History's Witness: Malraux at 70

In the life of a man like him there is a time for nomadic adventure and a time for sedentary adventure, a time for the barricades and a time for the memoirs.

--Father Pierre Bockel, as quoted in Malraux by Pierre Galante, 1971

FOR Andre Malraux, who turned 70 last week, it should indeed be a time for reminiscence. In 1967, the French literary giant and former Gaullist Minister brought out the first volume of his Anti-memoires, and he is now deep into the second volume, which he has decided to have published after his death. He is also at work on a history of the World War II French Resistance, a movement in which Malraux won a hero's place by leading the liberation of Strasbourg as the Maquis' dashing "Colonel Berger."

But as the archetypal homme engage, the intellectual man of action, Malraux is not yet fully ready to climb down from the barricades. Last month he announced that he was prepared to fight for Bangla Desh, the East Bengali independence movement spawned by the Pakistani civil war.

"The only intellectuals who have the right to defend the Bengalis in words," Malraux wrote to an Indian diplomat, "are those who are ready to fight for them." Was he ready? he was asked. "At the head of an infantry unit, certainly not!" he declared. "But leading a tank detachment, of course!" This week he will meet with India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, when she visits Paris, to discuss what form his role may take.

Writing. Every morning Malraux tears up the previous day's page from his appointment calendar. "Why go back?" he says. "The torn page is no longer there." In the same manner, he abjures birthday celebrations, and there were none last week. Still, Malraux has reached a degree of eminence at which there is universal agreement on his importance, if virtually none on his foremost achievement. Some believe that Malraux will be remembered largely for his writing. "A very great writer," says Pierre Viansson-Ponte, political editor of Le Monde. "With their backgrounds of the Far East, Spain and the French Resistance, Malraux's works are linked with life." In the political arena, Malraux receives fewer encomiums, least of all from the young. University students today read Man's Fate, Malraux's prizewinning novel, almost as eagerly as they do Sartre's Nausea and Camus' The Stranger. "But he simply isn't actuel, timely today," says Marc Bianciardi, a young French literature teacher. "Malraux was the front-rank leader of our dreams," explains Pierre Rousset, a leader in the May 1968 uprisings in Paris. "But alas! He chose De Gaulle, chose to side with the bourgeois state against the revolutionaries."

Poet Laureate. Malraux has always seemed to be where history was being made--revolutionary China, Spain during the Civil War, France during the Resistance. From novelist to reporter, revolutionary to Resistance fighter, adventurer to Cabinet Minister, he often seemed to be history's chosen witness. "There is no question," writes Pierre Galante in Malraux, his recent biography, "that of all Malraux's work, the most vivid, the most tragic, the richest adventure has been the story of his own life." A French journalist and editor of Paris-Match, Galante gleaned a wealth of new detail on the "intimate Malraux" from 30 interviews with the former Culture Minister. He relates, for example, that the sartorially elegant Malraux buys his blue serge and black wool-twist suits at Lanvin and that he dines frequently at an exclusive Paris restaurant, Lasserre, on hearts of palm, grilled steak and an orange filled with sherbet.

Despite Malraux's early sympathy for militant Trotskyism, it was his relationship with Charles de Gaulle--a relationship that Le Monde's Viansson-Ponte likens to that of "sovereign and poet laureate"--that gave lasting political direction to his career. The French President considered his handsome Culture Minister "my brilliant friend" and "incomparable witness." As Malraux saw it, De Gaulle gave the French a consciousness of their own greatness.

Both men shared an instinctive appreciation for the significant gesture. When De Gaulle died, his instructions for his funeral stipulated that "the men and women of France and of other countries of the world may, if they wish, do my memory the honor of accompanying my body to its last resting place."

Yet on that gray November day just a year ago when thousands of people lined the streets of the tiny village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to pay homage to the French President, soldiers prevented all but the official funeral procession from following the body to the cemetery. As Galante recounts it, an old peasant woman began to cry out: "He said everyone could be here! He said everyone!" Malraux stopped and took her by the arm. "Let her through," he said to one of the soldiers lining the road. "She speaks for France." The soldier stepped aside.

Love. One of the most charming anecdotes in Galante's book concerns Malraux's 1933 meeting with Louise de Vilmorin, an infectiously gay and witty writer. Over lunch one day, Malraux announced: "It is with you that I shall end my life." Despite that airy prediction, the two drifted apart after a brief affair, and they did not meet again until 1967. Malraux, then separated from his wife Madeleine, determined to keep his prophecy. He moved into the Vilmorin chateau at Verieres-le-Buisson. not far from Paris, beginning a period of almost carefree happiness. Then tragedy struck, as it had so many times in Malraux's life. The day after Christmas in 1969, Louise suddenly died of a heart attack. Malraux's despair was such, relates one of the Vilmorin family, that "every morning we wondered if we would find him alive."

But Malraux plunged deep into his writing. He continues to live with the Vilmorin family in the huge manor house and spends much of each day at his desk, working on his books. His name has frequently come up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but when the 1971 award was announced last month he was passed over once again. Recently, TIME Correspondent Paul Ress paid a visit to Malraux at Verrieres. "Malraux was a bit put out that his two cats both climbed onto the interviewer, ignoring him," reported Ress. "Otherwise he was in fine form, talkative and incisive on many subjects." Some of them:

ON MAO, WHOM HE VISITED IN PEKING IN 1965: "For Mao, only China counts. His first problem is to give every Chinese enough to eat and, second, to create a sense of nationhood among 800 million Chinese. To understand Mao's attitude, you must know wherein his genius lies. Whereas Marx and Lenin placed their faith in the working class as the revolutionary force, Mao put his in the peasantry. But in the Cultural Revolution, Mao employed an unknown force, one never used before as such in a revolution: youth."

ON THE U.S.-CHINA RAPPROCHEMENT: "Mao told me in August 1965 that only the richest country in the world [the U.S.] could come to the help of the poorest [China]. As for Taiwan, I think mainland China and Formosa agreed long ago that Taiwan would become part of Mao's China after the death of Chiang Kai-shek."

ON RUSSIAN-CHINESE DIFFERENCES: "Mao understands that the U.S. should believe in a consumer society because America is a capitalist country, but that Russia, the great socialist sister, should have the same values is incomprehensible to him and a betrayal of their common cause. If Kosygin succeeds in giving every Russian a small motorcycle, then that's the end of Mao's spartan Chinese Communism."

ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: "Historically speaking, there has never been an American foreign policy. Of course, the U.S. has lived moments of great historical importance, such as its entry into the last two world wars. What is lacking is a sense of destiny. A great country subordinates its domestic policy to its foreign policy. President Nixon maneuvers as if he were the President of Luxembourg."

ON WOMEN'S LIBERATION: "It's not revolutionary at all. However, it's very interesting, and a colossal reality. Naturally, women, like the working class, like all people deprived of rights, should be given them. The great error we would make is thinking that the problem is sexual."

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