Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dark, dramatic, with deep-set eyes burning in a gaunt face, at 53 Malraux has the looks proper to a hero, the talk proper to a genius. His ideas gush out in a torrent that overwhelms friends. His talk ranges from obscure Japanese painters to customs of American Indians, from Swiss primitives to Buddhist philosophers. He has argued Communism with Trotsky Hinduism with Nehru. In his dazzling transitions and far-flung references, he is a conversational wonder of the world made the more difficult to follow by his nervous facial tics and a constant snuffling into his hand caused...
Defiance of Death. Malraux's view of life begins with the bitter recognition of man's mortality. He is much obsessed with death. "You know as well as I do that life is meaningless," says one of his characters. "Death is always there, you understand, like a standing proof of the absurdity of life." Malraux's image of life, La Condition Humaine, is drawn from Pascal: "Imagine a large number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, every day some of them being butchered before the eyes of others, and others seeing their own plight...
...Malraux cannot, though all his life long he has wistfully acknowledged its power for others. "Certainly there is a higher faith: that proclaimed by all the village crosses," he wrote. "It is love, and peace is in it. I will never accept it; I will never bow to ask of it the peace to which my weakness beckons...
...Malraux found man's greatness to be defiance of man's fate. The real defeat was "having to accept one's destiny, one's place in the world, to feel shut up in a life there's no escaping, like a dog in a kennel." The drive to "at last attain something beyond, something outside himself" is Malraux's "warrant for release from man's estate." "If man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?" demands Malraux...
Turning Life to Account. Originally Flemish, the Malraux family were for 300 years shipbuilders at Dunkirk. André Malraux's grandfather was a fierce little man who for 22 years attended Mass kneeling on the ground outside, in rain or wind, because of a quarrel with the church authorities. He had a prejudice against insurance, and when a storm sank his whole fishing fleet off Newfoundland, the Malraux family fortune was wiped out. André was brought up by his mother, who ran a small grocery shop in a Paris suburb...