Matters of life and death
Malraux: A Life, by Olivier Todd (Knopf, 560 pp., $35)
FEW men live the sort of life they imagine for themselves in the boldest daydreams of youth. Andre Malraux (1901-1976) was one of the few. Swashbuckling was his primary vocation; shouldering his way into the world’s most perilous corners, loving the test of nerve, loving even more the general adulation for his feats of daring, he seemed to spend his days swinging from chandeliers with rapier in hand, after the Douglas Fairbanks manner. And of course he wrote, often about himself and men like him, the intimate companions of violent death. As one learns from Olivier Todd’s fascinating biography, he was fond of quoting Napoleon’s proclamation, “My life is quite a novel.” One of Malraux’s two best novels, Todd concludes, was “his own staggering, rollicking life.”
Most writers, and especially French writers, scorn the bourgeois life, defined since Rousseau’s famous sneer by its fear of violent death and its devotion to selfish pleasures of small consequence. Malraux despised it with particular ferocity. The son of an improvident businessman who skipped out on his family when Andre was an infant, the young Malraux could not bear the tedious drill of school, and ended his formal education at 16. Victor Hugo, a paragon of demonic energy who lived as ardently as he wrote, became Malraux’s model of artistic and political nobility. They were indeed similar, writes Todd: “So many lives in one, so many talents in one man.” Malraux tried this and that in the hopes of striking it rich. He earned a living as a rare-book dealer, wrote criticism for little magazines, published expensive editions of highbrow pornography. Fabulous schemes beguiled him. He sank his young wife’s fortune, almost a million dollars in today’s money, into Mexican mining shares, and lost the bundle.
A steady job was unthinkable, but plunder always remains a viable option for the venturesome. At 23, Malraux took his wife, Clara, on an expedition to the Cambodian jungle, where they excised some beautiful stone carvings from an ancient Khmer temple, with an eye toward selling them in America. The colonial authorities nabbed the couple, and sentenced Malraux to three years in prison. The faithful Clara enlisted the aid of prominent French literary men, who petitioned that the judiciary show leniency to a young man who one day would surely increase “the intellectual wealth of our country.” No imperial functionary longing for Paris could resist the importunities of Andre Gide and Francois Mauriac, and Malraux’s sentence was suspended. Before long he was back in Indochina as editor of a newspaper that derided the French civilizing mission and pressed for liberation of Annam (a region in today’s Vietnam). That particular anti-imperialist fantasy dissipated after a year or so, but the afterglow would last a lifetime.