386
PARTISAN REVIEW
Berlin:
Difficult
to
say. There are people who become Communists because
they think it is sci\ntific, and they think it is important to be rational and
to
organize the world in a rational way instead of letting things-circum–
stances , uncontrolled events- dominate one . That wasn't it either, though
he may, of course, think in these terms. I doubt it. I think that there are
people who become Communists because they are oppressed and dis–
gusted by the corruption and squalor of the world in which they live.
Some want to escape from it, others to purify it, and they want
to
remove,
scrape off, the horrible mildew, remove this suffocating feeling of living
in the midst of this awful , grey world. In fact, funnily enough, when I
talked
to
Pasternak in Russia he accused me of looking at Russia with
charmed eyes. " Here we are, " he said, "living in a dreadful, sordid,
stifling society, this ghastly pigsty, and you- you look at everything with
completely fascinated eyes. How can you? You idealize, you romanticize
everything here; when life is only there-art, personalism', Herbert Read
-only there , in the West. " Well, I think that although, of course, we are
very different , I am sure-and Malraux is in any case a man of genius and
I am very far from that-I think that he too, to some extent, was inter–
ested and fascinated by the same spectacle, because all his life , I suspect,
he must have looked for some renovation of things , what the Renaissance,
when it went back to Greece and Rome , called
renovatio, restauratio-a
return
to
brighter, simpler, grander values than their own world appeared
to generate.
It
may be a craving for the future , but if so, it is disguised as
a craving for the past.
Malraux talked about visions of splendor. There were three phenomena
he most admired: one was Alexander the Great-because he was very
handsome and died young , and died of his vices, all of which seemed to
him (as they did to John Kennedy) to be heroic vices; the second was T.E.
Lawrence , with whom he seemed to me to identify himself to some degree
-a romantic, bold, dissatisfied, unashamed, exhibitionist adventurer,
who took pride in his fantasies, who also looked for renovation in exotic
and remote societies, among prirriitive peoples; the third was the Parthians,
les Parthes,
because they alone had not been defeated by the Romans.
The three, tnings amounted to some kind of romantic search for heroic
values: hence, perhaps, his decision to suppon the hero de Gaulle, whom
he felt to be simpler and larger than life, free from doubts, ruthless, all
of a piece. I don't know. Malraux asked to be shown the room in All
Saints College which T.E. Lawrence had lived in when he was a Fellow in
the twenties, just as Gide had wanted to see Oscar Wilde's rooms in
Magdalen. In the end, with the help of Professor ErnestJacob, we identi–
fied it: he looked at it-it is a perfectly ordinary little college room, of
