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PARTISAN REVIEW
were brighter and larger than life, more authentic; where human beings
behaved more like human beings; where what they said sounded more
genuine, in some ways more childlike but also more sincere . That, it
seems to me, is what attracted him-a certain poetical, uncontaminated
quality in the lives of people he met.
This, of course, often happens to people who live under tyranny:
because they are isolated, forcibly isolated, from the outer world, and are
reduced
to
bare essentials, and
to
leading a kind of controlled, aborted,
and therefore childlike life, they sometimes are purified by this, kept
from growing up, and so free from the defects of freer, more easygoing,
more open and more blase societies . This is one of the by-products of
being forced into private life, when public life is dangerous or forbidden.
This, I think, he did encounter in the Russians, particularly the Russian
writers and artists whom he met. We, or rather, he, talked about their
charm and imagination in a vein of happy nostalgic reminiscence.
What he likes
to
talk about, I think, is exceptional people. While he
was at Oxford he had various tasks to perform:
to
receive an Honorary
Degree, and to open the new Maison
Fran~aise,
and so on. In the course
of this he had to meet a certain number of official representatives of the
University and was himself accompanied by official academic persons
from France; and although he was quite pleased
to
be doing this, I think,
he really seemed to want to resume talk about the interesting persons
outside the Western world whom he had met or had thought about; he
found it rather difficult to do this with most of the perfectly polite but
;lightly bewildered Oxford dons, some of whom, perhaps, if he had
known them better, he might well have found interesting, but whom
there was no opportunity to meet at length if one was engaged upon a
purely official visit of this kind.
When we were alone in our house, he would, with evident pleasure,
resume his very vivid and fascinating descriptions of Bukharin, for exam–
ple, and other old Bolsheviks who, in his opinion, knew that they were
doomed, and knew that they would end badly, but who at the same time
marched towards their fate in a manner which he found irresistibly inter–
esting. He liked talking about "fatal" men and women, obsessed lives,
lonely Byronic souls: for example, I remember a long conversation about
Lou Andreas-Salome, about whom a book had just been published, who
lived in Russia, then in Germany where Nietzsche had become infatuated
by her, and then became the mistress of Rilke, and ended by captivating
Freud and becoming a psychoanalyst herself. The life of this peculiar,
gifted, and fascinating woman absolutely gripped him. And he talked
of other people who led self-absorbed lives. He didn't want to talk about
