The fact that the confirmed bachelor Sir Isaiah would, in 1956, come to marry Aline Halban, who belonged to an aristocratic and very wealthy French Jewish family, was not just a surprise to his innumerable friends; it was the culmination of a bizarre sentimental adventure that could provide rich material for a delightful picaresque comedy. When his diplomatic mission ended in 1945, Isaiah Berlin returned to Oxford, to his classes, his lectures, his intellectual work. He was beginning to be known on both sides of the Atlantic, and from that time on began to spend terms or semesters at North American universities, above all Harvard, as well as making periodic journeys to Jerusalem. He was showered with distinctions, and the British establishment opened their doors to him. And then, well into his forties, sex seems to have erupted in his life, in a manner that one could only describe as tortuous and academic: through adulterous liaisons with wives of his university colleagues. An irresistible humour fills the pages in which Ignatieff – with great affection and indulgence – describes a first affair, lasting several years, with meetings in churchyards, libraries, corridors and even in his parents’ house. Overcome one day with remorse, Berlin went to the husband and told him the truth: ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ The aggrieved husband dismissed the matter with an emphatic ‘That’s not possible,’ and changed the subject.47
The second adventure was the serious one. Aline was married to an eminent physicist, Hans Halban, an Austrian by birth, who had worked on French nuclear programmes before coming to Oxford. She was attractive, cultured, rich and passionate about music and social life, like Isaiah himself. The close friendship forged as a result of these shared interests began to evolve in a ‘guilty’ manner. The physicist found out what was happening and tried to put an end to Aline’s outings. Isaiah Berlin paid him a visit. While (I am sure) they had tea, they discussed the problem that had arisen. Aline waited in the garden to hear the outcome of the conversation. The philosopher’s logic was persuasive, and the physicist recognised this. They both went out to the garden to walk among the rose bushes and the hydrangeas and inform Aline of their agreement: she could see her lover once a week, with the approval of her husband. And so it seems that friendly triangular harmony persisted until Hans Halban had to return to Paris. The couple decided to divorce, and Isaiah and Aline were free to marry. The marriage was a happy one. In Aline, Sir Isaiah found more than a tender wife: she was his accomplice, who shared his tastes and interests and helped him with his work, a woman capable of organising life with the confidence that comes with wealth and experience, and creating an agreeable, well-ordered existence in which social life – summers spent in Parragi in Italy, the music festivals at Salzburg, Pesaro and Glyndebourne, the dinners and outings with distinguished people – coexisted with the mornings and afternoons spent reading and editing his essays.
His intellectual work, which was rich, dense and extraordinarily acute, was concentrated in essays and articles, lectures and reviews, not in great syntheses, organic works or ambitious long-term projects. This was not due, as Ignatieff convincingly argues, to the dispersed life, full of many different obligations, that Berlin always led: brevity and small scale were his unmistakable hallmark. In the eighties, as if to prove those critics wrong who reproached him for not bringing out a major work on a wide-ranging theme, he decided to expand the 1965 lectures he had given in Washington on the origins of Romanticism (published posthumously as The Roots of Romanticism) and worked for many months in the British Library, filling hundreds of file cards. In the end, he gave it up: big projects were not his style. He lacked the ambition, the enormous faith in himself, that touch of obsession and fanaticism that produce masterpieces. The essay was more conducive to his modesty, his sceptical view of himself, his complete disregard for being, or appearing to be, a genius or a sage, his conviction – that was not a pose but something he felt very deeply – that what he had done, or was capable of doing, counted in the end for very little in the dazzling ferment of universal thought and literary creation.
That was not true, of course. Because in these relatively short texts that interpreted and reread the great thinkers, historians and writers of modern Europe, this born essayist – he is similar in this respect to another great liberal thinker, José Ortega y Gasset – has left a work that is seminal to the culture of our time. A work that ranks among the finest in the liberal tradition, a tradition that he brought up to date in a way that few other contemporary thinkers could match. Probably only Popper and Hayek have done as much as him, in our times, for the culture of freedom. Of the three, the most artistic, the best writer, was Isaiah Berlin. His prose is as transparent and readable as that of Stendhal, another polygraph who did not write but rather dictated his texts, and, quite frequently, the richness and animation of his ideas, his quotations and his examples, the liveliness and elegance with which he organised his thought, give his essays a novelistic quality, full of throbbing life and infectious humanity.
I saw him twice in my life. The first time, in the eighties, at a dinner at the house of the historian Hugh Thomas, at which the star guest was the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. They sat Sir Isaiah next to her, and, throughout the whole evening, the only one of the intellectuals present to whom she made a real attempt to show respect and affection was Berlin. He seemed rather overwhelmed and happy. At the end of the dinner, when Mrs Thatcher left, after a couple of hours of subtle cross-examination from the dinner guests, Isaiah Berlin declared, ‘Nothing to be ashamed of’. The second time was in Seville, in 1992, at a congress devoted to the fifth centenary of the discovery of America. People showered him with compliments, which he accepted blushingly but gratefully. I had written a series of articles on him, which would later become the prologue to the Spanish edition of the Hedgehog and the Fox, in which I committed the gaffe of stating that he had been born in Lithuania instead of Latvia. ‘Well, it’s not serious,’ he said, giving me some good-natured support, ‘because, when I was born, all that was Russia.’ Thank you, Sir Isaiah.
Paris, March 2000
The Thief in the Empty House
All Jean-François Revel’s books are interesting and polemical, but his memoirs, which have just been published under the enigmatic title The Thief in the Empty House, are also good-humoured, an uninhibited confession of sins, passions, ambitions and frustrations, written in a light and sometimes hilarious tone by a Marseillais who found himself, due to the vagaries of life, having to give up the university career he had dreamed of in his youth and become an essayist and political journalist.
He seems saddened, as he looks back, by this change of career. However, as far as his readers are concerned, it was not a misfortune but rather a stroke of luck that, because of Sartre and a beautiful journalist whom he made pregnant when he was very young, he had to give up his academic plans and head to Mexico and then to Italy to teach French language and culture. Dozens of philosophy teachers of his generation languished in university lecture halls teaching a discipline that, with very few exceptions (one of which is the work of Raymond Aron, whom Revel describes in this memoir with affectionate perversity), has become so specialised that it now seems to have little to do with life. In his books and articles, written in news-rooms or at home, spurred on by history in the making, Revel has never stopped writing about philosophy, but, in the style of Diderot or Voltaire, he bases it on a current problem. His brave and lucid contributions to contemporary debates have shown – like Unamuno in Spain – that journalism can be highly creative, a genre that can combine intellectual originality with stylistic elegance.
In its depiction of key events and characters, the book shows us an intense and varied life, where important moments – the resistance to the Nazis during the Second World War, the vicissitudes of French journalism in the second half of the twentieth century – mix with rather more bizarre ones, like the joyful description that Revel gives of a famous guru, Gurdjieff, whose circle he frequented in his early years. Sketched with the broad brushstrokes of a deft caricat
urist, the celebrated visionary, who dazzled a great number of gullible people and snobs in his Paris exile, appears in these pages as an irresistible drunken bloodsucker, draining the pockets and the souls of his followers. These followers included – however surprising this might seem – not just gullible people who could easily be duped, but also a number of intellectuals and well-read people who saw Gurdjieff’s confusing verbiage as a doctrine that could lead them to rational knowledge and spiritual peace.
It is a devastating portrait, but, as with several other people described in the book, the severity of the criticism is softened by the good-humoured, understanding attitude of the narrator, whose benevolent smile rescues, at the last moment, characters who are about to be crushed under the weight of their own cunning, vileness, cynicism or stupidity. Some of the portraits of friends, teachers, enemies, or other people, are affectionate and unexpected, like his depiction of Louis Althusser, Revel’s teacher at the École Normale, who appears as a much more human and attractive person than one might expect from the Talmudic and asphyxiating commentator of Capital, or of Raymond Aron who, despite occasional disputes and misunderstandings with the author when they were both star contributors to L’Express, is always treated with respect, even when Revel became exasperated at his inability to maintain a coherent position in conflicts that he often caused.
On other occasions, the portraits are ferocious and the humour cannot counterbalance the vitriol. Take the brief appearance of the French socialist minister during the Gulf War, Jean-Pierre Chevènement (‘A provincial and devout Lenin, belonging to the category of idiots who look intelligent, that are more lethal and dangerous than intelligent people who look like idiots’), or the portrait of François Mitterrand himself, who Revel was very close to before Mitterrand’s rise to power, and who vies with Jimmy Goldsmith for the title of the most unusual and deplorable person in the great parade of characters in this book.
Revel depicts Mitterrand as a man fatally uninterested in politics (and also in morality and in ideas), who resigned himself to politics because it was a prerequisite for the only thing that mattered to him: to get to power and keep hold of it. It is a memorable portrait, like an identikit picture of a certain type of successful politician: outwardly friendly, professionally charming, superficially cultured, relying on actions and phrases learned off by heart, a glacial mind and a capacity for lying bordering on genius, together with an uncommon ability to manipulate human beings, values, words, theories and programmes as the situation demanded. It is not just the leading figures of the left who are treated with jocular irreverence in the memoir. Many right-wing dignitaries, beginning with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, also appear as models of demagogy and irresponsibility, capable of endangering democratic institutions or the future of their country out of petty vanity and a small-minded, short-term vision of politics.
The most exquisite (and also the most cruel) portrait of all, a small masterpiece within the book, is that of the Anglo-French Jimmy Goldsmith, the owner of L’Express at the time when Revel was the editor of the magazine, a time when, incidentally, the magazine achieved a quality that it did not have before and has not had since. Scott Fitzgerald thought that ‘rich people were different’, and the brilliant, handsome and successful Jimmy (who now keeps boredom at bay by squandering twenty million pounds, in the upcoming elections in Britain, on a Referendum Party that will defend British sovereignty against the colonial aspirations of Brussels and Chancellor Kohl) seems to prove him right. But it might be difficult in this case to share the admiration that the author of The Great Gatsby had for millionaires. A human being can have an exceptional talent for finance and be, at the same time, a pathetic megalomaniac, self-destructive and awkward in every other respect. The account that Revel gives of the delirious political, social and newspaper projects that Goldsmith dreamed up and then forgot almost at the same moment, the intrigues that he stirred up against himself, in a constant sabotage of a company that, despite this, kept providing him with benefits and prestige, is hilarious, something out of a Balzac novel.
Of all the facets of Revel’s life – he was a teacher, an art critic, a philosopher, an editor, a gourmet, a political analyst, a writer and a journalist – it was as a writer and a journalist that he found the greatest fulfilment and in which he made his most lasting contributions. Every journalist should read his account of the highs and lows of this vocation, to realise how passionate it can be and, also, how beneficial and harmful. Revel refers to some key moments in which French journalism has uncovered a truth hidden until that moment by ‘the deceptive fog of conformity and complicity’. For example, when a gimlet-eyed journalist made an incredible find, among the rubbish piled up outside a bank during a dustmen’s strike in Paris: evidence of a financial racket by the USSR in France to bribe the Communist Party.
Another important story was the clarification of the mysterious comings and goings of Georges Marchais, the secretary-general of the Communist Party during the Second World War (he was a voluntary worker in German factories). This second scoop did not, however, have the repercussions that might have been expected because, at that political moment, it was not just the left that was anxious to keep the revelation quiet. The right-wing press also kept it secret, because they were afraid that the presidential candidature of Marchais would be damaged by the revelation of the Nazi sympathies of the Communist leader in his youth, and that his potential votes would switch to Mitterrand, which would have damaged Giscard. In this way, rejected by the left and the right, the truth about Marchais’s past was thus minimised and denied until the matter faded away, and Marchais could continue his political career without hindrance, right up to his comfortable retirement.
These memoirs show Revel on top form: ardent, troublesome and dynamic, passionate about ideas and pleasure, insatiably curious and condemned, because of his unhealthy intellectual integrity and his polemical stance, to live in perpetual conflict with almost everyone around him. The lucid way he detects the deceit and self-justification of his colleagues, the courageous manner in which he denounces the opportunism and cowardice of intellectuals who serve the powerful out of fanaticism or for personal gain, have made him a modern maudit, heir to the great tradition of French non-conformists, the tradition that caused revolutions and incited free spirits to question everything, from laws, systems, institutions, ethical and aesthetic principles, to style and cookery recipes. This tradition is in its death throes today, and, however much I scan the horizon, I cannot see who might continue it among the new batch of scribes. I fear, therefore, that it will disappear with Revel. But it will disappear with the finest honours.
London, April 1997
Culture and the New International Order
It might be a good moment, in the extraordinary times we now live in, in a world deeply affected by the advances of globalisation in every sphere of life, to reflect on the ways in which cultural life will be affected by the increasing interdependence between nations that has come about as a result of the internationalisation of communications, the economy, ideas and technology. There is a great deal of confusion around this issue and a number of prejudices that need to be addressed.
But we must first clarify what we mean by the word culture. For an anthropologist, this word, with its agricultural resonance, signifies quite simply the whole gamut of customs and beliefs that are most representative of a society, from the language which its inhabitants use to communicate, to the meals they eat and the sports that they play, including their customs, gods, devils and ghosts of every shape and hue. But this conception of culture is so vast that, by including so many things, it becomes rather imprecise. It is better to restrict the term and just refer to the spiritual dimension of human life in which knowledge and beliefs – ideas and myths – meld together, giving us a perspective which allows us to understand the world in a certain way, with a degree of confidence and safety, and to form a relationship, in a precise way, with things around us and with our fellow men and
women.
As we go back further in time, we find that cultures share fewer and fewer things: they tend to be more separate and in conflict. That is why, in antiquity, in that archipelago of culturally self-engrossed and isolated islands, mistrust, hatred and warfare dominated relations between cultures. Trade had a civilising and pacifying influence over time, building bridges between warring cultures and opening up routes through which adventurers, explorers, wise people and artists (along with conquistadors and plunderers) would gradually make contact with each other and start to mix, so that, after a time, their shared values would gradually replace former differences.
This brings me to the situation today, which is both terrifying and wonderful. For we are now living in a world which, thanks to internationalisation, is ever more interdependent, a world in which a common outlook seems to be rapidly reducing and removing what before had seemed like strong and impregnable barriers between cultures.
Is this a positive thing or a tragedy for humanity? The debate on this issue is just beginning, and it is sure to become more widespread and heated in years to come as antagonism intensifies between those for and against so-called globalisation. It is a wide-ranging debate in which it is not easy to differentiate cultural matters from political and economic issues, because they are so inextricably linked. In some areas, like communications, the opening of borders has had an enormously beneficial effect, because now it is much more difficult than before – and soon it will be impossible – for governments to impose censorship in the way they did in the past, by keeping people in the dark and thus manipulating public opinion. The development of audiovisual media and new technologies means that today, with a minimum of effort, citizens of any country can access diverse and contrasting information, and that authoritarian regimes, which are anxious to turn information into propaganda, find it more and more difficult to stop the free circulation of independent news and opinions that are not subject to their control. This is a great advance in terms of freedom, and gives a great democratic impulse to societies that have not yet managed to shake off dictatorships.