Malraux
A Biography
Chapter 1
To see an aquarium, better not be a fish.
Picasso’s Mask
“The last meaningful revolution, you ask me?” His gaze is keen and searching. “Modern revolutions are either hangovers from 1917 or they are fascist takeovers, but of course the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution require cobblestones to make barricades against cavalry. With the invention of the tank, revolutionary action really becomes obsolete.”
André Malraux is an elegant and slightly bent septuagenarian of extravagant memory and prodigious knowledge who receives his visitor with formidable verbosity and a choice of Scotch or mint tea. He talks about what Mao Tse-tung told him and what he told Trotsky and Kennedy and about History’s finer ironies. He recalls camels coming down the Pamirs, bellowing through the clouds, and says that listening to Europe’s great composers in Asia makes him feel that the West’s deepest emotion is nostalgia. He talks about the next war—a war for diminishing resources—while contrasting his darkening vision with faith in human resilience. He says God is dead, but that what ultimately matters is neither material rewards nor even happiness but spiritual dimension. What makes humanity awesome and culture a great adventure is not our own saying so, but our questioning everything.
His spare strands of hair are dark, his eyes green and his face, with its chiseled furrows and nervous twitches, is dominated by the arch of his brow. He examines his visitor’s half-finished sentences with intuitive impatience. He has a gift for taking quick and forceful possession of ideas and for formulating them in dazzling propositions. Yet his language is without redundancy or hesitancy. He never seems to feel his way toward ideas, and words flow from him at a rate that is almost the speed of thought. For punctuation, he may lift a long, apostolic forefinger and say, Mais, attention! as if to warn of upcoming illuminations. Objections are taken into account and a partner in conversation may come to feel grateful that doubts are entertained at all. Ideals are not defended with asperity but with common sense and a series of primo, secundo and tertio to keep matters straight until all extensions, consequences and impossibilities of various hypotheses have been disposed of and a cogent conclusion reached. When conversing with Malraux, André Gide has said, one doesn’t feel very clever.
“War puts questions stupidly, peace mysteriously. Our history is not a chronicle of ideologies or political abstractions, but of empires, of powers seeking to control events.”
He has always felt the tragic dimension of modern man and his novels are peopled with characters who in violent situations fight to create their own transcendental usefulness. He believes our civilization no longer has a clear idea of man and is therefore bound to change or disappear.
“You ask me if the universe has a purpose, if history leads somewhere or whether such questions are senseless. Not senseless, I’d say, unintelligible. The Iranians have given the answer in the Koran a modern twist: ‘Does the cricket run over by a truck understand the internal combustion engine?’ The cricket may think it has been run over by something very big and very nasty, but not how the internal combustion engine works. Nor what the engine thinks, or that it doesn’t think at all. Man thinking of himself in biological terms started with Darwin. The idea of a common human fate is very recent, and we don’t even know yet whether evolution is divergent or convergent.”
Malraux’s progression has been from high-pitched radicalism to political agnosticism and art as transcendence rather than beauty. His fiction is a tragic universe where individuals are opposed to society but at the same time draw their forces from it, a world where revolutions fail but justice rekindles justice and where to accept the unknown is to be fully human. A revolutionary movement is fraternal not only because it defends the individual’s values but because in revolt the individual exceeds himself. In his books, clear-eyed revolutionaries and magnificent losers die so that others may live with dignity. “What do you call dignity? It doesn’t mean anything,” a Kuomintang officer asks the captured Kyo in La Condition humaine, which in English received the title Man’s Fate.* “The opposite of humiliation,” the revolutionary answers. Pages later, he realizes that to die for human dignity is to die a little less alone.
Malraux’s last novel appeared in 1943. Since then, he has published over fifteen books, memoirs of his extraordinary life not always written in the first person and volumes about art and the creative process which say that what ennobles Man is what transforms him. “Art is a dialogue we have always carried out with the unknown. We have come to distinguish the contours of the unknown through the unconscious, through religion and magic and we may soon begin to understand such totally modern emotions as the feeling that we belong to the future, that our civilization is the sum total of all others.”
Five books appeared between 1974 and 1976, all parts of his ongoing life work. La Tête d’obsédienne, which became Picasso’s Mask in English, sees art as its own absolute, freed even of a need to be beauty, and as promise of a universal language that allows modern man to converse across civilizations and time. It is also about Pablo Picasso and the traces the artist leaves behind. Lazare is a meditation undertaken in the limbo of critical illness—Malraux’s own voyage to the edge of death in 1972 when a collapsed peripherical nervous system threatened him with paralysis of the cerebellum and total amnesia. It is also about the realization that the medical technology that saved him had not existed a few years earlier. Together with other, as yet unpublished texts, La Tête d’obsédienne and Lazare will form the second volume of the Antimémoires—“anti” because Malraux wants the ego talking about itself to yield to what is created in life. L’Irréel and L’Intemporel are the second and third volumes of The Metamorphoses of the Gods. L’Irréel—in English perhaps not so much the unreal as the non-real—sees the Renaissance as the stupendous turning point when artists stopped re-creating the world according to sacred tenets and began re-creating it according to imaginary values. L’Intemporel—in Malraux’s view neither timelessness nor immortality, but the peculiar time warp that allows a work of art to escape its own era—traces the volte-face of modern painting since Manet with whom Venus ceased to be both naked woman and poetry to become color arranged in certain forms. With these two big, richly illustrated volumes, Malraux has finished The Metamorphoses of the Gods, his reflection on art and its transmutations, started in 1957 as an afterthought to the monumental Voices of Silence, his hymn to art as intelligence imposed on matter.
He receives his visitors at the Vilmorin family château in Verrières-le-Buisson on the southern outskirts of Paris where he lives surrounded by the affectionate attention of the sister and family of the last woman in his life. Louise de Vilmorin lies buried somewhere in the park-sized garden under a cherry tree. “The cherries will rain down on my tomb and children will feast on them,” the novelist wrote in her will. Verrières is less than ten miles from the city limits and only a last few fields from suburban high-risers. The lovers of Verrières, twentieth-century Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, found each other late and lived a whimsical if autumnal liaison. De Gaulle didn’t exactly approve but when Madame de Vilmorin died, the president sent a rare personal note. A year later, he died.
The modern world is baffling, Malraux says, because our value system is devoid of meaning. “If asked, a thirteenth-century Christian could tell you on the spot what is good and what is evil. To think values today is to undertake a research. What is curious of course is that whereas nearly all civilizations with weak value systems have been moribund societies, ours is the most powerful the world has ever known.”
When asked whether he thinks this is a contradiction, he says the modern world is contradictory, in technology triumphant beyond the wildest dreams yet without spiritual ferment or direction.
He feels that although the atom bomb must be categorized as a shattering event, the major facts of our times are not events but shifts in concepts. “The relentless way we question our civilization is an example. Earlier societies have had individuals asking questions and wondering about the future. But nobody announced the end of Rome. Saint Augustine talked very seriously about it, but when he did Rome had already fallen. We, on the other hand, are engaged in wholesale challenge and are aware of a civilizational crisis.”
Modern man, he feels, is both fearful of tomorrow and hopeful, peering into the future for signs, but nobody has ever been able successfully to predict profound spiritual change. “In 200 A.D., thoughtful Romans began realizing that the empire had had it. What would happen next? Nobody really knew, but almost every one agreed—we have those letters from Baiae—that the most probable philosophy of the future would be stoicism. As it turned out, stoicism was to play no role at all because Christianity swept everything away. Nobody predicted the rise of Islam. It’s probably in the nature of revolutions of the mind to simply happen. Great religious minds aren’t necessarily the harbingers of great truths. To be a prophet, you must discover that soft spot in people that is vulnerable to your prophecy.”
Malraux believes that within a hundred years the two main spheres of human endeavor will be science, still advancing at a dizzying pace, and what he calls “the spiritual phenomenon.” He finds it curious that there is no real research into religious change, no History of Spiritual Movements from a social point of view. “Everybody has studied the origins of Christianity, of course, but no sociologist has studied such profound changes as Franciscanism, which brought into the Church a kind of Buddhism—‘My brother the rain’ and all that—which caused an incredible transformation. Likewise, primitive Buddhism was a kind of tragic agnosticism, Gautama Buddha teaching us to try to escape ‘the wheel’ of suffering, but it’s someone else, someone whose name we don’t even know, who got the idea that you can be reborn through inward extinction if you pronounce Buddha’s name with all the possible commiseration for the distress and misery of this world, in other words that you are in a tragic world but that you can move on to paradise. It’s as if Luther had said there’s no hell. The result was one hundred million conversions in twenty years.”
Malraux thinks faster than he speaks and feels terrorized in any language but French. He is without formal education. He reads Greek, has a smattering knowledge of Mandarin and a bookish command of English that allows him to read Shakespeare in the original but not to give directions to a London cabdriver. With the exception of Terence Kilmartin, who translated the Antimémoires, he has never been very lucky with his English translators. Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Les Voix du Silence is curiously archaic while passages of Robert Hollander’s rendition of La Tentation de l’Occident are downright inaccurate. The most famous of the novels, La Condition humaine, has been translated in stilted and heavy fashion by Haakon Chevalier, a University of California, Berkeley professor of Norwegian-French descent (whom Malraux helped during J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 “trial” when the Father of the Atom Bomb pointed a hysterical finger at Chevalier as the man who had tried to lead him astray). Not that Malraux underestimates the difficulties involved in transposing his words and thoughts, which often seem to mean more than they state. Before Gilbert started on The Voices of Silence, Malraux told him, “You’ll find my lyric passages frequent and fatiguing; just do the best you can with them.” A former colonial judge from Burma, famous for accomplishing the feat of translating James Joyce’s Ulysses into French, Gilbert is the translator of four other Malraux books.
It is not one of Malraux’s habits to visit a country without adopting its causes and in La Tête d’obsédienne he takes up Picasso’s struggle against old age and in so doing asks himself what his own creation might weigh in the face of the Big Void. Malraux first met the painter, twenty years his senior, as a tall, pale youth with a romantic lock over one eye trying to crash the clever, anarchic scene of post-World War I dadaism and cubism. In 1937, Picasso’s sketches for Guernica were to have illustrated the first edition of L’Espoir (Man’s Hope), the novel about the Spanish Civil War that made Hemingway so jealous he accused André of untimely pullout in order to write “masterpisses.”
The title of the Picasso book comes from a pre-Columbian skull carved in volcanic crystal that Malraux first saw at the National Museum in Mexico City in the company of Spain’s last Republican ambassador. Seated under his unframed Rouault and Braque paintings in the salon bleu overlooking the Verrières park, he explains that the obsidian head is exhibited in a glass case with a mirrored background that fuses the crystal cranium with the onlooker’s own reflection, “like in Narayana’s temple where the images of the gods on the sacrificial stones have been replaced by mirrors.”
Death has been at his shoulder since he was thirteen and, a week after France’s first flush of victory in 1914, a patriotic teacher took him and his classmates to visit the Marne battlefield and ashes from a funeral pyre wafted onto their box lunches. The best passages in his novels are descriptions of death up close—Perkins in The Royal Way, dying in a Cambodian village, fascinated by his own disintegration, or Katov, the medical student turned revolutionary in Man’s Fate, giving the cyanide pellets hidden in his belt buckle to wounded comrades in Chiang Kai-shek’s prison while he himself is led off to be executed in a manner singularly prescient of the next war’s concentration camp ovens—burned alive in a locomotive boiler on a Shanghai railway siding, a detail that lends credence to the oft-quoted remark that history has come to resemble Malraux novels.
Death has always hit close to him—and has not only felled comrades-in-arms. The mother of his two sons and the sons themselves died in accidents. His two half-brothers died in World War II, the elder absurdly during the closing hours of the conflict. His grandfather split his own skull with an ax, perhaps not inadvertently. His father committed suicide. “To reflect upon life—life in relation to death—is perhaps no more than to intensify one’s questioning,” he wrote on the opening page of his Antimémoires. “I don’t mean death in the sense of being killed, which poses few problems to anyone who has the commonplace luck to be brave, but death that brushes by.”
From above the mantel, he takes an exquisite early Braque. He brings it over to the garden window, to show the grain of the painting. “The last time I saw Braque, I quoted Cézanne’s phrase: ‘If I were sure that my paintings would be destroyed and never reach the Louvre, I’d stop painting.’ Braque took a long time answering. Finally in a subdued tone he said, ‘If I were sure all my canvases would be burned, I think I’d still go on.’”
When Braque died in 1963, Malraux was France’s Secretary for Cultural Affairs and ordered a state funeral in the inner court of the Louvre. It was a blustery, rainy September evening. A military honor guard played Beethoven’s Marche funèbre and Malraux delivered the eulogy, saying that burying Braque with state honors seemed to avenge a little Van Gogh’s suicide in the Auvers asylum, Modigliani’s pathetic obsequy and the long record of scorn, poverty and despair that is the history of art. As he finished the oration, the moon came out.
Malraux was Secretary for Cultural Affairs for nearly eleven years and as such tasted what few intellectuals ever come to enjoy—the power to experiment in culture. He sent the Louvre treasures on globe-trotting tours and for scraping centuries of grime off Paris landmarks. He initiated an unprecedented inventory of France’s artistic wealth, started new archaeological reserves, had Chagall paint the Opera ceiling and Coco Chanel decorate a wing of the Louvre. He pushed subsidies for theater, ballet and cinema (“for the price of one freeway,” he thundered in the National Assembly, “France can again become a land of culture”). He launched his “Maisons de Culture”—multi-purpose art centers designed not only to extend Paris standards to the provinces but to foster an interpenetration of the arts by combining facilities for drama, music, film and exhibitions. Although budgetary limitations prevented the building of the twenty-one “culture houses” originally planned, a number are in operation—at Bourges, Amiens and, the most grandiose of them, in Grenoble. He had eight thousand delegates attend a theater congress in Bourges and on Picasso’s eighty-fifth birthday organized a huge one-man show in the renovated Grand Palais. He created the Orchestre de Paris, had the Chambord, Vincennes and Fontainebleau castles rehabilitated and the Reims cathedral restored. And he traveled, from New Delhi to Brasilia, Cairo to Tokyo, Dakar to Ottawa, as de Gaulle’s ambassador to the world. “We all want to take part in life’s numerous adventures, but Mr. Malraux beats us all,” declared President Kennedy at a White House state dinner. His most spectacular voyage was to China to cement France’s early recognition of the People’s Republic. It culminated with a remarkable and much-quoted Mao Tse-tung interview, which Malraux was to recall in eighty sonorous pages in his Antimémoires.
“Malraux is an expensive minister,” said Georges Pompidou. The limits of the “Malraux era” were the limits of the Cultural Affairs ministry itself. Education and telecommunications were not under his control.
Modern industrial societies, he says, must break the stronghold of money on culture and see to it that the majority of citizens aren’t always flooded with trash. This holds true not only for bourgeois states without political leadership in cultural affairs, but for Marxist and totalitarian countries as well. Governments, he feels, must try to impose reforms that widen the access to authentic art and promote and preserve culture.
“Concrete suggestions? Not on the level of creation. The state has no business in the artist’s studio, but it certainly has in the dissemination of art. The most urgent area is education, which must be reorganized via television and video, a task as important as universal education was a hundred years ago. You must have the best minds teaching their specialty simultaneously in fifty thousand classrooms. Not all great minds are teachers, of course, which is where superior journalism comes in. Sartre put it very well when he said great minds reach their audiences in stages and Einstein told me theoretical scientists shouldn’t try to explain themselves, just write forewords to popularizing volumes.”
His days are busy. Schedules are kept by Sophie L. de Vilmorin and adhered to with reasonable punctuality. A symbol of his ministerial years he has hung on to is a chauffeur and a jet-black Citroën limousine. Sensitive to boredom, he finds things to do in Paris three, four days a week and has himself whisked into town on the flimsiest of pretexts. He has no sense of money but has an acute business sense and is uncompromising when it comes to his contractual due. Gallimard has been his publisher since 1930—he worked there as an editor while he wrote Man’s Fate—and likes to show up unannounced at the Rue Sébastien-Bottin. Although he lived for years in the nearby Rue du Bac, he is no Left Bank person. Hanging out in cafés never appealed to him. He has an apartment on Rue de Montpensier near the Comédie-Française and with Louise de Vilmorin had plans to buy a house in the restored Quartier des Marais.
He buys his clothes at Lanvin—gray flannels, navy blue serges, herringbones and always wears a tie and an elegant wristwatch. He was in his chartreuse camel hair coat inaugurating the Chagall building in Nice when a man stepped forward, yelled “Down with Chagall!” and splashed him with red paint. Malraux promptly “disarmed” his aggressor and in turn covered him with paint. “An esthetic disagreement,” he said calmly, “but I resent anyone insulting one of our greatest living painters.”
His favorite restaurant is Lasserre’s and he has always approached culinary temples with reverence. To outdo Le Grand Véfour’s Pigeon Prince Rainier, Lasserre’s has created Pigeon André Malraux, yet he is attached to dishes he learned to like as a child. If served beef stew he will politely eat up all the carrots on his plate. He doesn’t care much for fruit, but likes a dessert with his meals, either a pithiviers, his favorite cake, or a napoleon. A reformed chain smoker, he has given up both alcohol and cigarettes, but relapses occur at the sight of an ashtray.
The facial tics, which at moments afflict his composure and impair the flow of words, have long been legendary, psychosomatic proof, so to speak, of his staccato mind. In reality, the twitches are the result of acute sinusitis, neglected since childhood and in recent years complicated by aphasiac apheresis. The only sport he ever indulged in was fencing when, at twenty-five, he edited a newssheet in Saigon.
He has always had a taste for ostentatious living. During the first months of the Spanish Civil War when he commanded a small squadron of foreign airmen he lived at Madrid’s Hotel Florida. Whatever the day’s bombing mission, he appeared freshly shaven for before-dinner cocktails.
“I remember Stalin at Gorky’s house, arriving late, beguiling and farfetched. That was in 1934, just before the purges. I think Stalin was obsessed by statistics: if we kill all those who have known, etc., we will end up catching the real culprits.”
When asked what the world’s leaders he has known have in common, he says a feel for what will resist them and the ability to overcome such resistance. He remembers Trotsky in exile in southern France, his laughter showing his tiny gapped teeth. He remembers Mao as someone hesitating, a man haunted by what he hasn’t accomplished, Nehru as a British gentleman with a sad smile who couldn’t believe, as Gandhi, that the Ganges was a holy river. He remembers Kennedy asking him what popularity was. His relations with de Gaulle, he says, were not political but historic. When the general was defeated in a referendum in 1969 and resigned, Malraux followed him.
He was late for the general’s funeral at Colombey. Family, parishoners and old comrades-in-arms were kneeling in the arched nave when squealing tires were heard. Malraux didn’t speak at de Gaulle’s funeral. Instead, he wrote Felled Oaks, a hallucinatory retelling of de Gaulle’s confidences to him a few months earlier. The title comes from a Victor Hugo poem: “… oh, what savage noise in the waning light, the oaks felled for Hercules’s pyre.”
The following year, Malraux discovered a war where he could die heroically—Bangladesh. But the war lasted only ten days and Indira Gandhi made him wait. She knew the victory would be India’s and had no intention of giving any part of it to any international Malraux brigade.
If he was refused a hero’s death at the side of a crucified people in an Asia that had always fascinated him, he was given the satisfaction of being the man the leader of the world’s foremost power consulted before meeting the ruler of the world’s most populous empire. In February 1972, President Nixon called him to Washington. “He wants to meet someone who knows Mao,” Malraux said, taking off from Orly airport. American bombs were raining on Vietnam, and, Malraux tartly told the assembled French press, “to help bring about peace, you can contribute more by making a trip to the White House than by writing articles in Le Nouvel Observateur.”
“I told Nixon that nobody would know for fifty years whether his mission would be successful,” he says, replacing the Braque on the mantel between a Fautrier and a Poliakov. His newest acquisitions are from Japan, a prehistoric clay dove and a rare eighteenth-century drawing, gifts from admirers in Tokyo. The pigeon, predating Buddhism and the 600 B.C. foundation of the first archaic empire, is a curiously abstract rendition, with the tail prolonging the body without interruption. He explains that such figurines, usually of horses, doves and imaginary animals, were set on high poles around burial sites, apparently as protectors of graves. “What really makes them interesting is that this is the absolute anti-African art because this is the only sculpture executed in continued planes. In African fetish carvings you’d have interrupted surfaces, whereas here the roundness of the body continues into the plane of the tail in a single trait.”
He unrolls the Edo period drawing and indicates the delicacy of the pen stroke. “Skill, which plays such a major role in Western art, was less important in traditional Eastern and Egyptian art, perhaps because ideographic writing makes fluent calligraphy a matter of course. It may also explain why caricature is unknown in traditional Japanese drawings.”
He has always had far-flung contacts with influential people—Trotsky wrote to Simon and Schuster urging a quick American edition of Man’s Fate, and the Shah of Iran lent him Babylonian sculptures—but he also knows how to be generous with his person and his time to lesser mortals. To the many doing research on his life or writing about his place in literature, art history or politics he makes gifts of patience and counsel that are magnanimous, even princely. Questions must be submitted in writing in advance, but on the appointed day the interviewer is picked up by the chauffeur in the black Citroën at Antony station, whisked to Verrières and in the salon bleu met by a Malraux armed with typed-up key answers. A tape recorder is invited and once it is rolling, the typed sheet in his hand becomes not so much a string of signposts as a series of casual fermatas now and then arresting the flow of ideas. In conversation, his rare intelligence is luminous and his gift for complex ideas and formulation knows no obstacles, only organic pauses.
He is part of any French curriculum but his ascendance over his country’s youth was sharply challenged in the 1968 “May Events,” the student uprisings that indirectly led to de Gaulle’s downfall and were to reverberate through the national conscience for years. The summer of discontent was an outburst against an inefficient educational system and against a paternalistic regime, symbolized by a monolithic, state-controlled television network that didn’t allow plurality of opinion. The revolt saw quotations from Malraux’s books scrawled on college and university walls, taunting him with the Faustian pronouncements of his youth. Yet of the Gaullist cabinet members, he was the least painful to read. He called the riots “an immense lyrical illusion” and told his fellow cabinet ministers that politics were not an exercise in absolutes but in reality. “To know youth is to be part of it,” he reasons. “It is not attempts at ‘dialogues.’ No one is obliged to accept the famous generation gap—in fact, to accept it would be madness—but neither must anyone pretend to understand too much. I must say, however, that I don’t see the young. In music a little, yes; but not in architecture. Niemayer has talent, but he’s in his sixties. The writers of my generation were in their mid-twenties when Gallimard lived from publishing ‘what the young are up to.’ What book by a young writer today would be assured in advance of the audience of, say, a new book by Sartre?
“In painting, what can I say? Cubism looks more and more like the last important school. Picasso said, ‘I paint as I damn well please, but I’m the brother of the sculptor of the Cyclades and, by the way, of Cézanne and Manet.’ During his cubist period, he was taking on the whole Louvre. Makers of contemporary post-object, conceptual, earth art, etc., with their gigantism and aggressivity, don’t wrestle with Michelangelo, Titian and Cézanne on their canvases, but translate a very rare sentiment—the artist as a tracked animal, pursued and fearing being caged. At the same time, they say, ‘I care so little about the idea of painting that I work with perishable materials.’ You see this in America especially, where you have a way of painting that is constantly renewed and a willingness to be decorative that has all the earmarks of fashion.
“Although there is evolution in art, ‘advance’ in the sense we understand ‘progress’ in science doesn’t exist. In art, you don’t invent, you find out and the discovery of African art is no more an advance than the discovery of Romanesque sculpture. Progression in science is a staircase; in art there is no ‘up,’ progress is simply elsewhere. Science has no equivalent of the presence of all earlier art nor of creativity independent of History. Titian is after Masaccio, but you don’t view Titian’s work as being later than Masaccio’s in the same way you think of the internal combustion engine as being more recent than the plow.”
If asked what he thinks will be the next ‘elsewhere,’ Malraux says it will obviously be the work of an artist who is big enough to invent new forms that are acceptable to our notions of both beauty and transcendence. Novelty is both imitation and opposition. “To understand the existence of a void is pretty easy, to know how to fill it is the mark of a genius.”
The characters in Malraux’s fiction know what values are, rarely what truth is. His books, even his nonfiction, are full of enemy truths squaring off. Negative forces are absent and oppressors—capitalists, Nazis, Falangists—remain impersonal if often suffocating incarnations. The conflict is not so much between inner truth and surrounding realities. He inhabits all his characters and, through them, confronts himself, writing in staccato dialogue and striking images. Revolutionary action is often politically futile since his revolutionaries gain none of their objectives and often only manage to get themselves killed. In risking his life, man can at least choose his own death and thereby escape the absurdity and an accidental and meaningless end. Someone has said Malraux’s fiction isn’t really novels but metaphysical reportage.
In his writings on art, the creative process is both desire to express and will to achieve. Artists are locked in combat with their own talent and their work is the triumph over the darker powers that assail them and to which they yield in their quest for perfection and ecstasy. Art is born from the lure of the elusive.
Why hasn’t he written a novel in over thirty years?
“Perhaps because the novel calls for a strong narrative power and narration is today in images. The publicized and televised violence of everyday existence, hijacking and all sorts of minor events that used to be mystery for a writer, have helped to kill the novel. I mean a certain kind of novel with which we are all familiar—going from Balzac to Tolstoy. This sort of narrative received its death blow with the publication of Madame Bovary. Do you know what Alexandre Dumas’ reaction was when he read Bovary? He told his son, ‘If this is what literature has become, we’ve had it!’ And right he was. Compare Bovary with The Three Musketeers.
“Subject matter exists to be transmuted, we all reach our audience in stages, remember. The narrative means of Margaret Mitchell are not inferior to Dostoyevsky’s; it is in the realm of the imaginary that Gone with the Wind had nothing in common with The Brothers Karamazov. Television is a powerful means of story-telling, but it is weak in depicting intuition, fantasy, whimsy because the imaginary is not plot but a realm.
“Current theories on the novel, it seems to me, resemble the central problem facing fifteenth-century painters—depth and spacial values. Flemish painters advanced cautiously whereas the Florentines pursued the three dimensions with exuberance and, like land surveyors, caught space in a net of geometry. I think that for most novelists characters are fashioned by the drama of their stories, not the drama by the characters.
“A third reason for the decline of the novel is that whereas communism has invented the mythical Bolshevik hero, there is no such thing as a mythical capitalist character.”
Citizen Kane?
“Not as capitalist. There can be no capitalist hero since only Marxists claim that there is such an animal. No, what happened at the end of the great monarchies was The Ambitious One. This mythical character was invented as social climber in 1830 by Stendhal and Balzac and laid to rest as individualist in early Gide fiction. We now begin to see that The Ambitious One isn’t to be taken too seriously. I’d say that the guy who says he is going to take on the atomic bomb single-handedly makes us laugh. The realities of our era do not pertain to the particular. I think we’re beginning to realize something rather formidable, that from Nietzsche to, say, Gide, we thought values were individual. We now realize that this has been an incredible mistake. Values are not individual. Look at what has really moved the world during the last fifty years. Values are collective and the phenomenon called individualism is starting to look like what it really is, a historical myth, something nineteenth-century Western society invented like the Greeks invented Aphrodite.”
He is without a shred of sentimentality and rates doubt and self-distrust as the most superficial of human feelings. Every morning, he tears up the previous day’s appointments, a ritual, he says, that is accompanied by a spontaneous desertion of memory but is without regret, guilt or lassitude. He has never kept a diary. When asked why not in 1945, he said diaries are for people who like to remember. He has not written ten lines about the women in his life. Sometimes to their regret. Clara Malraux brings out volume after volume of memoirs, telling how she was part of so much of it, as indeed she was.
He can seem detached from himself, suffused only with impersonal passions, abstract apprehensions and enthusiasm once-removed. His mythomania is legendary and he has always played deliberately on the confusion of fiction and reality and even tried out his legends on new acquaintances. He has been careful never to deny being a political commissar for the Chinese communists in the mid-1920s. He has never said whether he discovered the ruins of ancient Sheba in the sands of Saudi Arabia. Sometimes events have chastefully veiled the evidence. When the Germans marched into Paris, Gaston Gallimard hastily burned whatever papers could be compromising for his authors, including a 1929 Malraux plan to liberate Trotsky from Alma-Ata, where Stalin had deported the founder of the Red Army. Malraux’s idea was to smuggle Trotsky out of the Soviet Union across the Himalayas.
The need for myth runs deep. It is part of Malraux’s creative genius and partly responsible for the failure of his first marriage. The idol of his youth was T. E. Lawrence. He wrote a penetrating foreword to the French translation of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, planned a book on him but only met Lawrence of Arabia once—in a gay bar in Montparnasse.
“But mind you,” he says, holding up the index finger of his right hand as an exclamation point, “the difference between Lawrence and me is that he was always sure he would fail whereas I have always believed in the success of my undertakings.”
His life’s adventure has been his progression from intellectual swagger to the discovery of a fraternal dignity in revolutionary movements and on to the probing on the summit of human endeavor—the creative process, which he thinks is man’s only triumphant response to a seemingly absurd fate. “The nineteenth century believed it was seeing the end of wars. Nietzsche was right—and Marx wrong—in foretelling that the twentieth would be the century of national wars.”
Both Nietzsche and Marx have influenced him, although on different levels. Marxism is part of the novels, not as philosophy but as part of the political equation, whereas Nietzschean ideas appear as an organic element. Malrucian man is not so much what he thinks as what he tries to discover.
“When you try to answer the question of whether human nature is infinitely changeable, you realize that science is changing the world, it is not changing us. But it’s hard to grasp the infinite. We have always been better at scanning the near future. What’s important is the next objective and there I cannot accept utter gloom. Why? Because of a certain frog’s reflex—keeping the head down while disaster hits. We have always done that.
“Also, I cannot agree that unmanageable population explosion and diminishing resources will lead to nuclear blackmail by underdeveloped countries and breakdown of industrial society. To wars, yes, but to a new medieval age turned toward ritualism, no. Pre-industrial China and Japan were never particularly religious and there was Roman atheism, more pervasive than ours since everything that counted in Rome was secular.
“The difference between ours and all other civilizations is quite obviously the machine and the fact we are without precedent. Other cultures rarely knew the societies preceding them—the Renaissance knew Antiquity, yes; but Rome wasn’t the inheritor of Egypt, much less of the Celts—whereas we are the sum of all others, the first planetary civilization. This is something momentous that started around 1870 when so-called cultivated humanity realized it was the inheritor of the whole planet. The next step is obviously to conceive humanity as one.
“Culturally, this means there are no more secrets. We don’t know what hasn’t been discovered, of course—ruins never unearthed, but we know everything that exists and has been.” He feels most indications point toward a coming together of humanity. Worldwide materialism is one sign and another is the shift in the way we see our differences, our perception moving from inferior-superior racism toward specific differences. A third hint is the acceptance of the idea of a common explanation of human fate, even if we don’t know for sure whether the next civilization will resemble ours.
In the meantime, we still live in an era of empires. “Mao used communism to reestablish Great China after the century of foreign humiliations. The bowl of rice has been a symbolic means. The United States is also an empire but it is the first country in history that has become a world power without wanting to. America has never sought political conquest. There have been episodes yes, but they don’t count. America was dragged into the two world wars, didn’t profit much from either conflict and has actually become the world’s master by selling its products at the best price. Now, this has never happened before and the consequence is that the United States has never really had any historical design.
“I would say, naturally with a grain of salt, that America has no policy. There are five or six U.S. policies because there are several vast powers in America—powers that are generally but not only economic—which have certain designs. But if the United States has no historical will, neither does Russia. Not any longer. Nor do the Chinese. They have a national will that is very strong. They do want to accomplish the most profound revolution, but in a vacuum. When they say they want to change Tanzania, they are making propaganda.
“The lack of will is something new. The British Empire still had a historical idea of itself, but the Soviet Union and Russian communism are no longer an international fact of life. I mean, if you asked Brezhnev, ‘What do you think of the basic unity of the international proletariat?’ I think he’d answer like a history teacher. Lenin would have answered like a priest being questioned on his faith. Because of Stalin we tend to forget that Lenin and Trotsky were profoundly world-oriented. They believed in international revolution. Do you know what Stalin told me? He said, ‘The most important thing I have to tell you is that when I was your age, we believed we would be saved by socialist revolution in Germany. And now we know that Europe will be saved by a Russian Revolution.’ This said by Stalin in 1934!”
Malraux feels it is idle to speculate about the larger future because we don’t know how humanity will overcome its short-term urges. “We just don’t know to what degree we will manage to overcome our impulses. In certain cases I’m sure we will; in others we won’t. Western man is imperfect because he is in a state of suspended animation. Science—as creed not as science—is a belief in a future explanation. We have shaped ourselves through standardized models—saint, knight, caballero, gentleman, Bolshevik—and exemplary models belong to dreams, to fiction. Asia has always had a hunch that man’s essential problem is to get hold of ‘something else.’
“Do I miss public life? Not at all. To be in power is not at all what people think. In France, people are fascinated with power because they are fascinated with the abuse of power because Louis XIV went to bed with a flower girl. It’s like the movies. Besides, I haven’t been associated with power but with a man I admired, a man who because of circumstances became something absolutely unforseeable in the destiny of my country. It has been an episode in my life. There have been others.
“In any case, to change the colors of Paris, to build ‘houses of culture’—you should see the one in Grenoble—doesn’t give you a sense of power. There were a lot of seamen in my family and I think that in building cultural centers, I have shared the pleasure they had in building ships inside bottles. They liked them a lot and kept them a long time.”
* See pages 363 for “Books by André Malraux” in French and in English.
Chapter 2
The most significant moments of my life don’t live with me, they haunt me and flee me alternately.
Antimémoires
“Almost all the writers I know love their childhood, I hate mine,” is one of the first sentences in the Antimémoires. Malraux couldn’t grow up fast enough and at forty said he didn’t like his youth. “To be young is to be held back.”
Georges André Malraux was born November 3, 1901, at 73 rue Damrémont, a long, prosaic street running down the less than picturesque northern slope of Montmartre. His mother was Berthe, née Lamy, a tall, pretty girl of nineteen who looked younger than her age, and his father was Fernand Georges Malraux, a strapling twenty-five-year-old with a flattering mustache and a sonorous laugh. A bit young but a handsome couple, people said. The Malrauxs had married in the little Saint Pierrede-Montmartre church when Berthe was two months pregnant and had right away moved into the big apartment on Rue Damrémont.
Fernand Malraux was from Dunkirk, the son, grandson and great grandson of seafarers, ship outfitters and fishing fleet owners. He was going into business for himself in Paris. He was one of those men who always try to invent a better mousetrap, an inventor, a director of ephemeral companies, a believer in dizzy financial schemes, a stock market habitue and a ladies’ man with few principles but a big heart. He had visited Spain once, hated it so much he swore never to leave France again and never did. He was something of a dreamer, had a gift for caricatures, knew his way with gourmet foods and the new century’s ideas. His favorite aphorism was, “You must always mistrust yourself.”
Berthe was the daughter of a farmer and came from the Alps. Her widowed mother, with the stately name of Adriana Romania, was of Italian descent and now lived with an unmarried daughter, Marie, in Bondy, a still semi-rural working-class suburb where they owned and managed a modest grocery.
Little André—the Georges was dropped while he was still an infant—was a serious, only child. He spent his first years quietly in the big apartment with his mother, when his father didn’t sweep him off his feet during irregular if boisterous eruptions into his and his mother’s life. Fernand was always elsewhere, it seemed, busy making money. Losing it, too, and recouping. The excitements of André’s preschool years were playing in Pare Monceau and visiting his grandmother and aunt in Bondy, a trip that took two hours via métro and trolley car. The big events were taking the train all the way out to Dunkirk to visit with his father’s family.
The Malrauxs were a Flemish clan that had lived between Calais and Dunkirk for centuries. The etymology of the name made it derive, perhaps via Mallaert, from Indo-European mal-ruk and made it mean ill-turned plow.* If Fernand was something of an eccentric, grandfather Alphonse was a character. The son of Louis Malraux, a commander of fishing fleets who died at sea, Alphonse was a master cooper, outfitter, ship’s chandler proud of his master title and of his fleet bringing cod from the Banks of Newfoundland. He had married Mathilde Antoine late in life and had had three sons and two daughters, with Fernand in the middle.
Like his father, Alphonse apparently never learned French but spoke the Flemish dialect of the Belgian border dunes. He was a querulous and forgetful man. He forgot to insure his boats—some accounts have it that he found insurance somehow immoral—and one night lost several of his ships, including La Zaca, his best vessel, in a storm. This brought him close to ruin as he doled out most of his remaining wealth to the widows of his drowned men. He never completely recovered, became secretive and almost shut himself off from his children: Maurice, Lucien, Fernand-Georges, Georgine and Marie. He cursed his fate and because he was in revolt against his parish priest over some canon law trespass, could be seen on Sundays kneeling outside the church, railing against God for having brought him to despair, but determined to remain within earshot of the house of God.
André was eight years old when one winter day grandfather Alphonse got so frustrated watching a ship boy’s clumsy attempts at splitting wood that he took the ax from the lad to show him. Forgetting it was double-headed, he swung the axe above his head so mightily he split his own skull. He died a few hours later at the hospital in his sixty-seventh year.
If André wasn’t to remember too many facts about his grandfather but all the legends, he was to remember the big stone house in Dunkirk with its tiled walls. The house went to Alphonse’s eldest son, Maurice, and stood there above the harbor and the gray Channel until it collapsed in a hail of bombs in 1940 when German air power and armor drove defeated British and French forces into the sea.
André’s uncle was to become deputy mayor of Dunkirk. His wife remembered André’s childhood visits. “Very early, he had a marked personality, but we were never able to get him to talk about his future. ‘You’ll see,’ was all he would answer. When he was ten he surprised us one day. He had hurt one knee very badly and for a while we were afraid the leg might have to be amputated. Doctors and surgeons, surrounded by the family, held a hushed consultation. When the physicians were ready to leave, André, from his bed, said, ‘I won’t see you to the door, gentlemen.’”
Despite his disclaimers, Malraux’s childhood was to ring through his fiction. Like his own father, Grabot’s father in The Royal Way dabbled in household inventions, and André’s grandfather Alphonse was to be evoked in three of his books. The Antimémoires was to contain savant mixes of transposed memory and acknowledged recollections. Ostensible portraits of the Alsatian Berger family were to include such paragraphs as this description of the grandfather’s funeral:
As the foie gras succeeded the crayfish and trout and the raspberry brandy followed the Traminer wine at the funeral dinner, the reunion showed signs of developing into a festivity. Thousands of years have not sufficed to teach men to observe death. The smell of pine and resin drifting through the open windows, and the innumerable objects made of polished wood, united them all in the memories and secrets of a common past, of childhoods spent in the shared surroundings of the family forestry business; and as they recalled my grandfather, they vied with one another in the affectionate deference which death permitted them to show unreservedly toward the rebellious old burgher whose inexplicable suicide seemed to crown his life with a secret.
A page later, the grandfather’s falling out with the Church and stubborn attending mass outside the parish church was to be remembered: