HUNGERING FOR HISTORY
Fowlie, Wallace
HUNGERING FOR HISTORY WALLACE FOWLIE Andre Mmlraux JEAN LACOUTURE Pantheon, $12.95 Through the course of this biography, we watch a man quite deliberately assuming a role in history. All his...
...He reminds us that the film Malraux himself helped to make from L'Espoir, has had no commercial popular success...
...Malraux remained a revered master for young people in Fraaee and elsewhere, as long as they believed that be bad actually participated in the historical events related in bis novels, but now that strong doubts have been cast over the reality of this participation, his position in the minds of the young has changed...
...Even while serving De Gaulle as a minister, he continued to show independence of thought and action...
...For almost thirty years his career and his destiny were allied with De Gaulle's...
...All his achievements of writer, interpreter of history, defender of causes, have been, before his death, recognized and applauded and . . . variously interpreted...
...Historical truth concerning his life and actions is not always accessible...
...When Andre" Malraux came to the United States in March 1937, under the auspices of The Nation, and spoke at several colleges and universities on behalf of the Spanish loyalists, be had already begun his writing on art...
...This book of Jean Lacouture is both the life story of Malraux and a close passionate history of a half century of French political thought and political parties, of the roles played by Malraux in Indo-China, China, Germany, United States and other countries...
...After the war, bis principal work was his three volume Psychohgie de I'art (1947-50...
...Some of the insights are hypotheses that will never be substantiated in a totally satisfactory way...
...Andre Malraux has had no disciples in the usual literary-philosophical sense, and whatever influence he has had is practically indefinable...
...Even in the year of its publication, 1933, it was recognized as marking a turning point in the history of the novel...
...Both men were actors in a few of the great dramas of modern history...
...They had similar views on history, on the role of France in history, on the need for them to remain independent and alone...
...In fact, Lawrence and Rimbaud were persistent ghosts in the background of Malraux's adventures in Indo-China and Asia...
...In this powerful story of China in 1926, the novel seemed to be returning to its violent origins in the epic...
...Only James Agee sensed its epic quality when he wrote: "Homer might recognize in it the only work of our time in accord with his own...
...Gaetan Picon still remains in France the most penetrating critic of Malraux's literary achievements...
...T. E. Lawrence's life fascinated Malraux...
...This biography is not a work of literary criticism...
...Justifiably this biographer draws constantly on Antimemoires, the "anti-memoirs" of Malraux, as the clue to the curious way in which the writer projected his views, bis movements, bit encounters witb so many eminent world figures...
...The tense style of the sentences and the somber images sparingly used in the text, revealed the anxiety both conscious and subconscious of humanity at that time in history...
...Were the conversations witb Mao Tse-tung true...
...His long relationship with De Gaulle seemed to satisfy Malraux's hunger for history...
...When De Gaulle asked Malraux to help him in the name of France, in 1945, the general certainly preferred Bernanos and Mauriac as writers, but he knew that Malraux's views coincided with his own...
...A most difficult biography to write, first because of Malraux's reticence about his personal life, and because of his unwillingness to state positively his beliefs, affinities, and activities...
...Were the conversations with Nehru true...
...This was proved later when, between 1958 and 1969, Malraux, as minister in charge of cultural affairs, wanted paintings, sculpture and architecture to increase the glory of France...
...Lacouture discusses each of the novels, the volumes of art criticism, and the valuable prefaces Malraux wrote for other writers, but the discussion is always in terms of the moment in history when the work was conceived and written, and the success or lack of success the work knew...
...what must be do...
...Antimimoires is not an account of Malraiw's life...
...His work, begun before that of Camus and Sartre, has continued after theirs ceased having the influence they exerted in the 1940s...
...It refused the usual treatment of psychology in the French novel, and it renounced the traditional subject matter of fiction...
...Malraux remains an enigmatic personality, but this biographer provides many insights concerning the man, especially the public man...
...We are constantly made aware of Malraux's remarkable intelligence, of his nervous energy, and of the strong public personality he demonstrated at every point in his career...
...And always in these volumes, as well as in the most recent volumes published since M. Lacotiture wrote his biography in 1973, the leading questions return for which Andre Mab-aux does not yet nave the answer: who is man...
...Even in spiritual terms the absolute agnosticism of Andr6 Malraux resembles the absolute faith of Charles De Gaulle...
...These volumes, while not acceptable to most scholars in art history, do reveal Malraux's encyclopedic culture, his skill in discovering talent, his desire to join with what is familiar in artistic culture elements less well known of primitive art...
...This biography is the most elaborate effort yet made to distinguish the legends of the man from the life that be actually led...
...His character is best defined in his search for fraternity, provided that the search demanded from him courage and heroism...
...There is much confusion in it about what is true and what is imaginary...
...His pages would have to be read in conjunction with Lacouture's in order to have a full estimate of Malraux the writer and Malraux the man of history...
...Man's fate" was indeed the subject of this book that announced the disasters that were to torture Europe a few years later...
...No longer, for example, can we believe that Malraux was a militant Communist in the Chinese revolution of 1926...
...Even if he grants it relatively little space, M. Lacouture is well aware that the novel La Condition Humaine (Man's Fate) is the work on which Malraux's reputation is founded...
...Malraux looked upon De Gaulle as the last great man to be obsessed with the concept of France...
...Jean Lacouture finds in L'Espoir, the novel about Spain, a greater sense of dynamic tragedy than critics traditionally find in it...
...The title, taken from Montaigne and Pascal, draws full attention not only to the theme of the book but to all of bis writings and to the effort of his life, if that can be summarized in a phrase...
...As far as possible, M. Lacouture, a most accomplished biographer, makes use of documents: novels, speeches, dialogues, letters, and especially the Antimemoires...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
