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PARTISAN REVIEW
and penetrating about him. What interested me, what made his conver–
sati.on delightful to me , was not merely his charm, which is considerable,
nor his eloquence, which is remarkable, but an extreme sense which I got
from him of acute discrimination between the genuine and the counter–
feit; he really does know what he wants, he knows what he is looking for,
what gives him these sharp sensations which make him live, make him
feel that he is alive. I think that Byron somewhere speaks of the desire for
sensation-to be conscious of oneself as existing even though it be in
pain-and I think that there is that Byronic element about Malraux,
wedded to a curious, sharp, ironical kind of realism, which was there in
Byron too . He didn't talk about Byron: but that 's what he liked about
Alexander and T.E. Lawrence, and the wild, unconquered Parthians.
This had a very Byronic ring to me. And there was also the defying of men
and nature,
contra mundum,
a traditional romantic image of the lonely
thinker. Malraux doesn 't seem to be a man who believes much in working
with a team, or leading a party, or altering his principles or his convictions
to
adapt himself to some mass movement in order
to
feel that he is lead–
ing the masses, or at least marching with them towards some goal. He
does not, I think, mind detaching himself, if need be, and pursuing his
own path: there is surely some desire for solitude in his feelings . And
some self-dramatization and self-romanticization also- much scorned in
our day but to me , I admit, rather refreshing; the whole thing the exact
opposite of Sartre, for example.
Courcel:
When I first thought about the subject I wanted
you
to
write on
in this book, it came to my mind that it could be , " Malraux and Marx–
ism." I then went on to think that "Malraux and the Marxist Adventure"
would convey better Malraux's relationship with Marxism, and that in
fact "Malraux and the Marxist Temptation" would even be more accu–
rate. I now feel that we are not really going to talk about Malraux and
Marxism at all, because he was never actually a Marxist in the proper sense
of the word.
Berlin:
I have no idea to what degree, if any, he was a theoretical Marxist;
of course he must have been one in some sense . I don 't know whether he
would describe himself as a Marxist at any period, but I can' t talk about
Malraux
and
anything, because I don't know him and one cannot judge
people by their books. One would get a very odd conception of what
Tolstoy's own personal character was like
if
one only had
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
to
judge by.
You
may say, you may well say, that it is
more important to understand
Anna Karenina
and
War and Peace
than
it is to understand the individual personality of Tolstoy. That may be so .
But
if
one wants to understand Tolstoy himself, one has
to
have lived
