Entertainingly repulsive

David Caute repeatedly displays petty vindictiveness toward political philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

By MARTIN SIEFF
Isaac & Isaiah book (photo credit: PR)
Isaac & Isaiah book
(photo credit: PR)
A FOOLISH, ridiculous and bitter old man has written a foolish, ridiculous and bitter book about a long-forgotten, very minor academic cause célèbre between two of the most famous Jewish intellectuals of 20th century Britain. However, thanks to one of those wonderful paradoxes that literature generates, it makes a fascinating read, evoking the guilty pleasure of watching a respected former academic (Caute was briefly a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in the early 1960s) perform the equivalent of obscene acts on stage with no awareness of how entertainingly disgusting he is.
In 1963, the political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian Jew brought to England in his youth, and at the time also a professor at All Souls, was consulted about the possibility of appointing the eminent Trotskyite Isaac Deutscher, a Polish Jew who had fled to Britain in 1939, to the position of professor of political studies at the University of Sussex. This was perfectly proper, even routine, as Berlin sat on the academic advisory board of that university.
Berlin was adamant that Deutscher, who had written exceptionally admiring and uncritical major biographies of Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin, not be given the position.
“The candidate of whom you speak [Deutscher] is the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable,” he wrote.
There is absolutely nothing new in this story. It was reported in Britain as far back as the 1960s and a sober, factually accurate account can be found in Michael Ignatieff’s masterly 1998 biography of Isaiah Berlin.
Ignatieff covers all the issues involved in a succinct single page of text. Caute, in his narrative, requires 290 pages, excluding the bibliography and index.
The book’s self-indulgent distortions – objectively they are lies, but Caute obviously believes them – begin with the very sentence where he includes Deutscher among the “major thinkers … of the 20th century.”
It is certainly true that Deutscher was, in the quarter century up to his death in 1970, a politically influential intellectual, as Caute also claims, but that in itself does not make him a major thinker.
Deutscher came from an ultra-Orthodox Polish Jewish background and rebelled against its ignorance, superstition and repression, as millions of others also did.
Then, like many others, finding his freedom in serving a far vaster tyranny, he became a revolutionary communist. He revered Trotsky and, amid the factional Marxist feuds in his native Poland, and facing jail or worse from the fascist and racist Polish government of the time, he fled to Britain.
Deutscher remained a Trotskyite revolutionary communist to the end of his days.
He also supported the Soviet Union against the Western Alliance, led by the US and Britain, which he regarded as truly evil. Deutscher also revered Lenin. He regarded Karl Marx as a scientist comparable to Einstein or Freud.
He remained utterly contemptuous of and oblivious to the flood of outstanding scholarship published in the West in the 1960s (subsequently completely confirmed by the flood of evidence from Russian historians and state archives) revealing the appalling truth about Lenin and Stalin.
Caute even admits that Deutscher would have refused to let his students read the greatest scholars of their time (and still today) on the history of the Soviet Union and the nature of totalitarian regimes.
Caute acknowledges that the works of Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, Sir Karl Popper, Walter Laqueur, Leonard Schapiro, Hugh Seton-Watson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
were all anathema to Deutscher.
In fact, it would have been an outrage if Deutscher had been given that coveted professorship at Sussex University. He did not have a PhD or master’s degree in modern history. All the basic scholarship and conclusions in his two main works on Trotsky and Stalin had already been totally discredited by respected academics.
He continued to the end to enjoy a good living from journalism, authoring articles in highly regarded media outlets such as The Observer (he was a close friend of its publisher and editor in chief David Astor) and even The Economist. Yet these articles were all embarrassingly incompetent pieces for which any honest or serious newspaper would certainly have fired him. He cited no sources and made sweeping, ridiculous predictions that were all quickly proven wrong. And he never learned from any of his endless mistakes, or even acknowledged them.
Entertaining as it is to see Caute’s petty vindictiveness repeatedly displayed, one does feel the need to shower after 10 minutes reading him. The tone of this book is exceptionally snide and mean.
From the dust jacket we learn that Caute is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
They must be letting anyone in these days.