Andre Malraux's grand adventure.(Literature)(Biography)

MEN WHO HAVE BEEN raised in the potentially suffocating atmosphere of an all-female household occasionally rebel in interesting ways. Truman Capote was one, Hemingway was another, and so was Andre Malraux. But unlike Hemingway, who fashioned himself into a hero eroded by self-loathing, Malraux fashioned himself into one he could love unreservedly. The French loved him too. One has only to recall the bemused comments of Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans, who was asked to write a page for a weekly magazine in Paris on what Malraux had meant to him--not much, as it happened--after Malraux died in November 1976: "They were horrified and immediately junked my contribution." When Malraux's most recent biographer, Olivier Todd, asked Premier Chirac in 1996 for his opinion of Malraux (one can scarcely imagine any biographer asking our own incumbent his opinion of Patrick White or Christina Stead) he said: "The water of the heart [l'eau du coeur] rises to the eyes."

Malraux's mother and father married in March 1900, the year the first Metro line opened in Paris, and rented a five-room apartment in Montmartre. Malraux was born on November 3 the following year.

His father decamped early and would father several more children with two mistresses. Malraux was raised by his mother and a beloved spinster aunt above his grandmother's confectionery store. His habit--established early--of willing a metamorphosis, may have been a genetic inheritance from his father, who had been by turns a non-commissioned officer, a broker, a part-time inventor, speculator and all-round show-off: He once called himself a major to impress the ladies and wrote "industrialist" on a legal document.

At eighteen, an average student, Malraux was turned down by the Lycee Condorcet, and thenceforth educated himself outside of traditional academic institutions. He suffered from Tourette's syndrome, but far from hindering his progress, it seemed to propel him to fierce concentration and action. By eighteen he was making something of a living from sourcing and selling rare books in the hothouse atmosphere of the Left Bank and was writing inflammatory articles for Action--a literary review--which attracted the attention of Andre Gide, who was some thirty-two years his senior. Malraux's interest in fashion propelled him to the English tailors around the Opera neighbourhood, where he treated himself to cravats and pearl pins--"often false" suggests Todd.

Paris was alive with Dadaists, Surrealists and the like, and he found congenial company while haunting the museums and art galleries. He soon tried his hand at buying and selling antiquities, writing art criticism, and some book publishing ventures, which brought him into contact with artists such as Georges Braque, Andre Derain and Fernand Leger. His contemporaries found him interesting, but thought his writing was strained, portentous and replete with delusions. By the time he met Clara Goldschmidt, an intense, multi-lingual German-Jewish woman who possessed a sturdier morality than he did, he had already begun the process of turning himself into an art work. They married in the teeth of ferocious opposition from both sets of parents, and Malraux, who saw no reason to be conventionally employed, proceeded to invest Clara's considerable dowry in Mexican shares, with disastrous consequences. Before the money evaporated, they had travelled extensively in Europe and then further afield.

MALRAUX'S UNCANNY ABILITY to carry people forward on a wave of his own fervour was demonstrated when at twenty-two he persuaded a committee of the French School of the Far East to support his archaeological expedition to Cambodia. When he detached--rather clumsily-bas-reliefs and fragments from the Banteay Srei temple with a plan to sell them to American buyers, he was arrested, charged and sentenced to three years in jail, but thanks to the efforts of assorted intellectuals such as writers Francois Mauriac and Gide back in Paris, he avoided this inconvenience.

He soon returned to French Indochina, with a contract from the publisher Bernard Grasset to come up with a proper narrative, not some "recondite text". He and Clara immersed themselves in the lives of the locals, and Malraux's instinct for justice--not yet garnished by any clear ideological position--asserted itself. He established, with Paul Monin, two newspapers, L 'Indochine and L'Indochine Enchainee, which became small thorns in the side of the local French authorities, highlighting as they did the abjectness of the locals under French administration. Their two years in Indochina had left Clara with a greater sense of obligation and unfinished business, but Malraux was ready to move on.