Bernard Levin Remembered

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 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.

Find more Arianna at Ariannaonline.com.

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