6:40am Thursday 25th February 2010
By Chris Koenig
It is always puzzling, judging exactly when something or someone turns into history. For instance, is Isaiah Berlin, born 101 years ago, history – yet? Technically, I suppose, the answer is yes, since he died (in Oxford) in 1997. But the flurry of books that appeared last year to mark his centenary has given rise to a veritable and ongoing industry that shows no sign of abating: biographies, volumes of letters, reviews in literary magazines, reviews of those reviews, etc. etc.
Berlin – who, incidentally, denied he was a philosopher, claiming instead to be a historian of ideas – was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909. When he was six his Jewish family moved to St Petersburg, Russia, where he witnessed the revolution. In 1921, the family moved again, this time to England, where Isaiah was sent to St Paul’s School – whence he went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he obtained a First. Then he took another Oxford degree, this time in politics, philosophy, and economics, and got another first in that – after less than a year on the course. Amazing. Relatives who stayed in Riga, by the way, were killed in the Holocaust.
The rest, I was going to say, is history. He was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls in 1932; became a Fellow of New College; Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory; and the founding President of Wolfson College. For 65 years, therefore, apart from a wartime spell in US, he was one of the best known – and certainly one of the wittiest – figures in Oxford.
Perhaps it is not unusual, a decade or so after the death of a great man or woman, for others to wade in with hostile criticism in order to cut his or her reputation down to size in the great scheme of things; it even happened to Churchill, I seem to remember.
Talking of whom: there is the story of how Isaiah Berlin’s reports from Britain's embassy in Washington during the war were so entertaining that Churchill asked to meet him, but thanks to some mix-up found himself having lunch with the American songwriter Irving Berlin instead. Bewilderment set in when the conversation turned to work in progress.
But from a Town point of view (ie from where I am sitting) the heated debate going on (for instance in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books), about Sir Isaiah’s reputation and standing, provides an interesting insight into Gown life – particularly mid-20th century Gown life at All Souls, where dons, unbothered by students, live together and eat meals together in sometimes waspish propinquity.
Life in that august place, a world apart, was apparently full of precious egos, easily bruised, petty snobbery, and college politics taking on an importance almost as great as world politics.
There is the story of historian A. L. Rowse (towards whom Berlin now stands accused of behaving duplicitously) coming down to breakfast one morning, cross about a bad review in The Times of his latest book.
‘You see the way the upper classes resent that I have been able to rise into their midst entirely by my own merit.” To which the Warden of the college John Sparrow, looking up from breakfast, replied: “Rowse, whatever gives you the impression that only the rich detest you?”
Charming and comforting somehow to learn that such brainy men (they were all men, of course) could be as silly as the rest of us.
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