Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Author. Volatile, restless, sharp-eyed, thin-featured, André Malraux is known slightly by many people, well by very few. He talks a great deal, and very rapidly, smokes constantly, is disturbed by a facial tic which stayed with him after illness in China. Gloomily handsome, mildly sardonic, he enjoys the companionship of pretty women. Born in Paris on November 3, 1901, of well-to-do parents, he went to five schools as War drove his family in and out of the city, graduated from the famed Lycée Condorcet, which schooled Proust, then studied Sanskrit at the Paris...
Among archeologists, Indo-China is famous for its immense, moldering, bat-infested ruins of Khmer civilization, of which Angkor Wat is the best known. Among economists, Indo-China is equally famous as one of the world's worst-run colonies. For a year young Malraux dug through ruins, crawled over fallen temples which reeked with the decayed jungle vegetation of eight centuries, collected Khmer statuary, then abruptly lost interest in Indo-China's past, became interested in Indo-China's present. Working with a group known as the Young Annam League, which fought for dominion status...
Between 1923 and 1927 Malraux shuttled back & forth between Paris and the Far East, published a magazine in Saïgon, helped natives get out newspapers the Government suppressed. At 24 he was associate secretary general of the Kuomintang for Cochin-China. At 25 he was a member of the Committee of Twelve (Chiang Kai-shek was another member) which directed the Canton insurrection during the Chinese revolution, Malraux's post being propaganda commissioner for the key provinces of Kwangsi and Kwangtung...
...revolutionary secret agent in the Far East in 1926 was a little like a soldier who cannot be sure his allies will not go over to the enemy in the middle of battle. Malraux was no Communist, but worked with the Kuomintang in the period of the united front between the Kuomintang and the Third International. When Chiang Kai-shek broke with his Communist allies in 1927, and the Chinese Revolution ended in a swirl of executions, betrayals, assassinations, Malraux left China for good, accompanied an archeological expedition through Persia and Afghanistan on his way back to France. The expedition...
...Conquerors was an immediate critical success but sold badly. Living with his wife and two servants in a little apartment on the Rue du Bac - four rooms filled with Khmer statuary, Oriental books and hand-painted Persian linen panels on the walls - Malraux remained as secretive in Paris as he had been in Saïgon, met Indo-Chinese conspirators, Chinese revolutionists in his office, had so few contacts with the French literary world that even his closest friends did not know where he lived. The Conquerors was followed by a mediocre adventure story laid in Indo-China, The Royal...