Matters of life and death

National Review, July 4, 2005 by Algis Valiunan

Malraux was certainly obsessed with his image as the most warlike of writers--so obsessed, in Todd's account, that he lied endlessly about his exploits. No matter how brave he was in fact, he was never enough to satisfy his fantasy of himself; to astound the world with his derringdo, significant male enhancement was called for. Todd punctures Malraux's inflated rendition in Anti-Memoirs (1967) of his capture by the Nazis, and shows that Malraux parlayed a decoration awarded under false pretences into a legendary reputation as one of the greatest Resistance warriors.

With careful nurture, legends grow and grow. Relying on a Malrucian canard that had gained credence through sheer repetition, Richard Nixon asked to speak with Malraux before embarking on his landmark 1972 summit with Mao Tse-tung; the word was that Malraux had taken part in the 1927 Chinese revolution, had known Mao and Chou En-lai in China then, and had stayed in touch with them since. In fact Malraux had had nothing to do with Chinese revolutionaries except writing novels about them, and had enjoyed one rather brief and perfunctory interview with the two Chinese leaders in 1965, which in Anti-Memoirs he made out to be an epic exchange of profundities among three world-historical figures. According to Todd, Malraux was so rapt in his own gross toadying that he failed to appreciate the contemptuous treatment Mao dished out to him.

At the time of that interview, Malraux was minister of culture in de Gaulle's government--not exactly a socialist gig-but he always had a soft spot for the revolutionary heroes he had revered as a younger man. About them he was an inveterate fantasist as well. Although he was sufficiently frank to disparage socialist realism in literature at the Soviet Writers' Conference in Moscow in 1934, he subsequently retreated from his own honesty about Communist failures. Some writers are more scrupulous about honoring the truth than others. In 1937 Andr, Gide repented of his own infatuation with Communism, writing in Return from the USSR that the Soviet Union "has betrayed all our hopes." Malraux essentially dismissed Gide's critique and averred, "Trotsky is a major moral force in the world, but Stalin has restored dignity to the human race." With Malraux, Todd writes, "an imaginary socialism gets the upper hand on socialism as it exists."

In politics Malraux came up short on moral courage. Yet in the face of terrible personal loss he did show a rare mettle. The body count of his loved ones who met a violent end leaves one reeling. Malraux's father committed suicide; his two half-brothers were killed in World War II; the love of his life, Josette Clotis, fell under the wheels of a train; their two sons died in a car wreck. Somehow he endured the blows without losing his mind completely, although in his last years he did descend into alcoholism and sometimes relied on Haldol, a potent anti-psychotic that tends to leave one temporarily brain-dead.

Suffering and death were the great themes of his work, and it seems they sought him out at least as ardently as he went looking for them. To understand "the supreme riddle of 'What am I doing on this earth where sorrow reigns?'" was the object of his thought and action. He thought he found the answer: In the fraternity of les miserables, and of the spirited revolutionaries who are willing to kill and die for them, Malraux discerned the affirmation of the life he led, and indeed of life itself.