by Leys, Simon
*The asterisk indicates a name or a word that is the subject of an article in this glossary.
MALRAUX
MALRAUX IN THE PANTHEON[1]
THIS 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 wa
s 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.
Malraux himself had little patience for dull minds: “I do not argue with imbeciles.” (Which, by the way, might explain why he was such a bad novelist: what is life, after all, but a long dialogue with imbeciles?) The most intelligent interlocutors, subjected to his rapid-fire monologues in relentless and stupefying bursts, felt like inarticulate fools, and the sharpest wits turned speechless. His rather offensive machismo never discouraged bright and talented women from offering him their passionate love. His first wife was a woman of cosmopolitan culture, who supported him intellectually, spiritually and financially. (Malraux quickly managed to gamble and lose her entire fortune on the stock market—and then told her defiantly: “You really don’t think I am going to work now?”) When she dared to entertain literary ambitions of her own, he warned her: “It is better for you to be my wife than a second-rate writer.”
With his fanciful military record, he still succeeded in inspiring the blind loyalty of authentic war heroes. Though singularly devoid of humour, he won the steadfast affection of one of the wittiest women of his time (Louise de Vilmorin). And even General de Gaulle (who appointed him as his Minister for Cultural Affairs) endured his most bizarre and ludicrous initiatives with uncharacteristic patience; his cabinet colleagues were puzzled at first, then concluded philosophically: “Malraux is mad, but he amuses the Général.”
His singular magnetism was originally built on impudent lies, then further enriched by a permanent and compulsive mythomania, expressed in an unremitting verbal flow. But in the end, his theatrical performances became convincing and even respectable, for they were sustained by a gallantry that was not counterfeit. When he ventured with his young wife into the Cambodian jungle to dismantle and steal monumental Khmer sculptures, and when he had himself flown over Yemen without maps and without adequate fuel supplies in search of the mythical capital of the Queen of Sheba, he was engaging in questionable or hare-brained enterprises, but these also demanded considerable physical courage. He constantly took enormous risks; he led a restless and dramatic life in restless and dramatic times.
* * *
Today, Malraux’s writings are hardly readable à froid—they are stilted, pompous, hollow, confused, verbose, obscure. But whenever we encounter the man himself—for instance, in the record of his conversations with Roger Stéphane, his faithful and lively Boswell, or in a good biography such as Cate’s—something of his old magic seems to be operating again. Malraux’s young and beautiful mistress (whose early death in a horrible accident was to shatter him) was once advised by a well-meaning acquaintance to give up a liaison which could hold no future for the daughter of staid bourgeois. She replied: “I prefer a liaison with a fellow like him to a marriage with a tax collector.” Her quixotic choice was to entail much pain and sacrifice, but one can appreciate her wisdom. Malraux could in turns be inspiring and ridiculous, heroic and absurd—he was never mediocre. (And his adventures fired our enthusiasm when we were twenty: if we were to forget this, we would forget the better part of our own youth.)
Cate’s account does not pass judgement, but conveys vividly these contradictions, which makes his book fascinating to read. At times, it can be quite funny too—witness this page describing the encounter between Malraux and Hemingway shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944:
During his brief visit to Paris, Malraux heard that Ernest Hemingway had arrived with the US Fourth Infantry Division and had flamboyantly “liberated” the Hôtel Ritz. This was too much for Malraux, who decided that he was not going to be upstaged in his home town by the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Crossing the Tuileries Gardens, he headed for the Place Vendôme. In his bedroom at the Ritz, Hemingway had just removed his army boots and was busy stripping some weapons with several “bodyguards” (FFI “patriots” he had picked up on his way to the festive capital), when the tall, lean figure of André Malraux appeared in the doorway. He was in uniform, with the five distinctive silver bars of a colonel’s rank on his shoulders.
“Bonjour, André,” said Hemingway, as affably as he could.
“Bonjour, Ernest,” replied Malraux.
It is not recorded if they shook hands, but since Hemingway’s were smeared with oil, it is quite possible that they dispensed with this formality.
“How many men have you commanded?” Malraux asked.
“Dix ou douze,” answered Hemingway casually. “Au plus, deux cents.” Since he was supposed to be a war correspondent, he could not reasonably boast of having commanded more.
“Moi, deux mille,” announced Malraux, whose look of triumph was ruined by a facial tic.
This was an affront Hemingway was not prepared to take lying down, particularly from a Frenchman who had rushed to the support of Republican Spain months before his own tardy appearance on the scene, and whose novel L’Espoir had outpaced his For Whom the Bell Tolls by several years.
“Quel dommage!” said Hemingway with icy sarcasm, “that we didn’t have the assistance of your force when we took this small town of Paris!”
If Malraux winced, Hemingway later did not bother to record it. Their conversation, in any case, must have been lacking in cordiality. For we have his word for it—it became one of Ernest’s favourite dinner table stories—that one of his bodyguards beckoned Hemingway into the bathroom and asked, “Papa, on peu
t fusiller ce con?”
But didn’t Malraux himself warn us? “There are no grown-ups . . .”
THE INTIMATE ORWELL*
THE INTIMATE Orwell? For an article dealing with a volume of his diaries and a selection of his letters—Diaries (London: Harvill Secker, 2009); A Life in Letters (London: Harvill Secker, 2010)—at first such a title seemed appropriate; yet it could also be misleading inasmuch as it might suggest an artificial distinction—or even an opposition—between Eric Blair, the private man, and George Orwell, the published writer. The former, it is true, was a naturally reserved, reticent, even awkward individual, whereas Orwell, with pen (or gun) in hand, was a bold fighter. In fact—and this becomes even more evident after reading these two volumes—Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality; Blair-Orwell was made of one piece. A recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at close hand was his “terrible simplicity”; he had “the innocence of a savage.” Contrary to what some commentators had earlier assumed (myself included[8]), his adoption of a pen-name was a mere accident and never carried for him any particular significance. Simply, at the time of publishing his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), he wished to spare his parents any potential embarrassment: old Mr. and Mrs. Blair belonged to “the lower-upper-middle class” (i.e. “the upper middle class that is short of money”) and were painfully concerned with social respectability. They could have been distressed to see it publicised that their only son had led the life of an out-of-work drifter and penniless tramp. His pen-name was thus chosen at random, as an after-thought, at the last minute before publication; but afterwards he kept using it for all his publications—journalism, essays, novels—and somehow remained stuck with it. In his private correspondence, till the very end of his life, he still signed his letters now Eric Blair (or Eric), now George Orwell (or George), simply following the form of address originally used by his various correspondents, who were either early acquaintances or later colleagues and friends. His first wife, Eileen (who died prematurely in 1945), and their adopted son, Richard, both took the name Blair; his second wife, Sonia (whom he married virtually on his deathbed), took the name Orwell. Shortly before the end of his life, he himself explained the matter very clearly to his old Eton tutor (who knew him as Blair): “About my name, I have used the name Orwell as a pen-name for a dozen years or more, and most of the people I know call me George, but I have never actually changed my name and some people still call me Blair. It is getting such a nuisance that I keep meaning to change it by deed-poll; but you have to go to a solicitor, etc., which puts me off.”