BERNARD LEVIN REMEMBERED
   By Arianna Huffington / London Sunday Times / Aug. 15, 2004

   I first met Bernard Levin on a "Face the Music" panel.  I was
   there as a curiosity -- a woman with a foreign accent, elected
   president of the Cambridge Union.  He was there as a celebrated
   columnist for the London Times, an intellectual with an
   encyclopedic knowledge of music.  It was 1971.  I was 21, he
   was 42.  He knew nothing about me.  I had had a major
   intellectual crush on him ever since I discovered his writings
   while at Girton.  I had devoured his book "The Pendulum Years,"
   and would meticulously cut his columns, underline them, and
   save them in a file (no, I did not put pressed flowers in the
   file, but might as well have).  So when I found out that he
   was on the panel, I was reduced to a bundle of inarticulateness.
   I'm still amazed that in my fog, I actually managed to recognize
   Schuman's Fourth Symphony.

   At the end of the taping, he asked me out to dinner the
   following week.  All I remember is that I spent the week
   prepping, getting myself up to date on Northern Ireland, the
   latest developments in the Soviet Union, and the latest Wagner
   recordings.  I must have bored him to death, because for the
   second date, he took me to Covent Garden to see Wagner's "The
   Mastersingers." As you probably have guessed by now, I spent
   the time between the dinner and the opera date reading about
   "The Mastersingers," and considering more has been written
   about Wagner than anyone else except Jesus Christ, there was
   a lot to read.  I thought of that night as soon as I heard
   the news of Bernard's death, because, as the curtain was going
   up, he whispered to me: "That's the opera I want to hear just
   before I die."

   We started a relationship which was to last until the end of
   1980, when I left London to move to New York.  And he was,
   in many ways, the reason I left London.  I was by then 30,
   still deeply in love with him, but longing to have children.
   He, on the other hand, never wanted to get married or have
   children.  What was touching is that he saw this not as a
   badge of independence and freedom but as a character flaw,
   almost a handicap.  As he wrote in 1983 in his book "Enthusiasms,"
   which he movingly dedicated to me even though we were no
   longer together: "What fear of revealing, of vulnerability,
   of being human, grips us so fiercely, and above all why?  What
   is it that, down there in the darkness of the psyche, cries
   its silent No to the longing for Yes?" It was a No that often
   coincided with retreating into depression -- the "black dog"
   that he described as "that dark lair where the sick soul's
   desire for solitude turns into misanthropy."

   No wonder he loved cats so much.  "Above all," he wrote once,
   "I love the detachment of cats, their willingness to be loved
   but not to respond beyond a certain, very clearly defined
   point; no cat ever gave its entire heart to any human being."
   And no wonder I decided to move not just cities, but continents.
   Our lives in London were so inextricably intertwined that in
   December 1980, I left for New York.  A quarter of a century
   later, I can still feel how tough and painful that decision
   was.  He wasn't just the big love of my life, he was a mentor
   as a writer, and a role model as a thinker.  My biography of
   Maria Callas, published in 1980, is dedicated to him: "Without
   his unfailing support and understanding," I wrote in the
   acknowledgements, "and without the long hours he spent reading,
   criticizing and improving, I wondered sometimes whether there
   would be a book at all."

   Breakfast in his kitchen in the flat he rented on Devonshire
   Place was a liberal education.  Every single morning newspaper
   and all the weeklies were spread on the kitchen table, with
   Bernard alternately lapsing into rage, disgust, amazement,
   or amusement, all volubly shared with me.  The only response
   to the morning news he never felt was detachment.

   Even though he was no longer a theater critic, many Saturdays
   were spent seeing two or sometimes three plays, starting off,
   off Westend.  (I just realized that I never saw a movie with
   him.) And of course anything he loved, he wrote about --
   whether it was a new play (especially a new Tom Stoppard
   play), or lobster, or Kiri Te Kanawa, or Glyndebourne, or
   Solzhenitsyn.  I remember really disliking his columns about
   food.  It was one of our few arguments, because on personal
   matters, his mode was not to argue, but to withdraw.

   We spent three summers touring 3-star restaurants in France,
   and music festivals in Austria and Germany.  And one of the
   summers I found myself rebelling by ordering grilled fish and
   vegetables every time while he waxed lyrical over one complicated
   French marvel after another.  He never drove, so I did all
   the driving on these vacations, and he kept me royally
   entertained with stories about the places we were passing,
   or the operas, or the music we were going to hear, or, God
   save us, the food we were going to eat.  One day in Salzburg,
   he stayed in the hotel to write, and I went shopping.  I ended
   up being gone for hours, and he ended up calling the police.

   Bernard's substitute for the family he never had were his
   friends.  He was passionate about them.  He observed every
   birthday, every anniversary, as though they were religious
   landmarks, and he loved the rituals of friendship: the annual
   visit to Glyndebourne with male friends from his youth; a
   week in the summer at Fleur Cowles' and Tom Meyer's house in
   Spain; the annual visit to Wexford, the little opera festival
   in Ireland he had put on the map.  So for his fiftieth birthday
   I organized for him a surprise birthday party with all his
   closest friends.  What made it more complicated was that we
   had rented a house in the south of France, and had to bring
   everybody there!  John Burgh, one of Bernard's best friends,
   and former President of Trinity College in Oxford, was my
   co-conspirator.  A plane was chartered to bring over 50 friends
   to Bernard, and I got everybody we had met in the area to put
   somebody up.  It was a great three days, and I'll always
   remember how much it meant to him.

   Even so, there was always what he described in the introduction
   to one of his column anthologies as "the gnawing feeling that
   ultimate reality lies elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner
   of the eye, sensed just beyond the light cast by the camp-fire,
   heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet, seen in the
   eyes of Rembrandt's last self-portraits, felt in the sudden
   stab of discovery in reading or seeing a Shakespeare play
   thought familiar in every line."

   He was ruthlessly honest about that "gnawing" and about the
   fact that he spent a large part of his life barricading himself
   against it.  He tried therapy, he tried Insight, a self-awareness
   seminar that I had helped bring to London, a stint in an
   ashram in India.  Lesser souls would have avoided the ridicule
   that was heaped on him for his spiritual "search" by simply
   keeping it to himself.  But he didn't, because anything he
   was touched by he had to write about.

   A couple of months after I left London for New York, Bernard
   called me to tell me that he had decided to take a drastic
   action.  He was planning to resign, both as a columnist for
   the Times, and as a book reviewer for the Sunday Times, and
   take a sabbatical without a date set for returning to work
   "to follow" as he put it, "the beckoning light wherever it
   might lead." Eighteen months later, in October 1982, he was
   back at the Times.  During that time he came to see me in New
   York.  In fact, we stayed in close touch until our last meeting
   a year ago.

   I was in London with my daughters.  The Alzheimer's was by
   then sufficiently advanced that I could no longer talk to him
   on the phone, so I called Liz Anderson, who had been a true
   gift in his life, to arrange to see him.  That was when she
   told me that Bernard's condition had so deteriorated that she
   had to arrange for him to be moved to a home.  We decided
   that he would be brought to the Berkeley where I was staying
   so we could have tea -- another favorite ritual of his.
   "Arianna," she warned me, "he may not recognize you." The
   warning, however, did not prepare me for the shock of not
   being recognized, especially because Bernard looked exactly
   the same -- as always fastidiously dressed and mannered.
   Except he turned down the tea and asked for water.  And then,
   no matter what memories, nicknames, shared moments I brought
   up, there was no connection.  I went back to my room and wept.

   I had been with him at the beginning of the journey into this
   other world with no bridge to ours.  It was 1988 when he had
   come to stay with me in Santa Barbara, and we had made the
   round of doctors in Los Angeles to find out why he kept losing
   his balance or was not able to retrieve certain words.  Looking
   back, it is astonishing that nobody diagnosed it as a very
   early stage of Alzheimer's.

   The hardest time was four years later.  By then, we were
   living in Washington, and he came to stay with me there.
   The medium he had mastered -- words -- now kept eluding him.
   It was such a cruel turn of fate.  The man who could recite
   entire Shakespeare passages without faltering was now struggling
   to find a simple, everyday word lost in the recesses of his
   memory.  "I fell to speculating," he wrote once, "about what
   it would be like to be a prisoner in reality instead of
   fantasy, and came to the astonishing and disturbing conclusion
   that provided I could read and write what I liked, and had a
   congenial cell-mate (or better still, a sentence of solitary
   confinement), I would not find it nearly so terrible as I
   surely ought to." But the key things that would have made his
   prison bearable were reading and writing, and now they were
   becoming tragically hard.  And increasingly, all that was
   left was the prison.

   "I can't take this," he kept saying.  "I'd rather be dead."
   The last time I saw him happy was three years ago when we had
   lunch with my daughters around the corner from the new flat
   he and Liz were sharing.  He put on a show for the girls.
   The old Bernard: charming, debonaire, funny, on top of the
   world.  Christina and Isabella, who had known him ever since
   they were babies since he was always in and out of our lives,
   were now old enough (12 and 10 at the time) to appreciate the
   glimpse of the old fire they got just before it was extinguished.

   He had been the first person I called, after my parents, to
   let him know that Michael and I were getting married.  He
   flew to New York for the wedding a week early, and was by my
   side right down to helping me place the 400 guests at the
   post-wedding dinner.  The man I had so desperately wanted to
   marry and spend my life with was now helping me with all the
   logistics as I was about to walk down the aisle.  It didn't
   make any sense, and yet it was perfectly natural.  As was the
   fact that when I lost my first baby when I was over 5 months
   pregnant in 1987, Bernard insisted that I do not cancel the
   benefit I was chairing for the Folger Shakespeare Library in
   Washington.  "I'll fly out and do all the work for you," he
   said.  "It will take your mind off losing the baby." And he
   did fly out, and he brought Maggie Smith with him, and he did
   do all the work for me, writing the most brilliant piece for
   Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen to perform.  He once again was
   there for me, and it was a huge success.  ("And then came the
   magic," wrote the Washington Post.  "From the balcony actors
   Alec McCowen and Maggie Smith, in a production by Bernard
   Levin, read excerpts from Shakespeare's greatest hits, making
   "a virtue of necessity" if the "truth were known." And then,
   as they "trippingly on the tongue" said: "Our revels now are
   ended ...  our little life is rounded with a sleep.")

   I still have on my desk a little plaque he gave me after he
   had finished editing my second book in the middle seventies:
   "You can break every grammatical and syntactical rule consciously
   when, and only when, you have rendered yourself incapable of
   breaking them unconsciously." But grammar and syntax and a
   horror of cliches and mixed metaphors ("try drawing this,"
   he would tell me) were the least things he taught me.  The
   most important was his passion against injustice, against the
   totalitarian, fanatical mindset, against the follies of those
   set in authority over us.

   But just as powerful was his reverence for anyone fighting
   the good fight.  The other side of his scathing prose was his
   capacity for hero-worship.  And he transmitted that to me
   too.  And through all the joys and pain of our own relationship,
   he remained to the end a hero to me.

Janos Gereben
www.sfcv.org
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