Fast Talker

Summary

From Letter from America no. 2545, BBC Radio 4, 21 and 23 November 19971

I shall try to say something vivid and worthy about a great man who has died, who was also a friend to whom I was writing when the sad word came in. The New York Times in a splendid obituary last Friday said a great deal in its first sentence. ‘Sir Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and historian of ideas, revered for his intellect and cherished for his wit and his gift for friendship, has died in Oxford, England, following a long illness.’

You have to picture a middle-sized but large shambling man, a swarthy face, bird’s-nest eyebrows, a large firm mouth, and, behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, dark, glaring eyes. The expression is that of a glorious Russian clown pretending to be a stern headmaster, and when his eyes twinkled and he opened that large generous mouth it was as if a two-minute silence had been proclaimed. All other human traffic stopped; he began to pour out a cascade of ideas, a Niagara of thoughts and images that never paused in its down-rushing volume and eloquence. It was no surprise to learn that he wrote his essays, his books, that way, by torrential dictation. I assume he’d discovered a shorthand typist who could take down from a machine enormous, perfectly parsed and structured sentences, spoken at the rate of about seven hundred words a minute, in a rolling operatic baritone with still the echo of mother Russia. For that's where he was brought up, the son of a timber merchant who, being a prospering Jew, quickly departed from Petrograd on the arrival of Lenin, and took his eleven-year-old son to London, where he went to school – and then on to Oxford, where for the rest of his life he lived (he wrote) ‘in my eyrie, far removed from the bustle of real politics and the movers and shakers you spend your life reporting’.

Once he was a guest with my wife and me in the house of my oldest American friend, Dean of the Yale Law School. Along that evening too was the late Denis Brogan, the astonishingly erudite Scot who knew more about American history than Americans, and French history than the French. He spoke with a marked Scottish brogue (well named) at only six hundred words a minute.