The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (23 page)

TRUTH

Sheridan observed that “the heritage of Gide’s Protestantism was that he hated lies . . . His cult of sincerity was untypically French, undoubtedly inherited from his Huguenot forebears.”[
204
]

Gide loved truth from his early years. He eventually abandoned the faith of his childhood (a forsaking that was not achieved without painful and dramatic turns), but he retained until death a passionate need for self-justification.

“Lying” haunted his imagination as a worthy topic for tragedy. He explained to Schlumberger: “Believe me, nothing can be as dramatic as the destruction of a mind through lying—be it self-deception or hypocrisy . . . If I were still in the habit of praying, I would pray without ceasing: My God, preserve me from lying!”[
205
] Some of the characters in his fiction were odious to him, but he knew them from the inside, and he painted them with such understanding that—to his dismay—many critics interpreted them as projections of himself. Thus Gide commented on Edouard—a character in
Les Faux-monnayeurs
, often seen as a mouthpiece for the author: “He is the archetype of the impotent, both as a writer and as a lover . . . He constantly lies to himself in his
Journal
, like the pastor in
La Symphonie Pastorale
. It is the same problem . . . What fascinates me above all else is this self-deception.”[
206
]

Once, his friend the philosopher Groethuysen was talking to him about the psychology of “the ambiguous person” (
l’être louche
), whom he defined as “a man who never manages to transform lies into his
own truth, and who constantly shifts his stand.” Gide replied: “It would be fun to create such a character, but if I were to write it, people would once again say that I was painting my own portrait.”[
207
]

From his own direct observation, Herbart concluded: “For Gide, lies are as attractive as the truth.”[
208
] With more subtlety, the Tiny Lady pinpointed the invisible confusion that enabled Gide to reconcile the two at the end of his life: “His commitment to sincerity is stronger than ever, but sincerity does not necessarily coincide with truth.”[
209
]

The queasiness (so hard to describe, yet so intensely felt) that readers as different as Flannery O’Connor and Julien Green experienced when confronted with Gide is obviously related to a deeper issue (in neither case was it a question of being shocked by his sexual proclivities: Green himself was homosexual, and O’Connor was shock-proof). Saint Augustine—probably the very first modern psychologist—identified it 1,600 years ago:

*
The asterisk indicates a name or a word that is the subject of an article in this glossary.

MALRAUX IN THE PANTHEON[
1
]

T
HIS STORY
is somewhat stale, I am afraid, but it still has a point. In a crowded church, the preacher ascends the pulpit and pronounces a moving sermon. Everybody is crying. One man, however, remains dry-eyed. Being asked the reason for his strange insensitivity, he explains: “I am not from this parish.”

I am not French, but French is my mother language and when I am in France I always feel completely at home—with only one reservation. Whenever the issue of Malraux crops up, the evidence hits me: I am not from this parish.

I experienced it for the first time twenty years ago. In November 1976, when Malraux died, a weekly magazine in Paris invited me to write one page on the theme “What did Malraux represent for you?” I always believed that death is not an excuse for withholding judgement; I naïvely assumed that the editors expected me to express a sincere opinion—and this is precisely what I offered them. They were horrified and immediately junked my shocking contribution. And yet, in my innocence, all I had done was simply to repeat what was already obvious to many discriminating foreign critics, from Koestler to Nabokov: Malraux was essentially phony.

For instance, on the tragedy of the Chinese revolution, instead of wasting time with the artificiality of
La Condition humaine
, one should read the account of Harold Isaacs: at least he knew what he was writing about. (The first edition of
The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution
appeared in 1938, but it took another thirty years before a French translation was finally published . . .)[
2
]

In those early days, Malraux, who only spent a few days in China as a mere tourist in transit, pretended to the French public that he had been a people’s commissar in the Chinese revolution. Later on, the epilogue of his Chinese adventures—his famous interview with Mao Zedong in 1965—proved to be an equally brazen humbug. A French sinologist recently made a comparative study of Malraux’s own description of this episode (in his
Antimémoires
) and of two other contemporary accounts of the interview in question—one in Chinese (notes taken by Mao’s interpreter, subsequently leaked to the Red Guards and published in China during the “Cultural Revolution”), and the other in French (compiled by the French embassy in Peking).[
3
] The comparison revealed that the three-hour cosmic dialogue between two philosophico-revolutionary megastars of our century had in fact been limited to a routine exchange of diplomatic platitudes that barely lasted thirty minutes. At one point in this brief and otherwise banal interview, however, Mao, who was already stewing up his forthcoming “Cultural Revolution,” dropped a tantalising hint, indicating that writers and intellectuals were deeply corrupted by “revisionism,” but that the youth might be mobilised against this counter-revolutionary evil. This, in a nutshell, was already a first suggestion of the gigantic explosion that was to shatter China the following year. Any interlocutor with some sense and a modicum of information would have recognised the true significance of this opportunity, jumped upon this unexpected opening and eagerly pursued the issue, but Malraux blindly ignored the cue that had just been offered him; and Mao, who by then could hardly conceal his impatience, brought the audience to an abrupt conclusion.

On the Spanish Civil War, who, after having read Orwell, could still take seriously Malraux’s histrionic amphigory? Next to the stark truth of
Homage to Catalonia
, the misty and flatulent speeches of
L’Espoir
have a hollow ring of café eloquence. As to the
Musée imaginaire
—a shrewd imitation of the work of the art critic and historian Élie Faure (whose name Malraux always took great care never to mention)—Georges Duthuit demonstrated long ago in his ferocious and scholarly
Musée inimaginable
(in three volumes) that Malraux’s foray into art history had probably been his boldest work of fiction.[
4
]

In his old age, Malraux confided to Bruce Chatwin (another seductive mythmaker—a lesser prophet perhaps, but a better writer): “In France, intellectuals are usually incapable of opening an umbrella.”[
5
] If this observation is true, it may well explain the puzzling and enduring prestige that Malraux always commanded among these same intellectuals: people who are too clumsy to handle their own umbrellas must naturally look with awe at a man who can fire machine-guns, drive tanks and pilot aeroplanes. (In actual fact, though Malraux organised an air squadron in the Spanish war, and styled himself a colonel when he led an armoured brigade of French partisans at the end of the Second World War, his only experience of aeroplanes was that of a passenger; and he never even learned to drive a car—which I find quite endearing, actually, but then, I myself often find it difficult to open my umbrella.)

Once you discard the heroic and colourful paraphernalia of the warrior and the adventurer, and confine your scrutiny to the more austere field of literature and criticism, where stage props and other gimmicks are of little support—in the end, what remains of Malraux’s self-built legend?

Nabokov, who considered Malraux “quite a third-rate writer” and was puzzled by Edmund Wilson’s professed admiration for him (“I am at a loss to understand your liking Malraux’s books—or are you just kidding me?”) commented on
La Condition humaine
: “From childhood, I remember a golden inscription that fascinated me:
Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-lits et des Grands Express Européens
. Malraux’s work belongs to the
Compagnie Internationale des Grands Clichés
.” And then he pursued and produced a hilarious list of rhetorical questions, asking Wilson to tell him, for instance, “What is this ‘great silence of the Chinese night’? Try and substitute ‘the American night,’ ‘the Belgian night’ etc., and see what happens . . .”[
6
]

Even in France there were a number of connoisseurs who privately expressed similar reservations. Sartre detected the trouble quite early: “Yes, Malraux has got a style—but it is not a good one.” In a letter to Simone de Beauvoir, he confessed: “
La Condition humaine
is plagued, by turns, with ridiculous passages and with deadly boring pages.” Exactly like Nabokov, he found Malraux’s narrative technique old-fashioned
and dismally reminiscent of the worst Soviet fiction. As to
Le Temps du mépris
, he simply considered it “deeply abject.” (Nabokov called it “one solid mass of clichés.”) Plodding through
L’Espoir
, Sartre added: “I am dragging myself through this book which may be full of ideas, but it is so boring! This chap seems to be lacking a little something, but, good God! he is lacking it badly!”[
7
]

The novelist and essayist Jacques Chardonne, who had questionable views in some other matters but who unquestionably knew about the subtle art of writing French prose, identified the root of the problem of Malraux’s mumbo-jumbo (his “
galimatias
”): “I have attempted to read Malraux, and I became angry. I am not going to do his work for him. Let him first sort out his own ideas. Once he finds out what he is actually thinking, he will become able to express it better and quicker.”[
8
]

An ancient Greek philosopher remarked that if horses had gods, these gods would look like horses. Every society puts in its pantheon the icons it deserves and in which it can recognise its own features. Our age has proved so far to be the age of Sham and Amnesia. But at this point you may suspect that the acrimony with which I have deplored Malraux’s entry into the Pantheon in Paris conceals some grudge—well, you would have guessed right.

What irks me is this: in 1935, Boris Souvarine, a former secretary of the Third International who had escaped from Moscow back to Paris, wrote the first documented analysis of Stalin’s murderous political career. This monumental and courageous work remains to this day a landmark in the unmasking of Stalinist crimes. The book was reissued in 1977, not long before Souvarine’s death. In the foreword which he wrote for this new edition, Souvarine recalled the vile and sinister obstacles he had to overcome when, forty years earlier, he first attempted to publish his historical masterpiece in Paris. At the time, the leading figures of the French intelligentsia avoided him as if he had the plague. Malraux, who could have had the book published by Gallimard, flatly refused to support it; but at least he was straightforward and said: “Souvarine, I believe that you and your friends are right. However, at this stage, do not count on me to support you. I shall be on your side when you make it to the top.” (
Je serai avec vous quand vous serez les plus forts
.)[
9
]

And yet . . .

Einstein (who ought to know something on this subject) once observed that good ideas are rare. It seems to me that Malraux hit upon
two
important truths—which, after all, still represents a respectable record, well above the average that can be expected from most literary men.

1. Malraux, who worshipped T.E. Lawrence and dreamed all his life of imitating him, perceived accurately what made this ambiguous hero truly inimitable. He confided to Roger Stéphane: “In reality, Lawrence desired nothing at all.
It is prodigiously hard to be a man who wants nothing
.”[
10
]

2. On the very first page of his
Antimémoires
, he noted one simple reflection that should stand forever as a glorious counterweight to all the heavy and endless trains of the
Compagnie Internationale des Grands Clichés
. When he asked an old priest what he had learned about human nature after having spent a lifetime hearing people’s confessions, the man replied: “Fundamentally,
there are no grown-ups
.”

CURTIS CATE’S BIOGRAPHY OF MALRAUX[
11
]

Tristan Bernard said that he never read the books he was supposed to review: he was afraid he might become biased. He certainly had a point: the acquisition of knowledge can needlessly complicate many enterprises.

After reading Curtis Cate’s biography of Malraux—a remarkable work, well-researched, perceptive and informative—I realised that, in what I had just written, I had overlooked one aspect of our subject.

The simple fact is: Malraux was obviously a genius. What exactly he was a genius at, however, is not quite clear.

Nearly all those who came in direct contact with him fell under his spell—and I am not talking here of naïve schoolboys but of famous writers, some of whom were twice his age, as well as eminent thinkers, statesmen, leaders of men, saintly monks, cunning old politicians, glamorous socialites, cynical journalists, unworldly priests. When young, he appeared to them as a prodigy; in middle age, he was their
hero; old, he became a prophet. At every stage in his life, he mesmerised and dazzled a vast and diverse audience. The old Trotsky in exile was so impressed after meeting the feverish and voluble young adventurer that he wrote at once to his New York publishers, urging them to bring out an American edition of
La Condition humaine
. André Gide—whom the French literati believed to be the twentieth-century Goethe, and who was thirty years Malraux’s senior—was overwhelmed by his conversation and privately complained that he could not keep up with such uninterrupted intellectual fireworks.