A Mandarin's Anti-Memoirs

I call this book Anti-Memoirs be cause it answers questions that memoirs do not pose and does not answer those they do pose, and also because one finds in it, often linked to tragedy, an irrefutable and gliding presence, like a cat passing in the darkness -- that of an eccentric whose name I have un knowingly revived.

Memoir or anti-memoir -- by any name, the book is bound to be a bestsell er. All through his adult life Author Andre Malraux has been I'homme en gage, a committed man whose activities capture the popular imagination. As a young student of Oriental archaeology, he was once jailed for trying to cart away from the Cambodian jungle some ancient Khmer statues that he admired.

As a left-wing intellectual he went to China in 1925 to serve as an aide to Mikhail Borodin, the Russian agent whose job was to subvert Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang for the Communists. That adventure was distilled in an epic novel entitled Man's Fate. When civil war broke out in Spain, Malraux signed on as a Loyalist air officer and wrote another novel based on personal experience, Man's Hope. In World War II he was a hero in the French maquis.

In 1958, Malraux went to work for Charles de Gaulle. As Minister of Culture, he gave Paris a new luster by ordering its grimy buildings scrubbed and floodlit. More important, he brought a new glow to French cultural life--at least on its fac,ade--by his grand subsidies to the arts and, most of all, by his personal distinction. Still to many a former leftist admirer, his acceptance of a government post amounted to a sellout of his principles. "How can you hear me now, Andre Malraux?" asked Film Director Jean-Luc Godard. "I am telephoning from the outside, a distant country, a free France."

Strength in Silences. For the past few years, friends and critics alike have waited impatiently for Malraux's own assessment of his career. Last year his first wife, Clara, beat him to the punch by publishing her version of their early years together. "But her picture of the thoroughgoing "misogynist," whose early rebellion had "reserved areas that he could define as it suited him, or according to his own advantage," served largely as a reminder that it was Malraux's version that was really needed.

Last week part of that version unexpectedly appeared. Pirated excerpts were printed in the newspaper France-Soir --two months ahead of the book's scheduled publication date. Malraux's publisher, Gallimard, duly registered its consternation at the leak, but the 3,500 words that were made public were only a teasing glimpse of what was to come.

They were largely a sampling of a mandarin's memories of the great men of his time.

>On De Gaulle in 1945: "Newsreels had familiarized me with his appearance and even with the rhythm of his language. I came to meet a man who would interrogate me. But his strength appeared, at first, in his long silences.

This is his way of paying respect to another man's mind. There was an interior distance which I did not meet again until much later in Mao Tse-tung."

>Mao in 1965: "He gave me an almost feminine hand with a pink palm as though it had just been boiled. To my surprise, he accompanied me out.

He walked step after step, stiffly, as though he were not bending his legs, more bronze emperor than ever in a dark uniform surrounded by light and white uniforms ... a legendary figure returned from some imperial tomb."

>Nehru in 1958: "Old age seemed to have given him another face rather than merely wrinkling his features. In his voice, his poise, under the crust of the intellectual patrician, appeared the image--calm and gentle--of a man who no doubt from adolescence had educated himself to be a gentleman."

The Whole Story. Such is the interest in the rest of Malraux's Anti-Memoirs that U.S. publishers have reportedly offered as much as $250,000 for the right to put out an English version. Even at that high price, they will only be buying part of the story. Anti-Memoirs is a four-volume work, and Malraux, now 65, has already arranged to have the other three volumes published posthumously.

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