Malraux: The End of a Civilization

At 72, Andre Malraux remains the archetypical questing man, still casting a fiercely brilliant eye on man's fate and mankind's shifting perceptions of art and politics. His latest book, La Tete d'Obsi-dienne, is a bestseller in France, even though it is heavily philosophical. In it, he reflects on art and civilization--Eastern, Western, African, pre-Columbian, prehistoric. TIME Correspondent Paul Ress visited the author in the Paris suburb of Verrieres-le-Buisson, where he lives in a villa surrounded by sweeping lawns and old cedars. Ress's report:

Propped on tables and chests of drawers were unframed paintings by Braque, Chagall and Rouault, and photographs of Malraux's own beloved cats. Once a chain-smoker, he has given up cigarettes and alcohol and looks younger than he has in years. "Did you know," he asked, "that the Mona Lisa hung in the bathrooms of Francois I, Louis XIV and Napoleon?* Francois I, well, that was normal because he bought it from Leonardo. It was not so logical in the case of Louis XIV, because in his reign the great painter was Raphael. And in Napoleon's day, Leonardo was thought of as a second-rate painter."

A first-rate novelist himself, Malraux confided that he is no longer writing fiction. "Of the great novelists of my generation," he asks, "who is? Hemingway did not finish his last novel. Gide did not write a real novel in the last ten years of his life. Sartre abandoned the novel. So have I.

"Why? I do not really know. Perhaps because the novel calls for a strong narrative power. Narration today has been replaced by the image. The publicized and televised violence of everyday existence, hijacking and all sorts of minor events that used to be a mystery for the novelists in the past have helped to kill the narrative novel. I mean a certain kind of novel with which we are all familiar--going from Balzac to Tolstoy. This sort of narrative novel had already received a blow with the publication of Madame Bovary. Do you know what Alexandre Dumas' reaction was when he read Bovaryl He told his son, 'If that is what literature has become, we've had it!' And right he was! Just compare Bovary with The Three Musketeers."

History will decide whether Malraux is a novelist, art historian, political figure, or all three; at the very least he will be remembered as the man who scrubbed the monuments of Paris. "I had asked myself why Paris was so sad. The great architecture of Paris dates from the 17th and 18th--gay centuries. But the dirt had blacked out the shaded tones. When we washed them the colors reappeared. One day when I was Minister of Culture, General de Gaulle asked me how the cleaning was coming along. 'Famously,' I replied. 'Let me show you the Cour Carree of the Louvre.' We stood in the middle of the courtyard. Half of it was grimy black, the other half a gleaming white. The general looked back and forth and then let out a loud whistle. It was the only time I ever heard General de Gaulle whistle." Malraux hastened to add that he, for one, does not consider the scrub-up his supreme accomplishment. "My greatest coup," he said, "is that the Restaurant Lasserre in Paris created Pigeon Andre Malraux to outdo another restaurant, Le Grand Vefour, which had invented Pigeon Prince Rainier."

From a bantering tone, Malraux turned skeptical on the subject of the hour--Europe. "It does not exist," he said, "and never has. It is the last of the great myths. Europe is a pink spot on the map. [In the Middle Ages it was] decided that there was a Europe because there was Christianity. Christianity was serious. Europe is a dream --for Europeans but also for others. I would like to know just how serious the American dream of Europe was. Did the leaders of America really ever believe in it?" The notion of a European Parliament was barely worthy of consideration. "What an idea--at a time when we all know that the Parliaments in individual countries in Europe are not functioning!"

Why are there no statesmen of stature in Europe today? "Cher monsieur," he answered with a rare grin, "the novel is in bad shape today, and so is Europe. We are not finishing our novels, and God is not putting the finishing touches on great men. The last of the great men of our day is Mao, and he is not in Europe."

Malraux feels the end of an era closing in. "Something started around 1450," he said. "The conquest of the world by Europe, followed by colonization. It is we who discovered the world. Nobody discovered us. This era lasted for 500 years. The year 1950 marked the end of the period. India became free in 1947; Mao came to power in 1949. In my book there is the perspective of the end of a civilization, just as we were at the end of the Roman Empire. We are actually between civilizations--the colonial one and a decolonized one--which we do not really know yet, but only sense."

* It was fashionable then to hang paintings in a nobleman's elaborate salle de bain. This was a salon, often very elegantly furnished with rugs, tapestries and paintings, to which the nobleman's valet brought a tub of hot water.

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