A self-made hero to the left

Screenwriter Philip Dunne, a member of the Hollywood left , said that when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, “all of a sudden people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux, who were gods, came to Hollywood.”

Malraux came in 1937, to lecture on Spain -- a “god,” or certainly a hero, to the international left since 1933, when “Man’s Fate,” his novel on the Chinese revolution, was published. He wrote that year to Edmund Wilson that he had been “Kuomintang commissar first in Indochina, then in Canton.” Haakon M. Chevalier, who translated the novel, introduced the American edition in 1934 by calling Malraux “for the first time ... a writer in whom the revolutionary and the artist are one.”

Chevalier described Malraux as “Commissioner of Propaganda for the [Chinese] revolutionary government of the South ... member of the Committee of Twelve.” He wrote that Malraux had been “active in the Canton insurrection and participated in hand-to-hand fighting.... Andre Malraux has lived through -- participated in -- the events of which he writes, and has understood them; and he has recorded them with superb mastery.”

All of which was nonsense. Malraux had never been to Canton, had absolutely nothing to do with the revolution and never was involved in hand-to-hand fighting.

He and his wife, Clara, financially embarrassed young Parisian intellectuals, had gone to French Indochina in 1923 to steal unguarded statuary from a Cambodian archeological site, which they expected to sell in the United States. They were arrested. She was allowed to return to Paris; he was held in Saigon and eventually given a one-year suspended sentence.

In 1925, they returned to Saigon to launch a newspaper that mixed scandal with provocative criticism of eminent figures in the French community and the colonial administration itself (to which it nonetheless offered no challenge). The paper did not prosper and had predictable and eventually terminal troubles with the authorities. It obtained some help from Chinese sources in Saigon’s sister city, Cholon, connected with the Kuomintang national revolutionaries in China. Malraux and his wife returned to France at the end of 1925.

Out of these Asian experiences he drew four intelligent books -- “The Temptation of the West” (1926), “The Conquerors” (1928), “The Royal Way” (1930) and “Man’s Fate,” which made his international reputation.

He floated -- with sensational success -- the notion that the book was an autobiography, modestly presented as fiction. He was thereafter considered the Byron of his age, the adventurer-poet, the artist-revolutionary, model for thousands of romantic young men (and women) determined to become heroes of the people.

One of those who three decades later followed in Malraux’s presumed steps, the young French writer Regis Debray, spent three years in a Bolivian prison after attempting to join Che Guevara’s doomed effort to provoke a popular uprising in that country. At the time of Malraux’s death in 1976, Debray wrote that he declined “the excessive honor” of being thought a heritor of Malraux, or even “one of Malraux’s victims.... I was one of his conquests. I admire his victory but I do not respect it.”

He went on: Malraux “never asked if an idea was right or not, but whether it had an effect.... Malraux was the first to understand that the lie no longer exists in the twentieth century, any more than truth does. He was the first to sacrifice the idea to the image.... Malraux’s innovation of genius in the 1920s was to introduce the techniques of advertising into the kingdom of belles-lettres. He knew before we did that legend is more important than what is read.”

Malraux was undoubtedly the most important and extravagant literary fake of modern times. He was obsessed with Lawrence of Arabia (whom he falsely claimed to have known) and presented himself as Lawrence’s successor, a liberator of colonial peoples in Asia. He skillfully exploited the international temper of the 1930s, becoming a fellow traveler of the Communist Party (but never a slavish one -- a luxury his celebrity allowed him).

He never became a member, but he was careful not to become one of the party’s enemies. When he was working for the Gallimard publishing house, he was offered Boris Souvarine’s hostile biography of Stalin and turned it down, according to Souvarine’s account, saying: “Your book is true, but is your side going to win?” Trotsky bitterly called him “a Stalinist agent.”

In the late 1930s, Malraux observed that the times were pressing him to live according to his reputation. He had invented himself as a hero and was therefore called on to become one. When the war in Spain broke out, he immediately grasped that the republican government would need aircraft, as much of the Spanish air force had defected to the Franco-led military revolt.

France’s Popular Front government, while nominally respecting the nonintervention pact signed in August 1936, was letting planes be delivered to the Madrid government under various subterfuges. With a little help from French intelligence, Malraux rallied a group of volunteer and mercenary pilots and technicians to go to Spain to fly the planes against Franco. He accepted a lieutenant colonel’s commission from the Spanish government and commanded the squadron with great success, even though he had never been a flier or seen military service. He went on raids, which he was not obliged to do, and handled with impressive skill and intuitive leadership a mixed crowd of idealists and hard men.

In 1944, he was to display this ability again. Manipulating his celebrity, and despite the fact that he had no role in the French Resistance until after the Allied landings (and a minor one then), he bluffed his way into command of a brigade being formed out of Resistance units to serve as infantry with the 1st French Army on the front in Alsace-Lorraine.

As in Spain, Malraux left tactical decisions to the brigade’s professionals, while handling the men with skill and intelligence. The brigade was part of the successful French defense of Strasbourg against a December 1944 German counterattack (Eisenhower had ordered the city evacuated as part of a general shortening of lines, an order French leader Charles De Gaulle countermanded). The brigade crossed the Rhine and in March was absorbed into the French army.

Malraux returned to Paris in January, in time to make a decisive intervention against a Communist bid to merge the different factions of the French Resistance into a single organization, which the Communists expected to dominate. It was his public break with the party. In military uniform, he impatiently told the meeting that alliance was one thing, but that the Communist proposal (the usual nominally equal leadership disguising actual Communist control) was burglary.

Malraux was a fake, but not merely a fake. He was genuinely brilliant, courageous, seductive, devoted to art, determined from adolescence to become a great writer and a great man, or if not a great man, the servant of a great man. He was never a great writer, but he was an immensely interesting one.

At first, his great man was Lawrence, and the link imaginary. Then he met De Gaulle, an experience he described as “coming up against a total personality.” He threw himself into the organization of De Gaulle’s first political movement. He was with De Gaulle again in 1958, when the general returned to power during the Algerian crisis, and he eventually became his minister of culture.

The attachment to De Gaulle was real and, it seems, reciprocal. Some argued that De Gaulle kept Malraux around for his political intuition, his publicity talents and “because he amused him.” In his memoirs, De Gaulle said ambiguously, “[T]he presence at my side of this genius friend, this devotee of higher destinies, makes me feel that I am shielded from the commonplace.” To De Gaulle, Malraux wrote: “To have had the honor to assist you has been the pride of my life -- and more, in the face of the abyss.”

Olivier Todd is a distinguished journalist and novelist, previously the biographer of Albert Camus (among others). This volume, published in France in 2001 to justified acclaim, uses much previously unpublished information on Malraux’s life and political and literary engagements -- not always simple to examine, given his chronic lies and mythmaking. The translation by Joseph West can be criticized for some jarring colloquialisms and annoying shifts from past to historical present tenses, but as Todd is bilingual, this presumably is what he wants. The book is indispensable to anyone who wishes not only to understand so complex, perverse and brilliant a man as Malraux but also the mark he made on the political and literary imagination of his times, and indeed of our own. *