by Mark Falcoff
What makes a writer important when people have ceased to read him?
Even today, when the French language is deeply embattled in its former strongholds in Latin America and Asia, French civilization remains throughout the world the only pole of attraction capable of rivaling that of the United States.
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Even today, when the French language is deeply embattled in its former strongholds in Latin America and Asia, French civilization remains throughout the world the only pole of attraction capable of rivaling that of the United States.
....
The capacity of French literary politics to exercise a continuing hold on the foreign imagination is perhaps best illustrated by the enduring eminence of André Malraux, who died more than fifteen years ago. Though somewhat passé in France, Malraux continues to inspire something of an industry in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
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Typically Malraux’s biographers have tried to finesse the jagged edges of his career—to find a coherent pattern of ideals where there was often only opportunism and self-seeking. Try as they might, they cannot deny that Malraux was by turns vain and selfish, greedy and childish, arrogant and snobbish, self-indulgent and ruthless. But they are not wrong to insist that he was much more than this. To start with, he was an extraordinarily gifted writer, capable of bringing new themes and techniques to the French novel. He was, for example, the first major writer of fiction to borrow techniques from the cinema—the jump-cut, the flashback, the wipe; he was also the first writer ever to treat air combat in epic style. He had a marvelous eye for detail, and a great sense of history: the settings of his novels—particularly in the Far East and in Spain—were “big stories,” not merely in France but throughout the world.
In matters personal, Malraux could display enormous personal courage and self-effacement when the situation demanded it. Evidently he possessed a remarkable capacity to lead men in dangerous and difficult situations. Having never flown a plane, he became head of a small air force in Spain—and successfully so. He commanded as the equivalent of a brigadier in the Resistance, having never risen above the rank of private in the French army. For all his later megalomania, as a Resistance commander Malraux refused to wear his insignia of rank or to claim any special privileges for himself; he was always willing to put himself at equal risk to his men. His personal charisma, so evident on the platform and on the battlefield, apparently carried over into ministerial suites as well: almost singlehandedly he convinced the French government to sell arms to Spain at a time when public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of what passed for “non-intervention.”
He was also one of the first postwar European intellectuals to make anti-Communism respectable, partly because as a one-time fellow-traveler (and a distinguished one at that) he could speak with particular authority. But also because he made a forceful case that—contrary to what the traditional Right in France imagined and feared—Stalinism in power meant not the empowerment of the working class but its degradation. The early Malraux had told audiences that Communism was the hope of the future; the latter Malraux announced his discovery that it was nothing but a vast historic swindle. It is true—as leftist critics have not been slow to point out—that the shift in ideological gears eventually led to a comfortable place for Malraux at the sumptuous table of triumphant Gaullism, but not immediately or inevitably so: after 1946 de Gaulle’s return to power was by no means foreordained. In fact, by throwing in his lot with the rpf Malraux drastically reduced his hold on what had once mattered to him most—Parisian literary fashion.
And it was precisely Malraux’s evolution toward the Right that undermined his place in French letters, since during the Forties and Fifties the Communist Party possessed a remarkably strong influence on French education, or rather, on educators who staffed the lycées in Paris and the provinces and contributed to the major literary journals. (The influence of Sartre and his infamous circle hardly needs to be commented upon.) Paradoxically, when the Party (and cultural philo-Communism) declined in the mid-Seventies, Malraux’s stature plummeted still further: this time from a lack of interest in the heroic themes (class struggle, colonial liberation, international solidarity, etc.) to which he dedicated so much of his novelistic work. To put it bluntly, today we know a bit too much about how things turned out in Cambodia or China (or how they might well have turned out in Spain) to be greatly moved by revolutionary tales of the Twenties and Thirties. Moreover, a novelist of “commitment” has little to say to an age of increasing ideological disbelief—which, given what “commitment” led to in so many countries, is probably just as well.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Malraux’s career is how early he peaked as a novelist—really, after Man’s Fate there was very little in the way of fiction. Most of his subsequent books were either art criticism or semi-novelized autobiography—and we are talking here about virtually forty years, which is to say, nearly three-quarters of Malraux’s active career. Herein lies, I think, the key to his continuing international renown: Malraux was one of the first of Western writers to become a literary superstar, to enjoy fame, honors, even power as much or more for who he was (how he lived, with whom he lived, and what he had done when he was not writing), as for what he had actually written. His appeal to Western (and non-Western) intellectuals consisted precisely in the fact that as a writer he had succeeded in casting himself in a heroic historical role. He therefore represents the victory par excellence of the intellectual over alienation and powerlessness—and in a country where the fruits of power are particularly sweet.
Of course, today neither in France nor elsewhere are intellectual superstars much in evidence; the closest contemporary equivalent is the former president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel, and he is the product of a specific set of circumstances unlikely to repeat themselves. Contemporary biographies of Malraux are heavily pervaded by a period feeling—reading them is rather like leafing through the rotogravure sections of prewar newspapers, printed in rust-colored inks with sepia half-tones. One recognizes the world and the people in it, and can find the interaction between the two at times interesting and even occasionally inspiring. But the story itself belongs to a different age of faith, and possesses for us little more than anecdotal or antiquarian interest.
Mark Falcoff is a writer and translator living in Munich.
In matters personal, Malraux could display enormous personal courage and self-effacement when the situation demanded it. Evidently he possessed a remarkable capacity to lead men in dangerous and difficult situations. Having never flown a plane, he became head of a small air force in Spain—and successfully so. He commanded as the equivalent of a brigadier in the Resistance, having never risen above the rank of private in the French army. For all his later megalomania, as a Resistance commander Malraux refused to wear his insignia of rank or to claim any special privileges for himself; he was always willing to put himself at equal risk to his men. His personal charisma, so evident on the platform and on the battlefield, apparently carried over into ministerial suites as well: almost singlehandedly he convinced the French government to sell arms to Spain at a time when public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of what passed for “non-intervention.”
He was also one of the first postwar European intellectuals to make anti-Communism respectable, partly because as a one-time fellow-traveler (and a distinguished one at that) he could speak with particular authority. But also because he made a forceful case that—contrary to what the traditional Right in France imagined and feared—Stalinism in power meant not the empowerment of the working class but its degradation. The early Malraux had told audiences that Communism was the hope of the future; the latter Malraux announced his discovery that it was nothing but a vast historic swindle. It is true—as leftist critics have not been slow to point out—that the shift in ideological gears eventually led to a comfortable place for Malraux at the sumptuous table of triumphant Gaullism, but not immediately or inevitably so: after 1946 de Gaulle’s return to power was by no means foreordained. In fact, by throwing in his lot with the rpf Malraux drastically reduced his hold on what had once mattered to him most—Parisian literary fashion.
And it was precisely Malraux’s evolution toward the Right that undermined his place in French letters, since during the Forties and Fifties the Communist Party possessed a remarkably strong influence on French education, or rather, on educators who staffed the lycées in Paris and the provinces and contributed to the major literary journals. (The influence of Sartre and his infamous circle hardly needs to be commented upon.) Paradoxically, when the Party (and cultural philo-Communism) declined in the mid-Seventies, Malraux’s stature plummeted still further: this time from a lack of interest in the heroic themes (class struggle, colonial liberation, international solidarity, etc.) to which he dedicated so much of his novelistic work. To put it bluntly, today we know a bit too much about how things turned out in Cambodia or China (or how they might well have turned out in Spain) to be greatly moved by revolutionary tales of the Twenties and Thirties. Moreover, a novelist of “commitment” has little to say to an age of increasing ideological disbelief—which, given what “commitment” led to in so many countries, is probably just as well.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Malraux’s career is how early he peaked as a novelist—really, after Man’s Fate there was very little in the way of fiction. Most of his subsequent books were either art criticism or semi-novelized autobiography—and we are talking here about virtually forty years, which is to say, nearly three-quarters of Malraux’s active career. Herein lies, I think, the key to his continuing international renown: Malraux was one of the first of Western writers to become a literary superstar, to enjoy fame, honors, even power as much or more for who he was (how he lived, with whom he lived, and what he had done when he was not writing), as for what he had actually written. His appeal to Western (and non-Western) intellectuals consisted precisely in the fact that as a writer he had succeeded in casting himself in a heroic historical role. He therefore represents the victory par excellence of the intellectual over alienation and powerlessness—and in a country where the fruits of power are particularly sweet.
Of course, today neither in France nor elsewhere are intellectual superstars much in evidence; the closest contemporary equivalent is the former president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel, and he is the product of a specific set of circumstances unlikely to repeat themselves. Contemporary biographies of Malraux are heavily pervaded by a period feeling—reading them is rather like leafing through the rotogravure sections of prewar newspapers, printed in rust-colored inks with sepia half-tones. One recognizes the world and the people in it, and can find the interaction between the two at times interesting and even occasionally inspiring. But the story itself belongs to a different age of faith, and possesses for us little more than anecdotal or antiquarian interest.
Mark Falcoff is a writer and translator living in Munich.
Read more - Source: https://newcriterion.com/issues/1992/11/the-faithless-malraux
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