Olivier Todd - Malraux: A Life

Table of Contents

For Anne-Orange Poilpr,
Helmut Sorge,
and John Weightman

INTRODUCTION

LEau du Coeur

DECLARATION OF INTEREST : Malraux mattered a lot to me. I was eight. Near the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg, my mothera Communist at the timeintroduced me to an American friend: Tom, a towering, jovial redhead. Tom, she explained, is joining the International Brigades in Spain. They sat on the beige metal seats and chatted. I overheard Madrid... Comrades... Barcelona... Tom left. Mother told me about a writer fighting in Spain, a man named Malraux, who commanded a squadron. I looked at his photograph in LHumanit. A few weeks later, my mother announced that Tom was dead.

I met the essential Andr Malraux, the writer, in 1943 under German occupation, once again at the Luxembourg. I had read LEspoir. I did not know the book had been banned. Luftwaffe soldiers in rough blue-gray uniforms were standing guard at the entrance to the gardens.

I was fourteen. The first paragraphs of the novel rang in my head: The uproar of trucks loaded with rifles covered a tense Madrid in the summer night. Dialogues crackled between the stations occupied by the government and those in the hands of Francos men.

Hello, Sepulveda? This is Madrid North, workers committee.

Your train has gone past, blockheads. Youre a load of dickless ass-holes, and were coming this week to cut your balls off.

Physiologically impossible. Salud!

In 1943, for me, in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Francoists in Sepulveda became allies of the German soldiers. The motto Gott mit uns on the silvery buckle of their belts corresponded to the motto of Francos troops: Viva Cristo Rey. The war in Spain has dragged on in our memories with Manichean simplicity. At the time, I overlooked certain questions. Francoism was abominable, but even at its worst it did not turn into Nazism. Let us dare ask, even if our first sympathies lie with the Spanish Republic: What if the Communists had taken power in Spain? What would have been the result of a Republican victory? A peoples democracy and a gulag?

Several generations of Frenchmen have slipped into one war or another by proxy. Readers have made sense of their own experiences through the prism of Malrauxs works and life. For a long time, I thought that no better life and death could be imagined than with the members of an International Brigade. In the contagious navet of the years before the Second World War, some equations seemed obvious: Francoists = Fascists = Nazis = Evil. We cultivated these simplified formulae. The ideological path in the other direction was Communists = Antifascists = Democrats = Good. How can we investigate Andr Malraux today with lucidity without renouncing some of the generous notions carried along by his works? Another tough question for whoever sets out looking for Malraux: Does lying matter? The hesitant biographer looks for factual truths about the life of a subject, even if that subject glosses over an episode in the name of the rights or duties of the imagination. For the most part, Malraux claimed, man is what he hides. No: he is also what he shows and what he does.

Andr Malraux was resuscitated for a few weeksprotean Lazarus that he wason November 23, 1996, when Jacques Chirac, fifth president of the Fifth French Republic, had his remains transferred to the Panthon in Paris. Why?

Chirac welcomes me one Saturday to a deserted lyse Palace.

Who are your favorite modern authors, Monsieur le Prsident?

Chiracs answer flows out: Saint-John Perse, Aragon...

He does not take a position either for or against Malraux as a novelist: For me, Malraux is not a great writer but a great man.

In this the president agrees with Andr Gide, an attentive and perplexed friend of Malraux. Why, then, did Chirac agree to the transfer of the ashes?

In 1996, we needed to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his death. He was the Generals companion, he invented the Ministry of Culture.... He had panache...

The president has recently reread LEspoir: His best novel, perhaps...

Chirac, it seems, would give him six and a half out of ten. He nevertheless sees a rare intensity in this book, a tremendous scale, a metaphysical quest. Malraux, for him, embodies a French nostalgia for the will and brotherhood.

Chiracs contact with Malraux was limited. In the 1960s, sitting at the end of the table in Cabinet meetings, Chirac brimmed with ambition and looked on glory; Malraux the ministre dtat, sitting next to President Charles de Gaulle, gazed on majesty.

Malraux dozed with a certain distinction, says Chirac. He would screw up his face and push his chin into a restless hand.... He had a great capacity for making others listen.

When Malraux started to speak, Chirac would see a certain tenderness in the eyes of General de Gaulle. Sometimes the junior minister went over to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs: In his office, Malraux fascinated and irritated me.... For art, there was no hierarchy. He saw Michelangelos everywhere.

I take notes. Chirac feigns (I think) a worried look: Youre not going to put that, are you?

Why not?

The president smiles. Chirac doesnt think much of Malrauxs books on art: They lack scientific rigor. But nobody spoke better than he about fetishes.

Chirac is more excited when evoking Malraux the Gaullist high priest. With a veterans verve, he recalls an electoral meeting in Seine-Saint-Denis (a red suburb): I was sitting behind Malraux. Chairs were flying. Communists were booing Malraux, who was sitting on the platform. When there was a silence, he jumped inextraordinary actorand started to address the militants and the Party sympathizers: I was on the Guadalquivir. I waited for you. I did not see you coming.

We return to the General. Chirac suggests, In every civilization, leaders have a fool. It relaxes them....

Malraux remained at Charles de Gaulles side until the very last: the theatrical, moving, and pointless abdication in 1969.

Malrauxs personality, says the president, gives rise to emotion, not necessarily admiration. The water of the heart [ leau du coeur] rises to the eyes.

ONE NEEDS to have heard his voice. At twenty as much as at fifty, Malraux wielded a weapon: a dark beauty and a magnetism that could make an impression of familiarity or shamanic intensity. Imagine Malraux prophetic, cocky at times, sneezing, juddering with nervous tics, expelling his repetitive interjections: Its complex... seriously... a hugeissue... major point... A finger on his chin whether pacing a room, a ministry office, or a battlefield. He kept the leading role for himself, except when faced with Charles de Gaulle. Malraux punctuated his remarks with a stamp of irrefutability, addressing servants or dictators, a museum curator or a museum attendant, in reverberating tones: Nevermind about that... secondly... At Borobudur, which you know better thanI... Stalin is all statistics...

In his speech at the Panthon, Chirac dehydrated Malrauxs misadventures in Cambodia. The president declared that Malraux had the intention of taking samples of bas-reliefs from a temple. Why the euphemism?

Malrauxs biography is neglected by current doctoral dissertations in France. The focus is on the