The Other Malraux in Indochina

Isabelle de Courtivron

Biography, Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 1989, pp. 29-42 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: 10.1353/bio.2010.0451

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v012/12.1.de-courtivron.html

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Isabelle de courtivron

The Other Malraux in Indochina

The publication of Clara Malraux's memoirs Le Bruit de nos pas (The Sound of our Footsteps) between 1963 and 1979 was largely responsible for the reinterpretation of Andr Malraux's youthful enterprises
and for the readjustments that his more recent biographers have been

compelled to make, particularly in their examination of the writer's

adventures in Indochina.1 Indeed, earlier studies of the years 1923 to

1926 are often laudatory in tone, even when tempered by the acknowledgment that Malraux's pursuits may have been less noble and his evasions of truth more serious than his allusions to this period had ini-

tially led readers to believe.2 The most detailed of these studies, Walter
Langlois's Andr Malraux: The Indochina Adventure, published in

1966 when Malraux was Secretary for Cultural Affairs, is marked by

the biographer's awe of the dignified statesman whom the young

adventurer had become as well as by Langlois's attempts to confer legitimacy upon the Malraux myth by justifying, even ennobling, the more ambiguous aspects of his subject's youthful capers.3 Two years
earlier, Andr Vandegans had devoted several hundred pages to

Malraux's slight body of early writings and had also lingered upon the
Indochina experience.4 Although his emphasis on Malraux's literary

influences and experiments differs appreciably from Langlois's focus on ideological development, both scholars explored the continuity between the younger man's philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations and the more mature writer's political commitments and literary

accomplishments. These meticulously researched texts nevertheless suffer from gaps in information that Malraux himself was careful not

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to fill in his disinclination to alter the self-image he had so elaborately

fashioned. Only in the 1970s were biographers able to shed more realistic light on what are now considered to be Malraux's overdramatization of his adventures and exaggeration of his political role in Asia dur-

ing the 1920s. The publication of Clara Malraux's memoirs marks a

watershed in this rvaluation of a legend, even while inviting the dis-

covery of a companion with whom, despite his reluctance to acknowledge it, Malraux shared intimately his Indochina years. Although both Langlois and Vandegans devote special attention to

Malraux's more serious activities as co-editor o L'Indochine (February 1925 to January 1926), their interpretations of the reasons for his first journey (October 1923 to November 1924) set the tone for their unquestioningly admiring accounts of both episodes. Recounting Malraux's expedition to the temple of Bantea Srey, his appropriation of Khmer sculptures that he attempted to ship back to France, his
arrest in Pnom-Penh and the two trials that followed, Langlois

attributes lofty motives to his subject:

Although he probably planned to sell part of whatever he found in order
to defray the expenses of the expedition, his greatest artistic concern was to obtain some outstanding objects for his own artistic studies. He has

specifically stated that he intended eventually to present any superior pieces he might find to the School's rival in Paris, the Muse Guimet,
whose remarkable collection of Asian materials had been built up by just

such gifts from dedicated private collectors, archaeologists, and retired

colonial civil servants.5

Andr Vandegans, even more anxious to frame Malraux's first

adventure not only in aesthetic but in philosophical terms, suggests goals that would seem quite disproportionate if attributed to even the most precocious of twenty-two-year-olds: "Malraux was seeking contact with distant worlds that would offer him the possibility of inflecting in new directions the civilization to which he belonged."6

These interpretations were readjusted in 1973 by Jean Lacouture,

Malraux's best known French biographer, who avoided such imposing

generalizations.7 Though he evinces high esteem for his subject, his

text is colored by an amused tolerance for the undeniably brilliant but somewhat suspect youth that Malraux was in his twenties. He accepts

much more readily than Langlois the profit motive behind the first Indochina adventure and describes the young man's cautious preparations for this journey, including his manipulation of academic and governmental contacts and his negotiations with American and German

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dealers who were potential buyers for the Khmer statues he would bring back to Europe. Less impressed than Vandegans and Langlois by

the expedition to Bantea'i Srey, and for that matter unconvinced of the
autobiographical basis of Malraux's dramatization of it in La Voie royale, Lacouture offers a refreshing perspective on this adventure: "This tragic confrontation with the Stiengs in La Voie royale is the

heroic version of a difficult thirty-mile excursion through the jungle

carried out with courage, energy, and patience, by three young touristaesthetes whose enterprise would be less likely to arouse admiration today."8 This change in tone and perspective is even more striking in the var-

ious accounts of Malraux's second stay in Indochina. Indeed, while much attention has been focused on the flamboyant jungle expedition,
on the two "Ubu-esque" trials that followed the Pnom-Penh arrests, and on the ultimate acquittal of Malraux and his travel companion

Chevassongenerally attributed to the mobilization of the Paris intelligentsia on his behalfthe growth of the Malraux legend really takes on momentum with his return to Saigon in February 1925. It is in his
role as co-editor of L'Indochine, a newspaper created in opposition to the colonial administration, which controlled the press and censored

any paper that did not unconditionally support its reactionary politics,
that Malraux's reputation as leader in the Young Annam and in the Kuomintang movements is grounded. If Andr Malraux's contributions to L'Indochine, under the knowledgeable guidance of lawyer Paul Monin, are irrefutablecopies of the

paper preserved in the Bibliothque Nationale attest to the young man's wit and polemical brilliancethe political role claimed for him
by both Langlois and Vandegans is, however, inflated at best and

incorrect in general. Vandegans suggests that "during the ten months

or so which he spent in Indochina in 1924, Malraux was in contact

with the nationalist circles and began to play a role in the ranks of the Young Annam movement."9 Langlois, bolstered by Malraux's tacit confirmation of these facts, asserts that the young man "set about organizing the Nationalist program into a political movement."10 Yet more surprising is both scholars' acceptance of Malraux's alleged contribution to and leadership in the Chinese Revolution in 1925.

When the colonial administration of Governor Cognacq, infuriated by L'Indochine 's daily exposure of its corruption, finally decided to put an end to this journalistic enterprise by denying the paper access to its printer, Malraux journeyed to Hong Kong to buy type that would enable him to operate his own printing press. According to Langlois, it

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was at this time that Malraux made a visit to Canton, where the headquarters of the new Nationalist government were located, and met with Borodine and other organizers of the strike.11 Vandegans also speculates that Malraux participated in Kuomintang activities in August 1925 and waxes lyrical when imagining this episode: "at the time he arrived, the city (Canton) must still have been abuzz with

echoes of the events that had just shaken it."12 Carried away by this romantic vision, and influenced by reports that Malraux was looking
pale and sickly that summer, Vandegans muses that "he must have spent himself, and excessively so" in the service of the revolution.13 Both writers use as their sources the rare statements made by Malraux concerning this period. They cite Paul Morand, who ran into Malraux in Hong Kong "on his way back from China"; a letter written by Malraux to Edmund Wilson in 1952, in which he cites his role as leader in the Young Annam movement and in the Kuomintang in Canton; and the 1928 translation of The Conquerors, in which biographical information provided by Malraux himself indicates that the author was "Commissioner of the Kuomintang in Cochin-China from 1924
to 1925" and "Assistant Commissioner for the Nationalist Government in Canton at the time of Borodine" in 1925.14 This collaboration

with Borodine seemed confirmed by The Conquerors, in which the author vividly recreated the strikes in Canton and Shanghai and which was assumed to be autobiographical. When asked directly about these events, Malraux refused to contradict any speculation, thereby nurturing his legendary status as a man not only of great eloquence but of visionary political action. Langlois and Vandegans stumbled upon this enigmatic silence and chose to rationalize it by suggesting reasons that even the most ardent of Malraux scholars today might find somewhat ironic. Speculating upon the reasons why Malraux never discussed his personal experiences in Indochina, Langlois attributes this reluctance

to speak about his private life to Malraux's "modesty."15 Vandegans

goes much further in explaining Malraux's refusal to shed light on this period; indeed, he anticipates and counters potential accusations of misinformation: "He [Malraux] remembers only vaguely the important dates in his life and perhaps also the titles he has had. These omissions are connected to a conception of life which is intent on forgetting the past in order to save energy for the conquest of the future, as befits

the nature of a spirit indifferent to the accidents of history and

involved only in grasping its meaning."16 Malraux was to corroborate this contempt for the autobiographical impulse"I don't interest myselfin the Antimemoirs.17

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Such portrayals of Andr Malraux as a modest man indifferent to

accomplishments and honors appear credulous, for they do not take

into account possible strategies for aggrandizement of the self. Obscuring the personal to the advantage of his role as participant in major historical events or his dialogues with world leaders results in the crafting

of a larger-than-life figure who, admittedly hostile to the affective dimensions of his life, is far from self-disinterested and certainly not
self-effacing. However, although both biographers can be faulted for

not being sufficiently skeptical, Malraux's "silences" were not only effective but could be considered credible in the absence of any witness
who might attest to a different and less heroic version of the facts. In his discussion of the second Indochina venture, Jean Lacouture

was again careful to seek a balance between Malraux's accomplishments and his limitations, straightforwardly dismissing exploits that had never occurred. He acknowledged that under Monin's leadership

the two coeditors of L'Indochine did try to resuscitate Young Annam, which had been a viable organization in the immediate postwar years
in Hanoi but had subsequently fallen into decline. According to

Lacouture, "owing to his propensity for 'writing up' events, Malraux

later presented himself, in various interviews and letters, as leader of the Young Annam party. This organization seems never to have grown much beyond the staff of L'Indochine and a few friends."18 Lacouture also dismisses any speculation about Malraux's participation in the

Chinese revolution and in the Canton and Shanghai uprisings. Lacouture even chides earlier biographers, including Langlois and Vande-

gans, for having added to the legend by accepting at face value the
"pathetic trimmings" that their subject wove around his life. Lacou-

ture thus forcefully rejects any theory of Malraux's modesty. This exposure of the autobiographical imposture, however, does not significantly damage his portrayal of Andr Malraux. The credit that must

be accorded to Malraux the writer fully compensates, in Lacouture's view, for the misinformation. Lacouture disentangles the man from the myth and reduces him to more human proportions. For this biographer, the writer's ability to create situations in which he had not participated and yet in which many were convinced he had, attests to his exceptional talent for the creation of worlds, if not of reality, then of
the imagination:
Could he extrapolate a China in turmoil from then Indo-China in disar-

ray? Could he reconstruct Canton and Shanghai from Saigon and Cholon, Chiang Kai-Shek's torturers from those of Dr. Cognacq, the traf-

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fickers of the Bund from those of the rue Catinat, the massive uprisings
of China from the social disturbances of the Mekong Delta or Saigon Harbour, the strategists of Canton from the comrades of Young Annam? Yes, since that is precisely what he did, with irrefutable forcefor us, if
not for the Chinese readers themselves.19

As Louise Witherell has noted, Lacouture is the first biographer to substantially incorporate the materials treated in Clara Malraux's memoirs.20 Indeed, his more tempered portrayal of young Andr Malraux is attributable, in large part, to Clara's version of their life

together until 1939. The first volume, Apprendre vivre (Learning to

Live), covered her childhood and adolescence and ended as she fell in

love with Malraux in 1921. The second volume, Nos vingt Ans (Our
Twenties), which appeared in 1966, included an account of their first Indochinese journey. The third, published in 1969 and entitled Les Combats et les jeux (The Struggles and the Games), was devoted entirely to their life and work together in Saigon in 1925. Langlois and Vandegans did not have access to much of the information that she

provides, much less to the rather unorthodox perspective offered by

Clara Malraux in her memoirs of the Indochina period.21 Clara Malraux is almost entirely absent from all accounts of Andr Malraux's two Asian journeys written prior to her own. She is men-

tioned less than a dozen times in Langlois's book, almost always incidentally. While Vandegans acknowledges that Clara might have facili-

tated Andre's access to German expressionist writers in the early

Twenties, she hardly appears, except in several footnotes, in the pages he devotes to Indochina. In this respect, Malraux's "modesty" concerning his personal life and the willingness of some of his biographers to indulge his silences result not only in protecting and perpetuating

his own legend but in eliminating Clara from an episode in which she
played a role that is far from negligible. In fact, it was her continued neglect by a growing number of scholars and biographers of Malraux's "first period"due in part to the latter's complete erasure of all shared aspects of his experiencesthat prompted Clara Malraux to

write her side of the story: "There were two of us, I maintain it."22
While one should not discount completely a desire for retribution, Clara's memoirs can be seen as the effort to retrieve a past that had consistently been misappropriated, distorted or, worse, elided. For there were indeed two Malrauxs in Indochina, not only on the boat that brought them to Cambodia the first time, on the horses that

took them through the jungle to Bantea Srey, and in the Pnom-Penh
hotel and hospital where they awaited trial, but also on the second boat

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to Saigon, on tours around the country where they both learned firsthand of colonial injustices and of the cruel oppression of the Annamites, in the makeshift offices of L'Indochine where their team wrote

despite heat and humidity, governmental hostility, and general societal

reprobation, and in Hong Kong where they purchased type that would enable them to resuscitate their paper. The "other" Malraux was Clara Goldschmidt Malraux, who had been Andre's travel companion
since 1921.

Clara Goldschmidt was born into a prosperous German Jewish family in 1897. Her adolescence was an exceptionally independent one.
Her father's death when she was thirteen left her under the weak tute-

lage of her mother. World War I further loosened the authority of a

family fragmented by the Franco-German conflict and less than firmly integrated in French society. Finally, the postwar years brought about
an additional societal relaxation of the constraints imposed on women. A rebel against bourgeois conventions from childhood whose multicultural background had taught her to accept painful contradictions,
an intellectual who felt more comfortable with books and ideas than

with tea parties and who rejected the young men approved by her family, Clara embodies the image of the flapper, of the "new woman," even of the infamous "garonne" of the Twenties that held such fascination for some and elicited such reprobation from others. She met Andr Malraux, then nineteen, at a dinner organized by Florent Fels for the contributors to his avant-garde review Action, for which she worked part-time as a translator. They discovered a common passion
for literature and art and launched into an unconventional whirlwind

romance. Despite familial reluctance on both sides, they were married several months later. Clara's substantial dowry enabled the young couple to enjoy a comfortable Bohemian life of art and travel until 1923,
when ill-advised investments in the stock market led them to near des-

titution. Since neither considered working a viable option, they decided to pursue Andre's scheme and to head for Indochina, hoping to return with enough precious Khmer pieces to guarantee some years

of freedom from the drudgery of ordinary jobs.

As Robert Payne has suggested, Andr and Clara were probably enraptured by the image of Rimbaudhimself a mercenary of sorts and the lure of exotic settings, as were the rest of their intellectual generation.23 But although rebellious, Clara was initially less eager than

Andr to embark upon such a potentially dangerous adventure. At the

time, and despite some of the fragile new freedom gained during the war, women were still imprisoned in the prevailing ideology of domes-

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ticity. Her decision to sever all ties with a wealthy family by marrying
a reckless and somewhat unprincipled youth and embarking with him to distant destinations in pursuit of questionable goals therefore attests to Clara's unusually daring spirit. Clara became a full partner in the

expedition, and even if, as Lacouture has suggested, the jungle trek would elicit less admiration today, it constituted a risk that not many
young women raised in a protective Parisian home would have accepted to take. Clara was arrested by the colonial authorities along with Andr and

Louis Chevasson, and held in a Pnom-Penh hotel while they awaited trial. When it became clear that they could no longer pay their bills,
Clara orchestrated a mock suicide attempt in the hope of forcing the

authorities to free her; instead, they were sent to a hospital where she
and Andr were at least housed and fed free of charge. This was not

much of an improvement, however, and after some weeks of despondency, illness, and growing fear about the outcome of their trial, Clara once again decided to act. She staged a hunger strike and feigned

episodes of madness. The authorities became alarmed; a preliminary hearing was granted during which charges against Clara were dropped. Ironically, it was the patriarchal Napoleonic code that enabled her to escape prosecution and to become instrumental in gaining Andre's

release. Indeed, in 1923 a wife was required by law to follow her husband; she was considered to have no legal free will and thus to bear no responsibility for her whereabouts as long as she was fulfilling her con-

jugal obligation. Clara Malraux's presence in Bantea Srey could not

therefore be considered a punishable offense. She was allowed to leave

for France, where she successfully organized support among Parisian

writers for Andre's release. On the ship that took her back to France

she met lawyer Paul Monin and enlisted him in the campaign for
Malraux's freedom. Later, she was to introduce the two men who dreamed up L'Indochine.

Little of this information is presented in biographies of Malraux

published before Clara's memoirs, and nowhere did he allude to these

events except to take pride in the fact that an impressive group of writers had banded together to demand his freedom in the name of his promising literary talent. Sharing an heroic adventure with a woman would certainly have damaged the Malraux image. As Susan Suleiman

concludes after rereading Malraux's novels from a feminist perspective, "Women are extras on a stage where men are the objects of des-

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tiny."24 Indeed, when he fictionalized this expedition, he turned it into the shared trials of two men. More importantly, being "saved" by a woman represented an even greater betrayal of Malraux's ethics of virility. Clara was thus eliminated completely from both fact and fiction. In her memoirs, she reveals that this omissionAndre's refusal

to acknowledge publicly her role in mobilizing public opinion to exert pressure on the appeals courtwas the first, and thus the most surprising and the most painful. There were, however, to be many more.

Accounts of their second journey, which involved a much more serious commitment on the part of the Malrauxs, similarly overlook

Clara's role. Her third autobiographical volume chronicles her participation in their anticolonialist journalistic enterprise, outlines her concrete contributions to L'Indochine, and offers a much more playful and

lighthearted perspective on their experience in colonial Saigon than do the dramatized versions proposed by a number of Andr Malraux's
biographers. Clara Malraux entitles her volume Les Combats et les jeux. This title

refers as much to the personal as to the political dimensions of their experience, for the relationship between the two young intellectuals
was as much one of diversions and amusements on one hand, and

opposition and conflict on the other, as was their daily work on the newspaper. Clara was clearly a member of the Indochine team as much
as were Malraux, Monin, Dejean de la Btie, Vinh, Ph, Hin and

Minh. As though to emphasize this fact, she consistently uses the pronoun "we" when referring to their ideological and practical enter-

prises: "We finally held the paper in our hands, our paper, fruit of our
minds and of our hands."25 While she deferred to Monin and Malraux,

who made the speeches and wrote the editorials, she participated as substantially as any of their collaborators in their joint project.
The importance of Clara's work on L'Indochine must not be underestimated. Along with local and regional news, and with literary excerpts

from the Parisian press, L'Indochine prided itself on its abundant and timely coverage of the international situation, which was attributed to mysterious "special correspondents." In fact, L'lndochine's international coverage consisted of selections from the British press, especially the Straits Times, that Clara had obtained permission to trans-

late and reprint during a journey she made alone to Singapore in early 1925. This selection stressed explosive revolutionary situations in
such colonialized regions as India and North Africa and especially in China, news that the French colonial press censored for fear that it

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might further intensify the Annamese nationalistic tendencies. For

this reason, a judicious presentation of the international scene was central to L'lndochine's mission.

While much of the work was probably collaborative, each member of the team necessarily assumed certain responsibilities. Monin and Malraux shared the editorial duties. Their Annamese colleagues con-

centrated on the important local and regional aspect of the paper and on translation from the Annamese press, a daring innovation in itself. Clara was the only one to speak several foreign languages. (All of
Andr Malraux's biographers acknowledge that he never learned En-

glish.) Consequently, she was in large part responsible for the international section, which represented approximately one quarter of the

eight-page paper. Yet so little was known about her particular activities that Walter Langlois, whose meticulous research on L'Indochine misses
few details, explains that these dispatches came from independent sources not available to other papers and concludes: "Obviously, L'Indochine had close links with Chinese sources in China, probably with Chinese newspapermen."26 Until Clara reclaimed her share of the

responsibility, only an occasional "ladies' page" about fashion had

been attributed to her. Her contributions to L'Indochine were, however, far more substantial, and the paper clearly would have been a less effective publication had it not been for the section that she developed. Clara's Indochina memoirs accomplish much more than the rectification of concrete matters such as these. They also provide a more

lighthearted perspective on the activities of Monin and the Malrauxs

that reduces them to human proportions. Her portrayal of three intelligent, energetic and rebellious young intellectuals who arrogantly confronted the colonial machinery and who even, while taking risks,

indulged in a great deal of fun, deflates the more grandiloquent analyses of this particular period of Malraux's life. Indeed, closer scrutiny
of L'Indochine reveals that the proportion of wit and humoras well as retribution against those who had tried to discredit and imprison Andr in 1924appears at least equal to that of serious analysis of col-

onialist oppression. Clara's subtle analysis of the ways in which her companion gradually transformed what he considered to be his first
"failure" in Indochina into the machinations of a corrupt administration to destroy him for purely political reasons unmasks Andre Malraux's earliest strategies for structuring his own myth. Moreover, Clara's evocations of evenings together after long days at the office, during which Andr and Paul practiced swordsmanship while she

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smoked opium present a somewhat more buoyant version of their life

in Saigon than earlier biographers had painted: "Our team had fun in 1925 in Saigon: the oldest of us, Monin, was barely thirty."27 One telling anecdote illustrates the readjustments that Clara's account compelled later biographers to make. She describes the journey to Hong Kong, in the summer of 1925, during which they purchased new type for their silenced paper, and denies any apocryphal visit to Canton. More to the point, Clara recalls that after having accomplished their

task, the young couple took a few days' vacation in Macao. At the time
when Malraux was purportedly assisting Borodine in China, he was in fact enjoying the tourist spectacles of Macao's casinos, brothels, and opium dens. While Andr Malraux's Antimemoirs are entirely structured around monologues or conversations with great men about art, politics and death, and are dominated by universal pronouncements on the human

condition, Clara's memoirs speak of daily personal experiences, of

ordinary human contacts, and return again and again to the learning process of life. Indeed, the motif of "learning to live" could aptly characterize all six volumes of her autobiography. She communicates her initial naivete and ignorance about the colonial situation and her astonishment when faced with the complexities of a historical situation that, as she admits freely, is often incomprehensible to her: I don't understand very well all of these comings and goings of generals, these cities at times captured at other times abandoned, these efforts to
form groups and their relationships to Occidental thoughtan Occident of which they want to free themselves through the thought, revised and corrected, of a semi-European, semi-Asiatic Russia, a phase that is doubtless indispensable to their own conquest of themselves. But I learn the names of Yuan Che-Ka, of Sun Yat-sen, of the war lords, of Tchang Ka-Chek, and I now know that the Kominform exists.28

Nor is she embarrassed, forty years later, as she documents the growth of her political consciousness, to take pride in this almost childlike process of discovery: "My brand new knowledge shines like copper."29 At no time does Clara, young bourgeois European intellectual, attempt to elucidate the complexities of Oriental thought. She is enlightened only by daily contacts with individual Indochinese friends and colleagues whose moments of joy or discouragement she shares and tries to interpret through her own experience of life. Unlike Andr, who is so disciplined intellectually that he boasts never to waste time daydreaming but relentlessly pursues precise lines of reflection organized around specific themes, Clara's thought process is

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anecdotal, associative, and turned toward the individual. Her memoirs therefore succeed in extracting their friends from Andre's fictional renditions or from the abstractions into which he has subsumed them,

and restore to each a face, a personality, a biographical reality. It is because she and Andr struggled at their side that they learned as much as they did, even if, she adds lucidly, "We did so only in our own
interest."30

Moreover, Clara who has proudly reclaimed the "we" in their enterprise, is not so invested in its success that she cannot distance herself critically from a self-aggrandizing assessment of its effectiveness, or give others their share of credit:
Our product was not as striking as we imagined it was. Most of the ideas

it presented had already and often been developed by Monin and Dejean in other papers, by Minh and Nguyen Ai-quoc in pamphlets . . . but whether it accomplished more than another, I would be at a loss to say.31 Clara also reinjects the humor that had been lost in other accounts of their activities. Alluding to their embroilment with powerful local editors, she calls these a "guignolade," a form of "ballet-theater" in which each player had an assigned part. The vaunted struggle against villainous adversity at times becomes comical. Even the intense figure

of Andr becomes humanized once seen from her perspective. She

incorporates the testimony of a mutual friend of theirs who remembers Andr during this period as "carefree, a guy full of humor who did not take himself seriously and others even less so."32 While Clara Malraux is revolted by injustice and committed to the struggle against it which she continued to demonstrate throughout her lifeshe refuses

to obliterate those aspects of a year in Saigon that made it occasionally feel like a vacation. She dwells on the excitement of distributing the
first free issues of L'Indochine in the streets, and on the celebration when the first paying issue sold well. "Our satisfaction manifested

itself in speeches, grandiose visions, and champagne, all of which we

indulged in, in the house on the rue Pllerin."33 Recollections of

atmospheres rather than words, of sounds and fragrances, of joyous

moments of apprenticeship and collaboration, are woven around and through the harder political realities.34 What is also brought into the

narrative is the transformation of Andr from adventurer to conqueror that Alfred Goessl and Roland Champagne have so convincingly analyzed.35

Clara's intentions in publishing her memoirs were in part to set the record straight, not so much by chipping away at the great man's leg-

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end as by revealing dimensions of the couple's mutual experience that

had been overlooked or distorted too often. She reinscribes herself in a

joint venture in which she had been too long the invisible companion and reclaims a past that had been stolen from her by the silences of

Andr Malraux and his mystified biographers.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
notes

1. Clara Malraux, Le Bruit de nos pas (Paris: Grasset, 1963-1979). Includes: Appren-

dre a vivre (1963), Nos vingt ans (1966), Les Combats et les jeux (1969), Voici que
vient l't(19T3), La fin et le commencement (1976), Et pourtant j'tais libre . . . (1979).

2. That is not to say that all such studies have been sympathetic; analyses critical of
Andr Malraux's fabrication of his own legend, appeared as early as 1948. Yet,

in the absence of concrete evidence, they did not attempt to reestablish a more accurate presentation of the Indochinese period (see, for example, "Interrogation Malraux," Esprit, October 1948).
3. waiter Langlois, Andr Malraux: The Indochina Adventure (New York, Washington,

London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966).

4. Andr Vandegans, La Jeunesse littraire d'Andr Malraux, essai sur l'inspiration far-

felue (Paris: JJ Pauvert, 1964).

5. Langlois, p. 8. 6. Vandegans, p. 210.

7. Jean Lacouture, Andr Malraux, une vie dans le sicle (Paris: Seil, 1973; trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).
8. Ibid., p. 61. 9. Vandegans, p. 140. 10. Langlois, p. 58. 11. Ibid., p. 157. 12. Vandegans, p. 252. 13. Ibid., p. 253.

14. Paul Morand, Papiers d'identit (Paris: Grasset, 1931), p. 251; Edmund Wilson,
The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Young, 1952); German trans-

lation of The Conquerors by Max Claus in Europaische Review, August-December 1928. All of these are cited by Vandegans in a footnote on pages 240 and
241 La Jeunesse littraire. 15. Langlois, p. 213. 16. Vandegans, p. 241. 17. Andr Malraux, Antimmoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 10. 18. Lacouture, p. 99. 19. Ibid., p. 117.

20. Louise Witherell, "A Modern Woman's Autobiography: Clara Malraux" in Contemporary Literature (Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 1983).

21. One might wonder, however, why neither took seriously into account either her oral testimony or her fictionalized version of this period. Vandegans dismisses
her first novel, Le Portrait de Griselidis, in a few lines of a footnote.

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22. Clara Malraux begins Voici que vient l't with this quote from Mallarm. 23. Robert Payne, A Portrait of Andr Malraux (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970). 24. Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Malraux's women: A Re-vision" in Gender and Reading, ed. E. Flynn and P. Schweikart (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1986), p. 128. 25. Clara Malraux, Les Combats et les jeux, p. 140. 26. Langlois, p. 130. 27. Clara Malraux, LCELJ, p. 140. 28. Ibid., p. 56. 29. Ibid., p. 71. 30. Ibid., p. 48. 31. Ibid., p. 146. 32. Ibid., p. 85. 33. Ibid., p. 147.

34. For an analysis of the tactile and sensual elements in Clara's writing, see Louise R.
Witherell, "A Modern Woman's Autobiography: Clara Malraux" in Contemporary Literature (Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 1983). 35. Alfred G. Goessl and Roland A. Champagne, "Clara Malraux's Le Bruit de nos

pas: Biography and the Question of Women in the 'Case of Malraux' " in Biography, Vol. 7, No. 3.