A Master of Contrasts

...That was about the time my wife and I met him in the Vilmorin family mansion in Verrières, outside Paris...

...Another is the way he turned himself into a legend through myths, embellishments and outright lies...

...Still another is the extraordinary scope of his interests...

...His friend Raymond Aron, who was not a Gaullist enthusiast in London in 194044, joined de Gaulle's new party, Rally of the French People, in 1947 for the same reason...

...Malraux before the end of World War II is, to be sure, presented with an appropriate mix of understanding and censure...

...his flight over the Middle East in 1934, when he pretended to have discovered the city of the Queen of Sheba...

...his participation in the Spanish Civil War...

...Lawrence...

...his difficult relations with the successive women in his life and with his children, etc...

...After reading Malraux: A Life one needs to listen to the recording of his speech in the Panthéon on the Resistance leader and hero Jean Moulin, who was being buried there in December 1964...

...The BOOK'S second major flaw is its failure to deal adequately with Malraux' work, let alone show the connections between the work of the imagination and the life of the writer...

...De Gaulle's tribute in Memoirs of Hope—that Malraux, sitting to the right of the General in Cabinet meetings, protected him from the ordinary (la terre-à-terre)—is ultimately more important than the enumeration of all the incidents that have led some to see in Malraux little more than a charlatan...

...Todd's interest in his subject, he notes in the Introduction, was tweaked at the age of eight, in 1937, when his then Communist mother told him "about a writer fighting in Spain, a man named Malraux...

...The first serious flaw is its uneven treatment of a life full of contrasts and— to use a word dear to Malraux—metamorphoses...

...Later, he shifted to heroes who serve a great cause, as in Man's Fate, his masterpiece about the Chinese revolutionaries, and his two subsequent novels...

...Near the close of his book, Todd recognizes that Malraux at the tail end of his life—having stopped drinking and overcome depression—was again an incomparable conversationalist...

...This was the quintessential Malraux...

...Todd admires his ambition and criticizes his habit of distorting and reshaping the truth...

...Instead, he reduces Malraux' role at the new Ministry of Culture to far less than it was and concentrates on the failures and faux-pas...

...But even in this part of the book, his attraction to Communism and his reservations about Soviet realities (both in the USSR and in Spain) should have been analyzed in greater depth...

...Compared with Sartre and Camus, Malraux was much more captivating...

...Moreover, Malraux played an important role in thwarting Communist attempts to have all the Resistance forces and factions merge in a single bloc that they would have controlled...

...The emphasis on empty or silly Malraux statements is a bit overwhelming...

...One reason is the adventurous life he led...

...his short, belated and not very glorious role in the French Resistance in 1944, followed by a far more impressive performance as head of a brigade that fought in Germany after the Liberation of France...

...As a biographer, he had to brush aside Malraux' famous remark dismissing private lives as "miserable piles of secrets," but he could have redressed the balance by putting more weight on what makes a person rise above them: deeds...

...The biographer is shocked by Malraux' anti-Communism in 1945-48, and by his prediction of a Communist coup or a Soviet invasion, but Malraux was not the only one to have such fears...

...Todd cannot be faulted for inadequate documentation...

...He was a man of action as well as a writer, a statesman as well as a controversial political figure (both in his philo-Communist phase in the 1930s and in his Gaullist years...

...the portrait of the aging great man ever more in thrall to drink and pills is a bit too harsh...

...Todd's tone grows increasingly catty and petty in portraying the early postwar period, when Malraux "falls in love" with de Gaulle, assumes the role of a high priest of Gaullism and, once the General returns to power in 1958, becomes minister of culture and the official celebrant of the Fifth Republic...

...Like Barrés, Malraux initially celebrated le moi—except that the egos he invented and esteemed were those of adventurers à la T.H...

...Much of this (including the vast difference between the banalities he exchanged with Mao in 1965 and the grandiose versions he gave of them) is familiar, but Todd's accounts are often richer than the previous ones...

...He met him in Paris in 1943, and again near the end of his life...

...It is hard not to be overwhelmed by both the speech itself and the performance...

...Although the young man in a hurry in his late teens and 20s did not have a miserable childhood, his parents were separated, André did not go beyond high school, and his father committed suicide...

...Reviewed by Stanley Hoffmann Buttenweiser University Professor, Harvard University Olivier Todd's numerous books include Albert Camus: A Life (1997), an excellent biography, and he has written about Jean-Paul Sartre...

...Todd says too little about Malraux the novelist, slightly more yet still not enough about the memoirist and the prober of world art...

...As a novelist and essayist he was fascinated by Victor Hugo, François-René de Chateaubriand and Maurice Barrés, and he was a passionate communicator of the art of many civilizations, continents and ages...

...In addition, he was intrigued by great men—Charles de Gaulle, Mao Zedong, Jawaharlal Nehru, Leon Trotsky—and even more by the elevation of himself into a peerless genius...

...In almost dizzying detail he deals with Malraux' expedition to Cambodia in the 1920s that got him into trouble for the theft of fragments hacked away from a temple...

...Just as the young de Gaulle, so to speak, anticipated himself in The Edge of the Sword, Malraux' embrace of de Gaulle was the logical outcome of his enthusiasm for great adventurers and causes...

...Here he focuses on an author who also would have liked to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never was—prompting Camus, at the time he received it in 1957, to say it should have gone to André Malraux...

...In those books, he had his characters act out all the themes of what would become the literature of existentialism: the need to turn death into destiny, to defy death, derision and banality, and the difficulty of communication among human beings.This questfor giving a meaning to one's life through extraordinary deeds explains, at least in part, his effort to transcend the ordinary even through lies, as well as his search for engagements in causes and in art...

...Nevertheless, this is not a satisfying book...

...It is this aspect of Malraux that Todd does not sufficiently convey, despite all his labors...

...I have never felt so strongly that I was in the presence of a genius: no small talk, no pretenses, a dazzling monologue on African art, and—when we got around to talking about de Gaulle and Malraux' relation to him, which was the purpose of our visit—a wonderful mix of insights, wit, affection, admiration, and some marvelous replies to critics of Felled Oaks, his book on de Gaulle...