Books in Brief: Personal Impressions

Personal Impressions, by Isaiah Berlin (Viking, 219 pp., $13.95). Kind words for men famous and obscure. Berlin delivered most of the pieces in this collection as eulogies. The remainder he wrote in the same vein, apparently with the idea that, living or dead, men should be given the benefit of the doubt. Not that there is reason to question the good things Berlin says: his subjects seem honorable one and all. Even the second Roosevelt, in the midst of squandering millions of other people’s dollars, put on a creditable performance that can, if nothing else, be admired as first-rate theater. As Berlin writes, FDR was a “handsome, charming, gay, very intelligent, very delightful, very audacious man.” But one yearns for more than Berlin gives on the likes of John Plamenatz (a professor of history at Oxford), Aubernon Herbert (a gentleman farmer at Somerset who had connections with Polish nationalists during the war), and Hubert Henderson (who was appointed warden of All Souls College and promptly died of a heart attack). Berlin’s mellifluous style, fond asitisof adjectives, shies away from plain facts like birth dates, parentage, schooling, occupations, wives’ names, and dates of death. Newcomers to his little-known Oxonians will have trouble getting their bearings. It is a thoroughly pleasant confusion, however. Berlin seems utterly incapable of bearing ill will toward anybody. While staunchly defending the Zionist Chaim Weizmann, he laments the fate of the Arabs in Palestine and expresses the hope—there is no doubt from the tone that he is sincere— that matters will improve. His capsule biographies full of superlatives painlessly bring to mind once again that this is a century without heroes. They say a lot by things they imply: that to be kind to certain politicians one must praise their looks; that the men who sinned least made careers in the safety of a university. Albert Einstein, whose theories crossed the campus boundary, turned out to be, in the eyes of some, the century’s most spectacularly unwitting villain. Berlin says of him: “He was an innocent man, and sometimes, I should think, taken in by fools and knaves.” A concluding piece on Russian writers underscores the tragedy of the naive. Receiving a midnight phone call from Stalin and asked to vouch for the loyalty of the poet Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak replied that “he had always known that this would happen, that they must meet and speak about matters of supreme importance.” “If I were Mandelstam’s friend I should have known better how to defend him,” said Stalin, and hung up. With Stalin, of course, the verdict was usually a foregone conclusion, but in this case, it seems the tyrant was right.