“MALRAUX – A Life” by Olivier Todd
(Published in the original French in 2001; English translation by Joseph
West)
And after Clara Malraux’s Memoirs,
here is another example of somebody writing about Malraux. Recently I read my way through the most
detailed biography about Andre Malraux that has yet been written. I refer to
Olivier Todd’s Malraux – a Life. Olivier
Todd (born 1929 – died 2024) was a Frenchman who inherited his English mother’s
surname because his French father had scarpered before he was born. Olivier
Todd was born and raised in France and he rarely spoke any language other than
French. A journalist and a novelist, he was best noted as a biographer. He
wrote biographies of Camus, of the poet and singer Jacques Brel, and of
Malraux. Todd prepared his Malraux work over a number of years. Malraux died of
cancer in 1976. Todd’s biography of him came out 25 years later in 2001. Despite
being much younger than Malraux, Todd had some things in common with Malraux. They
both, in their earlier years, were left-wing. But later they both sided with
open and democratic societies. Todd writes many positive things about Malraux, but
he also deals with his flaws, including his habit of lying about events in his
life and falsifying documents. But the reader should beware of some of Todd’s
judgments on Malraux. Todd was very much a disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre, and it
is well-known that Sartre (and his partner Simone de Beauvoir) frequently
ridiculed Malraux for being de Gaulle’s lacky as a minister of state. Part of
their bile came from one obvious fact. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir had never
been a part of the Resistance during the Nazi Occupation… but after the war,
they claimed they had. [This has been well-proven in many recent French documentaries].
Although Malraux was himself often untruthful, he did at least fight against
the Nazis in the latter part of the war, with great distinction. This is why
there is an odd bias in some of Todd’s comments.
Much as I
found many interesting and informative things in Malraux – a Life, I did ultimately
find it a chore to read. It runs to over 500 large pages before the index and
endnotes. I diligently scribbled many notes as I went through the biography,
but if I had made use of them all, I would have written a review longer than
you would ever want to see. So I’ve decided to deal with Malraux, as seen by Todd, by looking at
him in terms of constant things in his life rather than boring you by giving a
complete chronicle. For this reason I’ve chopped up Malraux’s life into
different categories. Beginning with…
Family: Malraux (born 1901 – died 1976) came from a lower middle-class family in
Dunkirk, part of France’s western sea-board. His father was a philanderer.
Malraux had some siblings but also some half-siblings because his father Fernand
Malraux divorced his mother and had children by another wife. Years later
Malraux’s brother Roland and his half-brother Claude were both very active in
the Resistance during the Second World War. They were both killed. Young
Malraux worshipped his grandfather (who had been a mariner) and was always inclined
to idolise heroic men. This was to be a life-long obsession. His father fought
in the First World War and often told tales of his heroism when facing fire…
tales which turned out to be complete lies. Malraux sometimes told [and wrote]
lies about his own heroism. In the 1930s Malraux’s father committed suicide. Olivier
Todd suggests that Malraux had what would now be called Tourette’s Syndrome.
This has been disputed, but lifelong Malraux had strange tics, his head often
shaking for no reason and his words coming out as an endless verbal stream.
Young Malraux was a voracious reader and well-informed about literature, but he
was only a mediocre schoolboy and didn’t get the necessary Baccalaureate. He
never went to university.
Wives and sex life: Like his father, Malraux was a philanderer. His first (and probably his
most important) wife was Clara Goldschmidt, a German-Jew whose family had
become naturalised French citizens. Clara was nearly four years older that
Malraux and when they married (in 1921) Malraux was barely in his twenties.
Their marriage was at first filled with travelling, visiting interesting places
and discussions with intellectuals in Paris. Todd says of the couple in their
early years “he acts the peacock; she acts the cultured coquette.”
(Chapter 3) They were also together in Malraux’s attempt to steal and sell for
profit statues in Indo-China (Phnom Pen)… which led to his briefly being put
into jail, from which he was bailed out by Clara who devised a petition that
was signed by many writers and critics. [By the way, although he had been given
a sentence for jail, he was really housed in a comfortable hotel in Saigon
during his brief sojourn.] This was when Malraux was just beginning to write –
getting articles in prestigious magazines (Nouvelle Revue Francais etc.)
and making a living by buying rare books and selling them for a great price
(and occasionally dabbling in pornography). He met Louis Chevasson, a man of
his own age who became his life-long friend and advocate. He also learnt how to
use the right sort of type-faces and fonts for publications [he had a long connection
with the Gallimard publishing house] ; how to write literary reviews that would
stir up controversy; and how to associate with important writers, from aesthetic
Andre Gide to Pierre Drieu la Rochelle on the right and Louis Aragon on the
left [for more about Drieu la Rochelle, look up my review of his novel Le Feu Follet on this blog
May 15 2017]. In all this, Clara collaborated with Malraux, typed up some of
his works, gave him helpful criticism and joined him in binges [she smoked
opium; he preferred alcohol]. But by the 1930s their marriage was falling
apart. He had many casual affairs. So did she. Their only child, Florence, was
born in 1933, but that didn’t mend things. They separated without formally
getting divorced. .. though she insisted for years that she was still his wife
and often had rows with the other women with whom he cohabited. Malraux had a
long liaison with Josette Clotis [who had had many lovers]. When she first got
pregnant, he wanted her to have an abortion. She rebelled against that. The
child was born and later they had another child… and then they separated. After
many more casual affairs, he finally got his legal divorce from Clara. He then
married Marie-Madeleine Louix, who was the widow of his half-brother Claude. And
some years after that he did not divorce Madeleine but he went to another house
and cohabited with Louise de Vilmorin. The fact is, where women were concerned
he was a bit of a swine. Olivier Todd notes, truthfully, that in his novels
Malraux found it very difficult to create credible female characters and left
them in the background of his narratives.
Genuine Courage: Despite his capacity to fabricate stories about himself, Malraux did do
some courageous things. In the first nine months of the Spanish Civil War, he
put together a squadron of war planes to fight for the Republicans and against
Franco and the Nationalists. He did the hard work of gathering together
professional pilots who were paid – not volunteers – and as he had never been a
pilot himself, he flew in many sorties as a gunner instead. This was dangerous
as the (Republican) Spanish war planes, and some French planes that had been
smuggled in, were antiquated and barely a match for the more modern [Nazi] German
and [Fascist] Italian planes they had to deal with. A number of times, the
planes in which he was gunner were almost shot down or came back to base
severely damaged. However his squadron was disbanded (under Communist pressure)
and many of his pilots were absorbed into the official Spanish air-force.
Malraux’s novel L’Espoir is basically an account of his experience in
Spain. Todd notes that Malraux spent most of 1938 preparing a film about the
war in Spain called “Sierra de Teruel”. Todd is very positive about this
film, regarding it as both persuasive and skilful; and much better that Joris
Ivens’ very preachy film “The Spanish Earth” which has been too often
regarded as a masterpiece.
In the Second World War, Malraux was able to put
together the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade, giving himself the code-name Colonel
Berger [even though his previous experience as a French soldier was brief at
the beginning of the war]. He did lead the Brigade very valiantly, faced many
dangers and kept up the morale of the brigade as they pushed on though Alsace
and Lorraine towards Germany. In this he learnt how to control a brigade of tanks.
His brigade protected Strasbourg and
were part of the attack on Stuttgart. For this he was rightly awarded the Croix
de Guerre, the Medaille de la Resistance and the British Distinguished
Service Order. Nothing about this should be belittled.
UNFORTUATELY, once the war was over, Malraux exaggerated
his war experience, and his words made their way into some hagiographic books
about him. Malraux claimed that he had been among the first to join the
Resistance as soon as the Nazis invaded France and Petain’s Vichy regime
collaborated with them. This was a not true. Malraux had been in the French
army at the beginning of the war, but when the Petain “armistice” came in,
Malraux withdrew from the fight. He avoided any connection with the Resistance until
very late. When some Resistants tried to persuade him to join the fight, he
said such haughty things as “Well, if you want to play soldiers” and
“I have had enough of lost causes.” [quoted by Todd in Chapter 20]. In fact
he joined the fight only in the last phase of the war. It was in the early
months of 1944 – when D-Day was already in progress and Free-French, American
and British forces were heading for Paris – that he suddenly became an active
patriot, and formed his brigade. It is true that he was once stopped by German
troops and was interrogated at length, but they let him go in the belief that
he was not part of the Resistance. He also claimed that he had been in charge
of the Resistance in many regions of France. Malraux never publicly retracted
his falsehoods, but in his later years he did discretely have removed from his
record some of the awards he had been given, knowing that he had not really
earned them.
In fairness, though, in his “Conclusion” Olivier
Todd notes – tongue-in-cheek - that
there was nothing extraordinary about Malraux’s behaviour. He writes “Not
all the French were supporters of Petain. Nor were they all members of the
Resistance. Malraux, by joining the Resistance in the Spring of 1944, is
therefore an excellent average Frenchman.”
Engish language version of Olivier's biography of Malraux
Novels and Literature: Malraux is now best remembered for his novels, but they were nearly all
written in his early years – “Les Conquerants” (1928); “La Voie
Royale” (1930); “La Condition Humaine” (1933); “L’Espoir
(1937)… and that is really the best of the crop. He did also write a novella
called “Le Temps du Mepris” (1935) about a Communist prisoner in Nazi Germany who
manages to escape with the help of another man who sacrifices himself because
he knows how important the escapee is to the Communist Party. Communist readers
loved it, but Malraux himself came to see it as a cheap pot-boiler and refused
to allow it be re-printed. In the early years of the Second World War, he began
to write what was intended to be a trilogy called “La Lutte avec l’ange”,
a generational saga. But he got to write only the first volume “Les Noyers
de l’Altenburg”. As for “La Lutte avec l’ange” itself, he claimed
that it had been confiscated from him and destroyed by the Nazis… which was
another lie. Really, from the 1930s on, he was more interested in writing books
about art (often lavishly presented with illustrations), travel in Asia, his
theory that Gothic Art was always linked to the Far East, and occasionally
philosophical musings. In all he wrote 42 books about art. Todd says (Chapter 37)
“The over-heated Malraux, drugged up and supercharged on words, like Sartre,
often writes on art faster than he thinks.”
Malraux’s reputation as an author revived when he published his “Anti-Memoirs”
in 1967, but that was his last literary hurrah. Says Todd in his “Conclusion” “his
readiness to think that the novel was now moribund was also motivated by the
fact that he had lost the touch for it.” Todd also says (Chapter 31) “The
chosen title ‘Anti-Memoirs’ signals that chronology and accuracy, as an
historian might see them, does not count.” Quite so.
Fantasies and Charlatan-ism: It might sound a little like killing an ant with a sledge-hammer, but
there were times when Malraux claimed to have accomplished things when he had
not. Malraux was in no way an archaeologist, but he claimed to have wide knowledge
of ancient sites. Obsessed with the Middle East and Asia, in 1930 he and Clara
travelled first to China (where for the first time he really got to know about
China… even though he had already written a novel set in China). Then he went
to [what was then called] Persia. In this “archaeologist” phase, he chopped off
the heads of statues, and then sent then back to Paris… from which he made much
money. Over the years, he accumulated many art-works – paintings and sculptures
– many of which ended up in whatever houses he lived.
A few years later, in an age when aviators were
regarded as heroes, he hired a plane and a pilot, telling the world that he was
searching for the authentic palace of the Queen of Sheba [who, by the way,
probably never existed]. His plane flew hither and thither around Northern
Africa and Arabia, looking for the site. Finally – from the air and not landing
– he took photos of what he claimed to be the site. He wrote newspaper articles
saying that he had discovered the palace of the Queen of Sheba… at which real
archaeologists collapsed with mirth. Malraux stuck to his guns. But only a few
years later, it was proven that what Malraux had seen was an oasis that had
been there for only a couple of centuries.
In the de Gaulle era [late 1950’s - late 1960s],
when Malraux was a Minister of the State, he gave many lectures on television –
a relatively new thing in France – mainly about art, especially about Asian art
and how it had influenced Western art. There is no doubt that he could be a
compelling speaker and he gained a large audience, though many viewers found it
hard to follow what he was saying, as he tended to rush at speed and use
incomprehensible words. [Stepping aside
from Olivier Todd’s book, I plucked off my shelves Clive James’ Cultural
Amnesia, wherein he dealt with influential writers and thinkers in the 20th
century. He had a chapter on the French critic Jean-Francois Revel who said
that Malraux was really a popularising speaker, who knew nothing about archaeology,
and who was often wrong about art. Probably true.]
Olivier Todd
And now for what may well have been the most
important thing in Malraux’s life, viz…
… Malraux’s
Politics. As a young man, he had been more litterateur
and bohemian than interested in politics. But after his first visit to French
Indo-China in the 1920s, he became disgusted with the French Colonial regime.
He was in some ways then the French equivalent of the English George Orwell,
who was also disillusioned by colonialism. So, going back to Saigon, Malraux
and Paul Motin set up a newspaper called L’indochine enchainee [Indo-China
in Chains]. It didn’t have a large circulation, but for the best part of
two years, it was able to criticise, ridicule and attack the colonial
regime…until it was shut down. Malraux never became a Communist, but he did often
side with them. In his early novels “Les Conquerants” and “La Condition Humaine”, he does present
Communist activists in heroic terms.
By the early 1930s he, and many others, were afraid
of the growing Nazi movement in Germany and were appalled that Nazis made
Germany a one-party totalitarian state. Waspishly, Olivier Todd notes that many
of those who were appalled by this managed to ignore that Soviet Russia had
been a totalitarian one-party state since 1917. In these circumstances, Malraux
sided with the Soviets. Olivier says “the shrewdness of Malraux and others
is short-sighted – their left eye has a large blind spot that prevents them
from seeing the totalitarian Soviets” (Chapter 11) . Malraux spoke briefly
with Trotsky after he has been purged by Stalin, but soon he went along with
the Stalinist line. He was often tutored by the two Soviet propagandists Willy
Munzenburg and Ilya Ehrenburg when it came to the massive Soviet Writers
Congress and later the International Writers Congress for the Defence of
Culture. Many [left-wing] French Writers were invited. Romain Roland was the darling of the Soviets. Andre Gide
proved to be the wild card – he nodded politely at the congress, but he did
some careful research and he found out what Stalin’s kingdom was really like – so
he went back to France and wrote “Retour
de L'U.R.S.S.” (“Coming Back From the U.S.S.R.” ),
denouncing the totalitarian state. As for Andre Malraux, he made some rousing
speeches about the progress of the U.S.S.R. and the brotherhood of man… but he
didn’t exactly follow the party line. He began to be uneasy about the purges,
the gulags, the Russian writers who had been shut down or liquidated. He
criticised the dullness of “social realism”, Stalin’s official idea of how
novels should be written and - to his credit – he helped one man escape from
the Cheka [Soviet secret police] and make it to France. Still, as a fellow
traveller, he mainly kept his mouth shut. That was the last of his admiration
of pure Stalinism. In the Spanish Civil
War, he soon cottoned-on to the fact that the International Brigades were
overwhelmingly made up of Communists and organised by the sadistic Andre Marty;
and the squadron Malraux had put together was closed down by Communist
pressure. Then came the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1939. French Communists neatly
said that the war against Hitler was merely a war between capitalists… so there
was no point in joining the Resistance. French Communists joined the Resistance
only after Hitler invaded Russia… then suddenly the war became a Soviet Holy
War. Could it be that Malraux didn’t fully join the Resistance for four years
only because of the Communists had set the pattern for just sitting back? Who
knows.
Left-wing Malraux finally had the scales dropping
from his eyes, towards the end of the war, when he saw that “the Communists
made a determined effort to infiltrate the Resistant bodies all over France and
now, when they can, they are penetrating those of the state.” (Chapter 23).
There is no doubt that many French Communists fought bravely in the Resistance,
but they were never the majority of the Resistance, and other (non-Communist)
Resistants had no desire to be absorbed into a Communist-run body…
From this point on, in the late 1940’s, Malraux was
dedicated to General de Gaulle. He had good reason for this. De Gaulle had
built up the Free French army, lead the victory parade when Paris was liberated
in 1944, and had frequently - in the war - talked to the French people via the
B.B.C. Although he was sometimes abused as being a potential dictator, he never
was one, despite his haughty demeanour. Gaullists were a great counter-balance
to the Communists. Malraux quickly became one of de Gaulle’s inner circle.
Malraux wrote some of the propaganda for the Gaullist party. It took quite some
time in the 1950’s for the party to gain much traction. Meanwhile it was a
different president who presided over France’s messy attempt to cling to Indo-China
in the 1950s, from which they finally had to withdraw (and leave the Americans
to pick up the mess in the 1960s… and they also failed.). In 1958 there was the
crisis in Algeria. Its indigenous people wanted to separate from France. French
settlers wanted to stay. There was another messy war. There was a referendum .
De Gaulle won and became President, with France having a new constitution, the 5th
Republic… and de Gaulle agreed to Algeria becoming independent.
By this time, Andre Malraux, middle-of-the-road
liberal, had become a member of de Gaulle’s cabinet. He was made Minister for
Culture. He was sometimes a quasi-ambassador who would escort important people
(like Jackie Kennedy, to whom he dedicated his Anti-Memoirs). He was
also a globe-trotter who met with the likes of Mao Tsi Tung and Nehru. His
admiration of great and powerful men was a life-long obsession, and he wrote in
detail about all the wonderful things he had said in long conversations with
Mao and Nehru… but Todd says that at most his dialogue with each actually
lasted for at most about a quarter-of-an-hour. In 1968, there were massive
riots in Paris involving students and later many workers from industrial
sites…. But there was a bigger backlash against Communists and other extreme
left-wingers, and even greater demonstrations supported de Gaulle. It was Minister
of Culture Malraux who lead a massive rally up the Champs Elysees… but the
following year de Gaulle stepped down and Pompidou took over. [Many
left-wingers changed their minds about Communism because the great riots happen
in the same year that the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.] And so Malraux
faded into the twilight of politics, was able to write his memoirs, and died of
cancer in 1976.
Many judgments were made upon him. Todd’s preface
says that the very level-headed Raymond Aron wrote that Malraux was “one
third genius, one third false, one third incomprehensible”. Todd himself
says “in all his writing, Malraux mixed the reality of his life and his
imagination.” These seem fair
verdicts. But at least some of Malraux’s books are worth reading.
*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *
I was planning to write yet another posting in which
I would give my personal judgement on the merit of Malraux’s literary works. But
by this stage I have given you seven postings about Malraux – his four most important
novels, his anti-memoirs, what his first wife thought of him, and a biography of
him. And by now I’m sure you’re sick of the man. The fact is, I can say all I
want to say about the quality of his work in a few sentences. First, at his
best he was a good journalist. When he is dealing with action – in uprisings in
China, in the Spanish Civil War, in his memories of the French Resistance – he is
very vivid and readable. [And I add that his version of the Spanish Civil War
is far more honest than Ernest Hemingway’s Hollywood-ish For Whom the Bell Tolls.]
But second, he too often goes into vague pseudo-philosophic fugues in which his vocabulary
becomes impenetrable. No wonder Raymond Aron said he was “one third incomprehensible”.
Then, in his novels, there is that macho streak where manly power and strength are
the main virtues… which goes along with his inability to deal intelligently
with women… which borders on misogyny. Always loathing the far right and moving
away from the far left, his politics were ultimately good but there was always his tendency to over-rate his influence as a leader. As an historian, I find his
work very interesting. But I would not rate his novels and memoirs as classics. Read him as history, not as literature.
