Tea at the Athenaeum

Summary

This impression is taken from an essay that first appeared in the issue of the New York Review of Books dated 17 August 1989. After some more general reflections that fall outside the scope of this volume, Brodsky recounts that he first saw Isaiah Berlin when Berlin was 63 and Brodsky 32. ‘I had just left the country where I’d spent those thirty-two years and it was my third day in London, where I knew nobody.’

I was staying in St John's Wood, in the house of Stephen Spender, whose wife had come to the airport three days before to fetch W. H. Auden, who had flown in from Vienna to participate in the annual Poetry International Festival in Queen Elizabeth Hall. I was on the same flight, for the same reason. As I had no place to stay in London, the Spenders offered to put me up.

On the third day in that house in the city where I knew nobody the phone rang and Natasha Spender cried, ‘Joseph, it's for you.’ Naturally, I was puzzled. My puzzlement hadn't subsided when I heard in the receiver my mother tongue, spoken with the most extraordinary clarity and velocity, unparalleled in my experience. The speed of sound, one felt, was courting the speed of light. That was Isaiah Berlin, suggesting tea at his club, the Athenaeum.

I accepted, although of all my foggy notions about English life, that of a club was the foggiest. (The last reference I had seen to one was in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.) Mrs Spender gave me a lift to Pall Mall and before she deposited me in front of an imposing Regency edifice with a gilded Athena and Wedgewoodlike cornice, I, being unsure of my English, asked her whether she wouldn't mind accompanying me inside. She said that she wouldn’t, except that women were not allowed. I found this puzzling, again, opened the door, and announced myself to the doorman.

‘I’d like to see Sir Isaiah Berlin,’ I said, and attributed the look of controlled disbelief in his eyes to my accent rather than to my Russian clothes. Two minutes later, however, climbing the majestic staircases and glancing at the huge oil portraits of Gladstones, Spencers, Actons, Darwins et alii that patterned the club's walls like wallpaper, I knew that the matter with me was neither my accent nor my turtleneck but my age.