Malraux was a colossus of French intellectual and political life and the range of his work is breathtaking, but then he always harboured great expectations of himself. This can be seen very clearly in his remarkable autobiographical work, Antimemoirs, where he discusses in loving tones his great uncle Walter about whom a certain family story circulated. As a small boy, in the mid-1850s, Walter had been asked what he would do when he grew up. Work at the Académie Française was the youthful reply. On further enquiries the young Walter announces that he would be behind the desk and there would be Victor Hugo, de Lamartine, Cuvier, Balzac. Still curious, the adults ask what he should do behind the desk with all the famous people: ‘I’d say to them: «Take it back and do it again!»’, is the self-assured reply. Such a childhood background was to mark Malraux’s whole attitude towards himself and his own achievements and while this may seem a boastful way to commence an autobiography which claims to be presented in a fashion designed to upset the stream of reminiscences such works usually propose, the book is, in fact, a mature reflection on his earlier works.


For his personal models in his youth included the likes of the British adventurer, T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Lawrence’s epic account of an Arab revolt against their Turkish rulers, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was a model for Malraux’s own efforts to create fiction on a scale with world-historical events. Man’s Estate is the culmination of a series of works in which Malraux pursued this objective and while some critics found his apparent vanity and self-glorification a drawback to his fiction, he was nonetheless awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1933 at the age of 32.


Man’s Estate still makes for fascinating reading as it pitches the central characters into the arena of revolutionary uprising. More specifically, Shanghai in the period leading to the massacre of communists by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces in 1927. The central characters are stereotypical versions of men and women of action, but they are invested with enough life to overcome what could otherwise become a tiring lecture on revolutionary praxis.


Kyo Gisors is a young communist activist with a Japanese mother and a French father. The latter, Old Gisors, is a sociologist and academic, committed to revolutionary justice in principle, but in practice taking solace in his addiction to opium. Chen is a young Chinese fighter who ends his life in an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Chiang Kai-shek himself. Katow is a Russian militant, the archetypal apparatchik devoted to his Party duties, who, in a famous scene gives away the cyanide tablets that would have given him deliverance and instead opts for a gruesome death by being thrown into the boiler of a steam locomotive. Of these four characters only Old Gisors escapes death — fleeing to Kobe in Japan to see out his life contemplating the sunset over the bay and taking opium.


As their fates unfold we are introduced to a vast panoply of characters and the novel’s plotting is of a complexity which baffled André Gide when he first come across it as a publishers’ reader at Éditions Gallimard. A second attempt convinced him of the brilliance of the book and helped assure Malraux’s place in French literature. While the high seriousness of Man’s Estate is a monument to youthful idealism it remains a quintessential example of engaged fiction.


It is in the contemplatative spirituality of Old Gisors rather than the revolutionary ardour and dedication of Kyo, however, that we can detect the germs of a more meditative self-image for the mature Malraux, something which comes to a head in his monumental study of world art, The Voices of Silence — a work which only serves to confirm his centrality to French cultural life in the twentieth century. What must be remembered above all was that he was not the elitist his background might have made of him and that while he may have acted as roving ambassador for de Gaulle, he was equally capable of visiting Chicago jazz clubs with Nelson Algren. His was an astonishing life that encompassed everything.

‘For more than five minutes Gisors had sat gazing at his pipe. There, before him, the little opium-box lay open, the lamp lit — that doesn’t commit one, though — and the clean implements. Outside was the night: indoors the beam of this little lamp and a great rectangle of bright light — the open door leading to the next room, into which Kyo’s body had been brought. The prison-yard had been emptied to make room for new prisoners and no one had objected to the bodies thrown outside being taken away. Katow’s corpse had not been retrieved. May had brought Kyo’s body home with her as carefully as if he were desperately badly wounded. There he lay, stretched out. Not serene, as he had imagined he would be before he killed himself but distorted by asphyxia, already something other than a man.’ p259