The real Malraux.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: It was very pleasing to discover that the May issue of Quadrant included an article on Andre Malraux, a major twentieth-century writer who receives far less attention in the English-speaking world than he merits. It was regrettable, however, that the author of the article, Patricia Anderson, saw fit to rely so heavily on Olivier Todd's recent biography (Malraux: A Life), a work that has done little more than add to the already enormous pile of myth and misinformation surrounding Malraux's life.

Biographies of Malraux--of which there are now several--should perhaps carry a warning for the unsuspecting reader. Malraux bore very little resemblance to the stereotype French intellectual who rarely ventures out of his Left Bank cafe or the calm of his study. He was a participant in some of the major historical events of his times, and, not surprisingly, acquired determined political adversaries as well as strong supporters. As a result, much that has been written about him, especially by his adversaries, shows scant regard for objectivity or factual accuracy, leaving the biographer with an information source in which truth, half-truth, and mere fantasy are often inextricably intertwined.

Added to this problem is that blight of so many biographies--the tall poppy syndrome. This so-called "great man", the biographer reasons (with an eye to the market), must surely have the odd skeleton in his cupboard. Let's rummage around until we find some--and if there don't seem to be enough, well, a little authorial licence is surely no bad thing ...

Finally--and happily for our biographer--Malraux can seldom be called as a witness in his own defence. Rejecting the nineteenth-century obsession with the individual self, he kept no journal, wrote no autobiography (his Antimemoirs are, as the name suggests, quite unlike memoirs), and seldom even paused to respond to the various wild accusations levelled at him by sundry detractors anxious to score a point.

The result of all this, the unsuspecting reader needs to know, is that it is often very difficult to separate fact from fiction in accounts of Malraux's life--a state of affairs for which, ironically enough, he himself is often blamed--critics accusing him of peddling a fabricated "Malraux myth" and crowing triumphantly when they discover that aspects of it are not true.

The principal facts of his amazingly eventful life--his commitment to the anti-Fascist Popular Front in the 1930s, his involvement with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, his service with the French army in the Second World War, his participation in the Resistance and arrest by the Gestapo, and his work as a minister in de Gaulle's governments, most importantly as a very active Minister for Cultural Affairs--are not in doubt.

But there is much about his life, especially his private life (often the biographer's preferred hunting ground) ...