Malraux

A Biography

Axel Madsen

• Publisher: Open Road Distribution
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781504008761
• eBook ISBN: 9781504008563
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The authorized biography of the most important man of letters in twentieth century France: André Malraux, French novelist, art theorist, and France's Minister of Cultural Affairs.

Part One

Chapter 1

To see an aquarium, better not be a fish.

Picasso’s Mask

“The last meaningful revolution, you ask me?” His gaze is keen and searching. “Modern revolutions are either hangovers from 1917 or they are fascist takeovers, but of course the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution require cobblestones to make barricades against cavalry. With the invention of the tank, revolutionary action really becomes obsolete.”

André Malraux is an elegant and slightly bent septuagenarian of extravagant memory and prodigious knowledge who receives his visitor with formidable verbosity and a choice of Scotch or mint tea. He talks about what Mao Tse-tung told him and what he told Trotsky and Kennedy and about History’s finer ironies. He recalls camels coming down the Pamirs, bellowing through the clouds, and says that listening to Europe’s great composers in Asia makes him feel that the West’s deepest emotion is nostalgia. He talks about the next war—a war for diminishing resources—while contrasting his darkening vision with faith in human resilience. He says God is dead, but that what ultimately matters is neither material rewards nor even happiness but spiritual dimension. What makes humanity awesome and culture a great adventure is not our own saying so, but our questioning everything.

His spare strands of hair are dark, his eyes green and his face, with its chiseled furrows and nervous twitches, is dominated by the arch of his brow. He examines his visitor’s half-finished sentences with intuitive impatience. He has a gift for taking quick and forceful possession of ideas and for formulating them in dazzling propositions. Yet his language is without redundancy or hesitancy. He never seems to feel his way toward ideas, and words flow from him at a rate that is almost the speed of thought. For punctuation, he may lift a long, apostolic forefinger and say, Mais, attention! as if to warn of upcoming illuminations. Objections are taken into account and a partner in conversation may come to feel grateful that doubts are entertained at all. Ideals are not defended with asperity but with common sense and a series of primo, secundo and tertio to keep matters straight until all extensions, consequences and impossibilities of various hypotheses have been disposed of and a cogent conclusion reached. When conversing with Malraux, André Gide has said, one doesn’t feel very clever.

“War puts questions stupidly, peace mysteriously. Our history is not a chronicle of ideologies or political abstractions, but of empires, of powers seeking to control events.”

He has always felt the tragic dimension of modern man and his novels are peopled with characters who in violent situations fight to create their own transcendental usefulness. He believes our civilization no longer has a clear idea of man and is therefore bound to change or disappear.

“You ask me if the universe has a purpose, if history leads somewhere or whether such questions are senseless. Not senseless, I’d say, unintelligible. The Iranians have given the answer in the Koran a modern twist: ‘Does the cricket run over by a truck understand the internal combustion engine?’ The cricket may think it has been run over by something very big and very nasty, but not how the internal combustion engine works. Nor what the engine thinks, or that it doesn’t think at all. Man thinking of himself in biological terms started with Darwin. The idea of a common human fate is very recent, and we don’t even know yet whether evolution is divergent or convergent.”

Malraux’s progression has been from high-pitched radicalism to political agnosticism and art as transcendence rather than beauty. His fiction is a tragic universe where individuals are opposed to society but at the same time draw their forces from it, a world where revolutions fail but justice rekindles justice and where to accept the unknown is to be fully human. A revolutionary movement is fraternal not only because it defends the individual’s values but because in revolt the individual exceeds himself. In his books, clear-eyed revolutionaries and magnificent losers die so that others may live with dignity. “What do you call dignity? It doesn’t mean anything,” a Kuomintang officer asks the captured Kyo in La Condition humaine, which in English received the title Man’s Fate.* “The opposite of humiliation,” the revolutionary answers. Pages later, he realizes that to die for human dignity is to die a little less alone.

Malraux’s last novel appeared in 1943. Since then, he has published over fifteen books, memoirs of his extraordinary life not always written in the first person and volumes about art and the creative process which say that what ennobles Man is what transforms him. “Art is a dialogue we have always carried out with the unknown. We have come to distinguish the contours of the unknown through the unconscious, through religion and magic and we may soon begin to understand such totally modern emotions as the feeling that we belong to the future, that our civilization is the sum total of all others.”

Five books appeared between 1974 and 1976, all parts of his ongoing life work. La Tête d’obsédienne, which became Picasso’s Mask in English, sees art as its own absolute, freed even of a need to be beauty, and as promise of a universal language that allows modern man to converse across civilizations and time. It is also about Pablo Picasso and the traces the artist leaves behind. Lazare is a meditation undertaken in the limbo of critical illness—Malraux’s own voyage to the edge of death in 1972 when a collapsed peripherical nervous system threatened him with paralysis of the cerebellum and total amnesia. It is also about the realization that the medical technology that saved him had not existed a few years earlier. Together with other, as yet unpublished texts, La Tête d’obsédienne and Lazare will form the second volume of the Antimémoires—“anti” because Malraux wants the ego talking about itself to yield to what is created in life. L’Irréel and L’Intemporel are the second and third volumes of The Metamorphoses of the Gods. L’Irréel—in English perhaps not so much the unreal as the non-real—sees the Renaissance as the stupendous turning point when artists stopped re-creating the world according to sacred tenets and began re-creating it according to imaginary values. L’Intemporel—in Malraux’s view neither timelessness nor immortality, but the peculiar time warp that allows a work of art to escape its own era—traces the volte-face of modern painting since Manet with whom Venus ceased to be both naked woman and poetry to become color arranged in certain forms. With these two big, richly illustrated volumes, Malraux has finished The Metamorphoses of the Gods, his reflection on art and its transmutations, started in 1957 as an afterthought to the monumental Voices of Silence, his hymn to art as intelligence imposed on matter.

He receives his visitors at the Vilmorin family château in Verrières-le-Buisson on the southern outskirts of Paris where he lives surrounded by the affectionate attention of the sister and family of the last woman in his life. Louise de Vilmorin lies buried somewhere in the park-sized garden under a cherry tree. “The cherries will rain down on my tomb and children will feast on them,” the novelist wrote in her will. Verrières is less than ten miles from the city limits and only a last few fields from suburban high-risers. The lovers of Verrières, twentieth-century Chateaubriand and Madame Récamier, found each other late and lived a whimsical if autumnal liaison. De Gaulle didn’t exactly approve but when Madame de Vilmorin died, the president sent a rare personal note. A year later, he died.

The modern world is baffling, Malraux says, because our value system is devoid of meaning. “If asked, a thirteenth-century Christian could tell you on the spot what is good and what is evil. To think values today is to undertake a research. What is curious of course is that whereas nearly all civilizations with weak value systems have been moribund societies, ours is the most powerful the world has ever known.”

When asked whether he thinks this is a contradiction, he says the modern world is contradictory, in technology triumphant beyond the wildest dreams yet without spiritual ferment or direction.

He feels that although the atom bomb must be categorized as a shattering event, the major facts of our times are not events but shifts in concepts. “The relentless way we question our civilization is an example. Earlier societies have had individuals asking questions and wondering about the future. But nobody announced the end of Rome. Saint Augustine talked very seriously about it, but when he did Rome had already fallen. We, on the other hand, are engaged in wholesale challenge and are aware of a civilizational crisis.”

Modern man, he feels, is both fearful of tomorrow and hopeful, peering into the future for signs, but nobody has ever been able successfully to predict profound spiritual change. “In 200 A.D., thoughtful Romans began realizing that the empire had had it. What would happen next? Nobody really knew, but almost every one agreed—we have those letters from Baiae—that the most probable philosophy of the future would be stoicism. As it turned out, stoicism was to play no role at all because Christianity swept everything away. Nobody predicted the rise of Islam. It’s probably in the nature of revolutions of the mind to simply happen. Great religious minds aren’t necessarily the harbingers of great truths. To be a prophet, you must discover that soft spot in people that is vulnerable to your prophecy.”

Malraux believes that within a hundred years the two main spheres of human endeavor will be science, still advancing at a dizzying pace, and what he calls “the spiritual phenomenon.” He finds it curious that there is no real research into religious change, no History of Spiritual Movements from a social point of view. “Everybody has studied the origins of Christianity, of course, but no sociologist has studied such profound changes as Franciscanism, which brought into the Church a kind of Buddhism—‘My brother the rain’ and all that—which caused an incredible transformation. Likewise, primitive Buddhism was a kind of tragic agnosticism, Gautama Buddha teaching us to try to escape ‘the wheel’ of suffering, but it’s someone else, someone whose name we don’t even know, who got the idea that you can be reborn through inward extinction if you pronounce Buddha’s name with all the possible commiseration for the distress and misery of this world, in other words that you are in a tragic world but that you can move on to paradise. It’s as if Luther had said there’s no hell. The result was one hundred million conversions in twenty years.”

Malraux thinks faster than he speaks and feels terrorized in any language but French. He is without formal education. He reads Greek, has a smattering knowledge of Mandarin and a bookish command of English that allows him to read Shakespeare in the original but not to give directions to a London cabdriver. With the exception of Terence Kilmartin, who translated the Antimémoires, he has never been very lucky with his English translators. Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Les Voix du Silence is curiously archaic while passages of Robert Hollander’s rendition of La Tentation de l’Occident are downright inaccurate. The most famous of the novels, La Condition humaine, has been translated in stilted and heavy fashion by Haakon Chevalier, a University of California, Berkeley professor of Norwegian-French descent (whom Malraux helped during J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 “trial” when the Father of the Atom Bomb pointed a hysterical finger at Chevalier as the man who had tried to lead him astray). Not that Malraux underestimates the difficulties involved in transposing his words and thoughts, which often seem to mean more than they state. Before Gilbert started on The Voices of Silence, Malraux told him, “You’ll find my lyric passages frequent and fatiguing; just do the best you can with them.” A former colonial judge from Burma, famous for accomplishing the feat of translating James Joyce’s Ulysses into French, Gilbert is the translator of four other Malraux books.

It is not one of Malraux’s habits to visit a country without adopting its causes and in La Tête d’obsédienne he takes up Picasso’s struggle against old age and in so doing asks himself what his own creation might weigh in the face of the Big Void. Malraux first met the painter, twenty years his senior, as a tall, pale youth with a romantic lock over one eye trying to crash the clever, anarchic scene of post-World War I dadaism and cubism. In 1937, Picasso’s sketches for Guernica were to have illustrated the first edition of L’Espoir (Man’s Hope), the novel about the Spanish Civil War that made Hemingway so jealous he accused André of untimely pullout in order to write “masterpisses.”

The title of the Picasso book comes from a pre-Columbian skull carved in volcanic crystal that Malraux first saw at the National Museum in Mexico City in the company of Spain’s last Republican ambassador. Seated under his unframed Rouault and Braque paintings in the salon bleu overlooking the Verrières park, he explains that the obsidian head is exhibited in a glass case with a mirrored background that fuses the crystal cranium with the onlooker’s own reflection, “like in Narayana’s temple where the images of the gods on the sacrificial stones have been replaced by mirrors.”

Death has been at his shoulder since he was thirteen and, a week after France’s first flush of victory in 1914, a patriotic teacher took him and his classmates to visit the Marne battlefield and ashes from a funeral pyre wafted onto their box lunches. The best passages in his novels are descriptions of death up close—Perkins in The Royal Way, dying in a Cambodian village, fascinated by his own disintegration, or Katov, the medical student turned revolutionary in Man’s Fate, giving the cyanide pellets hidden in his belt buckle to wounded comrades in Chiang Kai-shek’s prison while he himself is led off to be executed in a manner singularly prescient of the next war’s concentration camp ovens—burned alive in a locomotive boiler on a Shanghai railway siding, a detail that lends credence to the oft-quoted remark that history has come to resemble Malraux novels.

Death has always hit close to him—and has not only felled comrades-in-arms. The mother of his two sons and the sons themselves died in accidents. His two half-brothers died in World War II, the elder absurdly during the closing hours of the conflict. His grandfather split his own skull with an ax, perhaps not inadvertently. His father committed suicide. “To reflect upon life—life in relation to death—is perhaps no more than to intensify one’s questioning,” he wrote on the opening page of his Antimémoires. “I don’t mean death in the sense of being killed, which poses few problems to anyone who has the commonplace luck to be brave, but death that brushes by.”

From above the mantel, he takes an exquisite early Braque. He brings it over to the garden window, to show the grain of the painting. “The last time I saw Braque, I quoted Cézanne’s phrase: ‘If I were sure that my paintings would be destroyed and never reach the Louvre, I’d stop painting.’ Braque took a long time answering. Finally in a subdued tone he said, ‘If I were sure all my canvases would be burned, I think I’d still go on.’”

When Braque died in 1963, Malraux was France’s Secretary for Cultural Affairs and ordered a state funeral in the inner court of the Louvre. It was a blustery, rainy September evening. A military honor guard played Beethoven’s Marche funèbre and Malraux delivered the eulogy, saying that burying Braque with state honors seemed to avenge a little Van Gogh’s suicide in the Auvers asylum, Modigliani’s pathetic obsequy and the long record of scorn, poverty and despair that is the history of art. As he finished the oration, the moon came out.

Malraux was Secretary for Cultural Affairs for nearly eleven years and as such tasted what few intellectuals ever come to enjoy—the power to experiment in culture. He sent the Louvre treasures on globe-trotting tours and for scraping centuries of grime off Paris landmarks. He initiated an unprecedented inventory of France’s artistic wealth, started new archaeological reserves, had Chagall paint the Opera ceiling and Coco Chanel decorate a wing of the Louvre. He pushed subsidies for theater, ballet and cinema (“for the price of one freeway,” he thundered in the National Assembly, “France can again become a land of culture”). He launched his “Maisons de Culture”—multi-purpose art centers designed not only to extend Paris standards to the provinces but to foster an interpenetration of the arts by combining facilities for drama, music, film and exhibitions. Although budgetary limitations prevented the building of the twenty-one “culture houses” originally planned, a number are in operation—at Bourges, Amiens and, the most grandiose of them, in Grenoble. He had eight thousand delegates attend a theater congress in Bourges and on Picasso’s eighty-fifth birthday organized a huge one-man show in the renovated Grand Palais. He created the Orchestre de Paris, had the Chambord, Vincennes and Fontainebleau castle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Part One
• Part Two
• Books by André Malraux
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page