Overview
Often hailed as a "Renaissance man" for the astounding diversity of his activities, Andre Malraux was a living legend long before his death in 1976. Few French writers of this century have aroused such heated controversy and none, during a stormy lifetime, ever achieved greater international renown as a "hero" in deed as well as word. At the age of seventeen he shocked his parents by abandoning his high-school studies, going on in just three years to become a prosperous rare-book publisher, a keen literary critic, and an author of fantastic fiction. He then turned himself into a self-taught archaeologist and staged a bold statue-lifting raid on an abandoned Cambodian temple - an exploit which catapulted him to notoriety when he was only twenty-three. Four years later he dumbfounded the skeptics with a remarkable first novel (The Conquerors), later winning the coveted Goncourt Prize with La Condition humaine (Man's Fate). After Hitler's rise to power, he transformed himself into a spell-binding orator at anti-fascist rallies, and when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 he organized a volunteer bomber squadron for the hard-pressed Republicans, even though he had never piloted an airplane. Taken prisoner by the Germans in June 1940, he escaped to the French "free zone" and later teamed up with a British-trained SOE captain to form a brigade of resistance fighters, which he led all the way to Strasbourg in 1944. Impressed by his quick-witted intelligence and erudition, General de Gaulle made him Minister of Information in 1945 and later, in 1959, France's first Minister of Culture: two appointments which caused him later to be vilified by leftists as a "traitor" to his revolutionary past.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A rarity among adventurers, Malraux (1901-1976) was a swashbuckling, anarchic intellectual. Only last November, French president Jacques Chirac enshrined him in the Pantheon along with Voltaire, Rousseau and France's other greats. Cate, expatriate American biographer of another nearly mythical contemporary, Saint-Exupry, demythologizes the controversial, one-time communist-leaning Malraux, who from 1959 to 1969 was de Gaulle's minister of culture. Living dangerously and surviving by his wits and a little bit of luck, Malraux, Cate shows, turned his earlier experiences into novels: a Mao insurrection in Shanghai became La Condition humaine-Man's Fate, and his Spanish Civil War air squadron's futility (a self-appointed commander, he could not pilot a plane or drive an auto) was transformed into L'Espoire (Man's Hope). Twice a Nazi prisoner during the occupation, he escaped and assumed command of a resistance battalion, then manipulated himself into Gaullist office, along the way writing three influential books on art that later were collected as Les Voix du silence and an idiosyncratic memoir he titled defiantly Antimmoires. In the interstices of his stormy public life, he managed marriages and liaisons, all of which ended badly. Malraux's relationships with his wives were less than admirable, we learn here; his second marriage (to his widowed sister-in-law) broke up when he arrogantly accused her of "not breathing at the altitude at which I breathe." A life marked by pretense as well as panache, it is related rather flatly by Cate, who permits the inner man to escape and, rushing to conclude, gives only 60 pages to his subject's 30 tumultuous postwar years. Photos. (Apr.)Library Journal
If Cate's gripping biography had been available November 23, 1996, when Malraux's remains joined those of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola in the Pantheon, readers would have been even more bewildered by the burial site. An adventurer who always got photographed next to the Great Man, Malraux emerges here as a cause for marvel rather than admiration. Cate (George Sand, 1975. o.p.) is exhaustive in ferreting out documents of the interwar period at sites, whether in fact or fiction, of Malraux's exploits (e.g., Cochin-China, China, Turkey, Yemen, Spain, Vichy, and postwar France). Hardly a fan, Cate appears to have had the cooperation of all personal survivors and recognized members of the Malraux academic establishment. He cannot account for this constantly agitating Communist's becoming an eloquent Gaullist, and his evidence suggests that Malraux was a brilliant opportunist who became the "mythomaniac" depicted in his novels. Cate presumes considerable knowledge of 20th-century French literature and European history on the part of readers. For French literature and academic collections.-Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at BinghamtonKirkus Reviews
A highly readable biography that endeavors to correct, but not erase, the image of Malraux as a heroic, committed activist/intellectual.Malraux's youthful "archaeological" expedition to Cambodia, his anticolonial activities in Vietnam and China, his service with the Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War, his acclaimed novels, his underground activities for the French Resistance, and his postwar political career as de Gaulle's minister of culture—all would seem to suggest a uniquely romantic and large-scale life. Cate, to his credit, tries not to swallow unreservedly the conventional version promulgated by Malraux and his friends. For instance, the 22-year-old Malraux's expedition to Cambodia was largely, it turns out, an attempt to loot temple statuary. Cate (George Sand, 1975, etc.) gives a detailed, colorful, and slightly skeptical account of the unscrupulous venture. This episode might seem an unusual prelude to the anticolonial journalism Malraux began writing soon after, or to his radical fictionalization of the 1925 Cantonese insurrection in The Conquerors. But as Cate shows, such about-faces were a part of Malraux's character: His need for danger, risk, and adventure mingled with his desire to champion causes and to live life on a heroic scale. Cate's reading of Malraux's character seems persuasive when applied to many of his labors, including his efforts on behalf of the French Communist Party and his activities during the Spanish Civil War. His account of Malraux's life in the Resistance, working for both British intelligence and the French maquis, is the book's high point, providing fresh details and a thrilling narrative. The biography levels off afterward, but so did Malraux's political and intellectual drive, though his personality remained enthralling and enigmatic right up to his death in 1976.
The real Malraux remains inextricably tied up with the legend, and somewhat obscured by it. Cate provides a rich account of both.