20
PARTISAN REVIEW
Berlin:
No.
Krauze:
Did you have some relation with him?
Berlin:
None. I simply called on him because I happened to know
members of his family. I called on him and he offered me a cup of
tea. I was glad to meet Virginia Woolf, too, who, in my opinion,
is a writer of genius. I was deeply moved by Boris Pasternak, by
Anna Akhmatova in Russia. And in quite different fashion by
Edmund Wilson. By Auden, by Weizmann, by Churchill , by
Einstein . I am speaking only of the dead now. I prefer not to talk
about the living. Great men and geniuses-I am reverent towards
them.
If
I meet them, I feel terrified, but I'm glad to meet them.
Krauze:
Where would you say are the centers of the world's intellec–
tual activity at this moment?
Berlin:
Oh, goodness ... I think intellectual activity today is far
greater in the natural sciences than anywhere else. I'm not a sci–
entist and don't know any science, unfortunately. It seems to me
that the most gifted people today are attracted to the sciences.
There is always some field of mental life that flourishes at a par–
ticular moment of history, to which imaginative and intelligent
people are attracted. I think that there is today far more imagina–
tion and talent, or learning, in the natural sciences than there is in
art and literature.
I'm a little melancholy about that: if you were to ask me, as I
see you are on the point of doing, whether there are any writers of
genius alive, novelists, poets, historians of genius ... there are
some very good novelists, poets, scholars, but novelists, poets of
genius? Or painters of genius?
Krauze.:
Even poetry?
Berlin:
There are some very good poets living, but I would rather
not discuss them. Some of them are friends and there is something
vulgar and embarrassing about speaking of one's friends in pub–
lic. It's still worse to give marks to artists; it's amusing but vulgar
and demeaning-and absurd-to produce a form-order, or give
them places in league tables. And yet I think that one of the symp–
toms of the vitality of an art-this may seem a curious thing to
say-is the existence of serious rivalry among artists. That is to
say, when one writer or composer wonders whether another might
outdo him. Verdi, I suspect, may have been nervous about, let us
say, Gounod. And after Wagner became known, Verdi might have
been slightly apprehensive about him, and relieved when he died.
