My dinners with Isaiah: the music of a philosopher's life

Ned O'Gorman

He told me at our first meeting in Oxford, in April 1991, that he was an old man and would soon die. Might I have lunch with him in Salzburg in August at Tomaselli's? It was a cafe I loved, and our conversation that April day was filled with wonderful correspondences. Who, he asked, were the pianists I most admired? I named five and was right on the money: Radu Lupu, Richter, Brendel, Murray Perahia, and Andras Schiff. I asked him, quite terrified that I would be taken for a fool, did he not think Horowitz was very bad? He did.

When Isaiah was twenty-one, he wrote music criticism for the Oxford Outlook under the pseudonym of Albert Alfred Apricott. Even then he knew who he was - a mixture, a plural man, part Ariel, Puck, and Falstaff, and part sage, each lovely human facet of him cohering and radiating complete delight and the most elegant and yet not unflamboyant manner. He made the balance endure with grace.

I think that Isaiah found the world a marvelously interesting place. He was caught up in it, in its curiosities, in its absolutes, in its queer turns and sudden precipices, and how one wanted to know all about it. We used to play a little game: we thought of an imaginary line. On one side was genius and a sort of dwelling place of the great, and there was the space leading to it. Who got close, who got over the line, and who didn't get anywhere near it? We deliberated long about the quartets of Shoshtakovich, five of which I had heard the previous night. We decided that no matter how harrowing and tragic his quartets, somehow they are too exposed to the tempests of his feelings, too raw, too muddled to achieve the divine. But Isaiah could move with the agility of a tumbler to exclaim the next instant over what a "fine picture" Georg Frederich Kersting's Lesender bei Lamenlicht was. (He did not make it over the line.) It was the mix Isaiah understood so well. Pluralism is a mix, and in it one can discern, if one looks with a pure eye, the lineaments of truth.

I used to come to London or Salzburg, where we met over the years, armed with ideas, a new book, and once with the discovery that Andras Schiff played Bach quite as well as Glenn Gould, if not better, perhaps, being less rigid and less technical and closer to the soul of Bach. Isaiah loved Schiff's Bach. It was that mercury in Isaiah, that breakneck way he had of going from one thing to another as if he were composing a sonata: the melodies and sonorities of the mind and the imagination always in tune, at perfect pitch. During a chat about the Jewish mystics, especially about one Uriel Acosta who was a heretic and died a most gory death, a rich American lady, a friend of a certain great age, entered the restaurant and sat across from us. Isaiah said, "I cannot talk to her," and was out onto the sidewalk in a flash.

I think that the notion that the speed and the dance of the mind might soon stop made him so resent the idea of death. He was annoyed that he had to die, as if one had to expect that in the middle of a Schubert sonata or a Beethoven string quartet the music would stop and the players would sprint out for a game of cricket, leaving the beauty and the wonder abandoned to the void. There-was still so much to do, to see. Once, at the Atheneum, one of his London clubs, he reflected that he had never written about the Romantic poets and wished to do exactly that soon. Isaiah was intent on it because I do not think poetry came easily to him. I once sent him a first edition of the American literary critic Richard Blackmur and wonder if he had a chance to look at it. I think they would have been great friends. And at that tea, in the midst of musings about death and the Romantics, we talked of Verdi's Falstaff and of his sublime aria in the second act when Falstaff recollects his life as a page in the Court of the Duke of Norfolk ("Quand ero paggio del Duca di Norfolk"). We sang it loud enough so that some eyes turned toward us. I pronounced some word incorrectly. Isaiah corrected me and looked at that moment at a beautiful young woman with a fall of the most luminous blond hair who was seated nearby.

In December 1995, I had gotten the notion that Isaiah and Mitsuko Uschida, the colossal Japanese pianist, should meet. I brought them together in a lowly basement bar in Picadilly. All the clubs were closed. It was a terrible day - sleet, rain, snow, strong winds. We drank champagne, and oh, what wonderful stories I heard. When we said farewell to Mitsuko, I walked Isaiah back to his flat in Albany. Along the way we began to hum the opening bars of Schubert's Sonata, in B Flat, D. 960. I remember how cold it was. Undaunted, he paced along. Isaiah wore neither scarf nor gloves; he pushed away the air, the sleet, his voice piercing the winds. I got something wrong, the trills, I think, that crash up out of the abyss of Schubert's melancholy in the first movement. Isaiah set me right. Got me on pitch.

Once, over lunch at the Garrick, he told me that one of the first songs he ever learned was "A Bicycle Built for Two." As we sang it together - "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true..." - we began to muse over just how Susanna's aria in the last act of The Marriage of Figaro went, going over bits of it to get it more or less right.

Music always, always its clarion call to the mystery, always at the center of everything Isaiah found true and beautiful in his radiant life, even in the storm of the early evening in Picadilly. I left him at the entrance to Albany, that grand and imposing set of flats tucked in behind the traffic where all who are anybody in the world of the mighty might choose to live, but Isaiah was beyond that, what with the Romantics in his mind and Schubert bringing order to the present little winter tempest.

Isaiah's soul is most clear to me in his essay on Verdi, "The Naivete of Verdi." His sensibility is captured there - all the themes of his intellect, of his spirit. He wrote, "He [Verdi] was the last master to paint with positive, clear primary colors, to give direct expression to the eternal, major human emotions: love and hate, jealousy and fear, indignation and passion; grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, the passions that all men know."

Isaiah said to me they ear before he died - not his exact words (I never kept notes after my visits with him, thinking it a violation of some kind of trust) but true to the spirit of this thought - "Ned, when I die, there will be a grand memorial and you must come to it and push through the crowds and say, 'I knew Sir Isaiah Berlin, he was my friend. I want to speak.'"

Of course, when I went to London for his memorial in the Hamstead Synagogue, I could not do that for, as he had said, it was a grand and grave event. THe space was filled with his friends, titles and all of that, and it would have been a silly gesture and not tolerated. Alfred Brendel played the second movement of Schubert's B Flat Major Sonata, D.960 with care, and a sense of loss in every note, with complete sorrow as if he played it just for his beloved friend, as if he were there before him. (Isaiah could not understand why Brendel could not bear Richter - Brendel turned off the radio once when a recording of Richter's was played.) Isaac Stern, with fragile reverence and some torment, played the Sarabande from the D. Minor Partita of Bach. All very solemn - adagio, andante, no vivace, allegro, presto, scherzo - no music to recall Albert Alfred Apricott.

The memorial held later in the month at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., was just the sort Isaiah would have disapproved of with impatient but charitable annoyance. Dull, loving remembrances and no music anywhere - no piano, violin, string quartet - just sweet reflections that went on far too long. "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true," now that would have added a decent zing and would have revealed an Isaiah someone other than I must have known.

No death but my own son's has left me so alone. On the trip back to New York I wept. London would be a strange place without him now, as if the recitative had been lifted out of Bach's B Minor Mass, as if the branches of a flowering tree had suddenly withered and left their blossoms on the ground. I shall always hope that he might just walk into a room and greet me. "Caro amico," he would say, and then, when we had settled down to some hot chocolate (his) and wine (mine), "Now Ned, what is your news?"

And about Isaiah's troubles with death and a final annihilation, I offer this last reflection. During Easter of 1996 when I saw Isaiah in London, I had just come from Rome where I had scattered my son's ashes beneath an umbrella pine on a terrace in the Vatican. My son had died of AIDS a month before. I told Isaiah how transcendent Rome had been, how filled with light and flowers and cool fountains' bright tumult in the sun, cascading through my grief. I told him it was the only city in the world I loved, and he said, "Yes, I too find it the best of cities." Ah, I thought, that is good to know because my son, through all his tribulations with his sickness, through his loss of faith, yet asked me to scatter his ashes there where we had spent many summers. I found it a sign that he knew the eternal when he saw it. I think Isaiah saw it there as well, as he of course discerned it in Schubert and in Falstaff and in Bach.

I trust Isaiah's quicker-than-light wit to smile at this notion. I think that that just slightly mad and music-stricken, romantic corner of paradise where Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge dwell will greet Isaiah with delight. They will be a revelation to him. "I'm drawn to mad people," he told me when we were talking about Hamann. Though from time to time, to flee eternal encounters with his friends - Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Mozart, especially Schubert - he might drift away and look downward from the divine promontories toward earth, ardently and with rue, wishing to be part again of its enchanted spin through space.

RELATED ARTICLE: Isaiah Berlin: Understanding, not mastery

Sir Isaiah Berlin, longtime professor of political theory at Oxford, was widely regarded as a master explicator of the history of ideas. Among his books and collections of essays, The Hedgehog and The Fox (1953), Vico and Herder (1976), and Four Essays on Liberty (1969) are perhaps the best known. Berlin's rejection of determinist theories of history, defense of pluralism and liberalism, and penetrating analysis of the notions of positive and negative freedom have had an enormous influence on contemporary political philosophy. Esteemed as a brilliant conversationalist and revered as a colleague and friend, Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, and immigrated with his family to England in 1919. He attended Oxford as an undergraduate and served in the British embassies in Washington and Moscow during WWII. Berlin was knighted in 1957. David McCabe, who teaches political philosophy at Colgate University and is a frequent contributor to these pages, was asked to offer a brief assessment of Berlin's philosophical importance.

Isaiah Berlin's greatest contribution to the world of ideas may have been his exemplary commitment to the ideal of genuine understanding over mere intellectual mastery. More than most philosophers, he understood not only that mastery of a subject is not synonymous with deep understanding, but also that the pursuit of the first may imperil the second. The drive for intellectual mastery grows out of the assumption that the world is ultimately made for us and that the disciplined exercise of a properly trained mind can make all things clear: the deepest fabric of reality, the unvarying structures of human consciousness, the proper end of human activity. It is a comforting idol, but a false and distorting one. Whatever contemporary philosophers think on the question of whether the world was designed for our purposes, most recognize (partly as a result of Berlin's efforts) that our ways of conceptualizing, the very tools of organized thought, are shot through with contingency reflecting our particular time in history and our distinctive forms of life.

But for Berlin, this ideal of mastery and its underlying hubris about human reason were not only intellectually unsound, but potential sources of great cruelty as well. As he suggested in his famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," the "one belief, more than any other, responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals" is the belief that somewhere there exists a single definitive answer to the question of how human beings should live. He was thinking of Hitler and Stalin: he was warning of Pol Pot and Milosevic.

For Berlin, then, there were both intellectual and moral reasons to replace the ideal of mastery with the more humane and demanding one of understanding. Humane, because it allows greater space for such things as feelings, sensitivities, and traditions; demanding, because anyone who is willing to open himself to the world's diversity, and who forgoes the urge to reduce it to the neatness of the philosopher's categories, must always be prepared to have his deepest beliefs undermined and to find that he knows less than he thought. The result of this sort of inquiry is likely to be not a single magisterial work setting forth a system, but instead, as in Berlin's case, a constantly startling body of essays on a dazzling array of issues and thinkers, rays of light illuminating areas that we either had not attended to carefully or had misunderstood by imposing our own sets of problems and expectations. If any one theme dominates Berlin's work, it is his commitment to the truth of pluralism - to the view that a fulfilling human life can take many forms, and that there is no single formula to guide the choices we make about which goods to pursue either individually or collectively. What this commitment implies is that the goal of understanding those who think and act differently from us must always be prior to that of judging, an idea of enormous impact in contemporary moral and political philosophy.

But though the ideal of mastery is ultimately ill-conceived, the qualifies that dispose one for apparent success in it are, unfortunately, doled out more liberally than those conducive to deep understanding. The former include cleverness, an obsession with scoring points in argument, and a willingness to sacrifice humane engagement in the name of analytic rigor. What is needed for real understanding, for making the strange coherent and revealing the complexity in the familiar, is not only deep learning and an expansive intellect, but also qualities like charity, compassion, and humility. That Berlin could yoke these traits to a felicity of expression and analytic skills of the highest order ensures that his influence will be felt in humanistic studies for decades to come. For many of us who style ourselves intellectuals and seek better to understand the human world, he will remain a model we strive vainly, but happily, to emulate.

DAVID MCCABE

Ned O'Gorman is a poet and educator who lives in New York City.

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