Matters of life and death

National Review, July 4, 2005 by Algis Valiunan

Malraux: A Life, by Olivier Todd (Knopf, 560 pp., $35)

FEW men live the sort of life they imagine for themselves in the boldest daydreams of youth. Andre Malraux (1901-1976) was one of the few. Swashbuckling was his primary vocation; shouldering his way into the world's most perilous corners, loving the test of nerve, loving even more the general adulation for his feats of daring, he seemed to spend his days swinging from chandeliers with rapier in hand, after the Douglas Fairbanks manner. And of course he wrote, often about himself and men like him, the intimate companions of violent death. As one learns from Olivier Todd's fascinating biography, he was fond of quoting Napoleon's proclamation, "My life is quite a novel." One of Malraux's two best novels, Todd concludes, was "his own staggering, rollicking life."

Most writers, and especially French writers, scorn the bourgeois life, defined since Rousseau's famous sneer by its fear of violent death and its devotion to selfish pleasures of small consequence. Malraux despised it with particular ferocity. The son of an improvident businessman who skipped out on his family when Andre was an infant, the young Malraux could not bear the tedious drill of school, and ended his formal education at 16. Victor Hugo, a paragon of demonic energy who lived as ardently as he wrote, became Malraux's model of artistic and political nobility. They were indeed similar, writes Todd: "So many lives in one, so many talents in one man." Malraux tried this and that in the hopes of striking it rich. He earned a living as a rare-book dealer, wrote criticism for little magazines, published expensive editions of highbrow pornography. Fabulous schemes beguiled him. He sank his young wife's fortune, almost a million dollars in today's money, into Mexican mining shares, and lost the bundle.

A steady job was unthinkable, but plunder always remains a viable option for the venturesome. At 23, Malraux took his wife, Clara, on an expedition to the Cambodian jungle, where they excised some beautiful stone carvings from an ancient Khmer temple, with an eye toward selling them in America. The colonial authorities nabbed the couple, and sentenced Malraux to three years in prison. The faithful Clara enlisted the aid of prominent French literary men, who petitioned that the judiciary show leniency to a young man who one day would surely increase "the intellectual wealth of our country." No imperial functionary longing for Paris could resist the importunities of Andre Gide and Francois Mauriac, and Malraux's sentence was suspended. Before long he was back in Indochina as editor of a newspaper that derided the French civilizing mission and pressed for liberation of Annam (a region in today's Vietnam). That particular anti-imperialist fantasy dissipated after a year or so, but the afterglow would last a lifetime.

Malraux's Indochinese adventures would furnish matter for his first four novels: The Temptation of the West (1926), an exchange of meditative letters between two young intellectuals, one French, the other Chinese; The Conquerors (1928), a testimonial to revolutionary will, invincible even in the face of death; The Royal Way (1930), a gripping account of archaeological plunder in the Cambodian jungle and of the half-mad white man who would be king of a remote native tribe; and Man's Fate (1933), Malraux's finest novel (though Todd gives that distinction to Man's Hope), about the 1925-27 Chinese revolution in which Chiang Kai-shek's revolutionaries of the Right turned on their sometime Communist allies and, at least in Malraux's telling (Todd says it never happened), burnt them alive in locomotive boilers.

Life without danger was no life at all for Malraux. "One must risk death, not to die but in order to live," he wrote to a friend in 1934, after a cyclone had nearly brought down a small plane in which he was flying. That year with a pilot friend he flew over the Yemeni desert in quest of the lost city of Sheba, capital of the Biblical queen. Bedouin riflemen fired at them from the ground, and their fuel ran dangerously low, but Malraux claimed to have found the city; every respectable archaeologist scoffed, and in response Malraux's descriptions of his find only grew ever more bold and extravagant. Extravagant boldness was his style. He tried to organize a commando raid of especially manly writers to rescue Trotsky from Stalin, who had exiled his rival to Alma-Ata; fortunately, there were no takers. He commanded a Republican air squadron in the Spanish Civil War, although he had never flown a plane; from this wartime experience he wrote Man's Hope (1937), which for a socialist apologia offers a surprisingly astute consideration of political intelligence as it moves between theory and action. He served in the Resistance under the pseudonym Colonel Berger, after the hero of the novel he had just written, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg. "When one has written my books, one fights," Malraux insisted. Todd declares, "Malraux detests war in theory, but in practice ... he is attracted and obsessed by it."