Born: Paris, France, 3 November 1901. Education: Educated in Bondy; Lycee Condorcet, Paris; Ecole Turgot, Paris, 1915-18; attended lectures at Musee Guimet and Ecole du Louvre, 1919. Military Service: Served in the French army during World War II; wounded, imprisoned, escaped, and joined resistance: Compagnon de la Liberation, medal of the Resistance, Croix de Guerre, Distinguished Order. Family: Married 1) Clara Goldschmidt in 1921 (divorced), one daughter; had two sons by Josette Clotis; 2) Marie-Madeleine Lioux Malraux in 1948, one stepson. Career: Worked for Rene-Louis Doyon, booksellers, and in art department of Kra,Paris; archaeological expedition to Indochina, 1923: detained for stealing ancient sculptures, but case set aside; involved in political activities in Indochina: established opposition newspaper, L’Indochine, later L’Indochine Enchainee, 1925-26; art editor, then literary editor, and director of the Pleiade series, Paris, after 1928. Actively engaged in political activities: fought in Spain in the civil war: Colonel of the Spanish Republic; Minister of Information in de Gaulle’s government, 1945-46; Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s cabinet, 1959-69. President, Charles de Gaulle Institute, 1971. Awards: Goncourt prize, 1933; Louis-Delluc prize, for film, 1945; Asolo film festival prize, 1973; Nehru Peace prize, 1974. Honorary degrees: Oxford University, 1967; Jyvacskylae University, Finland, 1969; Rajshahi University, Bangladesh, 1973. Officer, Legion d’honneur. Died: 23 November 1976.
Publications
Fiction
Lunes en papier. 1921.
La Tentation de l’occident. 1926; as The Temptation of the West, translated by Robert Hollander, 1961.
Les Conquerants. 1928; enlarged edition, 1949; as The Conquerors, translated by Winifred Stephens Whale, 1929; also translated by Stephen Becker, 1976.
Royaume farfelu. 1928.
La Voie royale. 1930; as The Royal Way, translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1935.
La Condition humaine. 1933; revised edition, 1946; as Man’s Fate, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier, 1934; as Storm in Shanghai, translated by Alastair MacDonald, 1934; as Man’s Estate, translated by MacDonald, 1948.
Le Temps du mepris. 1935; as Days of Wrath, translated by Haakon M. Chevalier, 1936; as Days of Contempt, translated by Chevalier, 1936.
L’Espoir. 1937; as Man’s Hope, translated by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair MacDonald, 1938; as Days of Hope, translated by Gilbert and MacDonald, 1938.
Les Noyers de l’Altenburg. 1943; as The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, translated by A.W. Fielding, 1952.
Et sur la terre. . . (unpublished chapter of L’Espoir). 1977.
Screenplays: Sierra de Teruel. 1938.
Other
Le Demon de l’absolu. 1946.
Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinema. 1946; in Reflections on Art, edited by Susanne Langer, 1958.
La Psychologie de l’art: Le Musee imaginaire, La Creation artistique, La Monnaie de l’absolu. 3 vols., 1947-49; as The Psychology of Art: Museum without Walls, The Creative Act, The Twilight of the Absolute, translated by Stuart Gilbert, 3 vols., 1949-51; revised edition, as Les Voix du silence, 4 vols., 1951; as The Voices of Silence, translated by Gilbert, 4 vols., 1953.
The Case for de Gaulle, with James Burnham. 1949.
Saturne: Essai sur Goya. 1949; revised edition as Saturne, le destin, l’art et Goya, 1978; as Saturn: An Essay on Goya, translated by C.W. Chilton, 1957.
La Musee imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale: Le Statuaire, Des Bas-reliefs aux grottes sacrees, Le Monde chretien. 3 vols., 1952-54. La Metamorphose des dieux:
L’Inaccessible. 1957; revised edition, as Le Surnaturel, 1977; as The Metamorphosis of the Gods, translated by Stuart Gilbert, 1960. L’Irreel. 1974.
L’Intemporel. 1975. Brasilia, la capitale de l’espoir (multilingual edition). 1959.
Discours 1958-1965. 1966.
Le Miroir des limbes: Antimemoires. 1967; revised edition, 1972; as Anti-Memoirs, translated by Terence Kilmartin, 1968.
Le Triangle noir. 1970.
Oeuvres. 4 vols., 1970.
La Corde et les souris: Les Chenes qu’on abat. 1971; as Fallen Oaks, translated by Irene Clephane, 1972; as Felled Oaks, revised and edited by Linda Asher, 1972.
La Tete d’obsidienne. 1974; as Picasso’s Mask, translated by June and Jacques Guicharnaud, 1976.
Lazare. 1974; as Lazarus, translated by Terence Kilmartin, 1976.
Les Hotes de passage. 1976.
Oraisons funebres. 1971.
Paroles et ecritspolitiques 1947-1972. 1973.
L’Hommeprecaire et la litterature. 1977.
Critical Studies:
Andre Malraux and the Tragic Imagination, 1952; revised edition, 1967, and Andre Malraux, 1974, both by Wilbur Merrill Frohock; Andre Malraux: The Conquest of Dread by Gerda Blumenthal, 1960; Andre Malraux by Geoffrey H. Hartman, 1960; Andre Malraux, Tragic Humanist by Charles D. Blend, 1963; Malraux: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by R.W.B. Lewis, 1964; Malraux: An Essay in Political Criticism by David Wilkinson, 1967; Andre Malraux by Denis Boak, 1968; Andre Malraux: The Human Adventure by Violet M. Horvath, 1969; A Portrait of Andre Malraux by Robert Payne, 1970; Andre Malraux by Cecil Jenkins, 1972; Andre Malraux and the Metamorphosis of Death by Thomas Jefferson Kline, 1973; Malraux’s Heroes and History by James W. Greenlee, 1975; Andre Malraux by Jean Lacouture, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1975; Malraux: Life and Work edited by Martine de Courcel, 1976; Malraux: A Biography, 1976, and Silk Roads: The Asian Adventures of Clara and Andre Malraux, 1990, both by Axel Madsen; Andre Malraux by James Robert Hewitt, 1978; Imagery in the Novels of Andre Malraux by Ralph Tarica, 1980; Malraux: La Voie royale by Elizabeth Fallaize, 1982; Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity by Will Morrisey, 1984; Witnessing Andre Malraux: Visions and Re-visions edited by Brian Thompson and Carl A. Viggiani, 1984; Andre Malraux: Towards the Expression of Transcendence by David Bevan, 1986; Malraux: The Absolute Agnostic; or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law by Claude Tannery, 1992; Andre Malraux: A Reference Guide 1940-1990 by John B. Romeiser, 1994; Andre Malraux: A Biography by Curtis Cate, 1995; Andre Malraux: Politics and the Temptation of Myth by Gino Raymond, 1995; Shaping the Novel: Textual Interplay in the Fiction of Malraux, Hebert, and Modiano by Constantina Thalia Mitchell and Paul Raymond Cote, 1996; Andre Malraux: A Reassessment by Geoffrey T. Harris, 1996; Signed, Malraux by Jean-Frangois Lyotard, translated by Robert Harvey, 1999; Mona Lisa’s Escort: Andre Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture by Herman Lebovics, 1999; Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-aesthetics by Jean Frangois Lyotard, translated by Robert Harvey, 2001.
Andre Malraux’s theme, running through all his works, can best be summed up by a remark made by a quite different writer in an altogether different connection. It was Gore Vidal who wrote, in Sex, Death, and Money (1968), that ”in certain human actions, in love, in violence, [man] can communicate with others, touch and be touched, act and in the act forget his fate.” This sentiment lies at the heart of Malraux’s humanism also; but it is a tragic humanism, as critics have clearly perceived. W.M. Frohock, for instance, remarked: ”there inheres in man’s fate, in spite of all the possibilities of defeat, the possibility of the power and glory of being a man.”
Malraux’s mythic explorations of men (women play only a subordinate role in his fiction) caught up in history, picked out for large action by destiny, probe our fate in a grandiose manner that is comparable in few other novels. Indeed, it is to the great epic writers like Zola, Melville, or Dostoevskii that we have to turn if we are to seek parallels. Malraux is admired justly for the way he has used adventure stories—in much the same way as Melville used a whaling narrative, or Conrad used tales of the merchant navy—to convey a world-view marked by a tragic humanism which is nevertheless uniquely his own.
His individuality arises from a distinctive prose style. He uses a rhetorical manner that is elevated, imposing, even grandiloquent, on the one hand, and, on the other, a utilitarian style, modelled on Celine and the American writers of the 1920s whom he admired, which is curt, economical, and firmly action-oriented. This makes him a fine writer of stories in which men are fighting for a noble cause, especially when that cause is doomed. As a result, his best books are La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate), a graphic narrative of the collapse of the Communist rebellion in Shanghai in 1927, and L’Espoir (Days of Hope), an account of the Spanish civil war seen from the Republican standpoint as a moment of glory, sacrifice, and brotherhood.
Correspondingly there is not much to laugh about in Malraux’s world, and where there is humour it tends to be other-directed rather than self-directed: at the buffoon Clappique in Man’s Fate, for instance, or at grotesques like the worthies of French Guiana satirized in Antimemoires (Anti-Memoirs). His sometimes excessive fondness for aphorisms, too, can give the impression of an inflation in which the sublime teeters on the brink of the ridiculous and in which the nobility of the utterance can slide into windy rhetoric.
In politics Malraux was a kind of pessimistic radical, which accounts for his left-wing leanings before the war and his wholehearted endorsement of Charles de Gaulle after it. All his writings— his influential art criticism and autobiographical works as well as his novels and essays—are ultimately meditations on death. In La Tentation de l’occident (The Temptation of the West) a Chinese intellectual indicts Western man for having given death ”a tragic face.” Not surprisingly, therefore, Malraux’s finest book, Man’s Fate, ends on the death of love and the death of hope. Nevertheless he has done much—not only as a writer, but also as a controversial minister for the arts in de Gaulle’s administration in the 1960s—to promote a sense of human dignity, a recognition of the value of a man’s life which, as he once eloquently put it, ”is worth nothing, but which nothing can buy.”
