“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.]
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.
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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.
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