MY DINNERS WITH ISAIAH
O'Gorman, Ned
MY DINNERS WITH ISAIAH The music of a philosopher's life Ned O'Gorman saiah Berlin (1907-97), my friend of only six I years, was the happiest man I ever met. He simply knew all about it. He...
...He saw the shadows and the terrible light hidden in the shadows...
...Isaiah wore neither scarf nor gloves...
...He did not make it over the line...
...saiah said to me the year 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 his 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 think they would have been great friends...
...Isaiah said, "I cannot talk to her," and was out onto the sidewalk in a flash...
...On one side was genius and a sort of dwelling place of the great, and there was the space leading to it...
...Isaiah set me right...
...Isaiah loved Schiff's Bach...
...He made the balance endure with grace...
...I got something wrong, the trills, I think, that crash up out of the abyss of Schubert's melancholy in the first movement...
...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...
...grief, fury, mockery, cruelty, irony, fanaticism, the passions that all men know...
...What he perceived in literature and art, in political epochs and in their recorders, in composers and musicians, in the fine differences between virtuoso pianists Alfred Brendel and Sviatoslav Richter and their interpretations of Schubert, was a prodigy of practical knowledge, grace, and almost transcendent intuition...
...When we said farewell to Mitsuko, I walked Isaiah back to his flat in Albany...
...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...
...Undaunted, he paced along...
...I asked him, quite terrified that I would be taken for a fool, did he not think Horowitz was very bad...
...I think that Isaiah found the world a marvelously interesting place...
...Pluralism is a mix, and in it one can discern, if one looks with a pure eye, the lineaments of truth...
...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...
...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...
...When Isaiah was twenty-one, he wrote music criticism for the Oxford Outlook under the pseudonym of Albert Alfred Apricott...
...His sensibility is captured there---all the themes of his intellect, of his spirit...
...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...
...Once, over lunch at the Garrick, he told me that one of the first songs he ever learned was "A Bicycle Built for Two...
...Along the way we began to hum the opening bars of Schubert's Sonata, in B Flat, D. 960...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Isaiah was intent on it because I do not think poetry came easily to him...
...Might I have lunch with him in Salzburg in August at Tomaselli's...
...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...
...Who got close, who got over the line, and who didn't get anywhere near it...
...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...
...All the clubs were closed...
...picture" Georg Frederich Kersting's Lesender bei Lamenlicht was...
...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...
...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...
...We sang it loud enough so that some eyes turned toward us...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But Isaiah could move with the agility of a tumbler to exclaim the next instant over what a "fine Ned O'Gorman is a poet and educator who lives in New York City...
...I pronounced some word incorrectly...
...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...
...He did...
...Isaiah's soul is most clear to me in his essay on Verdi, "The Naivet6 of Verdi...
...Isaiah could not understand why Brendel could not bear Richter--Brendel turned off the radio Commonweal | 6 August 14, 1998...
...I named five and was right on the money: Radu Lupu, Richter, Brendel, Murray Perahia, and Andras Schiff...
...Who, he asked, were the pianists I most admired...
...In December 1995, I had gotten the notion that Isaiah and Mitsuko Uschida, the colossal Japanese pianist, should meet...
...The space was filled with his friends, titles and all of that, and it would have been a silly gesture and not tolerated...
...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...
...It was a terrible day--sleet, rain, snow, strong winds...
...I remember how cold it was...
...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...
...As we sang it together--"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true...
...We used to play a little game: we thought of an imaginary line...
...he pushed away the air, the sleet, his voice piercing the winds...
...It was a caf61 loved, and our conversation that April day was filled with wonderful correspondences...
...We drank champagne, and oh, Commonweal | 5 August 14, 1998 what wonderful stories I heard...
...He listened to the world as he listened to Schubert and Bach, as he read Akhmatova and Herzen, touching them with his wit and the speed of his manner...
...I brought them together in a lowly basement bar in Picadilly...
...Got me on pitch...
...We deliberated long about the quartets of Shoshtakovich, five of which I had heard the previous night...
...It was the mix Isaiah understood so well...
...He told me at our first meeting in Oxford, in April 1991, that he was an old man and would soon die...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
