Books: Vishnu and Vichy Water

ANTI-MEMOIRS by Andr éMalraux. Translated by Terence Kilmartin. 420 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $8.95.

André Malraux is a mysterious fellow —a natural-born actor who saved his histrionics for real life, a novelist who fashioned his books out of the materials of history and wrote himself into most of them in roles he actually played. So multi-chaptered is his life, in fact, and so intermixed is it with the events of his times that no adequate accounting could be contained within one book. Accordingly, when it was announced that Malraux would write the first volume in a projected autobiographical series, it was possible to wonder just which Malraux the author liked best.

There was something dashing about the passionately militant young Malraux, for instance. At 22, in 1923, this Malraux was arrested for trying to smuggle Khmer statuary out of Cambodia. Already an anticolonialist, he helped form those revolutionary forces that would eventually drive his countrymen out of Indo-China and make Mao Tse-tung master of China. The Malraux of the middle period had much to recommend him too. As an almost mythical liberal of the 1930s and a famous novelist (Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope), he helped organize and then commanded the brave, ramshackle Republican air force that flew against Franco’s armies in the Spanish Civil War. Finally, if the author felt inclined to autumnal apologia, he could start by revealing himself in his current incarnation as De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture: the man who gave Paris a long-needed face washing, planted a copy of the Venus de Milo in the Paris Métro and, lately, helped the General resolve last May’s student riots.

Flights of Rhetoric. A private account about any or all of these gifted Malrauxs would have been fascinating. But, as curious readers of Anti-Memoirs soon find, the author, now 67, has loftily decided to leave nearly all of his personal chronology out of his autobiography. (“Almost all the writers I know love their childhood,” he writes, thus disposing of all that. “I hate mine.”) What he offers instead is an odd, episodic mixture of action and reflection, frequently obfuscated by Malraux’s fondness for flights of impenetrable Gallic rhetoric. The book includes part of an early novel, some narrative accounts of his adventures in the French Resistance and elsewhere, and long replays of longer interviews with Mao Tse-tung and Nehru, both of whom he visited in 1965 not only as a former fellow revolutionary but as an informal emissary from De Gaulle.

Though disappointing, Anti-Memoirs is a remarkable cultural confection, especially for readers armed with some prior knowledge of Malraux and France, not to mention a tolerance for offhand allusions to everything from Vishnu to Vichy water. Its most accessible elements are brief recollections of personal danger, each spiced with the author’s sense of fate and history. Such incidents were chosen because they brought Malraux, the man of action, face to face with death—and the limitations of human courage—just as his lifetime has brought him face to face with the limitations of the revolutionary aims that he pursued so hotly in youth.

Like a number of Malraux’s novels, Anti-Memoirs is elevated and unified by the author’s rather heroic concern for the great central passions of the age. “It remains to be seen,” he writes, “whether civilization can exist only as a civilization of questioning or of the moment, and whether it can base its values for long on something other than a religion.” Malraux has always believed in what he calls “the revolutionary impulse, the provisional form which the demand for justice assumes.” He does not regard it as the property of any class, party or nation, but as something shared by a universal fraternity and supported by great human sacrifice. This was why, after having made common cause with (but never joining) the Communist Party for so long, he later felt free to help De Gaulle try to bring order to disordered France.

De Gaulle is grateful, no doubt. He has also become one of Malraux’s fondest and sharpest critics. He once summed up a florid Malraux report on cultural projects by snorting, “Clouds, clouds, Malraux, but occasional flashes of lightning.” Perhaps the General had read an advance copy of this book.