André Malraux
Cate, Curtis
Andre Malraux: A Biography Curtis Cate Fromm International /451 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Stephen Schwartz t would be hard to imagine an individual who more symbolizes the illusions,...
...In a strange development that smacks more of the nineteenth than the twentieth century, and which would seem nearly impossible today, he furthered his literary training by selling, rather than studying, books...
...Thus, Malraux's first great project was a venture into vandalism and theft...
...He then decided to dispense with further education, dropping out altogether...
...Yet lots of people who should have known better, including Leon Trotsky, were fooled...
...Similarly, he posed as a hero of the Spanish Republican air force even though he knew nothing of aviation, and never learned to fly an aircraft...
...Born in Paris in 1901, dead in a hospital southeast of Paris in 1976, he seemed to have seen and done it all...
...What does this mean for the so-called "peace process...
...This ad has been published and paid for by FL AME Facts and Logic about the Middle East PO...
...But all of this should stop immediately and for at least six months...
...Cate's account of this lifelong exercise in dishonesty suffers from occasional gaffes and minor errors, but it teaches us many lessons...
...Soon he was publishing minor critical articles, and by 1920, with the Dada excitement at its height among the writers and artists of Paris, he was working for Simon Kra, a legendary publisher...
...His enterprises were varied, if nothing else...
...But the resourceful Malraux was unprepared to take a real job...
...They ripped seven carved cornerstones, two representing protective goddesses, out of the walls and boxed them up...
...What does it mean and how should it affect the so-called "peace process...
...Qtfi...
...Vladimir Nabokov, who knew better than anybody, dismissed him as a puffer and assembler of clichés...
...After much effort, he succeeded in entering the exclusive publishing circle around the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, the greatest literary monthly of the century, as a book reviewer...
...The real Malraux was a risk-taker who more resembled a sociopathic drifter or criminal than a man of letters, or even an old-school revolutionary...
...The elimination of any Jewish vestige is the inalterable goal...
...Jean Paul Sartre remarked, famously, "Malraux has a style—but it is not a good one...
...So far, the Israelis have complied with all obligations...
...And, nobody ?not the United States, any other countries, or the United Nations—should be the arbiters of this...
...Then, the minimum conditions that Israel should impose on Arafat for any continuation should be: (1) The rescission of the PLO Charter advocating the destruction of Israel...
...The recent outrage in Jerusalem was preceded by a similar attack in a crowded Tel Aviv restaurant, in which, by sheer good luck, "only" three people were killed...
...The young Andre, seeking honors even as a youth, failed to get into the Lycee Condorcet, the most prestigious Paris high school of that time, where the poet Stephane Mallarme had once taught...
...With the coming of World War II, continuing in his line of publicly advertised gallantry, Malraux rallied to General de Gaulle, and after the war he made the sensible and correct choice in favor of Gaullism, the West, democracy, and capitalism against Soviet-imperialist anti-Americanism...
...Malraux's L'Espoir (Man's Hope) was, along with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, one of the worst books written about the Spanish Civil War...
...But in France, as so often, what counted was style, and style Malraux 80 October 1997 The American Spectator You deserve a factual look at...
...C ate notes that a truly great French writer, Guillaume Apollinaire, took a humble clerk's job in a bank when he found himself in similar straits, and used his paychecks to treat such friends as Picasso to dinner...
...His personality grew to encompass all forms of passionate affirmation, from STEPHEN SCHWARTZ'S latest book, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, will be published by the Free Press early next year...
...And of the ex-radicals of his generation, he attained the highest responsibility in government, as a minister of culture in de Gaulle's administrations...
...Any pretext suffices...
...Malraux, who had hinted at such issues in Man's Fate, seemed to decide that in Spain the cause was bigger than the ambiguities of Bolshevik conduct...
...As he himself wrote, "Almost all the writers I know like their childhood...
...Terror in Israel How should it affect the "peace process...
...The couple went to Cambodia, then a part of French-ruled Indochina, and located a temple unknown even to nearby villagers...
...Department of State...
...Arafat and the "Palestinian Authority" actively encourage their followers to use violence to accomplish their ends...
...But his budding career seemed to wither, as he lost work and money, the latter through disastrous investments...
...The affair could be said to have determined the rest of his career, for he had learned how easily intellectuals could be manipulated, and that literary swindles were easier to pull off than direct robbery...
...Breton may have recalled how his mentor, Apollinaire, had once been similarly (if falsely) charged, in a theft of statuettes from the Louvre, and besides, Breton was also a collector of non-European art...
...in any event, by then he had his own role as an icon of the Moscow-controlled Popular Front to worry about...
...They have turned over Gaza and all major population centers in Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") to the Palestinian Authority (P.A...
...Although Cate occasionally seems reluctant to criticize his subject's flaws, he suppresses nothing and excuses little...
...To put it in perspective, these 259 killed are equivalent to about 13,000 people being killed in the United States in such criminal attacks...
...His father represented, of all possible bourgeois horrors, the worst: he was a stockbroker...
...Only Israel should determine whether its national rights and its security requirements are being honored and fulfilled...
...All of these terror acts are specifically authorized by Yassir Arafat, who, though now a "statesman," was classified as an international terrorist by the U.S...
...His adventures involved testing the duties and responsibilities of ordinary life more than the dangers of ideological and physical combat...
...Interestingly enough, Malraux never compensated for his novelistic services to Communism, particularly through Man's Fate, by attempting a serious anti-Communist work...
...he never wrote a Marxist pamphlet or edited a revolutionary organ, never fought in a strike, much less on barricades, and never spied...
...Two Arab suicide bombers exploded their deadly devices in a busy market in Jerusalem...
...Not too long ago, it was the opening of an entrance to an archaeological tunnel that offended the sensitivities of the Palestinian Arabs...
...Lawrence...
...But did not his choice of West over East, in 1947, reflect moral courage...
...indeed, just as he was absent from the ranks of writers like Chambers and Koestler in bearing literary testimony to the true horror of Communism, he was also about ten years late, when compared with Chambers and Koestler, in making a clean break...
...For the next several years, Clara bankrolled Malraux's adventures...
...Andre Malraux was the exact opposite of the man with whom he eventually most sought to identify himself, T.E...
...Am flight 103 plane explosion which killed 270 people, mostly Americans...
...For the rest of his life, he spoke, wrote, and acted out in public, but without the sparkling talent he seemed to have displayed decades before...
...Not necessarily...
...that they were responsible for the blowing up of the Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 Air Force had...
...Where Lawrence served selflessly, faced the greatest physical and intellectual challenges, and then modestly withdrew into a form of silence, Malraux devoted a career to propaganda for himself...
...Andre Malraux: A Biography Curtis Cate Fromm International /451 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Stephen Schwartz t would be hard to imagine an individual who more symbolizes the illusions, delusions, and disillusion of twentieth-century intellectuals than the French novelist and politician Andre Malraux...
...Its arguments and images acted like flypaper to young minds everywhere seeking an idealistic and spiritual affirmation, the "heart of a heartless world," during the 1930's...
...The PLO has not even complied with the promise to amend their infamous Charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel...
...Were his books any good...
...It was just done out of sheer hatred for the Jews and the desire to kill as many of them as possible...
...speechifying before congresses of useful idiots about the glorious advance of Soviet Communism to leading an air squadron for the leftist forces in the Spanish Civil War...
...These are the same people who, since the "handshake", committed murderous terrorist attacks all over the world...
...Box 590359 ^ San Francisco,CA 94159 FLAME is a 501(c) (3) educational institution...
...Unfortunately, most of it was phony...
...she was the educated daughter of a very rich leather merchant...
...58 "Only Israel should determine whether its national rights and its security requirements are being honored and fulfilled...
...A history of terror...
...Malraux was a genius, if not as an author, then as a manipulator of image and myth...
...This emptiness was explained by his leftist enemies as a consequence of the abandonment of his past ideals...
...Even if the Israeli Jews were prepared to hand over the entire land of Israel and only retain the enclave of Tel Aviv, it would not suffice...
...C urtis Cate has done an admirable job of clearing the cobwebs of self-obfuscation from Malraux's life...
...By and large, no...
...The decade leading to the outbreak of World War II was convulsed with crisis after crisis, as political life turned into a brutal contest between the fascist and Communist variants of totalitarian statism...
...and in literally hundreds of other acts of terror...
...It is the best novel in praise of Bolshevism to have been produced by a non-Soviet author, although it cannot compare with the works of Isaak Babel and Boris Pilnyak...
...2) A full-bore effort on the part of the PLO to totally stop all terror attacks and to apprehend and turn over to Israeli justice all terrorists now operating under the protection of the P.A...
...But Malraux had never been a real Bolshevik like Whittaker Chambers or Arthur Koestler...
...Of course, on their way back to Saigon from the rainforest, Malraux was arrested...
...Next it was the Israeli Jews constructing residences in the eastern personnel died...
...He had already figured out a way to grow rich quickly and easily, There were, he told his bride, small Buddhist temples in Cambodia from which exquisite statuary could be easily removed for resale in the United States...
...This despicable incident made his reputation, for once the news of his being sentenced to three years in prison as a pillager of temples was publicized, his Paris colleagues leapt to his defense, mainly led, in a disconcertingly unthinking manner, by the surrealist Andre Breton...
...Fourteen innocent civilians were killed and hundreds of people were injured...
...There can be no question that they were also behind the Pan period before it...
...Malraux became a star of a kind then rare in public life...
...Only then, and not before, should it be prepared to continue its negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs...
...But that has not happened...
...Then he met his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt, at a literary soirée...
...I detest mine...
...The basic understanding with Arafat and his Palestinian Arabs was that terror and mayhem would stop...
...On the contrary: More Jews have been killed by terror attacks since the "handshake" than in any comparable And that is the nub of the problem...
...indeed, such terms as "star" weren't yet used for such folk...
...part of Jerusalem on land they own...
...He was, then, the classic bourgeois in reaction against his background, and, at that, a dandy playing at revolt more than a real rebel...
...What are the facts...
...Above all, that most intellectuals, and most of the people who admire them, are rather despicable fools...
...Further transfers are planned...
...In blood-curdling speeches, Arafat and his henchman goad their followers into violence, urging them to "liberate Palestine and Jerusalem" by jihad (holy war), "with blood and with fire...
...Only then, and not before, should it be prepared to continue its negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs...
...Since the signing of the Oslo Accord, 259 Israeli Jews have been killed and close to 1,000 wounded...
...Certainly, one can hardly imagine Chambers, by contrast, as a presidential cabinet member...
...But he was admired and desired by comrades and would-be lovers on every continent...
...His pretentious writings about art made him the laughing-stock of serious critics...
...His outstanding novel, La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate), which won him the 1933 Goncourt Prize, also helped put the Chinese Communists on the map of the world's consciousness...
...And that might take a long time...
...Even Man's Fate, his best, suffers from verbosity, artificiality, and excessive sentimentalism...
...Your tax-deductible contribution allows us to publish these important messages...
...But at least Hemingway stressed the moral evils present in the Soviet intervention in Spain, and was attacked by the comrades for it...
...Although he had never served the Communist International or any other conspiratorial body as an agent, he claimed to have been a commissar in revolutionary China...
...The murderous attack on the Jerusalem market, of course, had no pretext at all...
...Only the most naive can believe that the Palestinian Arabs (or the rest of the Arab/Muslim world) can be placated by the Israelis bringing "sacrifices for peace...
...He discovered, and exploited better than anybody else, the allure of Bolshevik commissars for urban bohemians around the globe in the years after World War I. Unlike the French revolutionary thinkers who took Communism seriously, he perceived that in the West it was basically a fad...
...Any pretext to violence suffices...
...However, the teenager had already, as a hobby, acquired a serious knowledge of the rare book and illustration business...
...No peace can come about until that attitude and that mindset change...
...For this, he was never to be forgiven by many of those Communists and fellow-travelers who once idolized him, although it was the best thing he ever did...
...In any event, the hue and cry out of Paris assured that Malraux would be spared any jail time...
Vol. 30 • October 1997 • No. 10
