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PARTISAN REVIEW
is looking for , or obtains; no , I think art means a great deal to him, simply
hecause he has a passionate attitude towards creativity as such, and he
conceives it in a romantic spirit. I think creation for him is individual
self-expression, and not simply the creation of an object: it is human
communication by these exceptional beings who are larger than life, see
more, suffer more , see through more, despise more, understand more,
despair all the more-that's his conception, I think, of what great men,
major actors , are like .
One of the things I enjoyed-and perhaps he did too-was our last
conversation, on the way to the airport, of a kind that undergraduates
have with each other. We began talking about whom (if we could go into
the past) we would have liked to meet, to ask to dinner, and so on. I was
sitting next to the chauffeur. I turned round asking him, " Now, if you
had to ask Plato or Socrates for lunch, which one would you choose?"
He answered without hesitation: " Certainly Plato .
It
would fl:ot be very
easy, but one would eventually get him to come-he is such a snob."
We went on to consider whether Plato would have snubbed Dante, and
there was more of this kind of thing. He always came back to Alexander
the Great whom he wanted to meet very much indeed, and I didn 't want
to meet at all; I thought he would have been too savage, arbitrary, but
that was exactly what he liked. He wanted to go to Ctesiphon
to
meet
some Parthians, but he wouldn't, he agreed , have understood a word
they said because their Greek must have been appalling-the Parthian
language is completely lost-but he didn't mind that; what he wanted
was to gaze upon them. Our conversation became one of mounting gaiety,
in which all kinds of fantasies were built up.
It
may seem an extraordinary
thing to say about a man of such talents, who has lived so eventful a
life-that there is something ungrown-up about him, which is peculiarly
attractive, something very young, very unexhausted . If the right subjects
are touched upon , and the right atmosphere conveyed, a great fountain
of intellectual gaiety springs forth, of rare quality, and to me very delight–
ful. There is nothing pompous about him, nothing stuffy or solemn,
in
spite of a clear sense of his own importance. Provided the subject stimu–
lates him at all, he goes off at fantastic tangents, which carry one with
them. All I can say is that it was to me an extremely exhilarating and
delightful visit, and I had that particular sensation, which one has with
certain types of men touched by genius; namely an enormous heightening
of vitality, and increasing flarness and regret after they are gone, though
a sense of excitement lingers on for some time after.
He is an eloquent genius, with no philistine fear of brilliant flights of
rhetoric. Mter the unsuccessful lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre, on the
