Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own.
Isaiah Berlin
They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. Isaiah Berlin, born in 1909, was fourteen years older than Richard Wollheim, and, coming into the world either side of the First World War, the two men had their roots in different centuries. Though they both made unique contributions to twentieth century British philosophy, their work was unrelated. Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas whereas Wollheim was a Freudian of the Kleinian school and a philosopher of art. He espoused psychoanalysis in his early thirties and had loved painting as an art form since he was a child. And yet ‘we are on very good terms’ – said Berlin sometime between 1988 and 1989, while Wollheim, in his autobiography, Germs, said it had been a ‘sublime’ friendship.
They first met in 1946 when Wollheim, an undergraduate whose studies were interrupted by wartime military service, was studying at Oxford for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Aged twenty-two, he had returned to Balliol in 1945 to finish his first degree in history and from 1947 to 1949 to pursue his second. Berlin instantly admired his brilliance. AJ Ayer was similarly impressed and offered him a job teaching in London once he graduated. Berlin though worried about Wollheim’s lifestyle. His PPE tutor from 1947-48, just three years his senior, was Marcus Dick. Tutor and pupil, a gifted man but also a disruptive alcoholic. Berlin noted with disgust:
Richard and Marcus seem to me to wander about Oxford in a melancholy unmarried way – I have never seen unmarriedness so bleak and lowering and corrosive …
The two men were not lovers and this was not a homophobic remark. But what else could unmarriedness have meant to Isaiah (also unwed at the time) other than sexual continence, or the lack of it? Marcus Dick was known for his womanising; Berlin for his lack of it. The classicist Maurice Bowra, an archdeacon of Oxford decadence, gave Dick a rare imprimatur as a new type of don who ‘gave tutorials with a bottle of whiskey by the armchair and a girl in the bedroom’. But it would take the rather repressed and well-behaved Isaiah time to warm up to that model. On December 6th, 1948 he noted that Wollheim’s university-appointed mentor ‘cannot long continue in Oxford … his life is too pointless and ill-adjusted … his mild, dazed aspect, the open bottles, velvet jacket, Byronic open shirt, air of endless hangover … subsequent sad collapses – all this clearly means loss of interest in philosophy.’ By 1952, however, after socialising in Italy with the now married Marcus and Cecilia Dick, Isaiah was more open to unconventional ways:
[Dick] is an honest fellow, a little crude, matter of fact, direct, capable and prosy with a queer streak of long hair and velvet jackets that make him interesting …
In the event Dick did not leave Oxford until 1963, when he took up a chair in philosophy at the University of Norwich. (He divorced in 1968 and died in 1971.)
The point of quoting Berlin on Dick is to invite the comparison with his friend Wollheim. Wollheim never hid his promiscuity and deep attraction to ‘low life’. He too married, but when that marriage also broke down he went on a protracted spree, reflecting in a later essay on how he engaged in
a frenzied cultivation of low life, in which I pursued, for its own sake, an encyclopaedic knowledge of pubs and clubs frequented by prostitutes and young burglars, transvestites and insomniacs. I didn’t want anything to go on in such places that I didn’t know of.
Perhaps he was not quite a sartorial match for his Byronic tutor, but Wollheim was always finely dressed in a grand bourgeois style. Grand indeed is how many remember him. It strikes me he pursued his two Londons, one centred on University College, the other steeped in the Soho underworld, like the silken-clad Baudelaire exploring the underworld of nineteenth century Paris. Like the poet, Wollheim’s disgust for moral propriety made him manically creative, yet he had also to protect himself from absolute self-destruction. When he entered psychoanalysis with the Kleinian Leslie Sohn in 1962 his father appeared at the heart of his complexes and tormented dreams. In his autobiography the young Richard remembered presiding over Eric Wollheim’s levée, watching how he tucked in his shirt tails and took up his exquisite pen and watch. He never saw his father naked.
Isaiah Berlin was an utterly different creature, untouched by such mania and only very distantly and respectfully interested in Freud because Freud was a thinker of the moment. Least of all was Isaiah mindful of things of the body and the person. Hating his appearance as a young man and regarding himself as unattractive, he was shy and inexperienced in sexual matters. It took him till the age of forty-seven, in 1956, to get married. Clearly, as he entered his fifth decade, Isaiah urgently needed to broaden his mind and even the different remarks made about Marcus Dick in 1948 and 1952 show that happening. Gradually, very late in his life, he became more at ease with himself and enjoyed his social and academic success. On his path to becoming an Establishment hero, getting to know young men like Marcus Dick and Richard Wollheim helped him become less censorious and made him a spiritually more generous man.
Berlin’s feelings towards Wollheim in 1946 somewhat resemble how he felt about the notorious upper-class philanderer Guy Burgess twelve years earlier. Berlin knew Burgess in 1934, when he himself was twenty-five, and they met again in 1940 when Burgess arranged Berlin’s life-changing journey to Russia. As Michael Ignatieff, Berlin’s biographer, observed: ‘It was an attraction of opposites: the fastidious, rather repressed don and the dishevelled homosexual adventurer.’ Berlin did with Burgess what he would do throughout his life with the multiple different, difficult personalities who attracted and repelled him. He drew them into his social-intellectual circle by virtue of their cleverness and entertainment value and turned them into heroic exemplars of unique if sometimes rebarbative human qualities. Burgess was ‘excellent company and in those days a friend of mine’, Berlin later recalled. Wollheim was also fine company and remained a friend for life.
After dazzling Oxford, Wollheim took up his role, in 1949, as an assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of London. Ayer’s idea in 1946 had been to create a philosophy department less stuffy than he had found Oxford, and with Wollheim he certainly imported an element of the new academic raffishness, besides his notorious own. The sexy, casual, new-style don was public-school-educated with impeccable manners, but despised formality. He was also quite wealthy and astonishingly well-connected. The more sober Isaiah Berlin also had those connections because society women loved him. And so he and Wollheim often met in the grander London drawing rooms and on holiday in France and Italy. Their political persuasions were left-wing and egalitarian, as was Ayer’s, but Wollheim and Berlin had each something to say about moral philosophy whereas Ayer did not. Wollheim believed in a constant inward self-exploration, as if to recover a lost harmony and a richer relation with the world. This he felt was made possible through intense involvement with works of art. Berlin was not thinking about personal conduct but about politics. In the earliest days of their friendship he saw how radically different postwar Western societies were diverging from the norm and upsetting the world at large. Quite different sets of values, equally valid, were in competition. These multiple systems were incommensurable. Just as for Wollheim people were.
Wollheim steadily climbed the academic ladder, reaching the immediate sub-professorial rank of Reader by 1960. And yet he was quickly aware that Ayer’s dependence on verification – his logical and linguistic analysis of statements claiming to be true – did not suit him at all as a style of philosophy. He was, like Isaiah, competent at what was required. But just as Isaiah switched to the history of ideas where he could flourish with his gift for understanding intellectual personalities, so Wollheim quickly abandoned logic for the world of imagination.
The metaphysician FH Bradley (1846-1924) helped Wollheim see his path. He found in Bradley ‘a theory of thought and symbolism’ which, he felt, better respected the wholeness of reality philosophy should attend to than the pared-down logic that ravaged it. Bradley’s eccentric Victorian religious mind, influenced by reading Hegel, persuaded Wollheim that logical language did violence to the facts of the world by isolating them from their surrounding complexity. As he put it in a 1953 radio talk on Bradley, language was not just a system of tokens or markers. Words are ‘not arrows we, the marksmen, aim at targets; but as missiles … take themselves there, or fall wide of the mark.’ This crucial preoccupation with symbolism Wollheim would reinvest into psychoanalysis as an alternative science of the mind. His psychoanalytically informed understanding of art would insist on the viewer working with the symbols before him. For a thinker drawn to creative writing, an outstanding intellectual journalist and future novelist, Wollheim found in Bradley his first philosophical home, as well as the basis for his life to come.
The friendship with Berlin flourished because Wollheim so amply fulfilled what Berlin wanted from a young academic philosopher. Ideally he – and I think Berlin only thought in male terms in those days – should be an ‘imaginative, sensitive, intellectually lively, morally sympathetic, fastidious, scrupulous, life-giving individual … on top of his academic subject. Otherwise the grey philistine ranks will close in.’ Wollheim was certainly imaginative, intellectually lively, and ‘a life-giving individual.’ Moreover he was the right social class, and that also mattered. Richard married Anne Toynbee, née Powell, in 1950, after she divorced the long-term chief fiction reviewer for The Observer and novelist Philip Toynbee. Berlin, who loved the intellectual high life, also knew Toynbee well. But now marriage brought the Wollheims as a pair inside the fold. After 1956, when Isaiah married Aline Halban, the two couples often enjoyed each other’s company in London, Oxford and abroad. There was nothing unusual about socialising with Picasso. Perhaps the friendship worked so well because Berlin and Wollheim came from similar Jewish backgrounds. Both were the sons of wealthy entrepreneurs who had remade their lives in Britain. Both had been privately educated at the best schools, and at Oxford. Berlin’s father was a prosperous timber merchant before fleeing Russia, and Wollheim’s father a highly successful theatre impresario who had chosen to move from Germany. He was Diaghilev’s agent when the great Russian choreographer brought the ballets russes to England. Many famous names passed through the Wollheim household on the Home Counties periphery of London and Richard grew up with great names as family friends. And yet in both cases their unusual émigré family stories left the two British philosophers with a measure of anxiety. Berlin in particular, who was born within the tsarist Russian empire and learned Hebrew as a child, found his European, Jewish and Russian origins at odds with English society and much of his elaborate social and intellectual performance was self-protective. Wollheim noted that it was only by chance he grew up in Tudorbethan England and not on Lake Wannsee, in the green hinterland of the pre-war German capital. To despise the comfortable stockbroker belt home in Walton-on-Thames because it was not intellectually chic became one of Wollheim’s psychological afflictions. The British cultural heritage was also not his first choice. He was always a Francophile, deeply versed in French literature, and fluent in the language. In a shared climate of worry Berlin’s very great love of music and respect for Russian poetry and the novel gave him an anchor in high art. Wollheim’s similar attachment to Proust, and to Renaissance painting, did the same for him.
A venture they pursued together with another close companion, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, was to edit a ‘Library of Ideas’ for the publisher George Weidenfeld. Hampshire and Wollheim were colleagues in London. The Ideas series ran from 1954 to 1956, which suggests it was not a great commercial success. But its intellectual heft was exemplary. While it ran its course Weidenfeld, another émigré, Austrian, Jewish and European-minded, described Wollheim as ‘then a great friend of mine’. Indeed here was a network of émigré and quasi-émigré friendships that ignited British cultural life after the war. The books were mainly titles in political philosophy with distinguished introductions, for example by the brilliant philosopher of law, Herbert Hart. Berlin’s main influence on the enterprise was to see Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism (1956) into print, and he persuaded Wollheim to translate the latter from the French.
But publishing was just an enterprise on the side. The two men were distinguished political philosophers, both known for their contributions to the BBC Third Programme. In 1956 the Aristotelian Society honoured them by asking them to speak together on ‘equality’.
The topic reflected the politics of the day. Equality, fairness, inherited wealth, class privilege and racial discrimination were all-consuming issues in postwar Britain. Atlee’s Labour government seemed to bring the chance to establish a socialist society of the kind that British intellectuals had been dreaming of for the previous fifty years and more. In another moral dimension meanwhile the Cold War pitted capitalist individualism against communist egalitarianism and that yawning difference in the two ‘systems’ was equally topical. British public opinion was mostly repelled by the despotism prevailing in Soviet Russia and disgusted when the Russians invaded Hungary. But a moral question remained whether an egalitarian system was not superior in decency.
The two papers were strikingly different, reflecting the characteristic orientation of their authors. (‘We never expected to agree.’) Berlin was an internationalist whose chief worry was about equally commendable human ideals inevitably conflicting. By contrast Wollheim was a public-school British socialist who aspired to building a left-wing Britain. He had in those years, as he recorded in a Fabian pamphlet, ‘a deep desire to produce a new theoretical basis for our Socialism’. Much of Wollheim’s 1956 paper concerned hypocrisy. The issue of social and economic equality in a new Britain challenged many thoughtful left-of-centre intellectuals whose backgrounds were wealthy and upper class. Wollheim was not satisfied by those who merely paid lip-service to the new ‘Rules of Life’. On the other hand hypocrisy was ‘the homage vice paid to virtue’ and could prove very useful in getting ‘the bigots and reactionaries’ to conform. In short Wollheim used his platform as a philosopher – not unusual in the profession, but not much disguised on this occasion – to deliver a personal message.
An unspoken issue that evening in London’s Gower Street was whether analytical philosophy’s close attention to language could in any way help resolve the wider debate around equality, fairness and ‘the competitive system’. The suspicion was that it could not. Wollheim, having briefed himself on the ways of hypocrisy, paid lip-service to the method prevailing in Oxford and London but, as he implied, it was after all a moral question whether the whole ‘monstruous scramble’ of consumer society should be encouraged or suppressed and everyone knew linguistic philosophy was at sea when it came to statements of value. Nor did analytical philosophy have much bearing on what was obvious to progressive minds in 1956: the need to change the law to further greater equality, democracy and liberty. In his report on homosexuality, commissioned by the Conservative government in 1954, Lord Wolfenden would insist that there ‘must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’. Both Berlin and Wollheim publicly expressed the wish to see homosexuality decriminalised and that was further implied in what Wollheim included in his address that evening. Still, what stands out from the 1956 seminar was the degree of Wollheim’s passionate demand for sexual liberty. There should be no state interference of any kind. That was equality.
Berlin’s approach, always more balanced and judicious than Wollheim’s, rather reflected his constant fear of fanaticism and irrationalism seizing hold of society. Regarding the evident ‘unequal distribution of natural gifts’, he observed that to reorganise the system to remedy injustice would probably involve such a highly centralised and despotic authority that it in itself would cause maximum inequality. Berlin was only passionate when it came to came to condemning despotism, above all the Soviet and the Nazi kinds. Otherwise he stood for a new age in humanitarian wisdom. Wollheim, on the other hand, was angry – an angry young philosopher at odds with himself and driven by his sexual appetites.
The two had another nominal discussion of political matters in 1958. Wollheim had reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement an anthology of political philosophy published by a high Tory British journalist, Tom Utley, the previous year. The content of the book and some of the reviewer’s comments outraged Isaiah. He dictated his response but didn’t send it, so Wollheim at least on that occasion never heard how much Isaiah loathed an inadequate, insular book, replete with neo-colonialist sneering about polities less accomplished than the English. Why did it contain nothing useful about irrationalism in politics and about the true nature of communism? To understand these political phenomena was to grasp as nearly as possible the tragedy of the twentieth century. Berlin did not share Wollheim’s view that fascism and nazism had been ‘the unmistakable deliverances of psychosis’. Hitler fitted that description, but otherwise there was ‘a tradition of irrationalist European thought beginning with Rousseau or the counter-revolutionary reactionaries’ and it was important to see the continuities with apparently calmer and more normal times. (Berlin’s understanding would have been useful today.)
In all this they were such different philosophers, Wollheim hardly a political philosopher at all, and certainly not in a British tradition. Berlin focused on what overt theories and dreams might lead human beings morally and politically astray, while Wollheim, more like an acolyte of the Frankfurt School, worried about the vicious unconscious. (For it was postwar German philosophy that was drawing on psychoanalysis to understand the immediate catastrophic past.) Interested in diverse human personalities and outlooks, Berlin led a buoyant life in an English society with which, in the end, he didn’t have much in common. Wollheim by contrast was so preoccupied by individual darkness that he threatened to drop out of ‘normal’ society altogether. Berlin worried about society, Wollheim worried about himself. Berlin believed certain perfectly legitimate human goals were irreconcilable. Wollheim was haunted by demonic otherness. There was only an oblique similarity between them, in the way one man juggled with infinite diversity and the other with ever-present abnormality, but they remained friends.
Communism was a very different topic from nazism, Berlin went on. It was a narrow and paltry selection of texts Wollheim had been given to review in Uttley’s book, and particularly on that topic. Wollheim was wrong to praise it.
If anyone really wants to know what Communism and socialism asserted in the twentieth century there must be texts other than [R.H.] Tawney for them to read … [Where is] my friend Plekhanov, who might at least have illuminated what orthodox Marxists were thinking in 1910 – even Kautsky or Bernstein would not be altogether irrelevant. Why is Trotsky omitted or Rosa Luxemburg?
Berlin, perhaps the best-informed scholar in the country at the time on the Marxist project in Europe, spotted the parochialism in the High Tory view that had produced this book. He saw how even so it threatened to engulf the politically English Wollheim in ‘party-pamphlet’ orthodoxies. He ‘violently objected’ to the book’s dismissals of ‘“the silly radicalism of the left”’ and the ‘realism’ that Conservatives claimed they stood for. If one wanted to understand the confusion of the English ‘Left’ circa 1958, and the ignorance of the nostalgic anglophile Right vis-à-vis a larger world, one could do worse than start with Berlin’s response, and the lesson he wanted to teach the younger Wollheim.
All his life Wollheim called himself a socialist. But his egalitarianism – into which this socialism translated –was premised on the ideal of equal access to art and enlightenment rather than an enforced redistribution of wealth. It was all rather comfortable because it meant no change for a man like himself. But then Wollheim was caught in the same dilemma as a whole cluster of high-minded British left-wingers of his day who were also Establishment figures, as his 1961 Fabian pamphlet showed. They believed the path to postwar cultural renewal lay with an infusion of intellectual freedom and vitality into the life of the masses (as they called them), and they wanted to increase access to high art – only not by simplifying it. This admirable position, long since lost to us, was also Wollheim’s, to which he added, all too vaguely for his passing friends on the New Left, his interest in ‘a new theoretical basis’.
In the 1958 debacle Berlin minded most personally that Wollheim seemed to admire the English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Who could admire Oakeshott after reading his views on Hobbes’s Leviathan? ‘However if you admire him you admire him.’ Oakeshott’s reputation for heterosexual philandering further stoked Berlin’s outrage. Communicating with Wollheim almost in a private code, Berlin placed him ‘somewhat below Jouvenel’. But ultimately the mention of Oakeshott engaged Berlin’s competitiveness. It didn’t show through often, but he believed his own cosmopolitan humanism was superior to nationalistic English nostalgia as the basis for what should be taught at Oxford.
Berlin evidently worried about his friend, about whom he had made a curiously apposite observation as early as 1948. Part of this passage has already been quoted:
I feel a sort of curious malaise about the whole of that generation [born circa 1920], whose sense of pleasure is too self-conscious and unspontaneous, and who are curiously tired – I suppose because of the war – and in Richard’s case, doomed to turn things to ashes. The only successful young dons are the crude, functional, tone deaf, robotlike mechanics; which is intolerable. I feel the party [the pleasure of university life – LC] is somehow being let down; that some imaginative, sensitive, intellectually lively, morally sympathetic, fastidious, scrupulous, life-giving individual is on top of his academic subject. Otherwise the grey philistine ranks will close in.
Wollheim was the very opposite of grey and philistine, but he needed to get a grip on himself. The moment came, it seems, in his inaugural lecture to the British Academy in 1975, when he insisted that philosophy – and culture generally – had to allow for ‘the bad self’ alongside the good. Evidently it was also a note on how to live with himself.
In 1962, when his psychoanalysis was ongoing, Wollheim left his wife. He embarked on wild months going from borrowed address to borrowed address, driving himself in a van and with few belongings. At the same time he began writing his novel A Family Romance, which would be published in 1969. Recalling that time almost thirty years later he put into the mind of his protagonist, David, how much he loathed the style of philosophy he had been forced to adopt by the Ayerian fashion:
I was beginning to recognize the difference between toiling at a desk, the coldness of the morning wrinkling the skin, late into the evening, without turning on the light, and work. Toil simulates work, it simulates the arduousness, the drudgery, of work but it dispenses with the trial and error, the matching of outer to inner, upon which completion depends. It pursues a disembodied perfection, always out of reach, though always in existence, effortlessly realized from the beginning of time, independent of the writing hand and the thinking brain.
In its place he had now turned to explore
the gait of disordered thinking in its various forms: the flight of manic thinking, of thinking that magically makes everything all right; the labouring hesitancy, the clotted exactitude of concrete thinking, within which thoughts get conceived as the things they are the thoughts of; and a special kind of squeamish pedantry, a self-enamoured love of qualification, under cover of which thinking, while aimed at ruthless self-examination, instates bland self-ignorance, perhaps self-error.
Here was a declaration, in fiction, that recalled Sartre’s famous renunciation of earlier philosophy in La Nausée [Nausea] (1936). It bundled together what Wollheim was perversely enjoying – that ‘clotted exactitude’ of returning to the presence of real, material objects – and what he despised – that ‘squeamish pedantry …’ in his flight from logical positivism.
Isaiah had a word for Wollheim’s intellectual situation: Kulturbolschewismus. His socialism was of ‘the Weimar Republic type … Bohemian, free, demanding moral, social, sexual freedom etc.’ As for the extreme psychology, who knows what Isaiah grasped of it. But they stayed friends.
When Wollheim became Grote Professor of Philosophy at the University of London in 1963, he turned the department into a commune, according to Berlin’s friend Arnaldo Momigliano. The department always had ‘a rather rough and tumble atmosphere’, Freddie Ayer noted, but Wollheim’s reign was even worse, depending on your point of view. Momigliano, professor of ancient history at UCL, was scandalised. ‘[Momigliano] hates Richard Wollheim for despising learning … his novel was final evidence of something shameless, exhibitionistic, no part of the world of feeling, learning, civilized relationships’. Against that accusation however one might observe that Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects, a marvellous revision of pedestrian British aesthetics, full of feeling and learning and an instant classic, was published in 1968 and finally made his name in the subject he most coveted.
The two friends saw less of each other in the two decades Wollheim remained in post in London. How JS Mill understood individual liberty, that topic so dear to Wollheim’s heart, constituted the height of their ongoing amicable disagreements. In a 1988 letter to another friend, Berlin might have been talking about Wollheim himself, his career as a writer and his consuming passion for art when he noted:
If society persecutes an artist for what it believes to be dangerous or immoral activities, his defence is not the pursuit of happiness – the motive for creating works of art is to create them, not some sort of happy condition which their creation results in.
It was as if he were saying that Wollheim did not appreciate the disinterested dignity of his own position as a seeker and searcher on a par with an artist. But then clearly Wollheim was desperate to secure his own happiness, and he admired Mill, and for that reason he fused those two emotions. It seems to me to have been a wilful misreading.
Isaiah’s seventieth birthday lunch at Wolfson College, Oxford brought a formal reunion in 1979 with Wollheim looking inwardly consumed and tortured, but also immaculately turned-out, in the group photograph. In 1982 he moved from London to New York and in 1985 to California, where he became professor of intellectual and moral philosophy at Berkeley. He had long wanted to get out of the insular environment that was academic London and freely pursue his artistic themes.
After an enlarged second edition in 1980 of Art and its Objects, where he laid the foundations for an intellectual and emotional modus operandi that was finally satisfying, lectures given that year at Harvard became in, 1984, The Thread of Life. Here was a book intertwining welcome thoughts about how to live among works of art with a less welcome involvement of psychoanalysis in the project, many readers thought. But for Wollheim psychoanalysis doubled as a healing, all-embracing metaphysical system. It had to be there in any account of what he valued. As he had once put it, thinking about Bradley, the task of a monist metaphysics like Bradley’s was to seek a solution to fractured reality, ‘disjoined … by the impact of Thought’. The need, which Wollheim himself had felt so intensely while tormenting himself with analytical philosophy, he now found gratified by psychoanalysis and art. Such a metaphysic might counter the violence of Time, ‘whose traditional emblems are … instruments like the scythe and scissors’. It might restore the thread of life to one who otherwise felt it broken.
In America followed a series of books on how to penetrate artistic works and find there the artist’s intentions. Art works and their creators were the ultimate partners for human beings seeking to grasp their own bewildering intentions. They offered a relationship that stood ever to be worked on and deepened. In all this Wollheim created a quasi-philosophical discipline of his own, whatever his official title was in Berkeley. Berlin, the quondam Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory in Oxford, did the same with the history of ideas. Both were mavericks.
Besides being ‘very clever’ Berlin loved Wollheim because he was ‘also very honest’. Meanwhile both undoubtedly had a gift for friendship, which they could bestow upon the other. Wollheim once defined friendship as having ‘a capacity to perceive, a willingness to respect, and a desire to understand the differences between persons’. That formulation could have been Berlin’s pluralism applied to individuals. Just understand how different these people and these polities and these religions are. The two men differed over politics and in the end especially over Israel, where Berlin’s loyalty to the Jewish state was emotional and unconditional and sat uncomfortably with a commitment to diverging visions. Yet another difference was how Wollheim favoured introspection while Berlin avoided it. Wollheim with his new/old metaphysics craved the kind of wholeness of experience that had long obsessed Romantic thinkers on the edge of philosophy and art. The realist Berlin was not introspective at all. And yet something rubbed off, for when Wollheim contributed ‘A Common Human Nature’ to Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (1991) Berlin responded on June 14th, 1991 with a matching honesty. It was the last published letter that passed between them and a revelation:
You praise me for responding to the personal characteristics of the people who [sic] I write about. So I do. Consciously or unconsciously I usually tend somewhat to introduce my own autobiographical elements into them – even de Maistre, I fear. But the thing I wanted to say is that I am no good at knowing what other people’s moods are. I am totally insensitive to whether they are sad or gay, embarrassed, secretly distressed, or whatever, unless this is made very obvious by tears or laughter. In a room I have no antennae for emotional conditions. What I do think I may know something about is basic characters of people, the skeleton more than the flesh or skin.
Wollheim nudged his old friend towards this landmark moment in his self-knowledge (a necessary reference for any future biographer). The subtle truth was that Berlin drew on insights from occasional self-scrutiny but what he did with them was invest them deeply in the memory of others. He partly recreated others in his own image, but not so as anyone could know. To write in praise of others – he became known for his éloges – was a mode of writing, so far from appearing subjective, that immediately gave him a place in the world of other people’s achievements. It minimised the conflict between himself and others and between himself and surrounding society. Incommensurability in personal relations would have meant terrible loneliness in a not always congenial England. Both these philosophers gave great thought to the old, old problem of other minds, only not in the arid form in which it was taught in their day. Dedicating himself to the differences between people, Berlin became a friend to the whole world in the same way as the alienated Wollheim tried to become a friend to himself.
Isaiah was eighty in 1989, and beginning the following year and continuing in May 1991 Wollheim interviewed him for posterity. The resulting three sessions were taped and given to the British Library to store as part of its collection of twentieth century voices. (The texts are also transcribed in the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.) The interviews followed the familiar lines of Berlin’s career, but it’s possible that after the last session, in May 1991, when they dined together at Isaiah’s home in Oxford, they switched once again into something more personal. The exact date of the dinner is uncertain, but this is what Wollheim recalled in Germs:
It is not an unusual story, but I have told it only once, one warm night in the early 1990s, when I was staying alone with IB in Oxford, and we were sitting up after dinner in a room scented with hyacinths. Every half-hour or so we took it in turns to say that it was time to go to bed, as we had for more than forty-five years, but we did not move. He was dressed in a thick tweed suit with a waistcoat, and a fawn-coloured cardigan over the waistcoat, and as the hour hand came close to two, we quite unexpectedly broached the subject of our first sexual encounters. ‘When did you lose your virginity?’ I heard him ask me. I told him in outline … but when it came to his turn, he stared up at one of the corners where two walls met the ceiling, as he used to do when he stood on the rostrum and the words poured out towards his audience in a magical flow, he pursed his lips and he said only how old he was at the time. ‘Very late,’ he added. ‘Very late indeed, but there it is.’ And in that ‘there it is’ he put all that deep acceptance of life, which started from the acceptance of himself, and which made his friendship so sublime.
The details in this lovely passage seem to conflict a little with reality. Hyacinths blossom indoors in deepest winter, but it was a warm night when they stayed up so late. It was warm, but in that case Isaiah was unusually heavily dressed. And was it he who asked that intimate question? Perhaps yes, for, if I am right, the two of them had spent that day finalising the story of Isaiah’s entire life, including the day he met Wollheim some time in 1946. Isaiah’s thoughts may well have drifted back to how the young Wollheim’s overt sexuality had so long ago caused him to find such a style of ‘unmarriedness’ corrosive. Then he may have mentally traced the course of the years of his own gradual late emancipation and happy marriage ten years later. He surely reflected how many differences between Wollheim and himself had failed to keep them apart. Above all the gap in sexual experience, which surely colours a whole attitude to life, was vast. Had Isaiah’s first time really been at the age of forty-seven? Wollheim, in his lovingly crafted paragraph, like an epitaph to their friendship, didn’t reveal.
1/7/2025
Lesley Chamberlain, with an interest in philosophy and biography, is the author of Nietzsche in Turin and many other books. Her Undoing the Moral Empire: British Moral Philosophers after the War will appear in early 2026. Isaiah Berlin’s magnificent Letters, especially the volumes Enlightening, Building and Affirming, are the chief source for this essay.
Homepage image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery NPG P1142 (Non-Commercial use)
