Letters from Oxford: Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson [Paperback]

Hugh Trevor-Roper, who passed away in January, 2003, will be remembered as one of the major modern historians. The public will remember him for his 1947 bestseller, 'The Last Days of Hitler', and even his most serious books and papers were accessible. He had a public profile, which had its ups and downs, and his work has always been "out there", in the public forum, for people to approve, debate, or criticize. This new volume, 'Letters from Oxford', edited by Richard Davenport-Hines, will interest those wanting to know more about the man behind the writing. It is an edited collection of his letters to the American-Lithuanian art critic and recluse Bernard Berenson, over a thirteen year period, 1947-1960, which gives readers some real personal insights into his professional activities, travels, his personal philosophy, as well as revealing the elevated and diverse social circles in which he moved with such ease.

In these letters, Trevor-Roper appears as a highly intelligent and energetic personality, who built up an incredibly vast network of important contacts, academic, political and social. Page after page conveys a vivid impression of his tremendous self-confidence and optimism, his mischievous sense of humour, the wide range of his professional and personal interests, and of his correspondents and contacts, which included art critics, professors, poets, philosophers and writers, politicians and diplomats, spies and generals, journalists and publishers, aristocrats, princes and princesses, kings and queens. It's easy to concur with Chris Hill, the noted Marxist English historian, that "...if Professor Trevor-Roper did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him".

As a historian, the letters reveal Trevor-Roper's acute feeling for historical truth and his intellectual passion for clarifying and understanding historical problems, his abomination of historical determinism and historical systems of all kinds, and his own broad philosophy of total history, inspired by Braudel and the Annales school which he so admired. There are frequent and illuminating references to the various historians and thinkers, past and present, whom he admired, such as Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Burckhardt, Namier, Braudel and Brenan. A lucid narrative style, breadth, originality, independent-mindedness and "resistance to social pressure" were some of the qualities which he prized in these historians, just as vulgarity, rhetoric, overspecialization, mediocrity, and ideological conformity were some of the qualities which he detested in others. In cast of mind, as the letters show, he was a thorough individualist and often liked to emphasize the role of the individual in history, and the elements of surprise, uncertainty, unpredictability, and even comedy, which are embedded in historical events. He had no patience with metaphysics or theology, and never lost an opportunity to ridicule or denounce religious obscurantism of all kinds and in all places. Like his hero Gibbon, he thought of religion in sociological terms.

Trevor-Roper's relationship with Berenson is an interesting one. These letters show that his annual visits to Berenson's Florentine villa of I Tatti were welcome escapes from the drudge of his academic duties at Oxford. He appreciated Berenson's hospitality, the vivid stimulus of his magnificent art colletion, and the convenience of his library for his work. Walking amidst the shady groves of ilex and cypress pines of I Tatti, he must have envied the good life which Berenson and his companion Nicky Mariano enjoyed in Italy. In the end, Trevor-Roper became quite attached to and protective of his host, who made his fortune as an expert authenticator of Renaissance paintings for wealthy American clients, and who, by all accounts, was perceptive and generous, if somewhat vain.

The letters show the lucidity and verve of his prose, as well as the "incurable combativeness" and liking for controversy, and the penetrating insight and coruscating wit, for which he was known. Being the kind of talkative, forthright and strongly opinionated person that he was, and with his breezy or scathing dismissals (A. J. P. Taylor, a 'provincial journalist'), denunciations (Lawrence Stone, 'unscrupulous' and a 'charlatan') and caricatures (C. S. Lewis, a 'man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earthstopper', a `misogynist') of those unfortunate historians or academics who found themselves, more often than not, on the wrong side of a debate or campaign, he naturally made as many enemies as friends. On the negative side, his frequent sarcastic references to the 'virtuous Asiatics' indicate his rather ill-informed views of Asians and Asian culture, and his ignorance of the difficulties and challenges facing Asian governments in the post-colonial world. His eurocentric views become quite tiresome at some points.

The book is a mine of information about the Oxford, England, Europe and the near East of the postwar era and the 1950s. I never imagined that Shostakovich, that secretive and mousy Russian composer, was once a dinner guest of Trevor-Roper in Oxford. Many surprising or perceptive remarks about various countries stay in the mind: on a visit to Portugal in September, 1951 he remarked on the `slovenliness of the people'; of contemporary interest, Iraq was described, on a visit in June, 1957, as `efficient, energetic, prosperous, complacent: a Levantine Switzerland' - what a striking contrast to the present-day horrors of that country! In the same period, Iran was praised for the magnificence of its mountainous terrain and geography, the colourful costumes of its rural women, and, prophetically for its time, is described as a country of "artifical stability ... full of revolutionary strains". There are, as to be expected, many amusing barbs about Scottish figures and institutions, the Jesuits, and Catholics in general.

Some other notable highlights of the book include the debunking of the myth of the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte as a kind of Swedish Oskar Schindler, as well as the intriguing and amusing insider accounts of collegiate politics in Oxford, including his own appointment to the Regius Chair of Modern History in 1957, and his role in the election of Harold Macmillan, then Tory Prime Minister, to the Chancellorship in 1960.