It is as well to have read Olivier Todd’s biography of
Malraux before opening ‘Anti-Memoirs’ for the exaggerations and downright lies
pullulate from the start and thus forewarned take that work as a qualified
fiction that is tangential to reality. That
reality is quite enough for fiction.
It is I think simplistic to take Malraux as a ‘man of the
left’ a sort of useful idiot naively drawn into the toils of cunning Reds organising
the intelligentsia from Moscow. Whilst
that was partially true he went his own way and to his credit detached himself
from Stalinism long before others who clung on till the 50’s. Given the vileness of the Hitler regime being
on the left was the only place for a decent person in the 30’s. Social realism was a doctrine that he
subscribed to and deviated from as his genius commanded. His tours in Russia to writers’ conferences
were a dissipation. Ideology is a
universal solvent of creative thinking and Malraux never succumbed. I feel that he was not a theoretical man,
more an entrepreneur of ideas taken on as they contributed to his personal
myth. Todd while he hits the buffers of
irony in dealing with the mythomania grants that his fabulism never was
employed in the destruction of others. Any
group of writers are indistinguishable from a nest of vipers and the
International Association for the Defence of Culture had its share of fellow travellers and approvers
who accepted show trials as necessary theatre.
At the age of 32 he had won the Goncourt Prize for ‘Man’s
Fate’ and his claims that he had been a figure in the K.M.T. and his failure to
deny that he had met Mao or let us say allowed for it to be believed made him a
target for recruitment to progressive causes.
He devised madcap schemes of his own.
One was to rescue Trotsky from exile in Alma Alta. That was of a piece with his plan of getting
up volunteers to fight for East Pakistan during the war in 1971. Also abandoned. He loved to fight for foreign causes but was
strangely reluctant to get involved with the Resistance leaving it until 1944
and then only as by way of being an organising colonel. His two half brothers
were both killed by the Nazis. They as
we say in Ireland were ‘out’ early. He
married the widow of one of them later on.
To emphasize the interweaving of his fiction and his life he took the nom
de guerre of Berger the hero of his novel ‘The Walnut Trees of Altenburg’. Todd refers to him continuously as Colonel
Berger. Before this elevation any talk
of getting involved in the fight was met with ‘Seriously’. He did run into danger, was shot at and
captured by the Nazis and somehow was later released. Todd isn’t quite clear how that was managed. A large bribe is hinted at. Who knows?
He was a part of the liberation of Strasburg and no his belt was not cut
in two by shrapnel.
Colonel was his preferred rank. In the Spanish civil war he was El Coronel
and he organised the supply and flew with a squadron of aircraft. Though a lousy shot in keeping with his
general clumsiness he flew as part of a bomber crew and claimed to have been
wounded in reality (what’s that) suffering from the jolt of a faulty take
off. Evil minded wags in Paris made out
that his uniform with triple bars was run up for him by Lanvin. His novel ‘Man’s Hope’ (L’Espoir) draws on this
adventure in which he was in peril and his running risks gained the respect of
his men. So not a poltroon with a wooden
sword, that useless thing as good as a right thing.
Such is the respect for the intellectual in France. His best front is literature and there his advance
is halted by his absorption into politics as an ardent follower of De Gaulle. There is a lesson here. Politics banalises everyone and everything and
even though there are some great achievements as Minister of State for Culture
at the right hand of De Gaulle one feels that this is a deflection from his
real mission. His drinking picks up,
mythomania turns to megalomania. He is
reported to have said there are only two men in France at the moment, De Gaulle
and myself. He hinted that there was a
secret testament of De Gaulle’s which indicated on the General’s demise, Le Colonel
would be succeeding. He held off on
acceptance of induction into the Acadamie Francaise feeling that the Nobel
prize committee would rule him out. Those
were the years in which he lost his inner self and substituted instead the
ministre d’etat, talking to Nehru, escorting Jackie Kennedy, the interview with Mao which he wangled was afterwards
inflated to a three hour colloquy that Nixon consulted. High class blague which
my Larousse tells me is a draw string pouch in which tobacco is kept. That little pouch was full of fables.
But yes like the Buddhist statues of Tibet, built around the
body of the illustrious teacher, inside the carapace of the ministre d’etat was
the real Malraux. He hit rock bottom
with his drinking and in that rock was a pen that only he could draw out. He was advised to go on a long private cruise
which he did and thus he began to write again – The ‘Anti-Memoirs’.
Todd’s book is superb, very long of course as you are
dealing with events that would fill several volumes. His plundering of statues in Cambodia as an
early lurch to fame nearly led to jail but his contacts with elite writers,
Gide, Maurois, Mauriac and others got him free.
That escapade is related exhaustively.
There was a zenana of clever women.
Something in the water in France.
Very readable, witty, ironic, the short sentences somehow
reflecting the jerky tics of his subject, the aphorisms in a hurry that
hover over intelligibility. Now there is
his book on Camus. Plunge on.
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