Man's Quest
(See Cover) During the Commune, a fellow who was arrested cried: "But I have never dabbled in politics." "Precisely." And his head was broken.
--Malraux's The Conquerors
On a hot July day in 1789, a swarm of sweaty, shouting men armed with muskets, staves and pikes, stormed the grim Bastille, prison of French kings. The triumphant revolutionists proudly drew up a Declaration of Rights "for all men, for all lands, for all times, and to give an example to the world." From that day, in the flood tide of the Enlightenment, France took to itself the role of custodian of liberty and torchbearer to mankind.
This week France celebrates Bastille Day once again, with a squeal of accordions in village squares, dancing in the streets, and a dazzle of fireworks over Paris. But in the Left Bank cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, gravitational center for France's intellectuals, there is an uncertain note in the gaiety. In the grave and troubled summer of 1955, France is unsure of itself and of its mission.
The Mandarins. Far more than in any other country, this mission has been fashioned neither by its statesmen nor its soldiers but by its intellectuals. In their time of greatness, they have made Europe an intellectual colony of France. For almost two centuries, France has acted as the conscience of Europe, its intellectuals the shapers of that troubled conscience.
French intellectuals have taken their responsibilities seriously, if not always solemnly. Voltaire was flogged for his impertinence and thrown into the Bastille itself for his political gibes. The philosophes of the Enlightenment freely claimed (and were freely granted) credit for fomenting the Revolution. Victor Hugo was peremptorily exiled for 20 years for his support of the 1848 Revolution. Franc,ois Rene de Chateaubriand, first proponent of Christian democracy, became Louis XVIII's Foreign Minister. Emile Zola rocked Europe with J'accuse, a defense of Dreyfus that was in fact an indictment of the established order.
Heir to this proud tradition, the intellectual in France today has the authority of a statesman or a guru. In the sidewalk cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, crew-cut young French students hotly dispute the exact degree of "despair" advocated by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre or his former disciple Albert Camus. Sometimes the great men themselves appear at the Cafe de Flore or the Deux Magots. When they do not, their movements, habits, tastes and idiosyncrasies are reported as if they were movie stars. By others, who call them "the mandarins." the French intellectuals may often be disregarded; but they are never ignored.
In the world's liveliest carnival of ideas, the mandarins dispute, propound and quarrel. Every week 380,000 Frenchmen buy the four intellectual weeklies that record their latest pronouncements. In regular newspapers, they often command more attention than politicians or priest Roman Catholic Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac, in Le Figaro, urges French youth to a more dynamic Christian socialism. Existentialist Merleau-Ponty attacks Sartre for his latter-day allegiance to Stalinism in L'Express, is answered by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Temps Modernes.
French intellectuals are appalled at the "bourgeois barbarism" that relegates U.S. intellectuals to the status of "eggheads." After a shuddering visit to the U.S., Simone (The Second Sex) de Beauvoir, complained: "The U.S. is hard on intellectuals. Publishers, managers evaluate your brains with a critical and disgusted air, like an impresario asking a dancer to show her legs."
Hope & Despair. For 300 years, the great dialogue in France has been between Faith and Reason, between Pascal, Bossuet and Chateaubriand on one hand, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau on the other. That dialogue animated the 27-year correspondence between Poet-Diplomat Paul Claudel, an unswerving Catholic who never doubted God, and Andre Gide. the backslid Protestant who never doubted the individual--a controversy generally conducted in scrupulously courteous and self-Centered letters, but frequently so agitated that one or the other broke off the correspondence. They ended by not speaking to each other.
In a France that professes to be 85% Catholic, the dialogue still goes on. The voice of Faith is still heard with respect.
But the giant lens of history has projected the battle of good and evil into the political form of a cold war. The battle for men's souls is being fought in public places. "Happiness can no longer be individual, like prayer," admitted Mauriac, and turned to his column.
In the intellectual world of Paris, which is both hothouse and hotbed, the Catholics are often admired as novelists in spite of their message. For the dominant mood of St. Germain-des-Pres is Doubt, not Faith.
The Age of Enlightenment, with its faith in man's essential goodness, had been an age of hope: man freed from his chains was to progress irresistibly toward a better and better world. In the ruins left by World War II and all it taught of the evil in man, the Men of Reason became the Men of Despair. Cried Camus: "Confronted by Hitler's terror, what values did we have that could comfort us and which we could oppose to his negation? None. What was happening was coming from man himself. We could not deny it. We saw it confirmed every day . . . The world in which we had to live was an absurd world, and there was nothing else, no space in which we could take refuge."
On the boulevards, the fashionable word became Sartre's "existentialism." There were no values, man merely "existed," alone in a world where God was dead. The better man knew himself the worse he turned out to be. All he could do was to "free" himself from the absurd world by accepting the worst and going on. To them, "the revolutionary act" was the "free act par excellence," and the existentialists debated endlessly whether they should support the Communist Party. "Should I betray the proletariat to serve truth or betray truth in the name of the proletariat?" worried Sartre.
But for the moment at least, existentialism has spent its lien on philosophical fashion. Sartre, after writing one of the most effective anti-Communist plays (Dirty Hands), lapsed into the security, not of the church, but of the Communist Party line. His most gifted colleague, gentle, ailing Novelist Camus (The Plague), parted from him. "For a faraway city of which I am not sure, I will not strike the faces of my brothers," he wrote, and disowned Communism.
The Man of Action. In these debates, one notable intellectual stands apart. He is Andre Malraux, a remote figure never seen in the cafes but constantly quoted there. Though he chooses seclusion, Malraux is the man who, supremely among his contemporaries, has lived the challenges of his troubled times, participated in the bloody angles of recent history. The best use a man can make of his life, Malraux proclaimed, is "by converting as wide a range of experience as possible." While the cafes debate the struggles between idealism and revolution, Malraux lived them. He has helped organize Communist strikes in China, fought the Fascists in Spain, listened while assassinations were hatched for "political" good, argued with conspirators, joked with hunted men. He is that ideal of French intellectualism, I'homme engage, the man of thought who is a man of action, living his ideas.
Malraux's life is a saga of modern godless man in search of himself. He has lived it more intensely, explored it more actively, expressed it more eloquently than any of his contemporaries. Still in his teens, he left his Roman Catholic faith; since then he has been a religious man in search of a religion. The search has carried him wherever men's souls were tried in war, wherever men's souls were expressed in art. He calls it the search for "the honor of being a man." Always he poses the humanist's anguished question: What is to be done with a soul, if there is neither God nor Christ?
His driven search has been no inner exploration of himself. It is an outward search for man's greatness. His interest is Man in a world of facts and action, the world's heroes, not its spiritual cripples or its Freudian oddities. To psychiatry's claim, "Man is what he hides, a wretched little pile of secrets," Malraux returns a proud answer, "Man is what he achieves."
"It is not by ceaselessly scraping away at the individual that you discover the man," he insists. "Self-examination does not teach us about man, but merely about the man who is in the habit of examining himself."
Dark, dramatic, with deep-set eyes burning in a gaunt face, at 53 Malraux has the looks proper to a hero, the talk proper to a genius. His ideas gush out in a torrent that overwhelms friends. His talk ranges from obscure Japanese painters to customs of American Indians, from Swiss primitives to Buddhist philosophers. He has argued Communism with Trotsky Hinduism with Nehru. In his dazzling transitions and far-flung references, he is a conversational wonder of the world made the more difficult to follow by his nervous facial tics and a constant snuffling into his hand caused by lifelong asthma. He is too intelligent for me," his brilliant old friend, Andre Gide, once confessed in admiration.
Defiance of Death. Malraux's view of life begins with the bitter recognition of man's mortality. He is much obsessed with death. "You know as well as I do that life is meaningless," says one of his characters. "Death is always there, you understand, like a standing proof of the absurdity of life." Malraux's image of life, La Condition Humaine, is drawn from Pascal: "Imagine a large number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, every day some of them being butchered before the eyes of others, and others seeing their own plight in the plight of their fellows . . . This is the picture of man's estate." Pascal found the defiance of man's absurdity in Faith.
Malraux cannot, though all his life long he has wistfully acknowledged its power for others. "Certainly there is a higher faith: that proclaimed by all the village crosses," he wrote. "It is love, and peace is in it. I will never accept it; I will never bow to ask of it the peace to which my weakness beckons me."
Malraux found man's greatness to be defiance of man's fate. The real defeat was "having to accept one's destiny, one's place in the world, to feel shut up in a life there's no escaping, like a dog in a kennel." The drive to "at last attain something beyond, something outside himself" is Malraux's "warrant for release from man's estate." "If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?" demands Malraux.
Turning Life to Account. Originally Flemish, the Malraux family were for 300 years shipbuilders at Dunkirk. Andre Malraux's grandfather was a fierce little man who for 22 years attended Mass kneeling on the ground outside, in rain or wind, because of a quarrel with the church authorities. He had a prejudice against insurance, and when a storm sank his whole fishing fleet off Newfoundland, the Malraux family fortune was wiped out. Andre was brought up by his mother, who ran a small grocery shop in a Paris suburb.
Though legend has it that he attended two "institutes," the institutes have no record of him. Malraux, ever willing to foster the legend of himself, has always refused to supply detailed data on his personal life. But somehow he acquired a vast knowledge of archaeology, art and ancient cultures. Already, he had begun to chafe at the bourgeoisie's world of "fact, ordered by no transcendence, and subjecting them to nothing," and yearned to "leave a scar on the face of the earth."
To the general astonishment, he persuaded the French government to authorize him, at the age of 22, to conduct an expedition to an unexplored area of Cambodia, where he had deduced that 1,000-year-old Khmer statues still lay undiscovered along the ancient Royal Way to Angkor Vat. In 1923, he and his first wife, Clara Goldschmidt, plunged into Cambodia's jungles, found the statues, and lugged them out on oxcarts. The French colonial authorities promptly impounded them as historical monuments, and put Malraux on trial for trying to remove them. His wife rushed back to France, succeeded in getting an impressive list of important writers to protest his arrest. His trial was dropped, and the saturnine young man returned to France as the dashing hero of a cause celebre. The Malraux legend was launched, and Malraux was well pleased. "A break in the established order is never the work of chance," he declared. "It is the outcome of a man's resolve to turn life to account."
Soon Malraux was back in Indo-China, seeking fresh testing places for his soul, and "something outside himself" in revolutions. He organized the "Young Annam" movement, then moved on to Canton. There he met Mikhail Borodin, Russian adviser to China's revolutionaries. Malraux in 1925 helped organize the Canton general strike aimed at British Hong Kong and directed propaganda for the Communist wing of the Kuomintang. He lingered on in China, was probably in Shanghai shortly after the Communist uprising in 1927. Between revolutions, he wandered the world, from India to Japan, from Central Asia to the U.S., to see and judge the masterpieces of the world's oldest cultures, put his findings into art books which he edited for the famed Paris publishers Gallimard.
Dagger with Talent. Out of his revolutionary adventuring, Malraux forged his novels and his ideas. The 1933 publication of La Condition Humaine (a bestseller in the U.S. under the title Man's Fate) broke upon the intellectual world like a revolutionist's bomb. Its theme was the 1927 revolt of the Chinese Communists in Shanghai, when they tried to wrest the city from foreign control, only to die when Chiang Kai-shek turned on them and bloodily suppressed their strike. Its intellectual revolutionists spoke of revolution as lyrically as a mystical communion, a tragic but glorious experience which transfigured men. It made his generation aware of a new kind of contemporary hero, the "engaged man," at grips with the vital issues of history. It won the Prix Goncourt, and Gide described it as "panting with an anguish almost unbearable." Cried Franc,ois Mauriac: "Here is a youth who since adolescence has been moving against society, a dagger in his hand, and who to stab it has sought out its most vulnerable point, in Asia . . . But look! He has talent, more talent than any other youth of his age."
Literary Paris lionized the young man with the dark forelock drooping over his incandescent eyes and talking, always talking "as if he were pursued." Two days after the Spanish civil war broke out, Malraux dashed off to join the Loyalists, explaining, "I am always more comfortable in a revolution than in a salon." There he organized and ran the Espana squadron, a collection of ancient planes begged, bor rowed or bought from anywhere and everywhere, some so inadequate that bombs were dropped by hand through toilet holes and gunners defended themselves by firing pistols at antiaircraft fire. The planes were flown by a motley crew of hired mercenaries, anarchists, Communists and dedicated idealists (anti-Nazi Germans, anti-Fascist Italians, English and French). Malraux himself flew 65 missions, crashed twice.
His last planes shot up, Malraux rushed off to the U.S., scoured the country from New York to Hollywood raising money and exhorting intellectuals to join Spain's anti-Fascist fight. If they lived, he said, their writing would be the better for the experience; if they died, their deaths would be more vital documents than anything they could write from an ivory tower.
Hallowed Deaths. In his novels of that period, Malraux preached that men's willingness to die for a cause gave their lives meaning. "Men who are joined together in a common hope, a common quest, have access, like men whom love unites, to regions they could never reach left to themselves." The problem, said Malraux, is human dignity. "Man can have no pride if he doesn't know why he is working." His heroes die, but each dies for "what in his time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope ... a death saturated with this brotherly quavering, an assembly of the vanquished in which future multitudes would recognize their martyrs, a bloody legend of which the golden legends are made."
His heroes were international revolutionary vagabonds. Often they were Communists, and at first Malraux saw in Communism something which gave "dignity back to all those I fight with." In the 1930s, the Communists claimed Malraux as their own. Malraux wrote a pro-Communist novel (Days of Wrath), went to Moscow several times, with Gide carried a protest to Hitler against the conviction of Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov for the Reichstag fire.
But Malraux was concerned with man's greatness, not with the "masses," however oppressed. "I don't like mankind," said one of his characters gloomily. "I don't even like the poor for whom, after all, I am going to fight." As an idealist, he was from the first at odds with the professional Communists. When Trotsky complained that his individualistic heroes needed "a good dose of Marxism," Malraux bristled, retorted that he was not concerned with collective action, but with the tragic men caught up in the stress of revolution.
Malraux put up with the Communists during the Spanish civil war. They were necessary, he conceded, "to organize the apocalypse." But his characters in his bestselling Man's Hope asked whether "to give them economic freedom you've got to have a system which will enslave them politically?"
The day of disillusionment was at hand. His friend Gide came back from Russia declaring: "Russia is not what we thought." After the Soviet-Nazi pact, Malraux announced bitterly: "What I wanted to defend for 20 years could not be defended by Communism."
Fighting for France. When the Nazi armies marched into France, Malraux volunteered as a private in the tank corps. For the first time, at the age of 38, he was fighting for his own bourgeois country. His war record was as dashing as a hero would wish. He was captured, escaped to unoccupied France dressed in an artisan's clothes, carrying planks on his shoulder. Soon he was working with the Resistance. As a start, he dynamited locomotives, intermittently returning to writing. By 1944 he had become "Colonel Berger," in command of 1.500 men in the southwest of France. He was riding in a car with several rescued British parachutists when he fell into a German ambush; to let the British escape, he ran across a field to draw German fire, was shot in the thigh, ran on until other shots brought him down.
Interrogated by a "priest" while lying bleeding on the floor of a hotel, Malraux still had the strength to engage him in a theological argument over St. Augustine; the man's ignorance of philosophy convinced Malraux that he was no priest but an S.S. officer seeking information. The Germans also tried standing him up against a wall and telling him he was to be executed. Malraux wheeled around to face death. The Germans did not fire.
Freed when the retreating Germans did not take their prisoners with them, he went back to command a Resistance brigade in the Vosges mountains. When he asked a French regular army commander if there was anything his guerrillas could do in an impending attack on Dannemarie, the colonel said yes, could he find some young fellow to blow up the locomotive of a Nazi armored train stationed there. "I'll do it if you like," said Malraux, and did.
At war's end, Malraux became Minister of Information in the brief Provisional government of General Charles de Gaulle. When De Gaulle retired in disgust, Malraux retired with him, disillusioned with the inefficiency of France's bureaucracy. "To know how foul it really is," said Malraux, "one must be in it, one must be married to it, and be frustrated by it as a man is by a wife with whom he is hopelessly coupled."
The Gaullist Adventure. Many of his admirers could not understand why the former Communist sympathizer turned to Gaullism, overleaping all the moderate positions in between. Many put it down to a Malrauvian need for heroes. Malraux himself insists: "It is not I who have changed, but events."
The alliance with De Gaulle was more natural than might appear. Both men--the devout Catholic De Gaulle, the devout humanist Malraux--were deeply conscious of the need for a new mission for France; both were deeply disillusioned by the powerlessness of the French parliamentarianism which had supinely handed over power to a Petain, and was now supine before the challenge of liberation. While De Gaulle brooded in the background, Malraux was the most eloquent voice of the Gaullist R.P.F.
"The R.P.F. is either a revolution or it is nothing," Malraux proclaimed. "If six months after we come to power we have not given the workers so much better a life that even the Communists cannot deny it, then the General and I will probably be shot--and deserve to be." He scorned those who talked of parliamentary liberalism at a time when the Communists were the largest single party in the French National Assembly. "No real democracy can exist where the Communist Party is strong," he said. "Kicking over the checkerboard is not just a peculiar way of playing checkers. "
Gaullism reached its peak in 1951, has since steadily disintegrated as De Gaulle has retired farther into the shadows of his retreat in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. Malraux visits him faithfully, has recently been representing him in informal conferences looking toward the formation of a new non-Communist Left, centered around ex-Premier Mendes-France. "Today France is saturated with lies, hypocrisy, empty promises," says Malraux. "In the absence of an ideology, she awaits the political leader who will adopt a philosophy of concrete action."
Art the Affirmation. It is not in politics but in art that Malraux now seeks a purpose for man. He is engaged in editing a huge, 40-volume series on the world's art. In Voices of Silence (1953), a massive synthesis of all the world's arts, which is really an ambitious philosophical work, he proclaimed: "A man becomes truly Man only when in quest of what is most exalted in him. True arts and cultures relate Man to duration, sometimes to eternity, and make of him something other than the most favored denizen of a universe founded on absurdity. Each hero, saint or sage stands for a victory over the human situation. All art is a revolt against man's fate."
It is perhaps a strange place for this onetime revolutionary to be celebrating revolt, yet Malraux's concern with art predates his concern with politics. And in art he finds affirmation. It is not an affirmation likely to satisfy those who have found faith in God, but it has carried Malraux, in his search for an earthbound meaning, beyond the gloomy bogs in which Sartre flounders. To the existentialists' obsession with man's degradation Malraux again proposes man's essential greatness. "The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness."
Monsters & Heroes. Today Malraux broods like a far-off Jupiter in Paris' Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he lives with his third wife and their three boys (his first marriage ended in divorce, his second wife was killed in a railroad accident at war's end) in an apartment furnished with Khmer statues, Hopi Kachina dolls, modern paintings, and a piano which both he and his wife play. Last week in a chat with TIME'S Correspondent Andre Laguerre, one of the few interviews he has given in ten years, he explained his present views. He did so with his customary lucidity: "We have to find in our civilization the equivalent of the profound concept of man, valid for all men, which each great religion has elaborated.
"Science proposes an image of the cosmos, not of man. The image of man as it existed in the great Christianity has lost weight. Religion still exists, but is no longer the aquarium: men are no longer swimming in it. Psychoanalysis has revealed to us only our monsters--those of each and those of humanity. It is not certain that our civilization can rediscover the heroes, and found on them its exemplary image of man . . . Only the future' will tell us whether the nations obsessed by the future--the U.S. and Russia--are better armed to reconquer the earth's past than the Europe of the Cathedrals.
"Ours is the first civilization searching for man which does not understand itself. The first to inherit the whole world, the first whose past is not a particular path but the mysterious adventure of mankind. This is particularly emphasized by the U.S. ... In all history, the U.S. is the first country to become one of the masters of the world without having tried. But the most powerful civilization the world has ever known, that of the whole West, has been incapable of inventing either a temple or a tomb.
"Our era is thus the first which poses civilization as a problem--which asks itself, what is civilization? This is a great adventure of the spirit. The image it recalls is of a man advancing not in the light, but in the night, lit up only by the torch he bears in his hand."
This is the place to which this tormented, restless man of intellect and of action has come in his quest through the godless pantheon of the Enlightenment. To Andre Malraux, man's hope, often betrayed, always risen again, is still in man. It is a gallant position, but perilously exposed, and Malraux seems to know it. "The next century's task will be." says Malraux, "to rediscover its gods."
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