artists as Evelyn Waugh or Kenneth Tynan, can be enjoyed as the most delicious kind of literary and intellectual confectionery (a form of nourishment Isaiah was the last to discount), the book is best read as a Bildungsroman of the twentieth century; the strenuous journey of an exceptional mind towards its own self-realisation.
Isaiah Berlin is most famously remembered (especially in Britain) as an unparalleled intellectual phenomenon: the encyclopaedic memory and prodigious intellect delivering high-velocity aperçus, at a rate that left audiences gasping: a bassoon on speed. The first time I saw him lecture in the late 1960s, on the tortured relationship between Tolstoy and Turgenev, he prefaced his remarks by declaring: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I must warn you that I speak very low and very fast, so if you fail to understand me, would you please indicate this by some eccentricity of behaviour.’ Since the caveat was itself delivered the same way, no one took him up. All of Berlin’s most dazzling qualities were on pyrotechnic display that evening: the sharp-focused illumination of literature as social thought; the representation (almost a re-enactment) of the cultural world from which that literature had sprung; the poignant incommensurability of ultimately irreconcilable tempers (a Berlin speciality, whether of writers or nations). As he warmed to the subject – as usual without a note, much less a text, the eloquence unfaltering – his expansiveness lit the wintry Cambridge evening. (It had been a prophetic choice when he had named the high-school magazine he founded at St Paul’s: The Radiator.) Narrating some of Tolstoy’s high moral absurdities, Berlin mugged, his broad face turning impishly deadpan, shamelessly milking the laughs. As for his two protagonists, especially Turgenev, who functioned as a ghostly (and sometimes disturbingly close) alter ego for his own anxieties and insecurities, Berlin not so much explored their personae as inhabited them; the basso profundo turning less, or more, emphatic depending on which of the two was getting his moment: the head shaking in mock disbelief; a hand tucked into the vest of his three-piece suit, then emerging in mildly Ciceronian gestures of advocacy. As a performance of the drama of ideas, the lecture was for the connoisseur of the genre, delectably operatic.
Which, some recent critics claim, is all that there really ever was. Reviewed coolly, without benefit of the sentimental reverence generated by a rich body of Berlin anecdotal lore, his whole body of work is said to amount to less than the sum of its parts. This demurral, offered as an astringent reaction against the excesses of Isaiolatry, was entirely predictable, especially in Britain where dimming haloes, especially posthumously, is something of a national pastime, but it could hardly be more obtuse. Far from Berlin’s central intellectual preoccupations havering weakly between the hard poles of analytical philosophy and political practice, they can be seen, now more than ever, as unerringly located, precisely at the point where ideas catch dangerous fire: in the realm of social religion. Far from the issues with which he struggled –
the tragic irreconcilability of liberty and equality; the social and psychological roots of tribal and national allegiance, to name but two – being extended footnotes to the long nineteenth century (where, certainly, Berlin felt at home), they could hardly be more germane to the tortured perplexities of our own immediate and future situation. When Tony Blair asked Berlin whether he truly believed ‘negative liberty’ (the removal of coercive constraint) sufficed without the complement of ‘positive liberty’ (a universally agreed good, reachable through collective rational self-determination), he was paying homage, rather than lip service, to the perennial importance of the distinction first essayed in Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. Doubtless Berlin would have answered, ‘You may well be right’, but even supposing you are, not to recognise the pursuit of whatever greater good the Prime Minister might have in mind would entail the sacrifice of some element of liberty, would be to bury his head in the deepest dune.
Nor is there anything about 2005 which would have made Isaiah Berlin repent of the insistence, reiterated in so much of his work, on the historicity of ideas; their particularity in time and place; their obstinate resistance to universalisation. The naive fancy that one-size-fits-all democracy could be transported from the Potomac to the Tigris; or that any sort of system of ideas could be held to be objectively ‘timeless’ and thus deliverable independently of specific cultural circumstances, would have filled him with grim disbelief. The notion that a war might be fought on such deeply mistaken premises would have left him shaking his head (and he did this as rapidly as his speech patterns) in dire dismay.
