It is reliably said that during Isaiah Berlin’s youth his pampering mother used to rouse him from sleep with the question, “What are we going to do today?” To which the answer was: “Nothing.” Perhaps Marie Berlin became the nicest kind of Stalin in his subconscious.[1]
In the depths of the Stalinist night, around midnight actually, the poet Boris Pasternak receives a telephone call from Stalin. Pasternak will later be celebrated on the other side of the Iron Curtain for a novel none of his friends and fellow poets particularly like (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, on the other hand, has a cynical hawk’s eye for neo-Gogolians who go off the Soviet rails). But in the year 1934 he’s just a Russian poet, or a Russsian-Jewish poet, which for Stalin, who still has a touch of the superstitious Georgian priest about him, makes Pasternak into a kind of Orpheus, a mysterious and chthonic Semite, half-ridiculous and half-diabolic. Pasternak has been running around Moscow all evening, in a frenzy of worry and inchoate guilt, trying to intercede on behalf of his friend Osip Mandelstam, who has just been arrested for a satirical poem he’s been reading to a circle of intimates, a poem whose subject is the “Kremlin Caucasian” (“His thick fingers are bulky and fat like live-baits/And his accurate words are as heavy as weights”). Mandelstam, who is incidentally the better and braver poet, is a Polish Jew, a human type that does not terrify Stalin (as many Polish Jewish communists will discover when they arrive in Moscow in 1938, fleeing Pilsudski’s police, and are summarily arrested and shot). What do Stalin and Pasternak talk about? It’s difficult to say exactly, because Pasternak over the years will return to this nocturnal conversation over and over, like a man whose life has been governed by a single nightmare or a single hallucination or a single failed encounter with the Real. But what is clear is that Stalin asks him something along the lines of, What are the poets saying about the arrest of Mandelstam? Or, more starkly, What do you think of Mandelstam? And Pasternak, as he was wont to do, speaks mystically and somewhat incoherently about poetry and the labyrinthine destinies of poets, about the incommensurability between politics and the lives of ordinary men, about the nature of justice in Russia. Stalin, who after all has a sense of humor, a sadistic and dialectical sense of humor, remains as silent as the grave and lets Pasternak prattle on for awhile. Finally he interrupts him. I see you aren’t able to stick up for a comrade, he says icily, and hangs up.
A few years later Mandelstam is liquidated in one of Stalin’s purges. But besides Pasternak’s name, Stalin leaves written instructions: “Don’t touch this cloud-dweller.” It’s hard to find a better example of what Adorno diagnosed as the fascist’s sadomasochistic contempt for art, for art’s childishness and vulnerability, a contempt that masks, naturally, a fear.
Which is not to say that Stalin was a fascist.
Which brings me to David Caute’s new, biblically titled book, Isaac and Isaiah. One shouldn’t be misled by the title. Paradigms and parallelisms exist only in the minds of bourgeois esoterics like Isaiah Berlin, not in history. When Berlin wants to attack the idea of history, he conjures hermetic genealogies that prove, in the crassly and inversely Hegelian manner of all liberal apologetics, the non-existence of history. When Berlin wants to attack Marx, he says, “From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud.” In a different draft, we get Plato and Lucretius instead of Zeno and Spinoza, and Thomas Aquinas instead of Thomas Hobbes, almost, as Anthony Arblaster put it, “as if it had to be Thomas somebody” (I am indebted here to the late Christopher Hitchens in his pre-renegade, pre-macho-imperialist days: it makes one wonder about polemical talent). My point is that, in Caute’s book, Isaiah is not a prophet but a feeble, conniving, Anglo-Jewish Cold War patriarch. Isaac, who is diverted from his patriarchal fate by the vicissitudes of history, is a down-the-rabbit-hole prophet, a dark prophet of an impossible history, a Stalinist Trotskyite with a Leninist beard. Deutscher described himself as a “non-Jewish Jew” and was loyal, in a way that become taboo after the Second World War, to Marx’s historical-messianic understanding of Jewishness as, on one hand, a tragic epiphenomenon of capitalism and, on the other, as a vehicle for historical redemption. Deutscher frequently traveled to and lectured in Israel, although he was never a Zionist and became increasingly critical of the national state. Berlin pissed off his mentor Chaim Weizmann when he told him, more or less, that he’d be happy to beat the Zionist drum but that he was unable to give up his aristocratic position in England to assume the role of a statesman-intellectual in a country that, to be honest, he couldn’t quite stomach. Caute cites Berlin’s dismay over being stranded on a dock in Naples with a crowd of Brooklyn Jews waiting to board the S.S. Theodore Herzl to Israel. “A mob of desperate, helpless refugees, human flotsam from some concentration camp, jostling, screaming, with no vestige of self-control, shaming and horrible”: a mob appeased, apparently, only by cold cuts and lukewarm tea. Caute tries to be even-handed, but it’s fairly obvious that he thinks Berlin’s one-sided, decades-long vendetta against Deutscher is pathological. Berlin vacillates between pathetic scruples about intellectual honesty and intellectual freedom (there’s a lot of hand-wringing on Berlin’s part, even in patently dishonest letters to Deutscher’s widow, Tamara, about whether his repeated overtures to frustrate Deutscher’s career stem from personal animus) and brutal animadversions. So when he calls Deutscher, in a letter to a friend and BBC radio producer who had recently given Deutscher air, a “mean, dead, talmudical ‘parshivy yevrey’ [mangy Jew],” it may come as a shock to Berlin’s admirers, who view him as something of a paragon and an ethical policeman. But anti-Zionist Jews are more than familiar with this kind of selective anti-Semitism on the part of the Isaiah Berlins and Martin Peretzes of the world (you self-loathing shtetl filth, you left fascists, you sexual deviants attracted to Arabs and Martin Heidegger, etc.). When Berlin maliciously caricaturizes Deutscher’s view of the Holocaust as some kind of quasi-divine historical punishment for Jewish participation in capitalism, he’s indulging in a common Zionist polemic against the wrong type of Jew (in this case, the Marxist Jew: and let’s not forget, because this matters in contemporary discourse, that Deutscher lost his entire extended family to German fascists). In the same way, Berlin felt free later in life not only to refuse to shake hands with Menachem Begin, but to compare the ultraright-wing nationalist and former terrorist Begin, outlandishly, to the left-wing Marxist Deutscher: presumably based on their shared racial-Polish-Jewish characteristics. The spectrum of anti-Semitic paranoia always bends, of course, into a single point of hatred. Berlin was merely virtuosic in that he was able to hide all of this behind a veneer of Jewish pluralism.
Caute includes an otherwise incongruous chapter on Arendt and the Eichmann trial in order to drive this point home. The pattern becomes familiar. Berlin takes a visceral dislike to a Jewish intellectual (in this case a woman, about which we hear little in Berlin’s discourse), is too neurotic to admit it, venomously and indirectly attacks, and then goes to theatrical lengths to prove his moral rectitude. In the case of Arendt, he orchestrates a scathing attack on her in The Times Literary Supplement, recruiting an acolyte for fear that his distinctively verbose prose would give him away, and then writes obsequiously to Mary McCarthy, Arendt’s best “Gentile”-American friend, begging her not to think that he could have sunk so low as to have written it.
I don’t think Berlin ever wanted to set himself up as a stern, murderous patriarch. Even if he’d wanted to set himself up that way, it would have been impossible. Hitchens got Berlin with precision, sociologically and characterologically, when he wrote: “Isaiah Berlin may have been designed, by origin and by temperament and by life experience, to become one of those witty and accomplished valets du pouvoir who adorn, and even raise the tone of, the better class of court. But there was something in him that recognised this as an ignoble and insufficient aspiration, and impelled him to resist it when he dared” (someone has to say it: Hitchens skirted Jewishness and homosexuality with anathemas and occasionally salacious “confessions”: e.g., “I’m Jewish and homosexual when it serves me, and otherwise those groups repulse me”). Berlin had read his Russian literature and felt the susurrus of nihilistic revolt in his sternum. But did he dare disturb the universe? How could he have when, and let’s be honest here about the assumptions we’re dealing with, which are assumptions that have to do with Jews and their position, so much rode for him on acceptance in the highest echelons of politics and society? I’m not talking about his knighthood, necessarily, which he rather self-deprecatingly blamed on his Jewish mother (she wept, apparently, when he told her he might decline). For a man who claimed to loathe the foundations of Platonism, who rivaled only Nietzsche and perhaps Ayn Rand (a fellow White Russian) in the firmament of anti-Platonism, it’s obvious that Berlin balanced his own precarious psychic equation in adopting the role of the philosopher-guardian, a role that served as an antidote to the more poisonous—especially for a Jew—role of the courtier, middle-man, and mercantile trader in ideas. Hitchens reveals the lacuna at the heart of “negative liberty” when he cites Berlin’s interview with Arthur Schlesinger, with whom he secretly “collaborated” on Cold War policy. Berlin’s position on nuclear armament was: “Unless there is some point at which you are prepared to fight against whatever odds, and whatever the threat may be, not merely to yourself, but to anybody, all principles become flexible, all codes melt, and all ends in themselves for which we live disappear.” Rather than seeing the military-industrial establishment at its most Strangelovian extreme as an “unaccountable and secret priesthood,” the kind of numinous body Berlin often decried as a conspirator against negative liberty, he quite blithely accepted nuclear warfare as a defense of the simple property-owning bourgeois citizen. No matter the negative liberty of the tens of millions who might die in this insane defense (or, for that matter, the millions who died in Indonesia and in Vietnam due to policies he supported at the highest level). But on a more pedestrian level, Berlin always waffled when it came to distinguishing between the pure violence the interferes with liberty and the more diffuse violence that blends into the background of the market economy. Sometimes he hailed FDR as a savior (and he always claimed to vote Labor, except when he didn’t, and to believe in the welfare state), and he always managed to find the most right-wing of revolutionaries to eulogize (Alexander Herzen, except against the beloved Turgenev, or the Girondists, or Garibaldi if he was dressed as a Zionist), but one would be hard pressed to divine anything but Tea Party plutocratic purism in his (always cautiously or downright cravenly expressed) political views. The Freudo-Proustian scene, for Berlin, was the Tsarist policeman whom he saw dragged away by an angry mob while out for a stroll with his governess in Petrograd. He later invented (the probable but unwitnessed) death of the policeman. Yes, he admitted, the police fired on the crowds. Yes, the Tsar sponsored the Black Hundreds and the vicious anti-Semitic pogroms that haunted the Jews of his childhood. But that belongs to the vortex of nature, not ideology. But a policeman, as an individual type, upholds the Proustian cosmos of bourgeois childhood. And how could he know anything else about Jewish experience in Russia but that of his father, who, as a prosperous timber merchant, was sociologically and geographically outside of the Pale? Berlin told Caute that he’d rather have been a novelist of the caliber of Tolstoy than a philosopher of the caliber, strangely enough, for Berlin, of Hegel. Then again, as Caute remarks, it’s hard to imagine Berlin as a novelist because he both disparages the novelist’s universal (Lukácsian?) vision (as when he chastises Tolstoy for his undisciplined theorizing) and seems decidedly stuck on his non-vulpine, metaphysical characters. And as a judge of character, Berlin is strangely spasmodic, if not indifferent. Isaac and Isaiah dwells at some length on Berlin’s divergent reactions to the high-British but almost equally Marxist historian E.H. Carr (a friend of both Deutscher and Berlin’s) and Deutscher himself. But if we’re going to be juridical in high neoliberal style, Carr was a more thorough and cynical apologist for Leninist-Stalinism or Stalinist-Leninism, because Carr, as Deutscher reiterated, saw Lenin/Stalin as some kind of virile, 20th-century Bismarck, whereas Deutscher tried to balance biographical history-from-above with both Marxist history and communist conviction. Nevertheless, for Berlin, Carr was an eminently decent man with an unassailable place in the symposium of liberal discourse (despite his wrong-headed views), whereas Deutscher was nauseating, unworthy to break bread with, a bloodthirsty barbarian who had somehow duped the good British polity into accepting him. With Berlin, though, one often finds this despotic arbitrariness. Caute likes his own analogy of the pub-crawling British soccer fan who expresses different opinions on the sport depending on whom he’s talking to (with regards to Deutscher’s prevarications on Soviet policy, which, we learn gradually, aren’t so much prevarications as scholarly and journalistic choices, with all the ethical dilemmas involved in scholarship and journalism). But it’s not difficult to apply the same drunken soccer fan analogy to Berlin when it comes to character, particularly the virtuous or villainous character of the possibly anti-Semitic Gentile. When Churchill asks him to review his piece of Victorian atavism, or his scheme to win the Nobel, or his memoir cum history, The Gathering Storm, Berlin writes back to him with his typical complaisance and his minor, ethical quibble. I now more than ever think it is a literary and political masterpiece, he says. But when Churchill, the notorious bigot, equivocates over Hitler’s anti-Semitism, he gets a slap on the wrist. In 1933, Churchill opined that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was unjustified, but that “Jews…acting against their country…must be put in their place.” Such an aside is liable to be misconstrued, Berlin warns, and should be deleted. Later Berlin and T.S. Eliot strike up a friendship of sorts, one based, I assume, on the preposterousness of their mutual Tory assimilationism. In 1934, Berlin finger-wags, You wrote that the presence of too many Jews jeopardises the unity of European Christian civilisation. Eliot remonstrates: I meant Jews as a religious group, not as a race. Berlin digs up material where Eliot accuses Jews of being a race. Eliot repents. Berlin, naturally, forgives.
Meanwhile, Berlin, who is, let’s face it, in spite of it all, a neurotic Jew, strikes up, like Susan Sontag does later, a great psycho-sexual and ideological relationship with the Soviet dissident and semi-dissident intelligentsia. This is after he’s worked as a British attaché in America during the Second World War but before his friendship with Camelot and then later with the Bundy brothers (on the day Kennedy is assassinated, by the way, students mob his lecture to the Workers’ Educational Association in Brighton, wondering what he’ll have to say about his friend, Kennedy: as an aside, Kennedy was bored by Berlin, who he thought was a useful blowhard, expatiating tediously about the relatively dull sex life of Lenin: ironically it isn’t until the comparatively anti-intellectual Johnson Administration that Berlin achieves the acme of his influence in American politics, giving liberal balm to the Svengalis of the Vietnam War, while pretending in public to be tragically conflicted by the baffling mess, and reciting, for the millionth time, his insipid summary of Turgenev’s anti-heroes cum heroes: “the small, hesitant, self-critical, but not always brave, band of men who occupy a position somewhere to the left of centre, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery of their left.”: at the lecture, to the disappointment of the entire audience, he speaks only about Machiavelli, and as every good scholar of Machiavelli knows, Berlin had a particularly weak, smarmy, and self-interested understanding of the philosopher). In Moscow, in the winter of 1946, Berlin acts as a depressed flâneur. In Leningrad, he acts as a revenant, and his spirits are lifted, and there is of course something touching about the prospect of Berlin walking through the snow to seek out his lost bourgeois kingdom, the apartment on Angliisky Prospekt: “He found the inner courtyard still as dank and dilapidated as thirty years before, the railings of the little basement shop, where an old tinker had repaired samovars and household goods, still broken.” Then, supposedly, he asks after the poet Anna Akhmatova in a bookshop. A literary critic tells him that he can take him to her apartment right away. The two spend a legendary afternoon-evening in her dilapidated, cold, and empty room. Berlin, who is purportedly a virgin at this late age and hasn’t read the poetry of the famous prophetess-seductress, this admittedly tragic figure whose first husband was killed and whose son was arrested in the Mandelstam case which Pasternak was connected to, makes a lasting impression on Akhmatova. At some point, the legend goes, Randolph Churchill yells from the courtyard demanding that Berlin return with him to the Hotel Astoria, “there to explain,” according to Hitchens, “to the domestics of the famine-stricken city that Mr. Churchill’s newly-purchased caviar should be placed on ice.” Berlin, chivalrous caricature that he is, obliges. He returns to Akhmatova’s apartment. To this day, interested scholars debate whether or not Akhmatova deflowers Berlin. Berlin and Akhmatova meet, depending on whom you ask (because the Soviet authorities are very interested), between three and seven times. Akhmatova writes her famous poem, Poem without a Hero, in which Berlin figures as the “Guest from the Future”. Berlin asks after Mandelstam and Akhmatova weeps. Berlin returns to London and Pasternak writes him a letter informing him of Akhmatova’s schoolgirl crush: “Her every third word was—you. And so dramatically and mysteriously!” The Soviet authorities learn of Berlin’s visit to Akhmatova after Berlin writes about it. Zhdanov writes his famous, damning report describing Akhmatova as “a frantic little fine lady flitting between the boudoir and the chapel…a harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer.” Things get difficult not only for Akhmatova but for her friends. Even Berlin’s uncle eventually falls victim to Stalin’s late anti-Semitic paranoia, or to the campaign against the “Jewish’ doctors plot”. In 1954, he’s arrested and tortured, and he dies of a heart attack shortly thereafter. Akhmatova is wary of Berlin, the guest from the future who has caused so much suffering. She loves him, so we’re told, but she’s afraid of his presence when he returns to Russia in 1956.
The Soviets accuse Berlin of being a spy. Berlin, to tell the truth, was too innocent to be a spy: he was a spy only in the Soviet sense of the term, which is to say a paid propagandist for the West. But he unwittingly and then half-knowingly worked for propaganda mills like Encounter that were funded by the CIA. When it came out that he and his friends were being funded by the CIA, he wrote to the relevant parties with instructions about plausible deniability and the natural good will of the naturally deceived. But let me say it again: Isaiah Berlin, that disciple of the most ineffectual characters of 19th-century Russian literature (Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s naive and lachrymose landlords), was not a spy. And Isaac Deutscher, who had no powerful friends but his own conscience, not that he put too much weight on that infamously frail concept, was not a Soviet agent. Caute backs off the claim that Berlin harmed Deutscher when he responded negatively (not evasively) to his own Stalin-in-the-night call. Berlin, who had influence, made it clear enough: he is morally disgusting and cannot be tolerated as a professor. It’s undeniable that Berlin, sitting on the academic advisory board at the University of Sussex, played more than a decisive part in ensuring that Deutscher was not appointed to a senior professorship in Soviet Studies: his role was not only necessary but sufficient. Caute gives extensive documentation of the enthusiasm that Deutscher’s candidacy was met with at the university before Berlin’s virulently negative letter, the sudden breaking off of contact between Deutscher and university officials, and then the polite but untruthful letter of rejection Deutscher received from Vice-Chancellor John Fulton. In the more than four decades between Deutscher’s death and the publication of Caute’s book, the story eventually got out, despite Berlin’s vigorous and incessant denials. Caute’s book should put the matter to bed. All the more so because, while establishing Berlin’s unscrupulous and less-than-honorable actions, he avoids overwrought accusations of McCarthyism and the like, and desensationalizes the affair. Berlin committed many sins, but the murder of Deutscher was not one of them. Deutscher did not waste away, as the victim narrative implies, churning out Kremlinology for hire, and the life of a bucolic university don, with all its tedious obligations, would surely have suffocated the Marxist warrior, who spent the final years of his life in a whirlwind of travel, lecturing, and literary and political activity. We never got to read the Lenin biography. This, as anyone who has read Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy knows, is a tragedy. But not all tragedies have villains.
Deutscher died young-ish, at the age of sixty, of a sudden heart attack. He lived, like Marx lived but better, as an unapologetic radical in the hospitable, semi-tolerant, but fundamentally overconfident, as only Leviathans can be overconfident, host culture of London. Towards the end of his days, he became an unlikely hero of the New Left, in England but especially in the United States. Berlin, of course, denounced Herbert Marcuse, as well as Arendt, as a product of “terrible twisted Mitteleuropa in which nothing is straight, simple, truthful, all human relations and all political attitudes are twisted into ghastly shapes by these awful casualties who, because they are crippled, recognise nothing pure and firm in the world.” Deutscher, at a guest-lecture in New York, responded to a Marcuse-inspired question from the audience, which implied that the American working class was dead and reactionary, with the following question: “Do you really believe that [members of the working class] are so much more prone, and by nature conditioned, to be corrupted by the meretricious advantages of this war-flourishing capitalism than you are? Socialist intellectuals must reach out to the young among the working class, shaking the sleeping giant out of his drugged myopia.” But, the echoes and dying gasps of Berlin will surely object, isn’t that the old canard of false consciousness, of latent exploitable consciousness being roused by an evil Dr. Frankenstein for the horrific objective of “positive freedom.” Let’s remember, as Deutscher did in Heretics and Renegades, what Shelley wrote in his ironic ode to Berlin’s hero Wordsworth about Wordworth’s turn from Jacobin to reactionary: “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave/Songs consecrate to truth and liberty—/Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,/Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.”
So Deutscher, the chorus goes, was wrong. He wasn’t wrong about facts, but he was wrong about history, as the thuggish anti-historicists will always delight in. And according to Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s competent but fundamentally iconodulic biographer, Deutscher was wrong about the ethical narrative of history, which is that of so-called human rights (after all its time groping in the dark, liberalism came up with a theory of history and then tepidly and ignominiously apologized: Vaclav Havel died and Ignatieff said Iraq was the wrong war but we’d get it right with Syria this time). And Deutscher, from the beginning, not being the crude determinist that Berlin said he was (Berlin for whom one event was essentially unconnected to the next, as Caute’s book suggests against its own grain, given Berlin’s wildly different accounts of himself, for instance on the so-called Suez Crisis, about which in a letter to Lady Eden he praised the Prime Minister for having “saved England,” despite later arguing that the operation was a tactical error and then even later that it was “morally wrong”) had one virtue in the face of fate, which is that he never feared, in his thinking and his life, that he should cease to be.
The gist of the liberal imagination, which has become obsessed with trials that are the obverse of the Stalinist show trials, wants to ask the following question: Who was guilty? I suggest, perhaps provocatively to the Manichaean memory of the shitty halcyon days of the anti-communist left, that the question of guilt is obsolete. As leftists, if we are still leftists, we’re all barely adolescent, post-Talmudic Jews who have only just recently and dishonestly snipped off our embarrassingly atavistic peyos, sneaking out of the ghetto and pretending to speak English, perhaps a little pretentiously and legalistically, with mixed memories of Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, those twin and mirrored failures, with nothing but our words and our consciences, and I’m not talking about our Congress for Cultural Freedom-funded consciences, to defend ourselves and what, for better or worse, we believe in.
Note
1 Before starting this piece, all that was in my mind was the epigraph’s anecdote and the Pasternak-Stalin conversation I invoke in the opening graph. The epigraph, naturally, made me chuckle and seemed both glib and profound in the way that ad hoc psychoanalytic insights usually are (and what better summary of Berlin’s “quiescent liberalism” than the firm, principled statement that “nothing” is to be done, the opposite of Beckett’s despairing “nothing to be done”). But what I was really thinking about was Proust, and the way Proust builds on Baudelaire in taking the latter’s correspondances and plunging them into the dimension of time/history. Of course, Proust begins with the scene of the coddled, neurasthenic bourgeois child lying in bed waiting for his mother’s kiss: that’s the paradisaical scene, the inverse of the primal scene (both Berlin and Proust seem to have fathers, by the way, who are largely absent from/irrelevant to their emotional lives). But Proust is one of Berlin’s hated “monists,” which is to say he believes in a realm of total truth in which everything is somehow, ineffably, connected to everything else. The phone call from Stalin in the middle of the night, in disillusioned adulthood, belongs to the same metaphysical-moral world as the visit from the mother (the nicest Stalin) at dawn. But the difference is that Berlin, as a child, lives in an extra-moral, paradisaical world—Pasternak, the adult, has plummeted into ethics. Something has to be done, there’s no avoiding it, as much as Berlin painstakingly wants to avoid action. And how does Berlin respond when he gets an opportunity to determine someone’s fate? I think I’m pretty much aligned with Caute in refusing to CONDEMN, or at least shriekingly condemn, Berlin for what he did to Deutscher: what’s more interesting is the ethical nature of the person that’s revealed in the act than the crime itself, which, for both Berlin and to a lesser extent for Pasternak, can hardly definitely be called a crime.
From December, 2013