Books
The sword is mightier
Olivia Manning
Francois Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man Robert Speaight (Chatto and Windus £6.75) Malraux: Life and Work edited by Martine de Courcel (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.95)
No writer of our time, not even Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell, has had a greater influence On public action than those two oroposing forces in French literature: Mauriac and Malraux. Malraux, dedicated to violence before office and political power turned his aggression on to the buildings of Paris, shared with Hemingway and Mishima unappealing weakness for self-aggrandisIng fantasy that lent nothing to his creative Work. Mauriac, a practising Catholic from a Prosperous, reactionary family, defended, With steadfast daring and unshakable integrity, the elected government of Spain, then the Resistance, then 'the post-war v. Mims of the epuration and later the Algerians. Both men supported de Gaulle and Mauriac, too, suffered when de Gaulle's Popularity was on the wane. The two novelists were complementary in character. We may see Mauriac as a right-wing socialist, Malraux as a sort of left-wing reactionary. Martin Turnell's notable study of Mauriac in The Art of French Fiction aPPeared in 1959, and Cecil Jenkins's admirable Mauriac, in the 'Writers and Critics' series, in 1965. We are due for a longer, Pefinitive work on this major French writer bin Robert Speaight's 'Study of the Writer and the Man' is scarcely that. It is sincere, r,serMus and worthy, but in parts it is dull. lving, as it does, a detailed precis of each "1 Mauriac's novels, it will probably have a Ong library life as a useful book for students. However, as a picture of the writer and the man, it lacks the profundity and critical perception of the two earlier vv. orks on Mauriac. Its chief interest lies in IrtS careful relating of Mauriac's novels to nhls early life and background. 'The story of bnordeaux, said Mauriac, 'is the story of my ,,ndY and of my soul.' His landscape is the ti‘t, ndscape of his youth : the great estates of ene Landes with their pine forests, the sandy 1,4rth. underfoot, the scents of resin and h-ur ning. wood, the isolated houses where lellrnan passions, increased by frustration, i ad to concupiscence, greed and hate. In an anterview, Mauriac said: 'I don't observe I don't describe; I rediscover. I redis'clover the narrow Jansenist world of my Itev.°11t, unhappy and introverted childhood. .as though when I was twenty a door Zittibin me had closed for ever upon that Ich was going to become the material of
my work.'
Mr Speaight is aware of that enclosed world of youth that inspired the novels but takes a too lyrical view of Mauriac's early days, reverting to those longueurs introduced into biography by Lytton Strachey with such unfortunate effect on many of his followers. Mr Speaight gives several pages to poetic meanderings like: 'On a close evening in July he might linger in the public garden and muse in front of the marble adolescent embracing its chimera; inhale the moisture of the pavement after rain; creep into Saint-Andre and kneel under the cool, incense-laden vaulting of the nave ...'
Well, yes, he might. And then, again, he might not.
The book grows livelier in its later passages that deal with Mauriac's literary relationships. His noted contemporaries, Valery, Malraux and Gide, his public life which he described as a 'continual prizegiving', and his success which faded towards the end, give the book a compelling interest. The friendship with Gide was intense but fluctuating. In view of Peyrefitte's malicious and unproven assertion that Mauriac, the guardian of public morality, was a secret homosexual, it is amusing to recall that Mauriac strongly disapproved of Gide's inversion and, when Gide posed as a martyr like Oscar Wilde, pointed out that the martyrdom which had brought Wilde to Reading Gaol had not kept Gide from Stockholm and the Nobel Prize. Gide, whose appetite for sex was matched only by his financial meanness, took a sly revenge. Having picked up a boy in Algiers, he rewarded him with a very small coin. When the boy protested, Gide said 'Just think, my boy, when you grow up you will be able to tell your children and your children's children that you slept with the great French writer Francois Mauriac'.
Speaight, who met Mauriac in September 1944, just after the liberation of Paris, recalls his 'tall, thin figure' and 'the features that Georges Duhamel imagined as a subject for El Greco in some studio in the Elysian Fields'. An American described Mauriac's face more vividly as a 'straight, vertical line made with the point of a pencil'. Physically Mauriac was for many the ideal of the creative writer, while Malraux's stern and handsome face stares out from the 'Life and Work' with the grim assertiveness of a Mussolini rather than a man of letters. The symposium, like Speaight's biography, is a gift to the student, packed, as it is, with details of Malraux's life and works, from his experiences in Indochina (scene of his earliest and most important work) to his last, and extraordinary, relationship with de Gaulle.
Malraux the writer lost himself in Malraux the man of action. Sartre attempted, in Les Temps Modernes, to define the rOle of the artist in public life:'! hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they did not write a single line to prevent it'; hut Flaubert and Goncourt, as creative artists, saw themselves destined to interpret men's actions not to control them. The engage writer is usually an outstanding figure in his age but, being of the age, is liable to die with it. Sartre himself is an indifferent novelist and Malraux's own novels are already gathering the dust of 'old, unhappy, far-off things,/ And battles long ago'.
A man so readily diverted from the pen to the pistol is, one suspects, a fighter—and a writer some way after. Malraux was certainly a fighter, first in Spain, then in 1940 in an armoured division, and finally in the Resistance. And where Mauriac depicts the passions of the human heart, Malraux is concerned with political action, his characters often have the fatal flaw of appearing as symbols of political thought. Meeting a young comrade of Che Guevara, Malraux told him: 'The Right no longer exists and today everybody is on the Left, which means the Left no longer exists'. Later, speaking of the writer, the young man made a penetrating comment: 'He is more human than the heroes in his novels'.
One of the photographs in this collection of essays depicts him in boyhood dressed as 'a young musketeer or marquis' and fixes him, one feels, in a posture that determined his life and damaged his art. For those who did not know him, these dramatic poses disguise his humanity. He admired Alexander the Great for his heroic vices, and T. E. Lawrence as an exhibitionist adventurer (an ' admiration not widely shared these days); then came worship of de Gaulle. In the face of all this, it comes as a surprise that he loves cats, is courteous and suffered from an unhappy childhood. These essays show us a man more admirable than many English readers suppose.
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