What Am I Doing Here? (15 page)

I almost interrupted. It was the first week in January. From across the Channel the English, far from creating anyone, seemed intent on ripping each other apart.

‘There have been two countries, and astonishingly, two only, which have coined a word to designate the exemplary man.
Attention!
I am not speaking of the aristocrat. You have the Spanish
caballero
and the English gentleman; and England and Spain are both colonial countries. Since then there has been one other exemplary type - the Bolshevik. It doesn't matter if it was true; the important fact is that the archetype occupies the collective conscience of the nation. The only country that did it better before
you
was Rome. Rome created a type of man to hold the world in check for five centuries. After him came the knight, but the knight was never a national figure, whereas the Englishman was English and the Roman was Roman. From Rome to England there were no nationalists. There were remarkable men, but they were never nationalists. And that to my mind is the capital importance of England.

‘A thing I find tiresome about the French is that their view of England is extremely Victorian. I do not think of England as necessarily Victorian or necessarily Imperialist. But the England of Drake is (
is
not
was
) a very great country. In her greatest moment she had no empire.

‘And when you ask me what I think of England, I'll say you have one great problem . . . '

The voice assumed a tone of exhortation. His problems are always moral problems; believing that if moral problems are set right, economic ones look after themselves.

‘The essential problem is: Will England find a way to recreate the English type? A new incarnation it will have to be, because the Victorian gentleman had nothing to do with the gentleman of Drake. The English character was strong enough; all the same it varied with the centuries. Will you rediscover yourselves?'

‘I think,' I said, ‘you're suggesting we revert to type. At heart we are an island of buccaneers and pirates.'

‛Et joyeux!
Tell me,' he said, smiling, ‘when did the English stop talking about Merry England?'

We could not decide. Chaucer, we said, was real Merry England. Drake was still Merry England. But the Puritans were melancholic, not merry. And Merry England certainly didn't survive the Industrial Revolution.

The next topic was the British Empire; how it was an aberrant episode in our history; and how we may even have borrowed the idea of Imperialism from the Indian Empire of the Moguls.

‘You must not run down the Mogul Empire,' he said and then rapidly outlined how Akbar the Great was the first Muslim ruler to break the Islamic anathema and encourage portraits of himself (because any likeness must show the essential beauty of the soul); how this potent symbol proved him a universalist in the manner of the French Revolution; how, therefore, like Napoleon he was, and how unlike Queen Victoria; and how this explained why the Muslims made a great civilisation in India and the British never did, comparing the Mogul cities like Agra, Delhi and Lahore with the Anglo-Indian Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, which he described as ‘transplanted British building suffocated by
bidonvilles'.

I asked him about T.E. Lawrence. In Lawrence's career and personality Malraux seems to have recognised elements that coincided with his own. He once nearly completed a biography of Lawrence,
Le Défi de l'Absolu,
but the war prevented its publication.

‘I was interested in the questions his life proposed. I was never exactly influenced by Lawrence. Because if you put Lawrence into modern dress, what was he? Technically, a resistance fighter parachuted into Arabia. Just as you parachuted English officers into France in the last war and we fought along with them, so the War Department in Cairo parachuted officers into the desert. There were no aeroplanes, but technically it was the same thing.

‘No, the person who interests me is the Lawrence who raises the fundamental question, the meaning of life itself. Before him there were any number of great spirits who questioned life, but always in the name of some superior power . . . like the Crusader who put his life in the hands of Christ. But the case of Lawrence is unique. Here was a man who questioned life, but did not know in what name he questioned life. And he was not ashamed by it.
Lawrence, en grandiose, c'est mai
'68.'

Malraux once described Lawrence as the ‘first liberal hero of the West', seeing in him the prophet of decolonisation. In retrospect he believes the most significant fact of the century to be Britain's abandonment of India and one of its most courageous acts the Labour Government's decision to leave in 1947. Once British India, ‘a symbol of immense importance', had gone, any idea of
Algérie Française
was stillborn. Lawrence was ‘an astonishing prophet in the historical perspective', defending what Britain did 30 years later, and an extremely poor prophet of
realpolitik
in that he did not see that the future ruler of Arabia was Ibn Saud.

I turned the discussion to de Gaulle. Rumour has it that Malraux lost his interest in Lawrence once he had discovered the General. Most Englishmen, I had explained, disliked de Gaulle. They saw in him a relentless Anglophobe. We had sheltered him in the war; Churchill had in fact made his career and later he showed nothing but ingratitude. (De Gaulle, as French Under-Secretary for Defence, flew to London on 17 June, 1940. Legally he had mutinied. The next day he made his famous broadcast over the BBC. In London he moved rather diffidently at first, even writing to General Weygand, the French Commander-in-Chief, inviting him to England to lead the Free French.) Did he, on meeting Churchill, I asked, see the possibility of becoming de Gaulle as he later was? Did he lose his modesty in the face of Churchill?

‘I believe it. I believe it. But take care! You are surely right. On condition that you are not
too
right. He will not have said to himself the evening of his meeting with Churchill: “Now it is I.” I don't think that at all. I think it was . . . like the sun's curve. At first he will have said to himself: “Perhaps it is unnecessary to call Weygand?” And then he will have said: “If there were no Weygand?” And then: “That is just as well. Sir Churchill is a great statesman and one can have confidence in him. If Weygand comes he will only make intrigues.” And in the end he thought exactly as you say. Remember to put a fog over the affair. Because it cannot have been clear to him at the beginning however much it became clear later.'

Was there, I persisted, a real meeting of minds? They were, after all, both outsiders. Could this be the reason that both chose to incarnate the soul of their country?

He deflected this one by suggesting I put in my portrait of de Gaulle something which was rarely discussed, the General's ambivalence. ‘When one speaks of de Gaulle's admiration for England it is true. When one speaks of his hostility and irritation it is true. But the real truth lies between the two. You must not forget the man's age. When de Gaulle was twenty the British Empire was the greatest reality in the world. It was not a question of sympathy. America was of small consequence. As a young officer in the First War, he thought, as did everyone else, the moment England enters the war, Germany will be lost. Now, when he arrived in London in 1940, he well knew that British power was not what it was, but he continued to have the impression of its power. So when Churchill said to him, “Between Roosevelt and you, I will always choose Roosevelt” (Roosevelt constantly tried to get rid of de Gaulle), everyone thought he was furious because that meant: “I will not choose you.” It was not that at all. He was stupefied! Because for the first time he heard the voice of England saying: “I am no longer the first power in the world.” And from that moment England meant something quite different to him.'

De Gaulle once wrote: ‘When all is said England is an island; France the cape of a continent; America another world.' Was his refusal to let Britain into the Common Market his oblique way of protecting us from the continental adventures we so little understand? ‘It was not so pure,' Malraux said.

‘It was his excessively strong feeling of England's destiny, [The French
destin
seems to be stronger than the English, and implies ‘historical fate'.] England's destiny was not the Common Market. He used to say: “If England enters the Common Market, England will be lost. And if England is lost, it is not attractive for us, Continentals, to have her in the Common Market.” For the General, you must remember, was passionately concerned with destiny.

‘There
was a man who arrived in his little plane and became one of the most important men in Europe. If he didn't believe in destiny, who could? He found an England, pressed to the point of extinction, but rescued in inventing Churchill, who pulled her out of Hell to save her. For him there was an English destiny and a French destiny and any reasonable French policy was to be founded on the British destiny, as he, de Gaulle, conceived it. He wanted to spare England and the Common Market. He wanted a
parallel
England, but with guarantees she did not become an American agent. [This may refer to de Gaulle's objection that Britain had access to American technology whereas France did not.] But he did not want to block the British.'

And most people in England would agree with him, I said. He then talked of another complicating factor, the General's attitude to France. When very young de Gaulle had formed his ‘certain idea about France'. He had a contract with her as a lover with his bride. (He once said to Churchill: ‘If I am not France, what am I doing in your office?') ‘But the only other country he thought of as a person was England. He never thought of Germany in the same light.'

He had wanted to preserve France from Americanisation?

‘I have rather mixed feelings about that. One side of the General's character was
antimachiniste.
At Colombey he used to go and chat with the wood-cutters. The wood-cutters for him were the Middle Ages. But he would never visit the locksmiths.'

However, de Gaulle had seen, he said, the need for a European federation to block the American industrial attack. He never believed in a politically federated Six, merely a convenient alliance. In this alliance he chose Adenauer, but then ‘like all great political figures, he had more than one iron in the fire. A German one. And a British one. They were both serious. The others no.'

What had drawn him and de Gaulle together? Did both intuitively realise that political actions of today and the great myths of the past somehow coincided?

‘Every historical figure who possesses that strange dimension one calls “poetic” rediscovers mythical elements in himself . . . I don't in any way take myself for a man of History, the General, yes. He began life at twenty with the thought: “How can I serve France as St Bernard served Christ?” St Bernard made Clairvaux [the first abbey of the Cistercian Order near Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises]. And the General – he could of course have been killed in 1918, but his vocation was very similar. You used to have the same spirit in England. I always find very beautiful the piece of paper they found on the frozen corpse of Scott: “I have done this to show what an Englishman can do.” The man was dead, so it was good. If he'd written it in a
bistro
, it would be nothing.'

He then discussed how all the great heroes of history have had to perform a similar set of actions before being acclaimed as heroes. But there were two very different types. ‘There is the positive hero and the negative hero, and the two do not mix. The negative hero usually has far greater poetic power. Lawrence and Ché Guevara were negative heroes. Alexander the Great was a positive hero. De Gaulle, all things considered, was a positive hero; he certainly lacked the masochism of a Lawrence. But the negative hero is a victim. If Guevara today were President of Bolivia it would never have worked. A hero like that requires the crucifixion.

‘But to return to the General, it was wonderful that he did what he did at the age of fifty and with so few means . . . unlike Caesar or Alexander who had immense resources. This struck me forcibly when I was talking to Mao Tse-tung. At one moment in our conversation I saw he understood General de Gaulle far better than the French. And for all Mao knew France could be in Sicily! When I asked him: “Why do you attach such importance to General de Gaulle?” he replied simply: “Because he is a man like me. He saved his country.”
C'est bizarre.
Mao knew very well the General wasn't a Communist. But he recognised the transcendent side . . . the hero who saves his country.

‘The bond between the General and myself probably lay in what one can call the Irrational. The others followed him for tangible reasons. [There was a faintly hostile tone as he talked of
les autres,
and I thought of the tax-scandals and racketeering that have stuck to the word Gaullism.] But there was in the General a quality that went above their heads, something he only shared with me.'

Was he tempted by the idea of monarchy? They sometimes say that de Gaulle was a king without a kingdom. As a young expert in tank warfare he had once hovered around the monarchist, party. My suggestion produced an appalled shake of the head.

‛He thought there would be no succession, for what he had done reposed on the Irrational. All the same he attached immense importance to legitimacy. But
his
legitimacy was June 18. He came to realise that no one else could have done it. If his Constitution was good, it would probably work. But that was not the same as his legitimacy.

‘He had one quality that was not monarchic at all, but one we admire in all great men who make constitutional experiments. Take the example of Julius Caesar in his role of dictator . . . de Gaulle was a little like him. If you use the word “dictator” in the Roman sense, then he was a dictator; in the modern Fascist sense, no.