Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.    

“MEMOIRS” by CLARA MALRAUX  (published in the original French in 1963 and 1966; published in English in 1967)

            In the last few postings I have been working my way through some of the literary works of Andre Malraux. Now I turn to what other people have said or written about him, beginning with his first wife’s views.

            In 1967, the reminiscences of Clara Malraux (nee Goldschmidt), formerly the wife of Andre Malraux, were published by the Bodley Head under the name Memoirs, translated from the original French by Patrick O’Brien.  Although presented as a single work, Memoirs was in fact two books which had been published separately in France. The first was called “Apprendre a vivre”, translated into English as “Learning to Live”, concerning Clara’s childhood, adolescence and finally first meeting with Andre Malraux; and the second was called “Nos vingt ans” translated into English as “When We Were Twenty”, concerning Andre and Clara’s life together in the years just after the First World War and in the early 1920s. By chance, when I was in Paris some years back, I bought in a flea market a battered copy of “Nos vingt ans”, and attempted to read it. But I quickly found that Clara’s work was often very confusing, presented in contorted prose very much like the work of her husband. So I abandoned the book and only re-connected with Clara’s memoirs when I got to Patrick O’Brien’s translations. By the way, Clara’s two books turned out to be only the beginning of her autobiographies. She wrote, in all, six books about her life (as well as writing a number of novels) – but I was not curious enough to batter my way through all of them.

 

                                            The young Clara Goldschmidt

            The first book “Apprendre a vivre”/ “Learning to Live”, is in many way a charming chronicle but also a sad and confused one. Clara Goldschmidt was born in 1897 into a German-Jewish family who had settled in Magdeburg-an-Elbe. The family were agnostic about religion and accepted equally Catholic, Protestant and Jewish outlooks. Clara’s first formal education was at a Catholic school run by nuns with whom she got on very well. She knew the catechism thoroughly, while at home the family honoured the traditional Jewish festivals though they never went to a synagogue.  But the family, who grew up polylingual, tended to prefer French culture rather than German culture, so they decamped to Paris and settled there, though they still kept in touch with their Jewish cousins and friends in Germany. In Paris, they happened to live next door to the eminent French socialist political figure Jean Jaures. As a teenager, Clara believed that Jaures could have stopped the First World War by negotiation if he had not been assassinated.  Occasionally Clara’s brothers were harassed by boys in Paris who didn’t like Jews (and remember this was not long after the Dreyfus affair). But Clara’s brothers were very good at fighting back. During the First World War, the family came under suspicion of sympathising with Germany and they were almost deported – but they were able to find an excellent lawyer who proved their real loyalty to France. One of her brothers, Maurice, the one she loved most, joined the army.  Trench warfare battered him and he was able to transfer to France’s air-force with honour. But by war’s end he was thoroughly disillusioned with the war itself… as was the mood with many young people by 1918. As the years had passed, Clara’s family, basically respectable bourgeois, tended to favour socialism.

            These are the external, political things that were going on in Clara’s young life, but much more of  “Apprendre a vivre”/ “Learning to Live” is concerned with her mental and psychological development as a child, adolescent and young adult. As a very little girl she had seen men publicly misbehaving (one episode, which caused a little scandal when the book was published, was a childhood memory of playing in the Bois de Boulogne and seeing exhibitionists exposing their penises). Something that shaped her attitude towards her fellow women, however, was the fact that her beloved father died when she was only 13. He was apparently a gentle and thoughtful man, but after he died Clara’s mother became cold and uncaring about her children. Partly because of this, as a teenager Clara became aware that women could be as aggressive and destructive as men in their own way. She was firmly a feminist, when she was young she understood that she was a woman and proud to be so, but she had no delusions about her own sex. Aged 14, she had to do dancing lessons, but surprisingly she became fond of the awkward boys who were also learning the steps.  Gradually she became part of a “gang” – nothing criminal, but hanging out with other adolescents in bistros and on the streets. She began kissing boys and sometimes flirting with girls. She was trying things out. She fondled a girlfriend intimately, but decided she was heterosexual. The fact was, she was always excited by sex and she admits that as a teenager she frequently masturbated. [Yes, another thing that seemed scandalous to this book’s first readers.] She began reading adult books. Like many teenagers she wrote grandiose plays and essays. But her spelling was atrocious – and this is what held her back when, aged 18, she made her attempt at the necessary baccalaureate. It was the dizzy years after the armistice, when young people began to adopt a more casual attitude towards sex. Nearing twenty, she got engaged to a doctor… but then she quickly broke it off. She went through the same scenario with a young man who had just come home from the war. Why? Because, she says, they would not take the initiative to make love with her.  For all her talk of women’s strength, she still believed that men should always be the ones to decide when they would have sex. Women were not to take the initiative.

            By this stage, she was becoming more and more alienated from her life with her family. Helped by her family she set off on her own to Italy, and for the first time saw the glories of the Italian Renaissance, especially the works of the great painters… and it was at this point that she also became interested in the avant-garde and started to frequent literary and artistic intellectual circles. She travelled to Germany (where there were cousins) and to Alsace (which had just been grabbed back from Germany) where she met for the first time this very interesting young man.

            Enter Andre Malraux. One obvious point has to be noted. Clara Goldschmidt was born in 1897.  Andre Malraux was born in 1901. She was nearly four years older than him. So she was 23 when they met and he was just touching 19, still very callow and yet enthusiastic, filled with ideas and already writing. He excited her. He took her to rough, rowdy nightclubs after he had read poetry to an audience. Once, when they were coming out of a sleazy club, he protected her from being harassed by some hooligans. The thugs shot at him, damaging one of his hands. He calmly took out of his pocket a revolver and shot back. Then they ran like hell. At least, that is what Clara tells us. It is clear that Clara was besotted with Malraux and he with her. Two crazy kids. Clara looks to what happened years later and writes:  “As our years turned out, he became… a wonderful soldier of fortune and a great writer, at the same time remaining an amateur of genius. Obsessed by Nietzsche of course and that even before we knew each other. And dividing people into the “amusing” and un-amusing as early as that too, and accusing the surrealists of taking themselves  seriously. What innumerable other things we said to each other, sitting side by side, looking in shop windows, strolling along the quays, drinking in bars.” (p.159) Note the Nietzsche bit, mes amis – you know, the German philosopher who believed in power and the superman and who glorified manly adventure. Plenty of cocky teenaged kids think that way, and here was adventuring Malraux.

So much for the first half of this hybrid narrative and we come to the second half “Nos vingt ans” / “When We Were Twenty”, which I find by far the more readable part of the tome. She again visits Italy but this time, without telling her mother, she goes with Andre. There is almost a scandal when the two of them are found to be travelling together in a sleeping-car without chaperone (remember Andre is still regarded generally as a kid). They go to Florence. Clara remarks: “His multifarious knowledge and its complexity never ceased to astonish me, and that also applies to the wild imagination and the biting wit that alternated in what he said, the originality of his comparisons, and the speed with which he reduced his thoughts to their essence. His romanticism had two faces, that of feeling, of the pathetic, and that of dandyism; it was mostly the second that I saw in this Florence marked by Savonarola and Michelangelo.” (p. 181) They consider getting married, but Clara says  “We cannot limit ourselves to each other, whether we are married or not. Of course in six months’ time we shall divorce. To stay together? It seems likely to me; but mustn’t  we first agrees upon out mutual freedom?” Malraux replies “You really think it necessary to settle all that?”  (p. 186) As many over-heated youngsters do, he asked her whether she would do the same if he committed suicide. She remarks “Yet what did I know? That he handles ideas remarkably well, that he was well read in many fields, that he had an unusual ease in discussion, and that he was not exempt from a certain degree of snobbery and social awkwardness. I knew what a refuge art was to him, and what writing and painting meant to him as a means of grasping the world; I respected that he was possessed by the desire to stake everything to feel the thrill of the moment more intensely; and I knew the shape of his fear of death.” (p. 192) For a while they dabbled in the occult. And they did get married. They were, in short, kids at heart, though very intelligent ones.

They went on travelling to Prague – where she wanted to see the Jewish cemetery – and Greece and especially Austria where they noted how impoverished it had become since the war as the Austrians had lost their empire. While they were there she began to notice his disdain for the Germans and his very patriotic sentiments about France.  They saw themselves as being an important part of the avant-garde, the cutting edge of what was modern in literature, music and sometimes these new things called cinema. They claimed to be washing away all the beliefs they had grown up with. Says Clara: “We were a generation without dogmatism, one that sought more than it found and that refrained from any kind of systemisation, in spite of the real liking of it – a liking that made it the temptation of Thomism and, later on, Marxism.” (p.208) Their moods were such that they often fell apart from each other. They went to Tunisia to cool things down… and they had their first moments of attraction to Marxism.

Young Clara and Andre Malraux when they were still youngsters looking for fame.
 

Now, dear reader, you may be wondering how this young couple was able to easily travel hither and yon when neither of them was working (apart from Andre’s writing, which brought in little money). The answer was that he, clever fellow, had set up a betting system on the stock-exchange which, for a couple of years, brought in to them quite a pile of cash. But suddenly the system he used crashed and they were ruined. How could they get out of this hole? Andre had for some years taken an interest in Asian sculpture as seen in European museums; and he dreamed up a hair-brained scheme which eventually brought him to unwanted notoriety. With the backing of dodgy entrepreneurs, he planned to go to Cambodia (part of what was then called French Indo-China) and to literally saw off statues hidden in the deep jungle and then sell them to American millionaires. So, fitted out with the right jungle clothes and with the implements which they thought would be able to cut through stone, they set off by sea, had a brief stop at Saigon (the centre of French colonial administration) and then they tramped thought the jungle. It was mad and they had to put up with the heat, the wild animals, the uncertain directions given by porters and the diseases. At one point, Clara came down with dengue fever. It was almost heroic (oh my goodness how Clara writes in an heroic tone!) and we have to remember that Andre was all of 21. But it was a complete failure. Not only did the implements fail to cut stone, but the French colonial authorities got wind of what Malraux was doing, dragged him in and prosecuted him for attempting to mutilate ancient works of art. He was found guilty in Saigon and condemned to three years in jail. Clara faked suicide to get out of jail, but was sent to a hospital. She wrote to France with letters for help and was finally allowed to return to France.

It has to be said that she gives very questionable apologia for their attempting to steal the statues. She writes: “Now more than ever I was convinced of our right to put works of art that were being threatened by the jungle back into circulation; there was a risk of their remaining abandoned for many a long year still, so great were the numbers of the monuments that the Ecole Francaise ought to have protected. We already loved the temples and the heads that floated in our imagination. We should have to part with some of them, that was true enough; but more and more clearly we thought of other expeditions, here or elsewhere, that should be for our own delight alone.” (p.264) And later, when having to reveal to the authorities what they had taken, she writes: “I was not going to let my mind be perturbed just because they had looked into our chest and found fragments from an almost ruined temple which had been so little cared for for years that it might well have collapsed entirely, its stones forced apart by the roots of the banyan trees or destroyed by the peasants tools.” (p.307) In all this, of course, she is neatly ignoring the fact that their real purpose was to make big money by selling art-works to millionaires.

At this point, it is clear that her relationship with Andre was often very shaky. On the ship that took her back to France, she had an affair with another man. But she also consulted a lawyer on the ship who gave her some ideas on how Andre could be brought back to France. The press had said very negative things about Malraux, but Clara set to work getting up a petition among writers and other intellectuals calling for this promising young writer to be pardoned and returned home. And it worked. A long list of eminent French writers signed the petition, ranging from the Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac to the fiercely dogmatic boss of the surrealists Andre Breton. There was a big campaign in the press, and finally Malraux came home, pardoned. It is interesting that most of Clara’s family were ashamed of her for having been partner to an opportunist who had served time, and they urged her to divorce Andre. But Andre’s family stood by him, and Clara’s step-father gave her much helpful advice.

And here nearly ends this volume of her narrative. But she does make some comments about how she and Andre’s views had changed over these few years. They were now more aware of the negative side of colonialism. She writes: “How much more we knew about the colonial world than when we left Europe! Almost in spite of ourselves we had discovered Asia in her humiliation.” (p.293) Yet she almost clings to the Nietzschean idea that you can achieve anything only by power and force. She writes: “If you do not want to submit, you must either be very strong or very shrewd, and we had been neither the one nor the other. Raskolnikov, Nietzsche, Julien Sorel, the other Sorel, and Rastignac danced through my head.” (p. 300) And there is something interesting about this essentially youthful statement: “We were the ones to whom teachers had lied and to whom parents had lied, we were the ones who knew that the philosophers contradict one another, that Spinoza did not carry on Descartes’ work – nor Kant, Spinoza’s. We were living in a world of uncertainty, a world in which everything was challenged and in which everything was changing. This being so, how could we have faith in anything other than ourselves…” (p.307) Let me note that later, for a while, they almost fell for the faith of Communism, though they grew past that. As for their marriage, it did eventually fall apart, but I have not read the books in which she told readers about it.

Now this is where my review could stop, but I have to say something about the difficult prose which I mentioned briefly at the beginning of what you have been reading. Frequently, as I read this book, I couldn’t help thinking that much of her prose is cluttered with suggestions and ideas that do not add up to clarity. Her prose is often very tangled and hazy. For no real reason, she spends much time writing about herself in the second person (“elle” – “she”). In one section, she gives us a number of pages she wrote as an adolescent which she called “Le livre de comptes”  (i.e. “The Account Book”), wherein she tries to understand what men are like. It is the kind of teenage rambling that would be better left in the bottom drawer. So much of her work is taken up with her analysing her relationship with Andre; and in doing so she over-thinks things. The general impression we are left with is of two big egos clashing with each other, not helped by their rivalry when it comes to writing. Yes, they were at first besotted with each other, but the marriage was flawed from the start. It is interesting, by the way, that Clara hardly ever refers  to her husband as Andre, but as “my companion”. If you have frequently read this blog, you will be aware that I greatly admire French literature (Good heavens! Didn’t I spend ages shoving down your throat the works of Honore de Balzac?). But I am also aware that French writers often dance around ideas in a vague way without getting clearly to whatever point they really mean to make. On a final note, I’m aware that much of Clara’s autobiography is self-praise and a sort of mythology based on half-recalled memories… but that is true of most autobiographies, isn’t it? It’s certainly true of her ex-husband’s Anti-Memoirs.