What Am I Doing Here? (14 page)

T
he career of André Malraux has startled, entertained and sometimes alarmed the French. As archaeologist, writer of revolutionary novels, compulsive traveller and talker, war hero, philosopher of art and Gaullist minister, he is their only living first-class adventurer. At 73 he is a national institution, but an institution of a most unpredictable kind. They consult him as an oracle; and if his replies bewilder, none will deny him one of the most original minds of our time. Furthermore, Malraux has an opportunist sense of timing, he has witnessed and influenced great events in modern history. He alone can tell you that Stalin considered
Robinson Crusoe
‘the first Socialist novel',
and
that Mao Tse-tung's hand is ‘pink as if it had been boiled',
and
that Trotsky's white skin and haunted eyes made him look like a Sumerian alabaster idol. He is also one of that select company who won the confidence of General de Gaulle.

The bones of his story are those of a talented young aesthete who transformed himself into a great man. At twenty-two, already suffocating in the false euphoria of post-war Paris, he mounted an amateur expedition to discover Khmer ruins in Cambodia, but the colonial authorities arrested him for making off with some sculptures half-lost in the jungle. The spite of his prosecutors, and his forced stay in Phnom Penh, alerted him to the offensiveness of colonial rule; and once he had evaded the prison sentence, he started an anti-colonial newspaper,
L'Indochine Enchainée,
in Saigon.

Some rather nebulous activities in or around the 1925 Communist uprising in Canton earned him the reputation of a Red activist. He returned to France with a passion for the Orient and created an entirely new kind of revolutionary novel. The best known,
La Condition Humaine
(Man's Fate), recounts in a bewildering sequence of episodes the later Shanghai rebellion against Chiang Kai-shek in 1927. The heroes, most of whom reflect facets of Malraux's character, scheme, spatter with blood, pit themselves against impossible odds and usually die in the process. Malraux himself emerges as a high-minded atheist, a fighter for social justice, haunted by death, yet denying the hope of immortality. His subject is Man, his tragic fate and heroic defiance in the face of extinction.

The Malraux of the Thirties was the anti-Fascist and hero of the Left, with the black forelock over his eyes, the nervous tic, the frown and cigarette and finger pointing wrathfully. His flair for personal publicity never deserted him; haranguing meetings of the
Front Populaire;
dashing with Gide to Berlin to plead for the Bulgarian Communists falsely accused of lighting the
Reichstag
fire; or irritating a conference of Marxist writers in Moscow with his liberal opinions. Malraux may have been a fellow-traveller, but never held a party card. He continued to travel, to move in fashionable circles, and hold down a post with the Paris publishing house of Gallimard, where he had charge of the art publications.

In his next incarnation he led a Republican bomber squadron in the Spanish Civil War with the honorary rank of colonel. Legend has it that Malraux wheedled some ancient pursuit planes out of the sympathetic, but politically neutral, French Government of Leon Blum. He flew on sixty-five bombing raids and sometimes even piloted himself (without a pilot's licence). At Medellin in the autumn of 1937 the Malraux squadron halted a Fascist column advancing on Madrid; later, at the battle of Teruel, German Heinkels forced it out of the air. Malraux – to the relief of the Air Minister, Cisneros – left Spain on a fund-raising tour of the United States, and, without speaking English, agonised American ladies with descriptions of nurses removing bandages from wounds without anaesthetics. The ladies paid for anaesthetics.

His detractors unflatteringly compared him to Lord Byron and laughed at his ‘artistic' flying jacket. But he emerges as the most effective foreign writer in a war of foreign writers; more effective, for example, than Hemingway. He crystallised these exploits into a novel,
L'Espoir
(Days of Hope), and a film of the same name. Before he had been a tourist on the fringe of revolution, now he courted death, mastered his fear of fear and survived, exchanging a cold cerebral world for
la fraternité virile
. He is one of the few writers clear-headed enough to describe the almost sexual arousal of men in battle. Spain changed him, perhaps from a potential suicide, into a survivor. His early heroes die of bullets, gangrene, tropical fever or by their own hand. Later, geared by a mysterious hope, they survive air crashes, poison gas, or tank traps. Spain also opened his eyes to the methods and aims of Soviet Marxism.

With France mobilised in 1940 he signed up as a private in a tank regiment. The career of T.E. Lawrence had fascinated him for years and critics have seen a conscious imitation of Aircraftsman Shaw. Malraux was captured by the Germans but escaped to the Free Zone and spent the early war writing; only to reappear in 1944 as a stylish
maquisard
with the pseudonym of Colonel Berger. Fighting in the red sandstone hills of the Corrèze, the old internationalist became a patriot. He fell into an ambush, and was wounded and captured by the Germans as he drew their fire from his English Resistance colleagues. For this he received the DSO. The Gestapo hauled him before a firing squad but did not fire, reserving him for interrogation. The same thing, he is proud to say, happened to Dostoyevsky. At the end of the war he resurfaced as commander of the quixotic Alsace-Lorraine Brigade under General de Lattre de Tassigny, and helped prevent a Nazi reoccupation of Strasbourg.

Malraux's rediscovery of France prepared the intellectual ground for his friendship with General de Gaulle. One rumour has it that, on meeting Malraux in 1945, the General said: ‘At last I have seen a man!' Malraux became Minister of Information in the first post-war government. He masterminded the nationalistic propaganda of de Gaulle's
Rassemblement du Peuple Français
in 1946-47. After 1958 he was Minister for Cultural Affairs, when he had Paris scrubbed clean, and made his celebrated visits to Kennedy, Nasser, Nehru and Mao Tse-tung. His alliance with the General astonished all opinions, Right and Left, and probably themselves. But the two had a great deal in common.

Both were intellectuals
and
adventurers with a taste for military glory, even if Malraux's was on a small scale. They were fascinated by the exercise of power and by the role of the archetypal hero who saves his country; both also shared the idea of national renewal through catastrophe. They delighted in the French language; hyperbole was their natural form- of expression. They were estranged from the values of their class, and despised politicians and industrialists. Without attempting to enter their world, they sympathised with the plight of workers trapped by twentieth-century machine civilisation. But they saw through the simple-mindedness of exaggerating the class struggle at the expense of national unity, believing that social justice is best obtained in a nation that knows its own ground. Malraux once asked Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘The proletariat? What is the proletariat?'

They knew as fact that nations will usually act nationalistically and were unimpressed by specious internationalism. They were alive to the dangers of Stalin well before Churchill's ‘Iron Curtain' speech at Fulton, Missouri. Malraux scorned the ‘extreme masochism of the Left' and said he saw no point in becoming more Russian and less French. The
Rassemblement
aimed at attracting the poor because the poor were patriots. But de Gaulle's and Malraux's appeals to French grandeur went straight over the workers' heads. Instead it was
the grande petite bourgeoisie,
often for venal reasons, who flocked to the Gaullist cause and gave the movement its self-contradictory character. Malraux remained precariously on the Left of the Gaullist Party and often felt compromised by it. But the General always valued his ‘flashing imagination' and was at least partly conditioned by him to the idea of decolonisation.

What makes Malraux a great figure is not necessarily his verbal performance or his writings. His life is the masterpiece. He has lived out the fears and hopes of the West in the twentieth century and has survived. He advances a prophetic insight, that Man (alone, now that the gods have gone) will outlive the threat of his extinction; and that great men, with all their faults, will continue to exist.

This said, one must confess to difficulties. Malraux inhabits the Mythical Present. He deliberately confuses the event with the archetypal situation. Alexander the Great, Saint-Just, Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo or Nietzsche are his intellectual companions and he moves among them on familiar terms. Legendary figures take substance; works of art come alive; modern people dissolve into myth. Mao Tse-tung, ‘the great bronze emperor' of the
Antimémoires,
is somehow interchangeable with the gleaming statue of an ancient Mesopotamian priest-king. Nor does Malraux believe in false modesty. He opens his memoir of de Gaulle,
Les Chênes qu'on Abat
(Fallen Oaks), with the observation that creative geniuses (such as himself) have never left records of their conversations with men of History – Voltaire with Frederick the Great or Michelangelo with Pope Julius II – and leaves the impression that, whereas the great man belongs to History, the great artist belongs to Eternity.

Then there is the problem of style. His presence mesmerises his listeners. They feel physically charged by his voice as it alternates from staccato outbursts to slushy whispers; then they find themselves flailing for sense. He taxes his reader's intelligence to the limit. Images sensations, exhortations, philosophic reflections and startling analogies are telescoped one over the other. Glittering insights are followed, as if in repentance, by ponderous explanations which do not really explain. The ‘difficulties' of Malraux once drew from Cocteau the wicked quip: ‘Have you ever heard of a human reading
La Condition Humaine?'
In translation the writing suffers a seachange. The highly-charged rhetoric, which is glorious in French, is unacceptable in English.

Malraux's breathless career has left lesser spirits far behind – and irritated. French literary circles have poured their energies into exposing its contradictions, but there remains a dimension which eludes them. Experts greeted his writings on the philosophy of art as amateurish, even if as astute a critic as Edmund Wilson valued them among the great books of the century. One art historian, Georges Duthuit, excelled himself by refuting Malraux's
The Imaginary Museum
with his own three-volume work,
The Unimaginable Museum.
Without daring to call him a coward, Sartre dismisses Malraux's exploits in Spain as ‘heroic parasitism'.

His private life is not for dissection. It is scarred by the suicide of a father, and a wife, two brothers and two sons killed. Yet he arouses suspicion that he has bottled up unpleasant secrets. His divorced first wife Clara took it upon herself to lay him bare as a fantast, but the effect of her memoirs is so infuriating that they increase him and diminish her. The fact is that men of action have a habit of consigning past loves and indiscretions to oblivion in the hope of better things to come. Malraux has a formidable memory, but he updates his recollection of the past to conform with his view of the present. By temperament he was never a note-taker or diarist, as his autobiography
Antimémoires
proves.

Malraux is alone. He can have no followers. He never allowed himself the luxury of a final political or religious creed, and is too restless for the discipline of academic life. He is unclassifiable, which in a world of -isms and-ologies is also unforgivable. His knowledge advances on a global front. The technique is that of the intellectual guerrilla. When the going is clear, he blinds his opponent with brilliance and detonates charges under his nose. Confronted by superior opinion, he gives ground, but, gliding off at an oblique angle, lures him into the marsh of semi-ignorance before the final attack. One threat he holds over his detractors; he may at any minute agree with them.

I first met Malraux two years ago at the house of his American friends Clement and Jessie Wood. At one point in the conversation he turned his green eyes on me and said: ‘And Genghis Khan? How would you have stopped him?' Silence. Recently I had the opportunity of spending an afternoon with him and asked if he would talk about Britain; about General de Gaulle's attitude to Britain; and about the mental blockage between Britain and France.

We met at Verrières-les-Buissons, the family house of the Vilmorins, who are the great horticulturalists of France. Louise de Vilmorin was his companion for the last three years of her life. Her
salon
overlooks a planting of rare conifers, blue-grey and dark green in the winter light, with a cluster of white birch trunks gleaming beyond. Among her sofas and chairs, covered in blue and white cotton, and the Chinese porcelain stools and the animals of gilt, lacquer and pearlshell, Malraux has spread his own territory, scattering his sculptures and paintings round the room. Then there are his drawings of cats, the cats he used to doodle through the long speeches of Gaullist ministers in session.

Malraux was wearing a light brown jacket with lapels like butterfly wings. He never relaxes in conversation, but strains forward on the edge of his chair. He listens to questions with intense concentration, sometimes resting his forefingers vertically on his cheekbones, before bursting into words and gestures. From under the melancholic mask he occasionally allows a glimpse of his highly developed sense of the ridiculous.

‘First,' he replied to my preamble, ‘what I think about England is far from what most of the French think. They are mostly anti-English and I am extremely pro-English.

‘And I will tell you why. Our whole civilisation is threatened by its most serious crisis since the fall of Rome. As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man. You know as well as I do that psychoanalysis has never made a man. And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity. England, to my eyes, is about the last country to have
une grande création de l'homme.'