My
History with Andre Malraux
So,
who out there has heard of Andre Malraux?
He
was an interesting guy—Wikipedia biography HERE, and an essay on his
life by Christopher Hitchens HERE.
He is somewhat like the French version of Ernest Hemingway in
the sense that he adventured around various global hotspots in the 1920s, 30s,
and 40s and wrote novels about the places he visited. He was an ardent leftist in his early life
and supported the Communists in China,
fought with the Republicans in Spain, and served with the French resistance during World War II. (…or at least, so he
claimed. He seems to have fabricated
much of his resume, and there is now considerable debate about which of his
claims are actually true.)
I
had previously encountered Andre Malraux back in my school days when
I had to read his book Man’s Fate* (W) for a college class entitled Western
Perceptions of China.**
The book
completely blew me away at the time.
Mind you, that was some 17 years ago now, and I’m not entirely sure how
it would hold up to a re-reading. (It
may have just been that it was exactly the sort of pretentious book that would
appeal to a pretentious 19 year old.)
But at the time I loved it. It
was about the Shanghai Massacre of 1927 (W) , and it combined the
exoticism of 1920s Shanghai
with a romanticized leftist view of revolutionary struggle and martyrdom with
plenty of philosophical discussions. (As
my professor said of the book, it read as if someone was intending to make an
action movie out of a philosophy discussion.)
[I
read that book back in 1998, long before I had started this blog or
this book review project, but a couple times in the past few years
I have mentioned my fondness for that book—see here and here.]
* The book was published in French as La Condition Humaine and I’ve seen it
published or referred to under several English titles: Fate of Man, The Human
Condition, Man’s Estate, Storm in Shanghai, et cetera.
** Western
Perceptions of China
was the same class in which I encountered Fu-Manchu.
Why
I Read This Book
I found
out a while back that Andre Malraux actually spent some time in Phnom Penh, where I’m currently living. (It was
this article here [LINK HERE], which alerted me to the fact.)
And
then I stumbled upon The Way of the Kings,
Malraux’s Cambodian jungle adventure story, shortly afterwards in a
bookstore. I leafed through it, but didn’t
immediately pick it up.
What
caused me to pick this book up was another book: The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (A), a recently
published adventure story that takes place in 1920s Cambodia. I discovered The Map of Lost Memories when a student of mine presented this book
to the class for her reading journal.
(One of the advantages of having my students do weekly reading journals
is that I get all sorts of interesting book recommendations from them.) And after tracking the book down in the local
bookstore, I discovered that some of the characters in that book are
fictionalized representations of the Cambodian adventures of Andre and Clara
Malraux.
So,
I decided I might as well go back and read Andre Malraux’s account first. I temporarily put The Map of Lost Memories on hold, and went back to Andre Malraux’s
original Cambodian adventure book.
Background
Information
Andre
Malraux and his wife travelled to Cambodia in 1923 with the intention
of trying to make their fortune by obtaining some of the statues from the
ancient Cambodian temples and selling them.
The French authorities had some idea of what they were planning, and sternly
warned them that taking artifacts from the Cambodian temples was strictly
prohibited. Andre Malraux and his wife
attempted it anyway, and they were promptly caught and arrested. (The most generous possible spin you could
put on the whole affair is from Kim Fay, who writes that the 1920s were “an era in which there were not black and
white attitudes about the morality of trafficking and owning art”).
The
first part of The Way of the Kings is
partly a fictionalized recreation of that journey, and partly Malraux’s attempt
to justify his actions. (The
justification, such as it is, appears to be that since the French government
archeologists did not dare to go up into the dangerous areas of the Cambodian
jungle themselves to study these temples, private adventures like Malraux were
doing the world a favor by taking the risks and obtaining the statues, and thus
fully deserved the reward from whatever they found.)
The
second half of the book is about a search for a French adventurer who has gone
missing in the jungle, and is highly reminiscent of Hearts of Darkness. [Hearts of Darkness is another book I had
to read for a class back in my college days, although I remember very little of
it, and it might be time for a re-read one of these days.]
The
Review
I’m still
trying to make up my mind whether this was a good or bad book. But it’s definitely a fascinating little book.
As
I already mentioned above, my college professor characterized Man’s Fate as a philosophy book someone
was trying to make into an action movie.
The same could perhaps be said of The
Way of the Kings (at least if you substitute “jungle adventure” in for “action
movie.”) It’s a bit heavy on the themes
of mortality and physical decay, but it’s also feels like a great adventure
story as well.
If
you like these sort of old-fashioned jungle-adventure stories, you should enjoy
this one. (Written in 1930, this book is
firmly in the 1930s jungle-adventure genre that would later inspire the Indiana Jones movies.)
The
set-up is also interesting. On the
jungle expedition, a young intellectual man is paired with an older reckless
man. The older man is completely free
from any restraint, and is in many ways the person that the younger man wishes
he could be. Except that the older man
is all too aware that his best days are behind him, and is obsessed with the
thoughts of the inevitable decay of his body.
Both men are searching for Grabot, a man who has become so completely
free of society’s constraints that he is rumored to have “gone native” among
the wild Cambodian jungle tribes.
It’s
a fascinating set-up for a jungle adventure story (albeit one that is slightly
ripping-off Hearts of Darkness.) I’m not sure this short little story fully
takes advantage of all the possibilities offered by these characters, but it’s
a great premise at least. (This short story
doesn’t have time to take these characters on half the adventures I wanted to
see them on. Perhaps somewhere out
there, there’s a longer and much more epic story waiting to be written involving
these same character types.)
There
are a couple short action scenes in the book, but most of the book is tension
and suspense rather than action, and what is really great about the book is how
Malraux builds up the tension in each scene.
Rachel Seiffert, who wrote the publisher’s introduction to my edition of
this book, describes this eloquently, so I’ll just steal from her: “I was most struck by the intensely visual
quality of his writing. The description
of Claude watching Perken walk out to their native captors is stunningly
evocative. Claude’s hands shaking as he
holds the binoculars, the blurry, frenzied searching until at least he gets a
visual fix. Having to watch this crucial
scene unfold in frantic snatches is breathtaking” (Publisher’s Introduction
p. viii).
Malraux’s
descriptions of the Cambodian jungle are really good as well. You can practically smell the jungle reading
this book. I’ll quote a short bit to
illustrate this—this is a description of one of the characters exploring the
ruins of an ancient temple deep in the jungle:
“The wall cut across the vegetation like a
path, but it was covered with sticky moss.
If Claude tried to walk along the top, the fall would be extremely
dangerous: gangrene is as much the master of the jungle as the insect. He began to move forward on his stomach. The moss smelled of decay, and was covered in
leaves that were half viscous and half reduced to their veins, as if partly
digested. So close to his face, the moss
looked very big—he could see the fibrils stirring slightly in the calm air—and
he was reminded, too, that there were insects here. After three metres, he felt a tickling
sensation.
He stopped, and scratched his
neck. The tickling moved over his hand,
and he pulled it away immediately: two black ants as big as wasps, their
antennae distinctly visible, were trying to slip between his fingers. He shook his hand as hard as he could, and
they fell. He was already on his
feet. No ants on his clothes. At the end of the wall, a hundred metres
away, a brighter gap: that had to be the gate, and the carvings. Below, the earth, covered in fallen
stones. Against the bright gap, the
silhouette of a branch: large ants, their bellies in silhouette too, their feet
invisible, crossed it like a bridge.
Claude tried to push it away, but he missed it at first. ‘I absolutely have to get to the end. If there are red ants, it’ll be bad, but if I
go back it’ll be worse…’ ” (p. 62)
…and
there are many more passages like that throughout the book, giving the reader a
real feel for the setting.
Having
thus far praised Malraux’s writing, I have to admit that there were any number
of sentences or sections of dialogue that just went completely over my head—I
often had no idea what Malraux’s sentences meant. It was slightly frustrating, but the odd
incomprehensible sentence here and there didn’t interfere with my overall
understanding of the story, so I just kept on reading through the book.
(Of
course with any translated book, you always have to wonder if anything is lost
in the translation. But I suspect it
might just be Malraux is one of those highbrow authors who occasionally likes
to make the reader work a bit to understand the book. I should also note that I’ve searched the
Internet for other reviews of this book, and I seem to be the only one
complaining about this, so it could just be me.)
And
then, when the whole story was over, I had to ask myself what the purpose of it
all was. There’s a lot of talk in the
book about the problems of aging and death, but I’m not sure the book adds
anything new to the discussion.
The
central human dilemma is that all of us must someday get old and die, but none
of us want to get old and die. This
conflict between our desire to stay alive and our inevitable death is perhaps
the basis for all human philosophy and religion. But in this particular book, I’m not sure
Malraux does much more than shine a spotlight on the problem. His characters talk a lot about their
inevitable decay and death, but I didn’t feel like I left the book with any
more insight on the problem than when I started it.
Although
you could perhaps argue that it is not the job of the novelist to solve these
problems, only to write about the human condition as it is. I suppose it just depends on what each
particular reader wants to get out of a book.
Other
Notes
* There are some interesting experiments
with changes in perspective in this book.
In the beginning of the book, everything is seen through the thoughts of
the younger man, Claude, but at about the halfway point the narrator’s
perspective begins to switch over to the older man, Perkins.
* When talking about Grabot, who is rumored
to have set up his own private kingdom in the jungle, the characters talk about
several real-life historical white men who have done the same thing. Brooke of Sarawak, who is a major character
in Flashman’s Lady, is one
of the people mentioned. (
Josiah Harlan, who was in Flashman and the Mountain of Light, would also fit nicely into this
category, but Malraux doesn’t mention Josiah Harlan.)
* In my Internet research on this book, I’ve
often seen it mentioned as part of Malraux’s trilogy on revolution in China, or sometimes revolution in Asia. However
unless I’m missing something, it has nothing to do with either. There’s certainly no connection to China that I
can see, and there’s not much here on the themes of revolution. There is a section about the jungle tribes
resisting the extending authority of the central government, but this isn’t
really the same as a revolution in the traditional-Marxist sense of the word.
(By
the way, the government troops sent in at the end of the book were the Siamese
government troops, and not the French, right?
If someone out there has read the book, help me out on this. That was one of the parts of the book I was
slightly confused about.)
* I linked to the Christopher Hitchens’
essay on Malraux at the beginning of this review, but it is
perhaps worth mentioning twice. [The link, once again, is HERE.]
In
the essay, Hitchens compares Malraux to the fictional Flashman. (“I was
put in the mind of a Gallic version of Harry Flashman: fast-talking and
protean, covered with unearned glory and full of embellished traveler’s tales
from many plundered colonies.”)
Hitchens
also includes Trotsky’s acid commentary on Malraux: “Malraux is organically incapable of moral independence; he was born
biddable.”
…and
yet, for all that, Hitchens is full of praise for Man’s Fate, which makes me think that I might not have been wrong
about the book and it’s power after all.
Hitchens
writes: “Published in 1933, it [Man’s
Fate] did for fiction what Harold Isaacs’s
“Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution” did for scholarship. It pointed up the increasing weight of Asia
in world affairs; it described epic moments of suffering and upheaval, in
Shanghai especially (it was nearly filmed by Sergei Eisenstein); and it
demonstrated huge respect for Communism and Communists while simultaneously
evoking the tragedy of a revolution betrayed by Moscow. Somewhat lushly Orientalist in its manner,
the novel was ridiculed for its affection by Vladimir Nabokov and hailed as
prescient by Arthur Koestler.
Link of the Day
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