Gossip and Gall

At first glance the undoubted affection that existed between Bernard Berenson and Hugh Trevor-Roper is hard to account for. When they met Berenson was eighty-two; Trevor-Roper was thirty-three. Although Berenson's achievements as an art historian were authentic and admirable, his detractors cast doubt on his character for having earned a fortune through his attributions of questionable masterpieces. No one could doubt that his mind was broad-ranging and as open to ideas as I Tatti, his elaborate villa near Florence, where he welcomed troops of people, including this reviewer, to whom he was a delightful and generous host.

The contrast between the two men, as is clear from their letters, was dramatic. The son of a Lithuanian Jew who became a pedlar in Boston, Berenson was sufficiently precocious to finish his formal education at Harvard. Trevor-Roper, a product of the English upper bourgeoisie, attended Charterhouse before going to Oxford. After the two men met at I Tatti in 1947, they began the twelve-year correspondence that ended with Berenson's death in 1959, copious on Trevor-Roper's part, less so on Berenson's. Interspersed are Trevor-Roper's letters to Nicky Mariano, Berenson's companion, who read her correspondence from Trevor-Roper to Berenson during his bouts of illness.

A perceptive man not given to suffering fools, Berenson nevertheless had a romantic notion of Oxford men, whom he found superior to the Harvard variety. He took to Trevor-Roper, the young Oxford don, even while writing that the young man was "passionate and obstinate, but for ideas only. . . . Very donnish, & often wearing a look of suffering superiority as he forebearingly listens to an interlocutor." Berenson's comment is borne out by photographs in which Trevor-Roper looks as though he had just swallowed half a lemon marinated in gall.

Perhaps all mutual attraction finally is mysterious, but it promptly becomes obvious that the attraction between the two was based mainly on a devotion to gossip religious in its intensity. People of all ranks visited Berenson and tended to confide in him. Trevor-Roper, conservative to the point of self-caricature, despised the "lower orders," but revered and gossiped about the titled, the powerful, and the wealthy, provided their money was inherited and they could give him a leg up the social ladder. He would die as Lord Dacre, thus casting doubt on the integrity of the British honors system.

Trevor-Roper often expressed contempt for Oxford dons who write little or nothing, but his own total scholarly production in terms of books consists of an early book on Archbishop Laud (1940), The Last Days of Hitler (1947), and the Hermit of Peking (1976). The book on Hitler earned him a small fortune and a Bentley. A later collection of journalism he pretentiously named Historical Essays (1957). As one reads the letters, it becomes clear that Trevor-Roper's journalism, his conniving in university politics, and his vast correspondence were substitutes for the historical works he projected but failed to complete. It is also pertinent that for several years before 1954 Trevor-Roper would often take to his bed for an entire week with what appears to have been the common cold.

In 1954 Trevor-Roper married Xandra Howard-Johnston, daughter of Field Marshal Lord ("Butcher") Haig, to the improvement of his health, we may infer, as well as the inflation of his aspirations to aristocracy. Marriage, however, failed to enrich his scholarly production. Following the popular success of his book on Hitler's fall and demise, the Sunday Times offered him a commission to report on France and Italy. That commission led to extensive travels as a journalist for the Sunday Times; he wrote frequent reviews for the left-leaning New Statesman (which he called "a contemptible rag") at the highest rates, garnering him the transitory fame of a contentious literary journalist.

In the letters to Berenson, Trevor-Roper poured scorn and invective on the countries he visited. He disliked...