Andre Malraux Anti Memoirs

� ANDRE MALRAUX ANTI MEMOIRS ANDRE MALRAUX ANTI-MEMOIRS TRANSLATED BY TERENCE KILMARTIN A literary and historic document of the first iTJiportance, Anti-Memoirs by Andre Malraux is among the most significant works of this century. In this book, Malraux tells of those events in his life which have consequence for all men. Mal r;mx's range of experience is unique, for as a statesman, Resistance fighter,novelist, and art historian,he is at once a man of action and a man of letters. Malraux has participated in the most crucial events of our times,the Chinese Revolution,the Spanish Civil War,the French Resistance during World War II and,since 1958, has served as a minister in De Gaulle's Cabinet. He weaves men and events,ideas and descriptions of great works of art into one vast tapestry of human experience. Presenting an incessantly changing kaleidoscope of exotic images,he takes the reader from the lost cities and civilizations of Asia and Africa to the torture chambers of the Gestapo. His conversa tions with such world leaders as Nehru, De Gaulle, Mao Tse-tung,and Chou En-lai are juxtaposed with reflections on life and death,the immortality and metamorphosis of art,and man's ultimate re lationship with the universe. , "What interests me," Malraux says, "... is the human condition." In Anti-Memoirs, the human condition is seen in concentration camps, in the midst of political upheavals,in the power and imagination of great leaders,and in the test ing of man's courage and endurance. By relating his actions and disclosing his thoughts, Malraux demonstrates the purpose and special meaning of his life and of all human life. Book Club 0!54 Edition ANDRE MALRAUXwas born in Paris in 1901. At tw enty-one he went to Indochina on an archae� ological expedition ard,i while th ere, joined with the Young Annam League in its fightfor Indo chinese dominion status. Later,he lived in China and observed th e struggle between th e Kuomin ta ng and th e Communists. After his return to France,he devoted himself to th e fightagainst fascism. In 1936, he organized an international air corps for th e Republican forces in th e Spanish Civil War. At th e outbreak of World War II, he was an officer in th e French army. He was wounded and captured,escaped, became active in th e French underground,was captured again, escaped, and finished th e war as an officer in Alsace. He th en became one of th e leaders of a political movementheaded by Charles de Gaulle. Since 1958, he has been Minister of Culture in De Gaulle's Cabinet. Malraux's books include Temptation of the West, The Conquerors, The Royal Way, Man's Fate, Man's Hope, Days of Wrath, The Voices of Silence, and Metamor phosis of the Gods. TERENCE KILMARTINis Literary Editor of London's Observer. His previous tr anslations include the following books by Henry de Montherlant: Chaos and Night, The Bachelors, and th e te tral ogy, The Girls. Jacket design by Chermayeff6 Geismar Associates Inc. 1 58 7 ANTI MEMOIRS ANDRE .........-RAUX ANTI MEMOffiS TRANSLATED BY TERENCE KILMARTIN HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON NEw YoRK CHICAGO SAN FRANciSco English translation Copyright © 1968 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., and Hamish Hamilton Ltd. Published in France under the title Antimemoires. Copyright © 1967 by Andre Malraux. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited. Printed in the United States of America FOR MRS. JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY Contents The Walnut Trees of Altenburg 11 Anti-Memoirs 71 The Temptation of the West 181 The Royal Way 263 La Condition humaine 335 Index 429 The elephant is the wisest of all the animals, the only one who remembers his former lives; and he remains motionless for long periods of time, meditating thereon. -BUDDHIST TEXT 1965, Off Crete. In 1940 I escaped with the future chaplain of the Vercors. * We met again shortly afterward in the little town in the Drome where he was parish priest and where he used to hand out baptismal certificates wholesale to Jews-on condition, however, that they let him baptize them: "Some of it may stick, after all ..."H e had never been to Paris, having completed his studies at the seminary in Lyons. We talked far into the night, as friends do when they meet again, amid the homely village smells. "How long have you been hearing confessions?" "About fifteenyears." "What has confession taught you about men?" "Oh, confession teaches nothing, you know, because when a priest goes into the confessional he becomes another person-grace and all that. And yet ...First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks . and then . ." He raised his brawny lumberman's arms in the starlit night: "And then, the fundamental fact is that there's no such thing as a grown-up person ..." He died on the slopes of Glieres. t To reflect upon life-life in relation to death-is perhaps no more than to intensify one's questioning. I do not mean death in the sense of being killed, which poses few problems to anyone who has the commonplace luck to be brave; but death as it manifests itself in every thing that is beyond man's control, in the aging and even the meta morphosis of the earth (the earth suggests death by its age-old torpor as well as its metamorphosis, even if this metamorphosis is the work of man) and above all the irremediable, the sense that "you'll never know what it all meant." Faced with that question, what do I care about what matters only to me? Almost all the writers I know love their child hood; I hate mine. I have never really learned to re-create myself, if to do so is to come to terms with that lonely halfway house which we call life. I have sometimes managed to act, but the interest of action, except when it rises to the level of history, lies in what we do and not * Mountain area of southeastern France, one of the principal maquis strongholds. (Tr.) t Plateau to the north of the Vercors, scene of a savage battle between German forces and maquis in March 1944. (Tr.) 2 in what we say. I do not find myself very interesting. Friendship, which has played a big part in my life, has never been leavened with curiosity. And I agree with the Glieres chaplain-though if he insisted that there were no grown-ups, it was because children are assured of salvation . \Vhy should I remember? Because, having lived in the shifting realm of intellect and imagina tion all artists share, then in the realms of combat and of history having known, at twenty, an Asia whose death-struggle threw new light on the meaning of the West-1 have experienced time and again, in humble or dazzling circumstances, those moments when the mystery of life appears to each one of us as it appears to almost every woman when she looks into a child's face and to almost every man when he looks into the face of someone dead. In the multifarious forms of that which drives us on, in all that I have seen of man's struggle against humiliation, and even in that sweetness which one can scarcely believe exists on this earth, life, like the gods of vanished religions, appears to me at times as if it were the libretto for some unknown music. Although the East I knew in my youth could be likened to an old Arab on his donkey sleeping the inviolable sleep of Islam, the two hun dred thousand inhabitants of Cairo have since become four million, Baghdad has substituted motorboats for the baskets of reeds and pitch in which its Babylonian peasants used to fish, and the mosaic gates of Tehran are now buried in the middle of the town like the Porte Saint Denis in Paris. America had had its mushroom towns for a long time, but they did not obliterate an older civilization, they did not symbolize the metamorphosis of man. That the world has never changed so much in a single century (except by destruction) is a fact with which we are all familiar. I myself have seen the sparraws swooping down on the horse-drawn buses at the Palais-Royal-and the shy and charming Colonel Glenn on his return from the cosmos; the old Tartar town of Moscow-and the pointed skyscraper of the university; all that the little railway engines in Penn sylvania Station, with their bell-shaped funnels so beautifully polished, evoked of the old America-and all that the Pan-American Building symbolizes of the new. How many centuries is it since a great religion shook the world? This is the first civilization capable of conquering the entire planet, but not of inventing its own temples or its own tombs. Not so very long ago, a journey to Asia was a slow penetration into 3 space and time combined. India after Islam, China after India, the Far East after the Middle East, Sinbad's vessels lying abandoned off an East Indian harbor in the gathering dusk, and after Singapore, at the entrance to the China Sea, the firstjunks like sentinels. Now, on doctors' orders, I resume this slow penetration, and con template the upheavals which have punctuated my vain and turbulent life as they have convulsed Asia-on my way to rediscover, at the other end of the earth, Tokyo, where I sent the Venus de Milo; Kyoto, changed beyond recognition; and Nara, almost intact despite its gutted temple (all three revisited not long since by air); and China, which I have not yet seen again.

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