バーリン三昧

今月をアイザイア・バーリン三昧の読書生活にするつもりです。
まずはこれを味読することに。本日原書を Amazon に注文しました。

ある思想史家の回想―アイザィア・バーリンとの対話

Conversations With Isaiah Berlin

邦訳書の解説で河合秀和さんが以下のように記されています。これで対談を読むのが非常に楽しみになりました。

バーリン自身が「われわれが説得したいと思ったのはわれわれが尊敬している同僚たちだけであって、このごく少数の同僚たちを説得できればそれだけで満足して公表する必要などは感じなかった」と書いている。このように対論を通じて、いわば自らの文体、思想の形式を形成したからであろうか、当時の同僚の一人は4巻の選集の発刊に際して「彼は語るのが本質の人であり、活字になれば何かが失われているように感じられてならない」と書いている。

続いてはこれ。原書のハードバック版は入手困難かも。

アイザイア・バーリン

ハードバック正誤表
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/onib/micorrections.html

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

著者であるイグナティエフがＢＢＣラジオで当時対談した放送がまだ聴けるようです。
In Our Times
War in the 20th Century
Thu 15 Oct 1998
BBC Radio 4
http://extdev.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054578
最後にこれ。バーリンを偲ぶ文集の決定版と言えましょう。しかしバーリン関連の本は亡くなって10年以上経つというのに現在でも彼地ではいろいろ出版されていますね。まるで日本の司馬遼太郎さんのようです。

Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin

http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=7204
せっかく購入したので書簡集もパラパラと眺めたいです。やはりこれだけ浩瀚な本だとハードバック版が安心ですね。

Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960: Isaiah Berlin Letters, volume 2

http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=0701178892
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/adam-phillips/self-amused
アラン・ベネットさんの昨年の日記にこんな文章がありました。

9 June. Reading Enlightening, the latest volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, which has been rather grudgingly reviewed. One redeeming thing about Berlin – if he needs redeeming – is that he likes women. He likes talking to them, he likes writing to them, gossiping with them and, I suppose, though a late starter he likes sleeping with them. This is unusual. Most men and fewer dons don’t like women. They may like screwing them, but liking the women themselves, that’s rare.

In the book there’s an account of how Berlin lunched with the queen and other eminent guests on 11 June 1957. At the lunch, Berlin tells us, he pressed the merits of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, Nabokov’s Lolita and the works of Genet, whereupon the titles were dutifully written down for Her Majesty by a courtier. So when in The Uncommon Reader the queen questions the French president about Genet it has some (though 50-year-old) foundation in fact. And it’s sheer coincidence. In 2007 when I wrote the story I had no knowledge of Berlin’s correspondence, the relevant volume of which was only published this year. I chose Genet simply as an author whom the queen would be most unlikely ever to have come across. And to mention him to her even in 2007 might be thought bold, but much more so 50 years earlier when the home secretary, R.A. Butler, was rather cross with Berlin, implying his temerity might have interfered with his knighthood.

Like Auden Berlin seems to have had no visual sense at all and to have been uneasy in the countryside.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n01/alan-bennett/diary

ベネットさんはバーリンが亡くなった年である1997年の覚書 Notes on 1997 にもこう記してみえます。

7 November. Isaiah Berlin dies. I’ve never understood (as he claims he never understood) why he should have been held in such high intellectual esteem. His writing is windy and verbose and the only one of his books I’ve managed to get through is The Hedgehog and the Fox, read when I was 20. He was the darling of the New York Review of Books, which in the Eighties seemed to carry pieces about him in virtually every issue. I’m currently reading Errata, the intellectual autobiography of George Steiner. I wish it wasn’t quite so intellectual, as the purely autobiographical sections – e.g. his early days at the University of Chicago – are fascinating. Steiner, in contrast to Berlin, never fails to embroil you in his language, making the reader feel that his thoughts have been hewn from the living flesh, as Kafka and Wittgenstein felt they should be. But again in contrast to Berlin, Steiner has not had much luck in commending himself to the English, partly because he’s awkward and, I imagine, touchy; and as he himself admits, the breadth of his approach, and not being modest or self-conscious about his intellectual equipment, have provoked ‘distaste, professional suspicion and marginalisation’. Berlin and Steiner would make good protagonists in a play, the two Jews, both supremely intellectual but one modest, self-deprecating and social, the other chippy, difficult and wholly unassimilable, so never given his due.

A propos Steiner, there was a time in the early Seventies when some friends and their families, including Brian Wenham, Derrick Amoore and Francis Hope (all dead before their time), used to rent a villa on the Mediterranean every summer. One year they were most excited to learn that Steiner was due to rent the villa next door. All of them, particularly Francis, were mettlesome intellects and they looked forward to the advent of Steiner and some off-the-cuff seminars.

Steiner duly arrived but turned out to be the Steiner the hairdresser.

16 November, Yorkshire. I watch two unlisted and unadvertised programmes on BBC2 in which Isaiah Berlin is interviewed by Michael Ignatieff. Never having seen Berlin or heard him (except in frequent imitation), I fall straightaway for his charm and see how one would want to think that here was a good man living the true life of the mind. It had occurred to me that Berlin was the antithesis of Wittgenstein and that Berlin in spate, as it were, would have been intolerable to a philosopher who was, to say the least, somewhat more terse. It transpires that they did once meet and that even Wittgenstein succumbed to the spell, not much caring for what Berlin said, but welcoming the honesty with which he said it. His mode of utterance is endlessly fascinating. Down the road from here is a spring called the Ebbing and Flowing Well, which bubbles up and falls back much as Berlin does, words overflowing from his mouth rather like a baby bringing back its food. He would have been almost impossible to dislike and I find myself greatly cheered.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n01/alan-bennett/notes-on-1997