THIS SIDE OF DEATH
Weathers, Winston
meaning may lie in them, that meaning is lost, and couldn't have justified the images themselves anyway. Scenes of this kind in a movie are an atrocity against our eyesight, and it is distressing...
...Not only the life he led, but the book he wrote, reveal Malraux's transformation of random events into organized life, life into art: life transformed into biography, reality transformed into a certain fiction...
...And the answer is yes--his Lazarus, a book of death, becomes an affirmative book for the living...
...Scenes of this kind in a movie are an atrocity against our eyesight, and it is distressing to see Bertolucci employing them...
...in defiance of militarism, an irrepressible human compassion...
...the large expansion of advertising and public relations companies...
...I find myself agreeing with them that it was a cruel time...
...it implies nothing...
...If Miller and Nowak have depicted an age in which there was a deep suspicion...
...surveying our death customs (reminding us of the distribution of sugar skeletons to children in Mexico on All Souls' Day...
...In nearly 450 pages, the fifties is examined in its different aspects, from McCarthyism to the civil rights movement to rock music, and the book is filled with details which not only evoke the period but also reveal its stresses...
...BOOKS , I III I I I LegzmsoMJ ANDRE MALRAUX Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $7.95 Seriousy ill in 1973 with a "form of sleeping sickness," Andr6 Malraux spent critical days in the S a l ~ Hospital wrestling with the possibility of his own death---a confrontation with mortality some three years before his actual death in 1976...
...To Miller and Nowak, in their book The Fi[ties, life in the Eisenhower years was a particular disaster...
...He has things to tell us--not unlike Prufrock/Lazarus, "Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you alL" Indeed, he makes the great effort to proTHIS SIDE OF DEATH WlNmN W~AI~IDIS vide us knowledge about death---recalling the famous deaths of Socrates and Christ, probing the very ways of dying (why is suicide taboo...
...Those that succeed each other here come p a t - - a biography as false as any other...
...dismisses Jacques Maritain and the religious existentialists for having the "wrong" preoccupations...
...And for the man who lost his faith, as he tells us, after Confirmation what else to do but discover and create value in this world, this side of death, in this natural and earthly city...
...Knowledge about dying, yes...
...and cowed liberals into ritualistic praise of America...
...It scores imaginative writing in the fifties for its sense of social conditions as being unalterable...
...9 Af~rmative in that Malraux gives major emphasis to the human quality of fraternity, that instinctive "element in man which is today fumbling for an identity," "as mysterious as love, and as divorced from right-mindedness or duty...
...Their prose, too, is often tin-eared, and sometimes ungrammatical...
...And he candidly explains: "The tragedy of agnosticism does not lie in the fact that we regard death as unthinkable, but in the f a c t t h a t we cannot bring ourselves to do so . . . . The word unknowable insidiously suggests a knowledge that is never attained . . . . The unthinkable is not what is hidden from us...
...He has been to the dark wall of death and has returned...
...Its assessments of the different phases of life during that time are like checklists, indicating how the fifties failed to live up to the current attitudes toward ethnicity, the environment, feminism, etc...
...Anxiety over an apparently impending nuclear war was traumatic in the fifties, and Miller and Nowak have demonstrated how this trauma affected both public and private life...
...For the "inconceivable has no attributes--not even menace" and without menace there is no fear...
...The being in death...
...One of the strengths of their sociological study is its amplitude, its abundance...
...the construction of giant Levittowns, with their acres of identical houses and totally standardized lives...
...This unthinkable nothingness "territies humanity," but Malraux proposes that "it alone can deliver humanity...
...False biography perhaps, but life thoughtfully orchestrated into wisdom, suffering recollected in charity...
...Having been young in the fifties, I am sometimes still haunted by visions of the fifties as a verdant Eden now lost...
...It fostered a heavy moralism and dubious religiosity in the Eisenhower administration (John Foster Dulles spoke of smiting the enemy "with the full force of Christianity") ; nurtured narrow prejudices (teachers were blacklisted and library books proscribed if they were suspected of "unAmericanism...
...Congratulating itself on its "normalcy," the period today seems curiously aberrant and neurotic...
...He reviews his father's suicide...
...The fifties became an age of fear and cant...
...but for the most part my sense of the fifties is closer to that of Miller and Nowak, who see it as a time of anxiety, oppressiveness, and eclipsed hope...
...At the moment of death, the life we review can become our ultimate consolation if that life is transmuted by our creative vision...
...Am I, from the House of the Dead, destined to note down only what belongs to life...
...To demonstrate, Malraux devotes a large portion of the book to his own fictional account of an incident from World War I that, for him, provides the ultimate definition of fraternity: At Bolgako on the Vistula, 1916, the first German gas attack, which, Malraux says, was "a confrontation beCommonweal: 821 tween fraternity and death...
...But in his meditations, ranging twixt battlefield and hospital (those two representat/ve locations of twentiethcentury soffering), where is the knowledge about the mystery of death itself...
...It tends, however, to be more of an indictment of the fifties than an "in-depth" study, which it claims to be at the beginning...
...He comments on his own lifelong concern with the "metaphysical character of death...
...the widespread use of new tranquilizers, and the enlargement of the profession ot psychiatry...
...In the light of the death-resurrection experience, Malraux sees himself as a modern-day Lazarus...
...Malraux vividly describes the attack upon Russian forces and the unexpected rescuing of Russian troops from the trenches by German infantrymen...
...the emergence of television as a dominant and leveling force in American life...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And pressed against the wall of nothingness, Malraux also realizes that the only vision left is that of life itself...
...The documentation of Miller and Nowak is detailed, and to read their book is virtually to relive the fifties, with its phobic obsessions and its dread of life...
...Malraux admits (as do other great Lazarus figures in modern literature, those of Andreyev, Rilke, O'Neill, Lagerkvist---and unlike the Kilbler-Rosses) that his "odyssey outside the earth to bring back the tablets" brings back nothing at all...
...During 23 December 1977:822 this era of physical change, and of Cold War fright, the country turned away from a close examination of its domesitc problems to seek private escape, or embraced a selfish materialism, practicising Norman Vincent Peale's "religion" of success...
...He discusses death philosophically with his doctor...
...This final volume in Malraux's autobiography is an artful, economical summary of much of his previous writing, a useful introduction actually to his thinking about man's fate, the human condition, the fundamental man, etc...
...The unknown realm of the unthinkable has neither shape nor name...
...The revelation is that nothing can be revealed...
...the migrr.tion of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs...
...suggests that the fifties liberals made no contribution...
...He records the death-threes of the patient in the next room...
...The F i f t i e s : The Way We R e a l l y Were DOUGLAS T. MILLER & MARION NOWAK Doubleday, $10.95 Home Free DAN WAKEFIELD Delacorte, $8.95 ROBERT EMMET LONG Perhaps the moral of The Fifties and Home Free is that there never was any ideal time to be young in post-World War II America...
...It does not imply that we are impotent...
...Malraux's entire lifemliterary, political, and otherwise--seems devoted to that task...
...converted the film industry into a propaganda machine, alerting the public to the danger of dissidents (who might even be their neighbors...
...The Fifties also describes what the country looked like then, the changes that were reshaping the national l i f e - - the expansion of the automobile industry, and the construction of super~trighways (a 40,000-mile Interstate Highway System was built at the cost of over forty billion dollars...
...If he can rely on such scenes at all, what is to prevent him in the end from making a movie like Pasolini's Sa/o, which has nothing but scenes of this sort in it...
...My view of man," Malraux says, "has changed little over the past thirty years," and now that view is given its last, perhaps most effective, articulation Reliving the events of his illness ~anxiety, plunges into unconsciousness, stretches of lucidity, dark nocturnal dreams, remembered images floating before him--Malraux sets forth his essential beliefs and convictions...
...We do not die with our eyes looking into death...
...It is practically programmatic in finding nothing "right" about the fifties...
...That wrestling led Malraux to the writing of this book, which explores not only the idea of death but also the "meaning of life" as pondered from the near-death perspective...
...Malraux's own autobiography is, I think, a demonstration of that proposition...
...Accepting the nothingness, we can die without anxi, ety...
...Reading the book one moves through a sea of split infinitives, trite expressions (a television show "hit the mark"), and illogical metaphors ("religious aspects permeate many of his works...
...At such times the authors seem as superficial as the waist-high culture they attack...
...Malraux asks...
...He says, "I have developed the habit over the past few years of seizing and storing up the images of the past...
...We die with our eyes staring back into the lighted room of existence...
...The book is useful in putting to rest an~( lingering illusions one may have about the fifties, but in allowing for no complication, for nothing redeeming, it leaves an impression of conclusions reached in advance, of an emphatic involvement never undertaken...
...But what about the condition of death...
...like love--and unlike liberty--a provisional sentiment, a state of grace...
...can we make a good death if we are destroyed by torture...
...Malraux also suggests, affirmatively, that, in the face of death's nothingness, we not only can discover but can help shape life's meaning...
...Looking back from death's shadows, Malraux discovers the meaning of life implicit in this linking and constructive fraternity ;mbedded in human nature...
...To turn from the fifties, as they have been recreated by Miller and Nowak, to the late sixties and early seventies, the setting of Dan Wakefield's novel Home Free, is to turn from nightmare to nightmare...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
