Man of a Seamless Cloth

...Perhaps one should begin by remarking, in defense of the author, that the Anti-Memoirs has been somewhat battered in translation...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editor, "Canadian Literature...

...But the extreme situations that engulf ordinary men, and Malraux in his role of ordinary man with them, sustain the stirring quality of the best scenes in his novels...

...Then you will understand that it is not merely because Malraux is Monsieur le Ministre...

...Like them, too, this book is a great declaration, a humanist manifesto of Malraux' belief that "there is thinking and believing man, or nothing...

...Most of all, one waits for the last volume...

...The Anti-Memoirs is a kind of interim reading, for it is arranged in a way that no single period of Malraux' life will be fully described until all four volumes are complete...

...This implied reproach to Stendhal, his semblable and predecessor, sets the tone of Andre Malraux' Anti-Memoirs, the first of a series of autobiographical works breaking the years of relative silence that followed his return to the life of action in 1958, when de Gaulle came back to power...

...It is association, not chronology, that Malraux uses as his pattern...

...He uses the title Anti-Memoirs because he rejects the kind of autobiography which follows sequentially, in small detail as well as in great event, the life of a man from seven to 70...

...Two other volumes will be published in Mal-raux' lifetime and a last after his death...

...a drama is being enacted in which men have grown into the personifications of great forces, and as such are remote and unreal...

...Even with the most accomplished translator, Malraux in English can at times read like a mere logo-maniac...

...It is interesting to observe how, in the Anti-Memoirs, he will remember long conversations with notable men like Nehru and Mao and de Gaulle, and present them in a style hardly different from that of the dialogues in his novels...

...His description of tank fighting in the early days of World War II is admirable, and, even more so, the account of his capture as a maquis leader, his seemingly miraculous escape from Gestapo torture, and his final release when his prison was abandoned by the German guards fleeing from the advancing Allied troops...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" "To reject the major facts about a man out of contempt for convention can lead to an exclusive preoccupation with the minor...

...To put a style of writing that is so idiosyncratic into another language is difficult at best, and in many Malraux passages it is virtually impossible to retain the peculiar resonance of the original...

...in a saint, the character of his saintliness...

...For this reason he is inclined to choose, as the people he remembers, men standing in symbolic relationship to the events of their time, or men in the extreme situations of life, like soldiers or resistance fighters, and to pick from his own life such crucial situations...

...And this is by no means the most competent kind of translation, not because it is in any literal way inaccurate, but simply because literalness is not enough...

...Events remind him of other events, and the links often stretch over long periods of time, making his book a series of episodes flashing backward and forward from one to the other, linked by a network of correspondences rather than a line of sequence...

...in a great man, the form and the essence of his greatness...

...Taken out of their linguistic contexts, the descriptions of exotic scenes, of splendid ruins, that fill so great a part of his imaginary works, have a deliberation that can easily assume the tone of artificiality rather than artifice...

...The style of life and the style of writing coalesce, and in Malraux' own words one sees how the man of action and the man of letters are made of the same seamless cloth...

...If, on reading this version of the Anti-Memoirs, you wonder why its publication has been such an event in France, make the effort of reading the original...

...But even in English the intended outlines remain, the grand structure is still extant, like one of Malraux' beloved Egyptian sculptures whose features have been worn by the bombardment of the desert sand...

...In fact, in this case it is fatal, since the translator often makes no real effort to solve the problem of finding a satisfactory English equivalent—as opposed to an English imitation—of Malraux' style...

...It is in describing the latter that he is most successful...

...The great men, and Malraux when he is among them, move on stages and speak like tragic actors...

...Other scenes having an almost obsessively fascinating quality are those where Malraux comes into contact with people whose attitudes have a disturbing but intriguing unlikeness to his own?queens of remote and doomed African kingdoms, or thugs in the political battles of Guiana...

...In other words, he superimposes on the doubtless prosaic actuality of the occasion a portentous quality he feels it should ideally have, much as Shakespeare reconstructed events in the histories of kings, the only difference being that Shakespeare did not make himself a character in his pageant of earthly greatness, while Malraux does...

...And in all of them, certain characteristics which express not so much an individual personality as a particular relationship with the world...

...Like a number of extremely Gallic writers—Proudhon and Peguy, for example, and of course Charles de Gaulle—he uses a rhetoric which, rendered with any literal-ness, seems stiff and even pompous...

...Here Malraux has his own classic rhythms, rather like a prose Racine, conscious always of the drama of the confrontation he is describing...

...What interests me in any man," he says, "is the human condition...

...If anything, his dialogue is even more difficult...

...As a pattern of construction, the reliance on them is highly successful and leaves one anticipating the next volumes, which will presumably interlock with the first rather than, in the ordinary sense of a tetralogy, follow it...

...It will doubtless illuminate those dark periods of Malraux' life in China, on which even in this opening volume of his autobiography he has chosen to throw no light...

...Malraux has never been an easy writer to transpose into English, and none of the versions we have of his novels is altogether satisfactory...

...Malraux has an almost superstitious interest in even minor correspondences, such as names being repeated at various critical times in his life...