What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  With France mobilised in 1940 he signed up as a private in a tank regiment. The career of T.E. Lawrence had fascinated him for years and critics have seen a conscious imitation of Aircraftsman Shaw. Malraux was captured by the Germans but escaped to the Free Zone and spent the early war writing; only to reappear in 1944 as a stylish maquisard with the pseudonym of Colonel Berger. Fighting in the red sandstone hills of the Corrèze, the old internationalist became a patriot. He fell into an ambush, and was wounded and captured by the Germans as he drew their fire from his English Resistance colleagues. For this he received the DSO. The Gestapo hauled him before a firing squad but did not fire, reserving him for interrogation. The same thing, he is proud to say, happened to Dostoyevsky. At the end of the war he resurfaced as commander of the quixotic Alsace-Lorraine Brigade under General de Lattre de Tassigny, and helped prevent a Nazi reoccupation of Strasbourg.

  Malraux’s rediscovery of France prepared the intellectual ground for his friendship with General de Gaulle. One rumour has it that, on meeting Malraux in 1945, the General said: ‘At last I have seen a man!’ Malraux became Minister of Information in the first post-war government. He masterminded the nationalistic propaganda of de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français in 1946-47. After 1958 he was Minister for Cultural Affairs, when he had Paris scrubbed clean, and made his celebrated visits to Kennedy, Nasser, Nehru and Mao Tse-tung. His alliance with the General astonished all opinions, Right and Left, and probably themselves. But the two had a great deal in common.

  Both were intellectuals and adventurers with a taste for military glory, even if Malraux’s was on a small scale. They were fascinated by the exercise of power and by the role of the archetypal hero who saves his country; both also shared the idea of national renewal through catastrophe. They delighted in the French language; hyperbole was their natural form- of expression. They were estranged from the values of their class, and despised politicians and industrialists. Without attempting to enter their world, they sympathised with the plight of workers trapped by twentieth-century machine civilisation. But they saw through the simple-mindedness of exaggerating the class struggle at the expense of national unity, believing that social justice is best obtained in a nation that knows its own ground. Malraux once asked Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘The proletariat? What is the proletariat?’

  They knew as fact that nations will usually act nationalistically and were unimpressed by specious internationalism. They were alive to the dangers of Stalin well before Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri. Malraux scorned the ‘extreme masochism of the Left’ and said he saw no point in becoming more Russian and less French. The Rassemblement aimed at attracting the poor because the poor were patriots. But de Gaulle’s and Malraux’s appeals to French grandeur went straight over the workers’ heads. Instead it was the grande petite bourgeoisie, often for venal reasons, who flocked to the Gaullist cause and gave the movement its self-contradictory character. Malraux remained precariously on the Left of the Gaullist Party and often felt compromised by it. But the General always valued his ‘flashing imagination’ and was at least partly conditioned by him to the idea of decolonisation.

  What makes Malraux a great figure is not necessarily his verbal performance or his writings. His life is the masterpiece. He has lived out the fears and hopes of the West in the twentieth century and has survived. He advances a prophetic insight, that Man (alone, now that the gods have gone) will outlive the threat of his extinction; and that great men, with all their faults, will continue to exist.

  This said, one must confess to difficulties. Malraux inhabits the Mythical Present. He deliberately confuses the event with the archetypal situation. Alexander the Great, Saint-Just, Dostoyevsky, Michelangelo or Nietzsche are his intellectual companions and he moves among them on familiar terms. Legendary figures take substance; works of art come alive; modern people dissolve into myth. Mao Tse-tung, ‘the great bronze emperor’ of the Antimémoires, is somehow interchangeable with the gleaming statue of an ancient Mesopotamian priest-king. Nor does Malraux believe in false modesty. He opens his memoir of de Gaulle, Les Chênes qu’on Abat (Fallen Oaks), with the observation that creative geniuses (such as himself) have never left records of their conversations with men of History – Voltaire with Frederick the Great or Michelangelo with Pope Julius II – and leaves the impression that, whereas the great man belongs to History, the great artist belongs to Eternity.

  Then there is the problem of style. His presence mesmerises his listeners. They feel physically charged by his voice as it alternates from staccato outbursts to slushy whispers; then they find themselves flailing for sense. He taxes his reader’s intelligence to the limit. Images sensations, exhortations, philosophic reflections and startling analogies are telescoped one over the other. Glittering insights are followed, as if in repentance, by ponderous explanations which do not really explain. The ‘difficulties’ of Malraux once drew from Cocteau the wicked quip: ‘Have you ever heard of a human reading La Condition Humaine?’ In translation the writing suffers a seachange. The highly-charged rhetoric, which is glorious in French, is unacceptable in English.

  Malraux’s breathless career has left lesser spirits far behind – and irritated. French literary circles have poured their energies into exposing its contradictions, but there remains a dimension which eludes them. Experts greeted his writings on the philosophy of art as amateurish, even if as astute a critic as Edmund Wilson valued them among the great books of the century. One art historian, Georges Duthuit, excelled himself by refuting Malraux’s The Imaginary Museum with his own three-volume work, The Unimaginable Museum. Without daring to call him a coward, Sartre dismisses Malraux’s exploits in Spain as ‘heroic parasitism’.

  His private life is not for dissection. It is scarred by the suicide of a father, and a wife, two brothers and two sons killed. Yet he arouses suspicion that he has bottled up unpleasant secrets. His divorced first wife Clara took it upon herself to lay him bare as a fantast, but the effect of her memoirs is so infuriating that they increase him and diminish her. The fact is that men of action have a habit of consigning past loves and indiscretions to oblivion in the hope of better things to come. Malraux has a formidable memory, but he updates his recollection of the past to conform with his view of the present. By temperament he was never a note-taker or diarist, as his autobiography Antimémoires proves.

  Malraux is alone. He can have no followers. He never allowed himself the luxury of a final political or religious creed, and is too restless for the discipline of academic life. He is unclassifiable, which in a world of -isms and-ologies is also unforgivable. His knowledge advances on a global front. The technique is that of the intellectual guerrilla. When the going is clear, he blinds his opponent with brilliance and detonates charges under his nose. Confronted by superior opinion, he gives ground, but, gliding off at an oblique angle, lures him into the marsh of semi-ignorance before the final attack. One threat he holds over his detractors; he may at any minute agree with them.

  I first met Malraux two years ago at the house of his American friends Clement and Jessie Wood. At one point in the conversation he turned his green eyes on me and said: ‘And Genghis Khan? How would you have stopped him?’ Silence. Recently I had the opportunity of spending an afternoon with him and asked if he would talk about Britain; about General de Gaulle’s attitude to Britain; and about the mental blockage between Britain and France.

  We met at Verrières-les-Buissons, the family house of the Vilmorins, who are the great horticulturalists of France. Louise de Vilmorin was his companion for the last three years of her life. Her salon overlooks a planting of rare conifers, blue-grey and dark green in the winter light, with a cluster of white birch trunks gleaming beyond. Among her sofas and chairs, covered in blue and white cotton, and the Chinese porcelain stools and the animals of gilt, lacquer and pearlshell, Malraux has spread his own territory, scattering his sculptures and paintings round the room. Then there are his drawings of cats,
the cats he used to doodle through the long speeches of Gaullist ministers in session.

  Malraux was wearing a light brown jacket with lapels like butterfly wings. He never relaxes in conversation, but strains forward on the edge of his chair. He listens to questions with intense concentration, sometimes resting his forefingers vertically on his cheekbones, before bursting into words and gestures. From under the melancholic mask he occasionally allows a glimpse of his highly developed sense of the ridiculous.

  ‘First,’ he replied to my preamble, ‘what I think about England is far from what most of the French think. They are mostly anti-English and I am extremely pro-English.

  ‘And I will tell you why. Our whole civilisation is threatened by its most serious crisis since the fall of Rome. As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man. You know as well as I do that psychoanalysis has never made a man. And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity. England, to my eyes, is about the last country to have une grande création de l’homme.’

  I almost interrupted. It was the first week in January. From across the Channel the English, far from creating anyone, seemed intent on ripping each other apart.

  ‘There have been two countries, and astonishingly, two only, which have coined a word to designate the exemplary man. Attention! I am not speaking of the aristocrat. You have the Spanish caballero and the English gentleman; and England and Spain are both colonial countries. Since then there has been one other exemplary type - the Bolshevik. It doesn’t matter if it was true; the important fact is that the archetype occupies the collective conscience of the nation. The only country that did it better before you was Rome. Rome created a type of man to hold the world in check for five centuries. After him came the knight, but the knight was never a national figure, whereas the Englishman was English and the Roman was Roman. From Rome to England there were no nationalists. There were remarkable men, but they were never nationalists. And that to my mind is the capital importance of England.

  ‘A thing I find tiresome about the French is that their view of England is extremely Victorian. I do not think of England as necessarily Victorian or necessarily Imperialist. But the England of Drake is (is not was) a very great country. In her greatest moment she had no empire.

  ‘And when you ask me what I think of England, I’ll say you have one great problem . . . ’

  The voice assumed a tone of exhortation. His problems are always moral problems; believing that if moral problems are set right, economic ones look after themselves.

  ‘The essential problem is: Will England find a way to recreate the English type? A new incarnation it will have to be, because the Victorian gentleman had nothing to do with the gentleman of Drake. The English character was strong enough; all the same it varied with the centuries. Will you rediscover yourselves?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘you’re suggesting we revert to type. At heart we are an island of buccaneers and pirates.’

  'Et joyeux! Tell me,’ he said, smiling, ‘when did the English stop talking about Merry England?’

  We could not decide. Chaucer, we said, was real Merry England. Drake was still Merry England. But the Puritans were melancholic, not merry. And Merry England certainly didn’t survive the Industrial Revolution.

  The next topic was the British Empire; how it was an aberrant episode in our history; and how we may even have borrowed the idea of Imperialism from the Indian Empire of the Moguls.

  ‘You must not run down the Mogul Empire,’ he said and then rapidly outlined how Akbar the Great was the first Muslim ruler to break the Islamic anathema and encourage portraits of himself (because any likeness must show the essential beauty of the soul); how this potent symbol proved him a universalist in the manner of the French Revolution; how, therefore, like Napoleon he was, and how unlike Queen Victoria; and how this explained why the Muslims made a great civilisation in India and the British never did, comparing the Mogul cities like Agra, Delhi and Lahore with the Anglo-Indian Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, which he described as ‘transplanted British building suffocated by bidonvilles’.

  I asked him about T.E. Lawrence. In Lawrence’s career and personality Malraux seems to have recognised elements that coincided with his own. He once nearly completed a biography of Lawrence, Le Défi de l’Absolu, but the war prevented its publication.

  ‘I was interested in the questions his life proposed. I was never exactly influenced by Lawrence. Because if you put Lawrence into modern dress, what was he? Technically, a resistance fighter parachuted into Arabia. Just as you parachuted English officers into France in the last war and we fought along with them, so the War Department in Cairo parachuted officers into the desert. There were no aeroplanes, but technically it was the same thing.

  ‘No, the person who interests me is the Lawrence who raises the fundamental question, the meaning of life itself. Before him there were any number of great spirits who questioned life, but always in the name of some superior power . . . like the Crusader who put his life in the hands of Christ. But the case of Lawrence is unique. Here was a man who questioned life, but did not know in what name he questioned life. And he was not ashamed by it. Lawrence, en grandiose, c’est mai ’68.’

  Malraux once described Lawrence as the ‘first liberal hero of the West’, seeing in him the prophet of decolonisation. In retrospect he believes the most significant fact of the century to be Britain’s abandonment of India and one of its most courageous acts the Labour Government’s decision to leave in 1947. Once British India, ‘a symbol of immense importance’, had gone, any idea of Algérie Française was stillborn. Lawrence was ‘an astonishing prophet in the historical perspective’, defending what Britain did 30 years later, and an extremely poor prophet of realpolitik in that he did not see that the future ruler of Arabia was Ibn Saud.

  I turned the discussion to de Gaulle. Rumour has it that Malraux lost his interest in Lawrence once he had discovered the General. Most Englishmen, I had explained, disliked de Gaulle. They saw in him a relentless Anglophobe. We had sheltered him in the war; Churchill had in fact made his career and later he showed nothing but ingratitude. (De Gaulle, as French Under-Secretary for Defence, flew to London on 17 June, 1940. Legally he had mutinied. The next day he made his famous broadcast over the BBC. In London he moved rather diffidently at first, even writing to General Weygand, the French Commander-in-Chief, inviting him to England to lead the Free French.) Did he, on meeting Churchill, I asked, see the possibility of becoming de Gaulle as he later was? Did he lose his modesty in the face of Churchill?

  ‘I believe it. I believe it. But take care! You are surely right. On condition that you are not too right. He will not have said to himself the evening of his meeting with Churchill: “Now it is I.” I don’t think that at all. I think it was . . . like the sun’s curve. At first he will have said to himself: “Perhaps it is unnecessary to call Weygand?” And then he will have said: “If there were no Weygand?” And then: “That is just as well. Sir Churchill is a great statesman and one can have confidence in him. If Weygand comes he will only make intrigues.” And in the end he thought exactly as you say. Remember to put a fog over the affair. Because it cannot have been clear to him at the beginning however much it became clear later.’

  Was there, I persisted, a real meeting of minds? They were, after all, both outsiders. Could this be the reason that both chose to incarnate the soul of their country?

  He deflected this one by suggesting I put in my portrait of de Gaulle something which was rarely discussed, the General’s ambivalence. ‘When one speaks of de Gaulle’s admiration for England it is true. When one speaks of his hostility and irritation it is true. But the real truth lies between the two. You must not forget the man’s age. When de Gaulle was twenty the British Empire was the greatest reality in the world. It was not a question of sympathy
. America was of small consequence. As a young officer in the First War, he thought, as did everyone else, the moment England enters the war, Germany will be lost. Now, when he arrived in London in 1940, he well knew that British power was not what it was, but he continued to have the impression of its power. So when Churchill said to him, “Between Roosevelt and you, I will always choose Roosevelt” (Roosevelt constantly tried to get rid of de Gaulle), everyone thought he was furious because that meant: “I will not choose you.” It was not that at all. He was stupefied! Because for the first time he heard the voice of England saying: “I am no longer the first power in the world.” And from that moment England meant something quite different to him.’

  De Gaulle once wrote: ‘When all is said England is an island; France the cape of a continent; America another world.’ Was his refusal to let Britain into the Common Market his oblique way of protecting us from the continental adventures we so little understand? ‘It was not so pure,’ Malraux said.

  ‘It was his excessively strong feeling of England’s destiny, [The French destin seems to be stronger than the English, and implies ‘historical fate’.] England’s destiny was not the Common Market. He used to say: “If England enters the Common Market, England will be lost. And if England is lost, it is not attractive for us, Continentals, to have her in the Common Market.” For the General, you must remember, was passionately concerned with destiny.

  ‘There was a man who arrived in his little plane and became one of the most important men in Europe. If he didn’t believe in destiny, who could? He found an England, pressed to the point of extinction, but rescued in inventing Churchill, who pulled her out of Hell to save her. For him there was an English destiny and a French destiny and any reasonable French policy was to be founded on the British destiny, as he, de Gaulle, conceived it. He wanted to spare England and the Common Market. He wanted a parallel England, but with guarantees she did not become an American agent. [This may refer to de Gaulle’s objection that Britain had access to American technology whereas France did not.] But he did not want to block the British.’