Ends of Europe (III): Forgotten Emissaries
25. Malraux
[Unfortunately] he did not live to see his plans take form. Matthew died last year, of cancer, at the age of 35, in the middle of his life’s way. But such was the beauty of his dream, and the love that he inspired, that some of us who knew him, led by his widow, Berta Willisch, determined to see it realized. […] It is crucial that the Matthew Strother Center has no goal […] beyond the pursuit of learning for its own sake. Which means, for the sake of whatever students want to do with it, of whomever it might make them. This is freedom. When education isn’t pointed in particular directions, its possibilities are endless. After college, Matthew disappeared to Europe. I didn’t hear from him for five years. Finally, I got a letter—at some thirty pages, the longest I’ve ever received. It was a spiritual diary that doubled as a reading log. He referenced Joyce, Hesse, Bellow, Camus, Lawrence, Larkin, Miller, Maugham, Hemingway, Chesterton, Salinger, Durell, Ozick, Blake, Gorky, Chekhov, Geoff Dyer, Paul Goodman, Roberto Calasso, David Shields, Gregoire Bouillier, and George WS Trow. At the end, he wrote this: ‘The straight river of my narrative has opened onto the wide deltas of the present, and looking out to sea there’s nowhere to go but anywhere.’ Exactly.[1]
William Deresiewicz
Claude Tannery is a forgotten emissary; his subject in L’Héritage spirituel de Malraux (2005) is not. It may seem a little unfair to list this chapter under M rather than T, but the very idea for this Ends of Europe project arose on a stroll past Strasbourg’s Médiathèque André Malraux in the summer of 2022, and Tannery’s short book is largely a collage, after my own heart, of well-chosen Malraux quotes. It was close, but whereas Lin Shaohua as the translator of Murakami was my subject in Chapter 22, Malraux is our subject and halfway point here, and Tannery our envoy. France Culture’s 2014 radio programme ‘André Malraux (1901-1976): Une vie, une oeuvre’ also provides some wonderful background to the man and the myth for any French-speaking readers.
‘Sentences are adventures’ was Malraux’s credo, inherited from Flaubert, and the revival of the ‘adventure novel’ one of his artistic priorities.[2] Tannery aims to convince his readers that Malraux was above all an existentialist on a ‘spiritual quest’ for himself and the rest of humanity. The epigraphs chosen for the book (from Malraux, who else?) point to the likelihood of a coming earthquake: ‘The world quivers and whispers at the tremors of something about to happen in the universe of spirit. […] The main problem in the world at the end of our [20th] century will be the religious one.’[3] Tannery argues that it would be better ‘to read Malraux in the light of this quest’ for meaning in eternity, and as a prose poet rather than a mere ‘novelist’, but he laments that his hero is still, in 2005, suffering the fate of Dante 30 years after his death: too much emphasis from critics on Florentine politics and biographical detail, not enough attention to the ‘gushings and upheavals’ of the individual human soul in its confrontation with the absolute. In Malraux’s case in particular, this would be a tragic ‘misunderstanding’ of a man who thought in eons, not days – and worried about the place of human beings in such a brutally endless natural order. As early as La Tentation de l’Occident (1926), Malraux departs from the tendency of his generation to put Man and History in place of a dead God, declaring instead that ‘Man himself is dead’: ‘The Chinaman Ling tells the Europeans [in La Tentation de l’Occident] that “absolute reality for you was God and then Humanity. But Man has died after God, and you are anxiously searching for someone to whom to entrust your heritage”. Malraux, of course, wants to resuscitate humanity via art, a purification of our animal evolutionary heritage into an essence of the best that has been thought and said, one capable of jolting us out of the desert of modernity – or indeed of modern space-time (and the fate of our meaty brains and bodies in it) - into an ‘absolute’ realm beyond all physical destiny:
Humanism is not saying ‘I did something no mere animal could have done’; it is to refuse the mere beast in us and recover a humanity everywhere we find what crushes it. For the believer, this long dialogue of metamorphoses and resurrections comes together in a single divine voice, because humanity only realises itself in the pursuit of its noblest part. […] It matters little that human beings have succeeded in transmitting their concepts and technologies for a few centuries, because humanity is a product of chance, and the world is made of oblivion. […] What does Rembrandt matter next to the march of nebulae? But it is humanity that the stars threaten, and it is to humanity that Rembrandt speaks. […] Every great artwork is a purification of the world, but their common lesson is the fact of their very existence. The victory of each artist over her servitude rejoins, in the immense firmament, the victory of all art over humanity’s destiny. […] One day, faced with the Earth’s arid expanses or the victory of the forests [over human civilisation], no one will be able to guess the forms that human intelligence imposed upon it, the stones of Florence carefully laid amid the Tuscan olive groves. Nothing will remain of the palatial buildings before which Michelangelo passed in a state of exasperation with Raphael, or of the Parisian cafés where Renoir sat with Cézanne, van Gogh with Gauguin. […] Survival cannot be measured in time, only in the form that the human victory over destiny takes.[4]
Tannery argues that Renaissance humanism – from Copernicus and Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent to Galileo and Shakespeare – created this propitious climate of ‘mystery over revelation’ before the Enlightenment and 19th-century historicism returned Europe to the old teleological idea that ‘one would understand everything later’:
The human relationship with the divine was individualised [as never before]. It was in 17th-century England and the 18th-century Encyclopedists that the theory of [this new] individualism was defined and elaborated. Property was affirmed as a right, above all the ownership of self. The individual human being was no longer conceived as part of a religious or social whole, but as an [independent] property owner called to negotiate the best possible contract for herself in society. The very raison d'être of society became the organisation of the enjoyment of self-ownership and the other forms of property deriving from it.
Malraux’s novels and early essays on art show how this individualism […] engendered a ‘reification’ of the individual. […] The triumph of individualism was a blind one; […] the seed, however, had been planted. On one branch of the resulting tree, the Encyclopedists argued that History was a child of Reason; by the 19th century, it was supposed to ‘make humanity’s adventure intelligible’. History with a capital H was born, no longer a mere chronology, but the anxious interrogation of the past with the goal of uncovering the destiny of the future.
The [European] 19th century experienced this History and its various progresses, which sought to explain the universe and replace the outdated religious accounts, with a mixture of hope and outright delusion. History and progress became [what Malraux called] ‘the final incarnations of Destiny’. Far from liberating humanity, History burdened it with a new fatalism. In place of the old Catholic dogma (‘suffer in this world of pain in order to gain eternal paradise’), a new belief in progress was now mandated: ‘Present generations, suffer for the sake of future ones.’
Tannery shows us a Malraux capable of evolution; after proclaiming ‘the failure of individualism’ as early as 1926, the dramatic events of the subsequent quarter-century leave a further mark:
The death of History as an explanation of the human adventure was consummated with the arrival of the ‘organised degradation’ of human beings. Massacres, torture and rape have been with us since time immemorial, but only in the 20th century does a methodical, at times even scientific organisation of an abasement emerge which is not only interested in eliminating an adversary, but often and above all in destroying any trace of human dignity.
Malraux repeatedly stressed that this degradation of man was not unique to totalitarian or dictatorial regimes, but had become a feature of all societies which, over the course of the century, had increasingly come to employ human sciences to boost sales, increase audience numbers or win votes. All these tactics rest on the idea that human beings can be manipulated, which is true, and that one has the right to manipulate them, which is much less clear.
[…] Another daughter of Reason – Science - allowed some to believe, for a while at least, that the world could be understood and humanity explained. This hope did not last long; everyone today knows that science has no power of orientation. It offers only pieces of knowledge, generating multiple new questions with every provisory solution. […] Distraught at this inability to find an answer to the ‘What am I?’ question in either religion, history or science, the 20th-century individual went to her own ego in search of grounding. This psychological individualism subjectified the whole business, reducing [identity] to self-awareness. Initially, however, people tended to find monsters in the depths of themselves. I stress initially, because Malraux came to realise, after 1950, that human beings could find other things than demons within. [… But] humanity cannot be grounded in the mere ‘self-awareness of each individual’, because self-evaluation and self-judgment are only possible when ordered by a higher or supreme value. Without it, judgment is an illusion, a lie.
[…] Instead of ‘scratching away interminably at the individual’, Malraux invited the youth of Europe to take a brave and lucid stance and to avoid the false comfort of doctrines tainted by [excessive] individualism.
Uninterested in the ruins of a culture built on ‘the vehement affirmation of self’, Malraux throws himself into ‘an incessant quest for another humanity and another form of selfhood’; Tannery compares Malraux’s stance to that of Camus at the end of L’Homme révolté: ‘Beyond nihilism, we are all busy preparing a renaissance among the ruins, but few are aware of it.’ In a giant universe where ‘humanity is but one adventure among others’, Malraux could find ‘no religion capable of offering a foundation stone for humanity across space and time’:
The history of civilisations and cultures ‘imprisons each religion in a circumscribed past, snatching away an absolute that the theosophies and syncretisms [of our time] obviously do not replace.’ […] For the 20th-century man, the Absolutes of the world’s religions have lost their capital letters and become ‘metamorphosed absolutes’ or ‘relativised absolutes’, as Malraux puts it in several of his works. […] Malraux sensed, however, that these religions could be subsumed by something so new that it was not yet possible to imagine it.
Although the gods of the past have been ‘the highpoint of human creativity’ and ‘torches lit one by one by human beings to reveal the path out of animal submission’, Tannery and Malraux single out medieval Western Europe as the beginning of something else:
That all religions, even the most contemporary, have become relative is the end of a long chain of events that began in the Renaissance, when the Christian world suddenly became [in Malraux’s words] ‘one world among many, and when Dante rescued Virgil from damnation’. To Valéry’s ‘we civilisations know we are mortal’ […] we must now add: ‘And we religions accept ourselves as mortal too.’ Great and beautiful mortals, to be sure, but mortal nonetheless.
Malraux should in no way, however, be confused with a Western chauvinist; on the contrary, Renaissance humanism is the candle capable of igniting a future world spirituality precisely because it embodies a transcultural beyond of itself. Al-Andalus, Tang China or any other Sternstunde of humanity may also be said to have done so, but Malraux is interested in healing the wounds of Western culture, which the Renaissance and Enlightenment necessarily inflicted, but which the 19th and 20th centuries, mired in colonialism, did not properly bandage:
Despite the impossibility of finding a universal and timeless fulcrum for a new spirituality, the quest for it is at the heart of all Malraux’s work. True spiritual life for Malraux offers the promise of reconciliation between human beings and the universe. For twenty-five centuries, driven by the twin heritages of Athens and Jerusalem, Western thought has focused on man, his destiny and his death. Nature and the stars were mere background décor in this process, or at best supplementary sources of anguish. […] Malraux invites us to accept that the life and death of individual human beings will only find their meaning if the decaying and germ-ridden bark surrounding every apple tree also finds its full and proper place.
A glance in any direction – China, India, Africa, America, Oceania – reveals sprouts of such a ‘spiritual humanism’ in pre- and post-Renaissance civilisations; by 1959, Malraux was cautiously optimistic that this power could be harnessed: ‘It looks more and more like the religions were nothing other than individual movements in an immense music.’ Like all men of his century (and ‘like Gisors at the end of La condition humaine’), Malraux was tempted by ‘resignation’ at different times, but he was always able, Tannery argues, ‘to triumph over the darkness and recover the light with the help of life’s mysterious revelation’.
Malraux, indeed, resolves ‘not to die without knowing what I thought of being alive’; unlike religions focused on post mortem destiny, Malraux’s humanism rests on the idea that ‘it is not what happens after death which gives meaning to life, but life to death’. The ‘secret of life’, Malraux argues, ‘would not have been less poignant if man were immortal’; the continued existence of works of art, and the possibility of the individual’s relationship with them, help to create a state in which ‘one is no longer interested in one’s own life as such’ but rather seeks ‘communion’ with the bigger ‘secret’ via ‘the fundamental emotion that human beings experience in the face of life itself’. A perfect freedom of the individual from the excesses of individualism is thereby promised:
‘Awareness of life is not the same as awareness of personhood.’ In order to become aware of life itself, of the vital flux pulsing through the cosmos, to experience a ‘fundamental emotion’ in the midst of it and enter into communion with it, the framework of individual personhood must be overcome. […] All those who embrace this ‘unlikely mystery’ will be liberated […] for the warmth of song.
Art, in this cosmology, offers the promise of ‘victory over time’ and ‘a constant rectification of Creation’:
The world of art is peopled with works that remain alive and have not yet been swallowed. It is ‘the world of the presence in our lives of that which should belong to death.’ […] It hence ties us to a time that is neither that of a human lifetime nor divine. […] The Christian Resurrection allowed the faithful to enter into communion with saints. The ‘giant resurrection’ of art, an empirical given which requires no leap of faith, also offers access to such communion. The Christian knows very well that St. John lived before St. Francis, but he communes with them both in the eternity of Jesus. Malraux knows that Rembrandt came generations before Cézanne, but he joins them via the real and intemporal presence that characterises the human art world.
Malraux nevertheless became acutely aware of the problem of the serendipity of intergenerational artistic transmission during a visit to Cairo Museum in 1965; the ‘inexhaustible power of creation which traverses the centuries’ is not enough on its own: ‘The precarity and complex character of artistic survival was revealed to me in this damned museum, […] which is no guarantee of the survival of anything.’ In Tannery’s summation of Malraux’s post-1965 doctrine, ‘the immensity of time offered by the world of art is not infinite. It becomes a world which once again seeks the beyond of itself. The survival it proposes - and hence also its triumph over death – are contingent.’ Face to face with the ‘solemn enigma of art’, Malraux rejects both the old religious solution (the relegation of all art to service of a Supreme Value) and the ‘art for art’s sake’ vogue: ‘Art proposes successive incarnations of the “What is a human being?” question, but it does not offer the response. Rather, it promises “a cortège of ephemeral answers to an invincible question”.’
It takes Malraux until 1974, in Tannery’s estimation, to reconcile the ‘transcendence’ of Judeo-Christian religion with the ‘immanence’ of Eastern traditions and to imagine a future global civilisation which might finally allow the individual ‘to experience herself not as a discrete animal, but as a constituent element of an always busy Creation.’ We do not yet ‘understand the language’ of this emerging world spirituality, but, Malraux and Tannery argue, ‘we hear its voice’. Malraux’s late affirmation that ‘metamorphosis is the law of the world’ not only grants non-Western traditions a place at the table of dialogue among civilisations, but also ‘crowns the efforts, over the last two centuries, of Goethe, Nerval, Lewis Carroll, Flaubert in La Tentation de saint Antoine, Lautréamont, Kafka, Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus, Richard Strauss, Jung, Valéry in his Mon Faust, Bachelard’ and others in the European tradition who have ‘stood on the shoulders of Ovid and Apuleius’ to emphasise and creatively transform this fact. The spirit of modern science is by no means hostile to such a civilisational endeavour, but Malraux was able to sense that ‘even though a technological civilisation requires an experimental method, […] a method is not enough to ground it. […] In the flux of metamorphosis in which human beings live, neither the world nor they themselves have a specific meaning, because such a meaning is impossible by definition – whether you seek to arrive at one via thought or faith.’ The appropriate ethical stance in the face of such an epistemological vista is not nihilism, but ‘astonishment’: ‘With a humility too often overlooked, Malraux accepted that the source of the River of Metamorphosis was “deeper than all our means of capturing it”.’ This ‘liberation from the question of meaning’ does not ‘imply our impotence; it implies nothing’. In other words, and as even Islamic thinkers in the line of Muhammad Iqbal have concluded, ‘the only revelation is that nothing can be revealed’[5]; human beings are on their own with their own ethicality, even though ‘this absolute unknowable is no domain of doubt, but just as imperious as the successive Faiths of the human past’. And yet something in this unthinkable, Malraux concludes, ‘is the only thing that can deliver us’ from meaninglessness and the ethical desert of an amputated individuality. ‘Conscience does not legitimise the universe’; rather, by tying us to the universe, it is, like love, its own reward. We are nothing without this umbilical tie, but we are free to love the universe on our own terms: ‘For Malraux, what matters is not an explanation or chain of reasoning, but the liberating interrogation. […] Human beings “find an image of themselves in the questions they ask”, not in their various ephemeral answers.’
Rather than merely privatising questions of meaning, as liberal societies promise, Malraux envisages a future global civilisation in which a ‘vaccine’ against them is found:
‘No question presses us more insistently than the meaning of life, because death forces it upon us.’ In the face of this stress, Malraux asks whether the ‘right response’ might not be to ‘immunise humanity against the question’. […] ‘Nothing proves that a civilisation can develop in such a refusal of the question of meaning,’ Malraux wrote in L’Homme précaire, but despite the prudence of his formulation, one senses that Malraux accepts at least the possibility. As he asks elsewhere, ‘would a civilisation durably immunised against all meaning be less surprising than the idea of a Christian empire at the death of Tiberius?
Tannery recommends citing Malraux’s more deliciously crafted sentences as free verse, so we will do so with an apt one here:
Just as a human being lives
Without knowing when she will die
So too could a civilisation develop
Without knowing why.
Another Western artist who has echoed Malraux’s sentiments on meaning, Tannery reminds us, is Gustav Mahler: ‘When I listen to music, and even when I’m conducting, I hear precise answers to all my questions; everything is perfectly clear and certain. Or rather, I realise with total clarity that these questions do not exist at all.’ Unfortunately, Malraux laments, there is no French synonym grandiose enough for the sublimity of the communion he has in mind; étonnement points in the right direction, but it is not quite enough for the surprise perfection of all spontaneous love. An ‘engulfing uncertainty’ reigns on the throne at the ‘“paradoxical summit” of our limited certainties’; a person who can welcome an accident of chance with appropriate awe is like the gardener who joyously welcomes ‘the appearance of a new flower on the plant she has been cultivating without feeling the need to inquire after the purpose of the plant and its blossoms’. As in medieval property law, the ‘precarity’ of this metaphysical perch is an object of prayer:
Until the 17th century, the adjective ‘precarious’ qualified a right exercised thanks to a revocable authorisation, and the [Latin] noun precarium designated a parcel of farmland offered for temporary use to those who had publicly prayed for it.
Human beings today believe they are the owners of the Earth and, increasingly, outer space as well. They are in fact exploiting a mere precarium, but as they have not presented their prayers, they are not really fit to do so. […] Human beings have yet to invent the prayer that will grant fortune its proper mystique, return grandeur to the word ‘astonishment’, and legitimise human uses of Earth and space. [Malraux’s] homme précaire is a chrysalid who knows he is temporary and senses that he will be something else.’
A new spirituality is supposed by this reorientation away from ‘the invincibility of death’ and towards ‘the uncanniness of life’, […] one which Malraux repeatedly said could flower.
The theologians can decide just how ‘new’ Malraux’s spirituality really is or was; what matters is his revolutionary prognosis for our century:
[The question of religion] will appear in a form as different from those we know as Christianity was from the ancient religions that preceded it. […] I think the task of the next century, in the face of the most terrible threat humanity has ever known, will be to reintegrate the gods. […] If the coming century does witness a spiritual revolution, which I consider quite possible (though no one knows how probable it might be), I think it will be tied to what we can vaguely see coming today, just as the 18th century enjoyed a foretaste of electricity thanks to the lightning rod. [This] major spiritual phenomenon […] will not necessarily take the form of a new religion. […] Upheavals of the spirit, by their very nature, defy all prediction.
As Tannery’s title suggests, Malraux is to be understood less as an outright iconoclast than as the conveyor of a ‘spiritual heritage’ which can only be transmitted via ruptures: ‘Will we prove capable,’ Tannery asks, ‘of inventing new songs of prayer for the “engulfing uncertainty” of the law of metamorphosis and its infinite succession of incarnations and ascensions?’
L’Heritage spirituel de Malraux ends, fittingly, with Tannery’s 1972 interview of Malraux in Verrières-le-Buisson (a southern suburb of Paris). The eager doctoral student is excited to join Malraux at his hearth, and the master does not disappoint:
We always thought it terribly important when someone was doing a doctorate – how very German we were in that regard! […] But what matters is that there is someone, someone serious, who undertakes a sustained labour of reflection. Whether the title is ‘Politics and the Self in X’ or ‘The Evolution of the Concept of Beauty in Y’ does not matter, even if the themes themselves are not entirely unimportant. But I am always interested when a young person decides to devote a solid chapter of her life to hard thought on important questions. If I am the subject, that is very flattering, but [my vanity] is not the point. […] These days, in a country like France, fewer and fewer people seem willing to go to the well (or wall) of serious thought. The discipline of the thesis is replaced by shallow preening at the Café Les Deux Magots.
Tannery, while promising to write about Malraux only after his death[6], summarises the ‘current state’ of his research in the following terms:
I have the impression that you have always sought out the universal man, the human being tied to the universe, the human being liberated from destiny. […] In our century, and most notably in your novels, you have sketched a new humanist architecture, the foundations of a new human being, a new conception of our relationship with the universe and ourselves. I hesitate to use the phrase ‘cultural revolution’, but [this is what you call for]: a new human becoming. It seems that the notions we [Europeans] have inherited from Christianity, our Renaissance and [Enlightenment] individualism, need to be modified in accordance with this hope for a new human being.
By 1972, however, Malraux does not really believe politics can be the main site or driver of the requisite spiritual innovation:
Mao is certainly a brilliant political powerbroker, but he doesn’t add much of interest at the level of his conception of human nature. The Indian Army, likewise, may have just saved Bangladesh, but it is the India beyond the army that attracts our curiosity. The Indian officer or general very much resembles his French or English counterpart. And that is a problem, because I don’t believe the world can just muddle on with a conception of human nature inherited from the West (as it seems to be doing at the moment). […] Thirty years ago, we believed a happy marriage [of civilisations] was possible – not easy, but possible. Today we are forced to admit that, although it is still possible, historical reality stands in the way.
Given the complexities in play, Malraux argues that the ‘revolution’ he vaguely envisages could take a hundred to two hundred years (‘let’s say one-fifty’); for the time being, humanity is too busy digesting the monsters of totalitarianism and the capitalist and populist excesses of liberal democracy to imagine a new form of humanist government which serves the interests, not of a single ruler, wealthy oligarchy or abstract ‘people’, but concrete human beings:
We are nowhere near it yet. For the moment, the main question is still what to do about regimes that serve parties. Political parties do not care a great deal about concrete humanity, but rather about an idea of humanity to which they seek conformity. […] If you had asked Hitler about the place of the human being in Nazi Germany, he would have said, ‘What human being? There is no human being. Only [Nazi] Germany matters.’ […] Stalin, who was cleverer, wouldn’t have said the same thing [in a Soviet context], but he would have thought it.
The Industrial Revolution, moreover, unleashed a new monster on the world:
No civilisation in the entire world had unlocked the power of the machine before. Machines are a much bigger phenomenon than the proletariat, because you can defend the proletariat or crush them, but you can’t destroy [the idea of] machines. If you’re the president of a company that makes five billion a year (a modest sum next to General Motors), what are you going to do with all the money? Either you invest it back into your business – expand into planes and bikes, let’s say, if you’re an automaker – in which case the triumph of machines is absolute. Or you invest the money [somewhere else]. And where do you think that money goes? Pre-industrial rabbit farming? The world of machines generates ever more machines.
Tannery wonders why comparatively wealthy modern societies seem so reluctant to invest in culture and the arts; Malraux, France’s most famous Ministre des Affaires culturelles (1959-1969) and certified bon vivant[7], argues that the problem is that the arts don’t cost enough (‘all the Rembrandts in the world would only cost a tiny fraction of the national budget’). The point, Tannery rejoinders, ‘is not that a society buys Rembrandts, but that it allows someone who might be capable of painting as well as Rembrandt [the economic and political freedom] to do so.’ Malraux’s answer is a model of simplicity:
Ah, that’s not insurmountable! It’s a technical problem [of distribution], even if it might take more than two minutes to solve. If the General [de Gaulle] had not left, and if I had stayed on [as minister], it would have been done. Anyway, some other country will do it one day. […] But what cannot be avoided is that the billions generated by the most powerful societies end up reinvested in machines.
This dominance of industrial civilisation is destined to grow ever more global and to make a mockery of ‘the terrible European pretension that machines belong to them’. Tannery counters that ‘one feels our world struggling to give birth to a new type of human relationship’; Malraux doesn’t disagree as such, but he knows one thing for sure: ‘The West, the one you and I have known, is finished. How long will the end take, and in what conditions will it emerge? That’s a lot more complicated.’
[1] William Deresiewicz, ‘Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul’,
, 29/5/2024 (accessed 17/6/2024).
[2] ‘André Malraux (1901-1976): Une vie, une oeuvre’, France Culture, 2014, ’
(accessed 17/6/2024).
[3] André Malraux, in Claude Tannery, L’Héritage spirituel de Malraux, (Paris: Arléa, 2005).
[4] This is a collage of Malraux quotations drawn from Les Voix du Silence, « La galerie de la Pléiade », (Paris, Gallimard, 1951), pp. 637-640 and Les noyers de l’Altenburg, (Paris, Gallimard, 1948), p. 142. See also Nicolas Righi, ‘L’humanisme d’André Malraux’, Le Philosophoire, 2004/2, pp. 195-211 (https://www.cairn.info/revue-le-philosophoire-2004-2-page-195.htm). Accessed 24/6/2024.
[5] See also my chapter on Iqbal in Peking Eulogy and my section on Naguib Mahfouz in Warriors for Civilisation.
[6] As Malraux told Sophie de Vilmorin about his interview with Tannery, ‘I’ve finally met someone who said to me: “I will wait until your death before writing about you.”’
[7] Olivier Todd paints one of the less flattering but not entirely damning portraits of Malraux the man (mythomania, compulsive lying, love of money etc.) in his biography André Malraux: une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).