What Am I Doing Here? (16 page)

‘The General had another dimension. He believed that certain events implicate rights and certain duties. He had, of course, read Roman history. And in ancient Rome, what was a dictator? It was power given to one of the consuls under dramatic circumstances. The dictatorship was not usurped. It was given by the Senate. In the First War Clemenceau, as
Président du Conseil
, enjoyed far greater powers than the other members as long as the war lasted. But the General also believed, a little religiously, that, in dramatic circumstances, legitimacy comes from the hand of God. That is how he saw June 18 . . . '

Then what did he make of the
évènements
of May 1968?

‘That most people saw it in an absurd manner. There was an infectious world rebellion of youth . . . in Holland, France, Japan, Germany, etc. He was well aware of it. Far more important there was in France the political problem of the trade unions. And there was an accidental encounter of the two. The unions profited from the student chaos, but they were not united, as the unions proved by refusing to cooperate with the students. The two phenomena were inevitable, the meeting not.'

But he felt his authority weakened by May 1968? ‘Yes, yes,' he said, ‘he did. At one point he thought: “It will be better if I go. Either the country will recover . . . or else the Deluge.”'

Malraux gave a press conference at the time in which he said: ‘The General is bitter as a man whose wife has deceived him with a servant.' Now he continued: ‘I asked him in retirement, “When do you think you will return?” and he replied, “Always.” I am sure it was the truth. But I am also sure the contrary was the truth. Because a man with a destiny like that never knows. You only have to look at the correspondence of Napoleon. Technically the Hundred Days was sheer folly. But if you think of Napoleon as a little artillery lieutenant who became Emperor of the West, then he could always have won a battle. It reminds me en
comique
of Josephine Baker, who said: “It's far easier to become a star again than become one.”

And Quebec? On 27 June, 1967, on a state visit to Canada, de Gaulle stood on a balcony and shouted: ‛
Vive le Quebec Libre.'
The Cabinet of Lester Pearson announced that this was ‘unacceptable', and the General, cutting his visit short, flew to Paris at once. Surely Quebec was a mistake?

‘But he had a passion for it! The situation was unique enough. The bomb attacks were beginning. They gave one the feeling there would be a great drama in Quebec. In fact there was none and the Canadians arranged it among themselves. But the General was taken in by those who wanted help from us.'

Malraux's loyalty to the General does not blind him to his faults. He used to exclaim: ‘Now there is his exaggerating!' at de Gaulle's latest anti-American outburst. But he will always defend him, as a tutor will defend a difficult but brilliant student. Indeed he will defend all his old friends. Amid the recriminations of liberated Paris, he was a faultless executor to his friend, the writer Drieu la Rochelle, who collaborated with the Germans and shot himself. As minister he would always help out of trouble an old battle companion of the International Brigade.

His political career had its great moments - the foreign visits, the procession round the gold coffin of Tutankhamen exhibited at the Petit Palais, the spectacle of Paris emerging from its layer of grime, or his funeral oration for his friend Braque. (In his study hangs ‘the Braque by which all Braques must be judged' – a seashore with fishing boats, reduced nearly to nothingness as if by a Japanese Zen master.) Yet his higher aims as minister failed. His brief was the ‘expansion and
rayonnement
of French culture'. Perhaps he was too little of a cultural chauvinist to put this message across? Perhaps his own ideas were too elevated for ordinary people to grasp? He believes that all art is a defiance of man's fate, and that through art a nation rids itself of its demons. He has a real hatred of the mediocre. And he must have suffered from the hatred he aroused, as a Gaullist, among the artistic Left and to find his
Maisons de la Culture
smeared with their graffiti.

And the very idea of a Ministry of Culture has something totalitarian about it. Didn't he feel compromised?

‘In France all art exists on the margins of society. I could not have survived in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One good thing about this country is that there exists an old respect (which you do not have in England) for the thinkers whose influence bore fruit in the Revolution, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. . . . Their influence gave a legitimacy to all art that was marginal.'

English art, I said, is at its best when it is really English and its great artists, like Palmer or Blake, are lonely eccentrics. Whereas in France foreigners often set the pace. ‘Think of Picasso . . . '

‘Ah, but that is the Soul of England!' He had seen an opening and was advancing towards it as towards a gap in the defences. ‘England is never as great as when she is alone. And France is never France when she fights for herself. The real France is the France of the Crusades or the Revolution. When the French fight for mankind they are wonderful. When they fight for themselves, they are nothing.'

I mentioned Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lenin's Cultural Commissioner and prototype for all Ministers of Culture. At once he conjured up an anecdote of Lunacharsky censoring Eisenstein's film
October
. ‘There is art; there is cinema. But . . . snip . . . snip . . . there are also politics.'

He continued: ‘The Bolsheviks were sadly misinformed about art. But they had been exiled in the same
bistros
as the Cubist painters. Lenin returned to Russia with the idea that, after all, Cubism was the natural expression of the proletariat, and that is funny enough. It didn't last long, but gave the Russian avant-garde breathing space to develop. It vanished once Lenin was dead; for Stalin there was no such thing as cubism . . . But in Lunacharsky you have the mixture of an old émigré who drank
café-crème
at La Rotonde with Chagall and who ordered theatre sets from him, and a Bolshevik minister with the responsibilities of a minister. From day to day he had a bridge ahead and a bridge behind, and then he died.' He was not simply discussing Lunacharsky, but airing the difficulties of any intellectual trapped by the realities of power.

When it comes to the Russians, Malraux's sense of the ridiculous breaks loose. At my first meeting he told the following anecdote of how he and de Gaulle took Krushchev to the Salle des Glaces at Versailles.

De Gaulle (tapping one foot on the parquet floor): ‘This is the famous
parquet de Versailles.'

Khrushchev (bending down): ‘We have exactly the same at the Hermitage in Leningrad, but ours is made with ebony.'

De Gaulle to Malraux: “This man is beginning to bore me.'

Then there is the story of de Gaulle's visit to Stalin after the Yalta Conference. Stalin had a special showing of a film of Russian soldiers slaughtering Nazis. As each German fell, Stalin squeezed the General's knee till it was bruised. ‘Finally,' he said, ‘I had to take my leg away.'

Malraux described Solzhenitsyn as a nineteenth-century Tolstoyan novelist who had ignored the advances of Pasternak or Babel. He repeated the story of Gide's visit to Stalin to enquire about the role of the homosexual in Soviet society, and how a frantic Kremlin staff prevented the visit; Gide would have been deported to France, but they to Siberia. He also recalled with affection Sir Isaiah Berlin, surely for verbal dexterity Malraux's most distinguished rival. ‘He shares with me the same comic recollections of Russia. We were there at the same time and moved in the same circles. Even as late as 1934 when the purges were beginning, Russian intellectuals lived in a
milieu extravagant.
It was like Montparnasse in the First War. It had a quality that was utterly Shakespearian.'

He continued with a description of writers' cafés in Republican Madrid, with George Orwell as a
garçon timide
, and how Hemingway bought his first smoking jacket to attend his (Malraux's) fund-raising lecture in New York. ‘I did not know him well. Later I saw him occasionally in France. But the last time I had the impression that the malady had already begun.' The two cordially loathed each other. Hemingway thought ‘Camarade Malraux' a poseur and Malraux thought Hemingway a fake tough. Earlier I had asked him about the American.
‘Hemingway, c'est unfou qui a la folie de simplicité.'

Changing the subject I asked how it was that black African peoples had fewer complexes about their French colonial past than their English-speaking counterparts?

‘For us this is the heritage of the French Revolution. The blacks were made citizens of France by the Convention of 1792. And the result is bizarre enough. Because a Senegalese can say to half my friends: “But I was French before you.” An enormous number of Parisians have parents from Alsace, Nice, etc., which only joined France in the nineteenth century. But Senghor [poet and President of Senegal] could say, if he wanted to, “I have been French since 1792.” The Convention emancipated the colonies. Afterwards Napoleon imposed the old conditions because of Joséphine, but the idea of emancipation lingered on.'

How did Malraux see a life of action? ‘There is a type of man who requires action for its own sake as a painter requires paint and canvas. But, take care! Many of the greatest men of history, especially those involved in
la grande politique,
have not seen much direct action. It is a matter of individual temperament. You cannot categorise it. Napoleon was bellicose enough. Alexander also, but Caesar much less, and Richelieu not at all. And Richelieu was one of the greatest French men of action. He lifted France from a third-rate power and left it the first country in Europe.'

This is not what I meant. After all Malraux had seen plenty of direct action before concluding that ‘adventure no longer exists except in the hearts of governments'. What did his own actions mean to him?

‘In France intellectuals are usually incapable of opening an umbrella. When an intellectual bothers to become an orator or fight for his country, that is already something. Let us say, I have a happy mixture of intelligence and physical courage, one which I proved from day to day in Spain. It is an accident, a happy accident, but none the less an accident and a banal one! The classic French intellectual is the
homme de bibliothèque,
the writer in his library, a tradition that begins with Voltaire — and is in fact untrue because Voltaire took extremely strong political positions. But the reputation of the man in the library took hold. There is one figure whom you are too young to remember, but who played a role of immense importance — Anatole France. Anatole France was a gigantic talent. He had a state funeral. But Anatole France was not only an
homme de bibliothèque;
his heroes Were
hommes de bibliothèque.'

‘But you escaped from the library?'

‘When . . . you return from Asia and you find all your companions on the
Nouvelle Revue Française
writing novels about homosexuality and
attaching immense importance to it,
you are tempted to say, “There are other things. The Tomb of the Unknown Pederast under the Arc de Triomphe is a little much.”'

Malraux has no objection to revolutionaries as such, only to hot-air revolutionaries, a class he calls the ‘sensitive souls of the Café Flore'. His attitude to revolution is ‘Go to Bolivia or stay in the Café Flore.' He admires Régis Debray and recently lunched with him. It was a great success even if Madame Debray found the proceedings a little undialectic. Two years ago visitors to Verrières were amazed to find his study turned into a command headquarters and Malraux himself poring over maps of East Bengal. Mrs Gandhi, to his evident irritation, did not want her father's old friend on the battlefield, and he did not visit Bangladesh until after independence.

‘But if India had not entered the arena, I could have done something very serious. I wanted to take about six hundred officers to Bengal. In France there are any number of retired army officers, not particularly young, but not excessively old. And they are very bored and very ready to march. With six hundred officers above the rank of captain we could have had an officer training school to turn out 2,000 Bengali officers in six months. All their officers had been Pakistanis, and we could have done a great service.'

And how did he find Mujibur Rahman? ‘Europeans make the mistake of thinking he's a kind of Gandhi or Nehru . . . Mujibur has a charismatic action. When he tours the country, he thinks everything is wonderful because they receive him everywhere in a magisterial way. He creates a passionate atmosphere. “Bangladesh will overcome!” etc. But that is far from certain. He is a pure man, I don't doubt. There is no corruption in him, but there is corruption in the state and their difficulties are gigantic. But I, for one, am not too pessimistic. When in our time you do not have a totalitarian government, the action of the individual at a local level is strong enough to create an organisation. It is not the Central Government of India that makes India. And the progress of India since independence,
formidable!'

And what of the prospects for an adventurer today? He did not think the word had much sense. A faint possibility, perhaps, in Central Asia (after all the Soviet Union is the last Imperial Empire to have survived). ‘But,' he said sadly, ‘there are blocks of flats in Samarkand.' We ended the conversation on Afghanistan, with its pale green rivers and Buddhist monasteries, where eagles wheel over the deodar forests and tribesmen carry copper battle-axes and wreathe vine leaves round their heads as they did in the time of Alexander.

‘And Tibet,' he said, ‘there is always Tibet. . . '