The Last Renaissance Figure

When asked why he had ceased writing novels, Andre Malraux liked to give a Delphic reply: "Narration today has been replaced by the image."

In Malraux's case, the image replaced more than narration: it replaced the man. Long before he died of lung congestion last week at the age of 75, the last Renaissance figure had become a legend and an exemplar of "I'homme engage" (the committed man). With the possible exception of Lawrence of Arabia--whom he greatly admired--no other 20th century figure so theatrically fused the strands of scholarship and art, politics and quixotic adventure.

"I love to displease," Malraux once said. His celebrated restlessness may have sprung from dissatisfaction with his origins. His father was a Paris banker, his mother a grocer. When Andre was four his parents separated. Like modern France's other intellectual men of action, Camus and Sartre, Malraux was raised by women in an atmosphere that was petit bourgeois and claustrophobic.

There was always an aura of mystery about Malraux--partly because this otherwise precise man chose to cloak episodes of his life in vague details. Where he was educated, for example, remains unclear. In 1923 Malraux suggested to his new wife, Clara Goldschmidt, that they set sail for Indochina to make their fortune. "We'll go to some small temple in Cambodia," he told her, "pick up a few statues and sell them in America. This will keep us going for two or three years."

Art Lover. Instead, Malraux was arrested for stealing antiquities. When the government sentenced him to three years in prison, Clara organized a protest campaign by intellectual friends in Paris. Franc,ois Mauriac and Andre Gide made speeches; Anatole France boomed, "This young man isn't a thief; he's an art lover!"

Returning to Saigon in 1925, Malraux stirred up fresh trouble. Appalled by the French colonial administration's mistreatment of the Vietnamese, he started a radical newspaper called L'Indochine and presciently warned that revolution was inevitable unless reforms were made. Later he observed the increasingly bitter struggle between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and the Communists. That war for China's soul was the theme of his third novel, Man's Fate, which brought him, at 32, to the attention of the world. In its chilling climactic scene, the captured radical Katov gives two of his fellow prisoners a cyanide tablet, then marches toward the flames of a railway-engine boiler --an almost biblical gesture in defiance of death.

Katov might have been Malraux himself: not even his critics questioned his astonishing physical courage. "I am aided," he explained, "by irrational feelings of invulnerability." During the Spanish Civil War, he organized an air corps for the Loyalists and flew 65 combat missions against Franco's troops. But irony--the intrusion of fact upon expectations--eroded his leftist zeal. Malraux witnessed the Communist betrayal of the Republican cause and turned his back on Marxism in 1939 at the time of the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. With the signing of that paper, he recalled, "I married France." His other marriages were not so successful: the first ended in divorce. His mistress, Josette Clotis, by whom he had two sons, died in 1944 in a railway accident. His last marriage ended in separation after 18 years. But the Gallic Bride remained constant. Under the nom de guerre "Colonel Berger," he fought with the Resistance during World War II, and crossed the Rhine into Germany as commander of the proud Alsace-Lorraine Brigade.

Stoical Figure. The war made him a brother-in-arms with Charles de Gaulle, who shaped and dominated Malraux's later years. It was a linking of Jupiter and Prometheus. Malraux served as Minister of Information in De Gaulle's first postwar government and later as chief propagandist for his party, Le Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais. When the general was recalled to power in 1958, Malraux became Minister of State for Cultural Affairs--a post created especially for him. He undertook a campaign to preserve France's architectural masterpieces (including the much-debated scrubbing of the Louvre), set up "houses of culture" in the provinces and sought to get art out of museums and into public places. In the postwar years he became a kind of psychohistorian of art, exploring the metaphysical elements of painting and sculpture in such works as The Voices of Silence and The Metamorphosis of the Gods.

During the '60s, leftists sharply criticized their Minister. How, they asked, could this archetypal man of the left, this paradigm of intellectual freedom, serve De Gaulle's regime--even to the point of suppressing antigovernment expression? Literary critics questioned his lofty, mandarin style, his easy skill at generalizing. "Clouds, clouds," De Gaulle himself once snorted, "but occasional flashes of lightning." The flashes illuminated an increasingly stoical figure, a secular saint whose face might have emerged from one of the Giotto frescoes he so admired. After the 1961 death of his sons in an automobile accident, Malraux became more than ever a man unto himself, living up to the magisterial adage "Never apologize, never explain." His autobiographical Anti-Memoirs revealed a formidable mind but not the man. Only in private--often at lunch at his favorite Paris restaurant, Lasserre--would he display his dry wit and vast erudition. In a single aside, Malraux could range from Greek to Latin to Hebrew, from Icelandic sagas to the latest gossip about Picasso. He remained, to the end, riveted by human causes. In 1971 he volunteered to recruit and lead a tank corps in Bangladesh against invading Pakistani armies. Every morning he ritually shredded the previous day's page from his appointment calendar. "Why go back?" he asked. "The torn page is no longer there." There are no more pages to rip from the calendar that chronicled Malraux's spectacular career. Which of his many personae will survive most vividly: radical, soldier, author, connoisseur, Gaullist apologist for la belle France? Malraux left posterity with a hint. More deserving of the Nobel Prize than many writers who won it, Malraux once mused: "If I can say to myself on dying that there are 500,000 young people who, thanks to my work, have seen the opening of a window by which they can escape the rigors of technocracy, the leisure activities which are, for the most part, violent or vulgar--if I can say that, I will die happy."

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