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Letter
to Quadrant (Published July/August
issue, 2007)
SIR: It was very
pleasing to
discover that the May issue of Quadrant included an
article on André
Malraux, a major twentieth century writer who receives far less
attention in
the English-speaking world than he merits. It
was regrettable, however, that the author of the
article, Patricia
Anderson, saw fit to rely so heavily on Olivier Todd’s recent biography
(Malraux: A Life), a work that has done
little more than add to the already enormous pile of myth and
misinformation
surrounding Malraux’s life.
Biographies
of Malraux – of which there are
now several – should perhaps carry a warning for the unsuspecting
reader. Malraux
bore very little resemblance to the stereotype French intellectual who
rarely
ventures out of his Left Bank
café or the calm
of his study. He was a participant
in
some of the major historical events of his times, and, not
surprisingly, acquired
determined political adversaries as well as strong supporters.
As a result, much that has been written about
him, especially by his adversaries, shows scant regard for objectivity
or factual
accuracy, leaving the biographer with an information source in which
truth,
half-truth, and mere fantasy are often inextricably intertwined.
Added to this problem is that blight of so
many biographies – the tall poppy syndrome. This
so-called ‘great man’, the biographer reasons (with
an eye to the
market), must surely have the odd skeleton
in his cupboard. Let’s rummage
around
until
we find some – and if there don’t seem to be enough, well, a little
authorial
licence is surely no bad thing… Finally – and happily for our
biographer – Malraux
can seldom be called as a witness in his own defence.
Rejecting
the
nineteenth century obsession
with the individual self, he kept no journal, wrote no autobiography
(his Antimemoirs are, as the name suggests, quite
unlike memoirs), and seldom even paused to respond to the various wild
accusations
levelled at him by sundry detractors anxious to score a point.
The
result of all this, the unsuspecting
reader needs to know, is that it is often very difficult to separate
fact from fiction
in accounts of Malraux’s life – a state of affairs for which,
ironically
enough, he himself is often blamed – critics accusing him of
peddling a fabricated ‘Malraux myth’ and crowing triumphantly
when they discover that aspects of it are not true.
The
principal
facts of his amazingly eventful
life – his commitment to the anti-Fascist Popular Front in the 1930s,
his
involvement with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, his service
with the
French army in World War II, his participation in the Resistance and
arrest by
the Gestapo, and his work as a Minister in de Gaulle’s governments,
most
importantly as a very active Minister for Cultural Affairs – are not in
doubt. But there is much about his
life,
especially his private life (often the biographer’s preferred hunting
ground) that
is uncertain and debatable, and quite possibly likely to remain so.
Todd’s biography – which even Patricia
Anderson
concedes ‘can be tiresomely speculative’ – makes little effort to
distinguish
between fact and conjecture and has, if anything, amplified the
confusion
between
the two. Anderson’s
willingness
simply
to
repeat Todd’s version, despite her apparent misgivings, is a good
illustration
of how the various forms of the Malraux myth have come into being:
repeated
often enough, speculation and innuendo simply end up being treated as
fact.
More
regrettable
than
any
of this, however,
is the tendency of books such as Todd’s to distract attention from what
is much
more important about Malraux – his works themselves.
Anderson
claims they are ‘incomprehensible’, but this is often the complaint of
the
reader who is unwilling to approach an author with the care and
thoughtfulness
he or she deserves; and, in any case, placed beside a Derrida, a Lacan,
or a
Levinas, for example, Malraux’s writing is lucidity itself.
The hallmark of Malraux’s works – the novels,
the ‘antimemoirs’ and the volumes on visual art – is not obscurity but
uncompromising
honesty and startling originality. Malraux
has taken a long, hard look at modern Western
civilization and has
seen how little now remains of once-cherished ideals such as progress,
reason, science,
democracy, and visions of world peace. ‘We
now know’, he writes in The Voices of
Silence, ‘that peace in our time is as vulnerable as it ever
was;
that
democracy can usher in capitalism and totalitarian policies; that
progress and science
also mean the atom bomb; and that reason alone does not provide a full
account
of man.’ Malraux’s response to
this,
nevertheless,
is not self-pitying despair but an unremitting search for something
in man that can, despite the collapse of ideals, enable
him to rise above the satanic urge simply to destroy and humiliate.
His search results in the powerful images of
struggle and human dignity found in novels such as La
Condition Humaine (Man’s Estate), and in the fascinating
account
of visual art in The Voices of Silence
and The Metamorphosis of the Gods, in
which Malraux leads us to see art as, fundamentally, a ‘humanisation’
of the
world, a ‘revolt against man’s fate’.
All
this is strong
medicine – too strong
apparently for Anderson,
and also for Pierre Ryckmans (whom Anderson
quotes) who impatiently dismisses Malraux as a ‘phony’. Malraux
requires
a reader who will not take fright at the first sign of a new
idea, or of challenges to comfortable, familiar dogmas. For a reader of
this
stamp, prepared to approach his works with an open and attentive mind,
his works
can be immensely rewarding – far more so than any account of his life
could
ever be, and certainly one as unreliable as that provided by Olivier
Todd and Patricia
Anderson.
Derek Allan
Australian National
University
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This
is a letter to the
editor published in the
Australian monthly Quadrant. It was in response to
an article
concerning
Malraux in their
May 2007 issue. It expands on some of the points in my
earlier
letter on a similar subject to the Higher Education Chronicle.
'Olivier Todd’s recent biography
(Malraux: A Life) ... has done
little more than add to the already enormous pile of myth and
misinformation
surrounding Malraux’s life.'
'Anderson's
willingness to repeat Todd’s version, despite her apparent misgivings,
is a good
illustration
of how the various forms of the Malraux myth have come into being:
repeated
often enough, speculation and innuendo simply end up being treated as
fact.'
'...
the tendency
of books such as Todd’s to distract attention from what
is much
more important about Malraux – his works themselves.'
'Malraux
requires a reader who will not take
fright at the first sign of a new idea, or of challenges to
comfortable,
familiar dogmas.'
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