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Big Talker
The reputation of Isaiah Berlin rests on words
and letters, not books.
by James Grant
10/31/2009 12:05:00 AM, Volume 015, Issue 08
Enlightening
Letters 1946-1960
by Isaiah Berlin
Edited by Henry Hardy
and Jennifer Holmes
Random House, 704 pp., $50
The Book of Isaiah
Personal Impressions
of Isaiah Berlin
Edited by Henry Hardy
Boydell, 368 pp., $47.95
On June 11, 1957, two days before the announcement of his knighthood (awarded, so a friend teased, for services to "brilliant conversation"), Isaiah Berlin lunched with the queen. Ignoring frowns from other guests, he insisted on the merits of various books banned for obscenity in Britain, including Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and one by Edmund Wilson. In a letter to Wilson he remembered finding the queen to be quite jolly:
She asked me if I read much--& said that her father once informed his luncheon guests that he had been reading a most interesting book--the Bible --& had any of them read it, & if so, what did they think of it. You cannot tell me that I shd have had a gayer time at the White House or the Elysee. The Queen inquired after my views of the works of Louise de Vilmorin--I asked hers regarding Cocteau. I think perhaps you had better not disillusion the benevolent U.S. press with their view of this grave, dull, limited, horsey young early Victorian prig.
In this second volume of letters, we find Berlin mixing with just about everyone in high society. His work in Washington during the war, preparing dispatches on American opinion for the Foreign Office, had secured his reputation and given him enviable contacts. Despite this, the late 1940s and early '50s were in many ways ...
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