Brother Malraux
Kaplan, Roger
THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER SIX / MARCH 1977 Roger Kaplan Brother Malraux He was Renaissance man and Resistance hero, adventurer in the East and defender of the...
...Yet he met the artists, like Picasso, who would revolutionize art in his lifetime: always in front, he thought that more interesting than comparing Ingres and Delacroix in a classroom...
...In La Condition tmmaine, the Kuomintang--which in Les Conqudrants was seen holding off the British Empire with the help of Comintern cadres--is now afraid of the growing Communist influence in its ranks and is preparing to stab the Shanghai Communists in the back...
...THE ALTERNATIVE: AN AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOLUME TEN, NUMBER SIX / MARCH 1977 Roger Kaplan Brother Malraux He was Renaissance man and Resistance hero, adventurer in the East and defender of the West...
...He would be a thinker, it goes without saying, but he would also be a man of action, and his lessons to posterity would be found in his deeds as well as in his writings...
...The remark is ironic, perhaps humble, for Malraux believed passionately that men must strive to live up to their best ideas, whose power he never underestimated...
...Even in La Vole royale, there is a war of sorts, against a savage tribe whose members castrate and blind their captives...
...VII In all Matraux's novels, there is an extraordinary interplay between spiritual obsessions and violent action...
...Western man's situation i~ 1930 may be precarious and absurd...
...on behalf of the Republican cause...
...he would be intelligent enough to grasp the revolutionary intellectual and artistic currents released by that war and to understand that it signalled the waning of Europe's preeminence in the world, the rise of America and Russia, the awakening of Asia...
...For you, absolute authority was first God, then Man...
...does death negate life, or can it give it meaning...
...Afterwards, he spoke everywhere he could (including the U.S...
...Les Conqu~rants and La Condition humaine are set in the eye of the great tempest over Asia that was as decisive for twentieth-century history as were the two world wars...
...Towards the~ end of the war, Malraux became one of the more prominent members of the Resistance, and was military commander of one of the maquis regions...
...The experience of jail, trial in a colonial court, and imprisonment until late 1924 when the sentence was commuted, in large part thanks to protests on his behalf from writers and artists in France, did not endear Malraux to French power in Indochina...
...even the Communists understood this...
...Africa...
...how can we be better men...
...Certainly there are few novels where the significance of European Communism is explored with so much passion and intelligence...
...Renaissance, the last and the greatest of the uoraini di virtU, and he might well be led to reflect that it was all ending in an abysmal nightmare were it not for the fact that his very life proved that men can endure and triumph...
...Art exists not for the consolations of feeble aesthetes, but to justify man's claims to nobility...
...In May 1968, French students thought they were sweeping away he vestiges of the past...
...His philosophical passages, however, are never ponderous, because they are always made of the flesh and blood that surround them...
...And always, Malraux also writes of the private war man must wage against the forces-cowardice, bad faith, laziness, backsliding--that would take away his dignity and reduce him to nothingness...
...VI At the beginning of World War II, Malraux enlisted as a private in a tank division, and was captured by the Germans when the French army was defeated in 1940...
...Since he was a man of no religious faith, ideas and art took the place of the sacred...
...What counted for Malraux, in life, was to surpass the human tragedy, the recognition offinitude and death...
...He would not be a dogmatist, nor would he be anything but a man of principle: for dogmas are mere human guesses that times of change shatter along with the conditions that made them seem reasonable...
...In a sense, it is the best book available on the Fifth Republic (it is much else besides...
...In the same famous speech in which he said this, he added: "For us, the guarantee of political and spiritual liberty is not in political liberalism, which is condemned to death as soon as it comes up against Stalinists: the guarantee of liberty is the strength of the state in the service of all the citizens...
...His name: Andr~ Malraux...
...Stalin probably thought it might be subversive...
...What concept, a colleague asks, can have led Mollberg to abandon his former confidence...
...He visited Hong Kong and Canton and, according to some biographers (he was reticent to the point of secretiveness about his private life), worked for the Kuomintang, which at the time was supported by the Comintern...
...Possibly his most ambitious work, it is an attempt to answer the question: what is the essence of humanity...
...He was no academician...
...He too is an intellectual, albeit one whose life has been highly-adventurous...
...He returned to Paris in 1926, and, while taking up his editorial work (editing such writers as Gide and Mauriac and becoming director for art books at Gallimard), published his first major work, La Tentation de L'Oeeident ("The Temptation of the West," 1926), in which he set forth the theme, to which he would often return, that to know man one must compare men in various civilizations...
...This is the extraordinary question posed by the Communist leader, Kyo...
...In the midst of the violence and abjectness that characterized his times, Malraux offered hope and honor and said that hope gave men the strength to surpass themselves...
...he said scornfully...
...Lawrence's failure, understood that one's dreams begin at home...
...Vlalraux saw this too...
...In the face of the stupidity of false utopias, he scandalously took political reality as he found it and was willing, intellectual and writer, to assume responsibility for it instead of sitting back in phoney world-weariness or useless moralism...
...Andr~ Malraux, whole man, was a beacon for his times, and if we wish to preserve a world in which free men can think and thrive we must make him a beacon for our times too...
...As France got bogged down in Indochina, whose aspirations to independence Malraux had helped arouse, and the RPF was defeated at the polls, de Gaulle retired to write his magisterial Mdmoires de guerre...
...Surely a novelist cannot ask for more--if he can bear to deal with so much...
...Even while recognizing that Western ideas are rapidly penetrating the Eastern consciousness, the Oriental counsels his correspondent to follow the East and submit to the eternal rhythms of the world...
...However, it is mainly a book in praise of the Spanish people, a large fresco of the rebirth of a people's dignity...
...The novel is a story of war and betrayal in Shanghai of 1927, and it won for Malraux the prestigious Prix Goncourt...
...MiSllberg, Africanist and philosopher--but at Altenburg they are all philosophers--has worked fifteen years on a book that would present a "rigorous and powerfully coherent interpretation of man...
...There was some talk of a film of Man's Fate, directed by Sergei Eisenstein and with music by Shostakovitch, but nothing came of it...
...If his thinking is sometimes difficult to follow, it is because of his passion for communication, not from any arrogance of mind: he trusts the reader to catch up with him as he races from idea to idea and, if the reader cannot, the books are always there to be read anew...
...At the colloquium of Altenburg, which Walter Berger, friend of Nietzsche and renowned historian, organizes, the dreadful weight of a possible negative answer is given all the moral--and therefore human--actuality of a boxer's last fight in a story by Ernest Hemingway...
...This was certainly an ambition Malraux shared...
...He presents the Communists as dedicated to winning the war and confident in the Spanish people's ability, once the war is won, to make their own emancipation (in Marx's famous phrase...
...Perhaps he underestimated the resilience of political liberalism...
...IV The first two novels of adventure, Les ConquSrants ("Th, Conquerors," 1928) and La Vole royale ("The Royal Road," 1930) written in overlapping periods, have something Conradian about them...
...the traditional Right looked backvar.d to, well, 1788, one imagines...
...Whether L 'Espoir is the best political novel ever written is a question which need not detain us...
...and together with his voluminous writings on art during these years, they showed him possessed, in his old age, of all the enthusiasm of his youth, the enthusiasm for everything that can raise man's thoughts from despair to confidence in himself and in his human culture, or shall we say the culture that makes'him human...
...VIII While fighting for France, meter by meter, while seeing his comrades tortured by the Gestapo when he was captured in 1944, Malraux had learned the significance of national pride...
...Vincent Berger and his men prove just the opposite: man recognizes himself in his capacity for turning fate-death--into freedom: overcoming it or, at least, extracting from it something, be it only a desperate gesture of fraternity...
...There are few writers indeed who can make the clash of ideas leap from a page as effectively as they can raise from it the awful whistle of shells, and Malraux is the best...
...Their hope...
...Kyo and his friends, who have given their lives to a vision of justice of which fate is making a mockery, must learn how to die with dignity...
...And it is the only value that can give meaning to the lives of the doomed heroes of La Condition Immaine ("Man's Fate"), Malraux's most famous novel (1933...
...In 1934, accompanied by Andre Gide, he travelled to Berlin to solicit the 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 elease of the man falsely accused of burning the Reichstag...
...The young Chinese in France who, in La Tentation, is exchanging letters with a young Frenchman on his way to China, points out that the Occident has lost control of that individualism which served it so well, for the countervailing sense of absolute values has been pulverized by the intensity of the twentieth century...
...Perhaps this is so...
...Malraux never wrote about his private problems--"What do I care about what matters only to me...
...It certainly is not...
...For him, the courage to face life truthfully and to describe it honestly was not only a precondition for serious intellectual work, it was a stark necessity for life itself...
...It is significant that he is a Marxist, for the adventurers of La "Voie royale and Les Conqudrants had to progress, by the logic of Malraux's artistic development, beyond the pure will-to-power --tempered by a vague longing for fraternity which they affect to scorn--and towards serious political commitments...
...Fraternitd is a word that crops up frequently in his writing...
...Years later, in the Anu~e'moires, Malraux was to write: "One of the most profound metamorphoses is from the submission to fate to the domination of fate...
...When the cause was just, he threw himself into it, and made no apologies for courting power or for wanting to be read, not by an elite of literati, but by as wide a public as possible...
...Be that as it may, Malraux had every right to say, ten years later, that it was the Communist Party, not he, that had abandoned and betrayed the ideals of the admirable, tormented, and yet firm men of L 'Espoir...
...In the last quarter of our century, more than at any time since the Jewish prophets taught man that history is charged with meaning, the very essence of humanity is an open question...
...The Fourth Republic ~oked backward to the Third...
...This is the answer to the austere and, like so many intellectuals, inhuman M~illberg...
...Malraux is basically a war writer...
...that day, it was the face of France...
...And the young Malraux certainly cannot be invoked against the old one for saying, over the ashes of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin, brought to the Pantheon: "Today, young people, may you think of this man as you would have approached your hands to his poor deformed face on the last day, his poor lips that had not talked...
...Before the international Brigades were organized in October, he was ~-quipping and flying missions with the Espafia Squadron...
...Manuel, the emerging loyalist military leader, is faced with men who broke at the front...
...I am determined to serve my party and I will not let psychological reactions stop me...
...One wonders, though, how many citizens of a nation that sells its honor for oil and arms markets, can even hope to measure up to the standards of a man like Jean Moulin...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 9...
...For in this striking new conception of the autobiography, the characteristically Malravian point is in some ways the same as the Gaullist point about France: it refuses to be a memory, a recounting ofgestae--and Malraux had enough to recount!--or an intimate confession, or an apologia, or even, which is normally seen as the summit of autobiography, the unfolding of an education...
...Life, he wrote inLa Tentation, "is a series o: possibilities...
...In 1936, when Franco led a rebellion of the Spanish officer corps igainst the legitimate government, Malraux arrived in Spain llmost immediately--to fight for the Republican cause...
...It may seem ironic that Malraux the young revolutionary should in his later years have spoken so strongly against the forces of "revolution...
...much of the energy of the rallies which he organized for the Gaullist political campaign therefore had to be expended on replying to "a systematic organization of lies chosen for their usefulness...
...And this, precisely, was a large ,art of the Gaullist program for France...
...What does one do...
...What he stood for was will against weakness, determination against trepidity, fraternity against disunity...
...In another conversation involving Marxist and Christian, the Communist says the best thing one can do with one's life is to "transform into consciousness the largest possible experience...
...De Jaulle, despite his occasional'lapses into certain anachronisms, vas the only French politician willing, as Malraux had always :ounseled, to study the possibilities concretely and proceed from here...
...In Les Conque'rants, Garine is in the service ot the Chinese revolution, fighting in the ranks of the Kuomintang lot the downtrodden coolies whom he affects at times to despise...
...Malraux had found an important value in fraternity, the fraternity that allows men to hope for something better...
...In Le Temps du mdpris ("Time ~f Scorn"), a novella of 1935, he was one of the first to warn of the .*xi~tence of concentration camps...
...He would be, in an age which he might well conceive of as the last phas e of the Modern Era, which began with the colossal dreams of the Roger Kaplan, a native of Parzs, is a doctoral candidate in t/ae history of culture at the University of Chicago...
...I don't care for fine phrases, but, after all, men's hope, that's what they live and die for...
...But to the stupefaction of the audience, his talk announces that he has given up his project, that human history has no meaning whatsoever, because, he claims, different cultures and civilizations cannot share what to them is most meaningfhl...
...In helping one another face extinction, they impart to their deaths some of the meaning with which they wanted to fdl their lives and the lives of others...
...l contributed to giving them hope...
...As he writes on the last page of Les Voix du silence ("The Voices of Silence," 1951): "Humanism does not mean: 'What I did, no animal could do,' it means: 'We refused what the animal in us wanted, and we want to rediscover man wherever we have found what crushes h i m . ' " To Malraux as Minister of Culture the nation was the continuation of his search for "possibilities," for ways of fashioning something in the fold of an indifferent eternity...
...Perhaps the Westerner in Asia is condemned to a certain degree of cynicism...
...What mattered was what, in him, mattered also to other men...
...On the 18th of June, 1940, de Gaulle's voice from London had spoken for this unvanquished nation the larger part of whose population was vanquished, and in liberated Paris four years later, his presence represented its triumphant unity and continuity...
...the army is about to test a new gas on the Russians...
...With de Gaulle he tried to awaken in the French their best qualities, knowing that France is great only when universal, when working for all mankind...
...The Antim~moires, in 1967, were the latest chapters of Andr~ Malraux's record of his "bloody and vain life," his encounters with men...
...The publication did not last long, though its circulation was very large, but Malraux's commitment to the liberation of the peoples of Asia was firmly established...
...So it is fascinating to compare his years of service in the Fifth Republic with his literary work of that period--the Antimgmoires...
...What good is a life that one will not die for...
...For against the background of crisis--collapse of values, international instahillty--Malraux had chosen his possibilities...
...but hk, ultimate ambition is "to leave a scar on the map" by protecting the independence of the wild tribesmen over whom he has established a sort of kingdom...
...I-Ie escaped to the Free Zone (Vichy), and his letter to de Gaulle, offering his services as a pilot in the Free French air force, was eaten by its carrier on the point of arrest--an episode from one of his novels, one might say...
...Hence, its importance for him: as a way of reaching into the mystery of man and overcoming helplessness, and a far better way than fighting with tanks and machine guns...
...but Man is dead, following God, and you are searching with anguish for something to which you can entrust his strange heritage...
...After their execution, he says: "I knew what had to be done and I did it...
...I believe man too small for that...
...He was born on November 3, 1901, and he died on November 23, 1976...
...Although one may doubt, in view of the Gaullist electoral victory in June, whether May was, finally, much more :han a large guignol compounded by a normal, if mightier than asual, French general strike, Malraux took the challenge seriously and worked hard to assure the Gaullist triumph...
...But the spiritual transcendence which he sought to explain in his writings on art would have meant nothing to him if it did not foster - - a s religion still does for some--human solidarity...
...He had the responsibilities of power, but his double commitment to action and words in the service of man's resistance to nihilism and despair, remained the same...
...and this great creator, who four years later, 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 t the age of seventy-one, volunteered his services as a tank ommander to an invaded Bangladesh, was too busy to waste time xplaining how things had been...
...Malraux was convinced that art, not in itself--that would hardly befit the man of action--but by its continual release of creative and re-creative energies, is the truest semblance of eternity available to man...
...Malraux would have written a different book if he had been in Spain a year later than 1936, for by 1937 percipient observers (like Orwell) could detect the full horror and hypocrisy of Communist actions in Spain...
...Because of its frontal attack on this question, which never keeps it from dealing with its characters in all their human, non-ideological aspects, L'Espoir is the best book to start with if one has never read Malraux...
...perhaps his oversophistication makes him affect a certain dandyism in politics as well as in dress: Garine unseriously asks if he should not pass over to the enemy (in this instance the British Empire...
...And in addition he was, in the epic sense of the word, a ;tatesman...
...A year or so after the colloquium, he is on the Vistula front...
...all the more reason to bulk and hope...
...His own literary work of this period was rather precious, influenced by the surrealism of the time but without the violent energy of an Andr~ Breton...
...The novel's protagonist would be a European always crossing mountains and oceans to the most distant parts of the other continents, one in complete command of his own tradition but with an insatiable curiosity for the traditions of others, a man with no identity problems inhibiting him from meeting and appreciating countless men unlike himself, able to grasp their essential likeness and the essential contemporaneity of the treasures of dead civilizations...
...If you wanted to write a great historical novel of the twentieth century, one that would stir your contemporaries with a chronicle of the great events of their era and an anguished meditation on the problems of the destiny of mankind, and inspire your children with epics of desperate action in the service of liberty and teach them what's worth fighting for, one thing you would not lack is material: ours has been a century of permanent conflict and incessant interrogation...
...Not a concept...
...The shock of the strangulated enemy line was so frightening that the entire German attack has turned itself into a rescue mission, and the Germans are dropping their guns and searching like lost children for Russians who are still breathing, and trying to carry them out of the gassed area...
...the Soviet Union is, with the exception of Mexico whose help is limited, the only source of arms...
...He was not mistaken in his estimate of the strength of the Communist Party, which still threatens France today...
...there can be little doubt that de Gaulle appreciated Malraux in large part for this lucidity...
...He respected all religious thought, without caring for churches, because he recognized in it the source and constant inspiration of the fundamental human questions, the questions, precisely, that reappear in all his books, from the Cambodian jungle to the blazing streets of Shanghai, from the barricaded positions on the outskirts of Madrid, to the torture chambers of the Gestapo, from the gassed no-man's-land of the Vistula front, to the space of contemplation before a great painting in the Imaginary Museum, to the space of awesome dialogue between the two armchairs in which he and Charles de Gaulle are sitting: why are we here...
...then as chief spokesman for de Gaulle's Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF...
...By spiritual obsessions is not meant religious faith: on the contrary, he attacked organized religion throughout his life and, despite his fascination with Asia, never was tempted to convert to Hindu or Buddhist ways of thought...
...Perhaps Malraux was denouncing the demands of submission to tess natural powers when he has the Frenchman answer: "The most beautiful death proposal is a solution only for weakness...
...The loyalist colonel of the Guardia Civil, Xim~n~s, tells him: "You want to act without losing any part of fraternity...
...The gas works: and the horror of the decomposed Russian line--dead animals, dead grass," and dying men--is so overpowering that when Vincent Berger reaches the first enemy trenches, he finds that his men have forgot they are soldiers...
...Although naturally he reflected upon the relation between the two, it slowed neither his political energy nor his creative contributions...
...The four fascist columns are advancing, the fifth is spreading terror behind the lines...
...He would be old enough to see the Great War, if not to fight in it then to hear his father or uncles tell him about it...
...What indeed does one do...
...but principles are what men live by, what make them human, connecting them to the severed past and the unknown future...
...But because he knew that no man is steeled until he has been tempted by what he dislikes most, his books are not propaganda for his ideas, but always unique creations in which his ideas come to life...
...L'Espoir is a dazzling record of the first year of the Spanish Civil War...
...The book, which one may :ompare to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, is, once again, an iffirmation against terrible forces: for only the hope of fraternity, )f reunion with his family and comrades, saves the anti-Nazi ~assner from breakdown during his interrogation and incarcera:ion...
...He flew sixty-five missions against the fascist columns advancing on Madrid, was wounded twice, wrote chapters of L'Espoir ("Man's Hope") during refueling stops...
...Malraux returned to his lifelong studies of the arts...
...but it was published when the ~r was still undecided, and it contains a frank defense of the Communist argument (against the anarcho-syndicalists) of winning the war first and making the revolution later...
...Le Temps du mdpms is an episode in the anti-Nazi crusade...
...The expedition was a success, but on their return to Phnom Penh the Malraux and their companion, Louis Chevasson, were arrested and charged with stealing temple statues...
...In truth his role in the destiny of his nation after the war was not much different from his role as a free ~crivain engagd in the thirties...
...However, he asked religious questions...
...Malraux recognized that the party of Kyo and Manuel had become a gang of henchmen for Stalin, and so he fought it, first in the councils of the Resistance...
...You think there is, in what you call man, something permanent which doesn't exist...
...Adding to the perfidy, the Comintern, while trying to decide whether staying in Chiang Kai-shek's good graces is worth the sacrifice of its adherents, contributes to the massacre...
...how to make man see that he can build his greatness, without religion, on the void that crushes him...
...The man of the hour, Malraux realized, was Charles de Gaulle, who had saved France's unity by appealing to the mythic image of the nation...
...Not satisfied working with publishers on the most important art being done in Paris, Malraux took his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt, on his first great adventure: an archeological expedition in 1923 to a remote Cambodian forest...
...Les Noyers de l'Altenburg covers the Great War as well as the French defeat of 1940...
...One might say that he did things in order to think and write about them, except that he remarked that the ideas one uses are as often as not merely justifications for one's deeds...
...In the meantime, Malraux will not turn his back on the individualistic rationalism of the West: "The consciousness of being one is one of the irreducible givens of human existence," he wrote in an essay of the same period, "and perhaps the only intangible...
...The intensity v/hich ideas create in you today seems to me to explain your life better than the ideas themselves...
...He was surely one of the first of his generation's prominent writers to realize that maintaining a skeptical distance from public affairs and received social values--though necessary to preserve one's intellectual integrity--was no absolute good in itself: the question was what this distance led one to...
...The Indochinese experience, in sum, gave Malraux a political perspective while deepening his philosophical base...
...Undoubtedly there is in this notion part of the explanation for France's often irritating independent course within the Western alliance...
...He audited courses at the Ecole du Louvre and The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 5 went to work for publishing firms, editing beautiful books containing work by the likes of Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob, Fernand IAger...
...He was among the first to denounce, at a time when the Communist Party was very popular in France (right after World War II), the manipulation of ideas by the Communists: if ideas became the property of a party, they would be turned into lies...
...He returned in 1925, not to look for statues but to edit a pro-independence newspaper...
...It remained for Ionesco, that cunning ~,enius, to point out that the allies of youth were the grandfathers, "emembering the halcyon days of anarchism before the Great War...
...Vincent Berger, joining in the rescue, is fatally poisoned...
...The intellectual was, it appears, stymied by reality...
...They are both about men, like the young Malraux, in searcl~ of adventure--and values...
...If you were so ambitious as to try to tell a story explaining what has happened for such convulsions to be possible, you might well be inclined to invent a protagonist who was born with the century and acted in its great events...
...France, in effect, was a crowd of aggards living in their own museum and wearing slippers...
...No other writer save George Orwell, apparently, perceived so sharply and so soon the monstrous ability of the Communist Parties to use the big lie technique and other methods of massive deceit...
...the Communist Party wants to defend it...
...Calling for socialism and anarchy from the ~treets of the immaculately bourgeois Latin Quarter was pure 'lyrical illusion," and Malraux perceived a deep civilizational ".risis in this Luddite rage that appealed to distant hopes from the ,ast century...
...If the aim of his many books can be reduced to one sentence, it is this one...
...In the thirties came the series of great novels and the political commitments which marked Malraux as the prototype o 9 _ 9 _9 - _9 L , _9 , , I eenvam engage...
...But when the victory over Nazism was assured, Malraux threw his prestige and his talents into the battle to save France from Communism, saying there was no inconsistency in stopping policemen from perverting the ideal of social justice that had identified him with the Left in the thirties...
...But Malraux will have none of this: man will have to find values the hard way...
...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of La Tentation is that i reveals Malraux's knack for being ahead by decades of just abou every one of his contemporaries...
...Perken, the obsessed protagonist of/~ Vole royale, does not appear to believe in anything...
...and the traditional Left looked ,ack with more nostalgia than any of them to the days when there vas a myth of the Proletariat...
...Malraux therefore took the high road: the great events and the great questions...
...Whether it is one of the best political novels of the twentieth century is a question we need not ask...
...And so it was fitting, when de Gaulle returned to power and established the Fifth Republic in 1958, that he should have chosen Malraux as his Minister of Culture...
...L'Espoir, a novel of the civil war, has sometimes been called a propaganda book...
...The intellectual confuses his own obtuseness with an unsameness that would allow man to recognize in his fellow only the bestial...
...There was never any doubt in his mind as to this reality: it never occurred to him, as it does sometimes to other Westerners who are tempted by the Orient, to take a Buddhist perspective--or even a Maoist one...
...But unlike some later existen tialists--Malraux has rightly been called a forerunner of that moo~ which unfortunately now means almost anything to anyoneMalraux was not one to equate the despair provoked by his sens~ of crisis with defeat or resignation...
...But in the interim, he believed the interior resistance premature and therefore foolhardy, and he withdrew to write La Lutte avec l'ange ("The Struggle with the Angel"), of which only the first part, Le.~ Noyers de l'Altenburg (' 'The Walnut Trees of Altenburg"), was published (the second part was destroyed by the Germans when they raided his library...
...Every value has been questioned, every answer has led to more problems, today, the unprecedented well-being and freedom which are the fruits of twenty-five centuries of what we used to call the adventure of the Occident are called the result of plunder and...
...Only in the name of the nation, and of the principles it represented, could resistance be organized against the Nazis...
...III Finishing high school in 1919, Andr~ Malraux chose autodidactism over college and set himself to studying art, which fascinated him...
...He travelled alongside the Communist Party in the thirties, because the first menace was Hitler, and counseled Gide against publishing Retour de I'URSS until the end of the Spanish War, even though he knew Gide had seen the ugly truth in the Soviet paradise...
...To learn from Asia meant to get a fresh perspective on the West, but still with Western eyes...
...In a sense, the temptation of the West was the European's, not the young Chinese's--the temptation to submit to dogmas as a cynical escape from moral despair...
...But Vincent Berger, Waiter's nephew and the narrator's father, cannot accept this dismal nihilism, even though he finds no words with which to refute M~Uberg successfully...
...but Malraux is nonetheless intent on making his heroes fight for what is in their view an increase in human brotherhood...
...It also convinced him that, whatever value his early, somewhat whimsical and surrealistic work might have, writing, like political action, must be rooted firmly in reality...
...In the specific context of Spain in 1936, the Republic is in danger...
...This aim is the link between his fiction and his writings on art, the consistent theme that unites his apparent paradoxes and contradictions, hislife with his thought--or, if one prefers, his soul with his self--and that is the primary motivation of his extraordinary career...
...And the clash of ideas leaps from his pages like the whistle of shells...
...V Malraux participated actively in the antifascist movement...
...The heroic officer's son, in 1940 a prisoner of the Germans, remembers how men can connect with that "nobility within them that men ignore --that triumphant part of the only animal who knows he must die...
...With Malraux, only the most difficult questions were worth pondering, only the greatest causes worth fighting for, only the noblest men worth joining in the march across life: is it any wonder that one cannot put down any of his books (as J e a n Schlumberger remarked) without a kind of enthusiasm for the human...
...There was a character for such a novel, and the novel is his life...
...II In Andr~ Malraux's life there was none of the "thought versus action" dilemma which plagues so many intellectuals...
...He ;till found time to go look for the lost city of the Queen of Sheba in he Arabian desert: the perilous flight is magnificently "emembered in the Antimdmoires...
...exploitation, and the political and economic ideas which produced them are reviled instead of copied and adapted...
...but the CP insists on brutal efficiencies--including executions of deserters and a downplaying of revolutionary fervor--that rankle the many nonCommunist Republicans, in particular the anarchists who consitute the biggest single Republican group...
...He helped found the World League Against Antisemitism...
...But is such a question even possible any longer...
...He meets a German carrying a Russian: "There was in the whole motion, in the manner the German held the body, a clumsy and poignant fraternity...
...He who had embraced internationalism and fought in other peoples' wars, who had thought deeply and written on the reasons for T.E...
...Malraux was to remark to an American journalist that the museums he erected throughout France as Minister of Culture were the best monument to his memory...
...In the face of the political and intellectual opportunism that characterized his world of collapsing and changing values, he asserted that the simplest values were still the best and that loyalty and fraternity could give more worth to men's lives than expediency and facile adaptation...
...In 1944 Malraux emerged at the head of a tank column in the The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 7 Brigade Alsace-Lorraine, known to his men only as "Colonel Berger...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
