College Record 2019

THE RECORD
In Search of Isaiah
Berlin: A Literary
Adventure
Henry Hardy (HF)
Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers
of the twentieth century – a man who set
ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and
plurality was passionate and persuasive and
inspired a generation. His ideas – especially
his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty
and political despotism – have become even
more prescient and vital today. But who
was the man behind such influential views?
In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling
story of a decades-long collaboration
between Berlin and his editor, Henry
Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring
Berlin’s huge body of work into print. Hardy
discovered that Berlin had written far more
than people thought, much of it unpublished.
As he describes his struggles with Berlin,
who was almost on principle unwilling to
have his work published, an intimate and
revealing picture of the self-deprecating
philosopher emerges. This is a unique
portrait of a man who gave us a new way
of thinking about the human predicament,
and whose work had for most of his life
remained largely out of view.
A fuller appreciation of this book follows,
for which we thank Christopher Schenk (GS
1972–75)
This delightful book contains intriguing
insights into the character and personality
not only of Isaiah Berlin but also of its author,
Henry Hardy. Hardy begins by positing
himself and Berlin as polar opposites: the
genius, adept at delineating the bigger
picture but careless with details, and the
pedant, meticulous and punctilious about
accuracy, to the point of obsession.
As the story progresses, it becomes obvious
that they have quite a lot in common. For a
start, they are both good writers, masters of
that dying literary art form, the long letter.
More importantly, they are both remarkably
candid about their thoughts and feelings. They
do not dissemble: there is no guile in them.
Nevertheless, their honesty is by no means a
guarantee that their accounts of themselves are
accurate.
Hardy writes to Berlin in 1976, ‘You have a
refreshing candidness and directness about
dissenting from received opinion’. Hardy’s own
honesty is described as ‘directness’, though ‘to
be direct’ in this sense seems to be one of those
irregular verbs: I am direct, you are tactless, he is
rude.
As a graduate student in the early days of
Wolfson, Hardy was remarkably busy and
productive. As well as completing two degrees,
he founded and edited Lycidas, Wolfson’s first
magazine; he set up his own publishing imprint
using his middle names of Robert Dugdale; he
played the organ at St Frideswide’s, directed
a choir, ran the College music society, and
composed a number of short pieces; he even
found time to teach Ancient Greek to Cecilia
Dick’s younger daughter, Cressida, who is now
the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. It
was at this time that, with the encouragement
of Sam Guttenplan, he embarked on what was
to become forty years of work, to give the lie to
Maurice Bowra’s famous quip that ‘like Our Lord
and Socrates, Isaiah does not publish much.’
In those heady days before the College moved
to Linton Road, Wolfson was a remarkably
egalitarian institution. Stephen Grounds tells the
story of how he introduced himself to the older
man standing next to him in the queue for lunch
at 60 Banbury Road, with the words ‘I’m Stephen
Grounds and I come from Birmingham’, to be
greeted with the rejoinder ‘I’m Isaiah Berlin and
I come from Riga.’ Berlin involved himself with
the graduate students in a number of ways, for
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019