ISAIAH BERLIN
389
with him, to hear the voice, the intonations, see the gestures, have a
direct vision of the individual himself, for a sufficient length of time .
Deducing people or trying to reconstruct them from brief meetings, still
more from their works is, I think, never much good .
Courcel: You
must admit that in the case of Malraux, Marxism was not mere
intellectual play, nor a way
to
enjoy intellectual comfort, it was in fact a
commitment: he was involved in the Chinese revolution, and he was even
more involved in the Spanish Civil War, to the extent that he actually
organized and led the
Escuadnlla Espana.
It
was indeed not an abstract
approach, but a physical involvement.
Berlin:
Oh, I am sure that action is very important to
him,
because I think
there is a craving for some sort of heroic life in him. But I think he 's rather
like-I don't know, I may be quite wrong, and what I am going to say
may be terrible nonsense-I think there's something about him which
probably existed in the early years of Christianity, when people who were
not particularly interested in the Christian theology, nor even in the view
of Man and of God which Christianity unfolded, but who were oppressed
by the exhausted-or what they felt to be the exhausted-stifling edifice
of the pagan world, people whom Christianity liberated, for whom it was
a transformation and a revolution, a vision of infinity which made all
things new, a new heaven and a new earth, restored an earlier, younger
world. Perhaps it sprang from a neoprimitivism, as if history were cyclical,
and this was the beginning of a new cycle . That, I think, is what Malraux
may be like, what may have attracted him originally to left-wing move–
ments whether in Asia or in Europe, or in Russia. He is certainly fasci–
nated 'by Asia. When he went to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford what
he most wanted to look at were Chinese, Persian, Afghan things . We all
knew, of course, of his fascination with China and with Indochina. It may
be that he wanted to experience some sort of contrast, conflict, between
the old Western civilization and something which would excite it into a
new vitality by producing a spark, by bringing two cultures together and
creating a collision.
I think the idea of a sort of collision of conflicting values, and the emer–
gence from this of something new and fresh , and not simply a gradual
evolution of something which had in embryo been there all the time–
that, I think, may be what in some way moved him. That is why he talked
about Russia very much as I tend
to
think of it, as a world which for
various political and historical reasons had to a large degree been insu–
lated from what was going on in the West, and which therefore for West–
erners preserved a kind of strangeness, a Jansenist,
au-delii,
quality, in
which some things, some writers, some values, some forms of experience
