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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

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Courtivron the malrauxs and indochina 33

Such portrayals of Andr Malraux as a modest man indifferent toaccomplishments and honors appear credulous, for they do not take

into account possible strategies for aggrandizement of the self. Obscur-ing the personal to the advantage of his role as participant in major his-torical events or his dialogues with world leaders results in the craftingof a larger-than-life figure who, admittedly hostile to the affectivedimensions of his life, is far from self-disinterested and certainly notself-effacing. However, although both biographers can be faulted fornot being sufficiently skeptical, Malraux's "silences" were not onlyeffective 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 Lacouturewas again careful to seek a balance between Malraux's accomplish-ments and his limitations, straightforwardly dismissing exploits thathad never occurred. He acknowledged that under Monin's leadershipthe two coeditors of L'Indochine did try to resuscitate Young Annam,which had been a viable organization in the immediate postwar yearsin Hanoi but had subsequently fallen into decline. According toLacouture, "owing to his propensity for 'writing up' events, Malrauxlater presented himself, in various interviews and letters, as leader ofthe Young Annam party. This organization seems never to have grownmuch beyond the staff of L'Indochine and a few friends."18 Lacouturealso dismisses any speculation about Malraux's participation in theChinese revolution and in the Canton and Shanghai uprisings. Lacou-ture 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. Thisexposure of the autobiographical imposture, however, does not signifi-cantly damage his portrayal of Andr Malraux. The credit that must

be accorded to Malraux the writer fully compensates, in Lacouture'sview, for the misinformation. Lacouture disentangles the man fromthe myth and reduces him to more human proportions. For this biog-rapher, the writer's ability to create situations in which he had not par-ticipated and yet in which many were convinced he had, attests to his

exceptional talent for the creation of worlds, if not of reality, then ofthe imagination:

Could he extrapolate a China in turmoil from then Indo-China in disar-ray? Could he reconstruct Canton and Shanghai from Saigon and Cho-lon, Chiang Kai-Shek's torturers from those of Dr. Cognacq, the traf-


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34 biography Vol. 12, No. 1

fickers of the Bund from those of the rue Catinat, the massive uprisingsof 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, ifnot for the Chinese readers themselves.19

As Louise Witherell has noted, Lacouture is the first biographer tosubstantially incorporate the materials treated in Clara Malraux'smemoirs.20 Indeed, his more tempered portrayal of young AndrMalraux is attributable, in large part, to Clara's version of their lifetogether until 1939. The first volume, Apprendre vivre (Learning to

Live), covered her childhood and adolescence and ended as she fell inlove with Malraux in 1921. The second volume, Nos vingt Ans (OurTwenties), which appeared in 1966, included an account of their firstIndochinese journey. The third, published in 1969 and entitled LesCombats et les jeux (The Struggles and the Games), was devotedentirely to their life and work together in Saigon in 1925. Langlois andVandegans did not have access to much of the information that sheprovides, much less to the rather unorthodox perspective offered byClara Malraux in her memoirs of the Indochina period.21

Clara Malraux is almost entirely absent from all accounts of AndrMalraux's two Asian journeys written prior to her own. She is men-tioned less than a dozen times in Langlois's book, almost always inci-dentally. While Vandegans acknowledges that Clara might have facili-tated Andre's access to German expressionist writers in the earlyTwenties, she hardly appears, except in several footnotes, in the pageshe devotes to Indochina. In this respect, Malraux's "modesty" con-cerning his personal life and the willingness of some of his biographers

to indulge his silences result not only in protecting and perpetuatinghis own legend but in eliminating Clara from an episode in which sheplayed a role that is far from negligible. In fact, it was her continuedneglect by a growing number of scholars and biographers of Malraux's"first period"due in part to the latter's complete erasure of allshared aspects of his experiencesthat prompted Clara Malraux towrite her side of the story: "There were two of us, I maintain it."22While one should not discount completely a desire for retribution,Clara's memoirs can be seen as the effort to retrieve a past that hadconsistently been misappropriated, distorted or, worse, elided.

For there were indeed two Malrauxs in Indochina, not only on theboat that brought them to Cambodia the first time, on the horses thattook them through the jungle to Bantea Srey, and in the Pnom-Penhhotel and hospital where they awaited trial, but also on the second boat


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Courtivron THE MALRAUXS AND INDOCHINA 35

to Saigon, on tours around the country where they both learned first-hand of colonial injustices and of the cruel oppression of the Annam-

ites, in the makeshift offices of L'Indochine where their team wrotedespite heat and humidity, governmental hostility, and general societalreprobation, and in Hong Kong where they purchased type that wouldenable them to resuscitate their paper. The "other" Malraux wasClara Goldschmidt Malraux, who had been Andre's travel companionsince 1921.

Clara Goldschmidt was born into a prosperous German Jewish fam-ily 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 afamily fragmented by the Franco-German conflict and less than firmlyintegrated in French society. Finally, the postwar years brought aboutan additional societal relaxation of the constraints imposed on women.A rebel against bourgeois conventions from childhood whose multi-cultural 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 fam-ily, Clara embodies the image of the flapper, of the "new woman,"even of the infamous "garonne" of the Twenties that held such fasci-nation for some and elicited such reprobation from others. She metAndr Malraux, then nineteen, at a dinner organized by Florent Felsfor the contributors to his avant-garde review Action, for which sheworked part-time as a translator. They discovered a common passionfor 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 cou-ple 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, theydecided to pursue Andre's scheme and to head for Indochina, hopingto return with enough precious Khmer pieces to guarantee some yearsof 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 sortsand the lure of exotic settings, as were the rest of their intellectual gen-eration.23 But although rebellious, Clara was initially less eager thanAndr to embark upon such a potentially dangerous adventure. At thetime, and despite some of the fragile new freedom gained during thewar, 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 marryinga reckless and somewhat unprincipled youth and embarking with him

to distant destinations in pursuit of questionable goals therefore atteststo Clara's unusually daring spirit. Clara became a full partner in theexpedition, and even if, as Lacouture has suggested, the jungle trekwould elicit less admiration today, it constituted a risk that not manyyoung women raised in a protective Parisian home would haveaccepted to take.

Clara was arrested by the colonial authorities along with Andr andLouis 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 theauthorities to free her; instead, they were sent to a hospital where sheand Andr were at least housed and fed free of charge. This was notmuch of an improvement, however, and after some weeks of despon-dency, illness, and growing fear about the outcome of their trial, Claraonce again decided to act. She staged a hunger strike and feignedepisodes of madness. The authorities became alarmed; a prelimi-nary 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'srelease. Indeed, in 1923 a wife was required by law to follow her hus-

band; she was considered to have no legal free will and thus to bear noresponsibility for her whereabouts as long as she was fulfilling her con-

jugal obligation. Clara Malraux's presence in Bantea Srey could nottherefore be considered a punishable offense. She was allowed to leave

for France, where she successfully organized support among Parisianwriters for Andre's release. On the ship that took her back to Franceshe met lawyer Paul Monin and enlisted him in the campaign forMalraux's freedom. Later, she was to introduce the two men whodreamed up L'Indochine.

Little of this information is presented in biographies of Malrauxpublished before Clara's memoirs, and nowhere did he allude to theseevents except to take pride in the fact that an impressive group of writ-ers had banded together to demand his freedom in the name of hispromising literary talent. Sharing an heroic adventure with a womanwould certainly have damaged the Malraux image. As Susan Suleimanconcludes after rereading Malraux's novels from a feminist perspec-tive, "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 intothe shared trials of two men. More importantly, being "saved" by a

woman represented an even greater betrayal of Malraux's ethics ofvirility. Clara was thus eliminated completely from both fact and fic-tion. In her memoirs, she reveals that this omissionAndre's refusalto acknowledge publicly her role in mobilizing public opinion to exertpressure on the appeals courtwas the first, and thus the most surpris-ing and the most painful. There were, however, to be many more.

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

Clara's role. Her third autobiographical volume chronicles her partici-pation in their anticolonialist journalistic enterprise, outlines her con-crete contributions to L'Indochine, and offers a much more playful andlighthearted perspective on their experience in colonial Saigon than dothe dramatized versions proposed by a number of Andr Malraux'sbiographers.

Clara Malraux entitles her volume Les Combats et les jeux. This titlerefers as much to the personal as to the political dimensions of theirexperience, for the relationship between the two young intellectualswas as much one of diversions and amusements on one hand, andopposition and conflict on the other, as was their daily work on thenewspaper. Clara was clearly a member of the Indochine team as muchas were Malraux, Monin, Dejean de la Btie, Vinh, Ph, Hin andMinh. As though to emphasize this fact, she consistently uses the pro-noun "we" when referring to their ideological and practical enter-prises: "We finally held the paper in our hands, our paper, fruit of ourminds and of our hands."25 While she deferred to Monin and Malraux,

who made the speeches and wrote the editorials, she participated assubstantially as any of their collaborators in their joint project.The importance of Clara's work on L'Indochine must not be underes-

timated. Along with local and regional news, and with literary excerptsfrom the Parisian press, L'Indochine prided itself on its abundant andtimely coverage of the international situation, which was attributed tomysterious "special correspondents." In fact, L'lndochine's interna-tional coverage consisted of selections from the British press, espe-

cially the Straits Times, that Clara had obtained permission to trans-late and reprint during a journey she made alone to Singapore in early1925. This selection stressed explosive revolutionary situations insuch colonialized regions as India and North Africa and especially inChina, news that the French colonial press censored for fear that it


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might further intensify the Annamese nationalistic tendencies. Forthis reason, a judicious presentation of the international scene was cen-tral to L'lndochine's mission.

While much of the work was probably collaborative, each memberof the team necessarily assumed certain responsibilities. Monin andMalraux shared the editorial duties. Their Annamese colleagues con-centrated on the important local and regional aspect of the paper andon translation from the Annamese press, a daring innovation in itself.Clara was the only one to speak several foreign languages. (All ofAndr Malraux's biographers acknowledge that he never learned En-

glish.) Consequently, she was in large part responsible for the interna-tional section, which represented approximately one quarter of theeight-page paper. Yet so little was known about her particular activitiesthat Walter Langlois, whose meticulous research on L'Indochine missesfew details, explains that these dispatches came from independentsources not available to other papers and concludes: "Obviously, L'In-dochine had close links with Chinese sources in China, probably withChinese newspapermen."26 Until Clara reclaimed her share of theresponsibility, 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 lesseffective publication had it not been for the section that she developed.

Clara's Indochina memoirs accomplish much more than the rectifi-cation of concrete matters such as these. They also provide a morelighthearted perspective on the activities of Monin and the Malrauxsthat reduces them to human proportions. Her portrayal of three intel-

ligent, energetic and rebellious young intellectuals who arrogantlyconfronted the colonial machinery and who even, while taking risks,indulged in a great deal of fun, deflates the more grandiloquent analy-ses of this particular period of Malraux's life. Indeed, closer scrutinyof L'Indochine reveals that the proportion of wit and humoras well asretribution against those who had tried to discredit and imprisonAndr in 1924appears at least equal to that of serious analysis of col-onialist oppression. Clara's subtle analysis of the ways in which hercompanion gradually transformed what he considered to be his first"failure" in Indochina into the machinations of a corrupt administra-tion to destroy him for purely political reasons unmasks AndreMalraux'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 lifein Saigon than earlier biographers had painted: "Our team had fun in

1925 in Saigon: the oldest of us, Monin, was barely thirty."27 One tell-ing anecdote illustrates the readjustments that Clara's account com-pelled later biographers to make. She describes the journey to HongKong, in the summer of 1925, during which they purchased new typefor their silenced paper, and denies any apocryphal visit to Canton.More to the point, Clara recalls that after having accomplished theirtask, the young couple took a few days' vacation in Macao. At the timewhen Malraux was purportedly assisting Borodine in China, he was in

fact enjoying the tourist spectacles of Macao's casinos, brothels, andopium dens.While Andr Malraux's Antimemoirs are entirely structured around

monologues or conversations with great men about art, politics anddeath, and are dominated by universal pronouncements on the humancondition, Clara's memoirs speak of daily personal experiences, ofordinary human contacts, and return again and again to the learningprocess of life. Indeed, the motif of "learning to live" could aptly char-acterize all six volumes of her autobiography. She communicates herinitial naivete and ignorance about the colonial situation and her aston-ishment 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 toform groups and their relationships to Occidental thoughtan Occidentof which they want to free themselves through the thought, revised andcorrected, of a semi-European, semi-Asiatic Russia, a phase that is

doubtless indispensable to their own conquest of themselves. But I learnthe names of Yuan Che-Ka, of Sun Yat-sen, of the war lords, of TchangKa-Chek, and I now know that the Kominform exists.28

Nor is she embarrassed, forty years later, as she documents the growthof her political consciousness, to take pride in this almost childlike

process of discovery: "My brand new knowledge shines like copper."29At 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 friendsand colleagues whose moments of joy or discouragement she sharesand tries to interpret through her own experience of life. UnlikeAndr, who is so disciplined intellectually that he boasts never towaste time daydreaming but relentlessly pursues precise lines ofreflection organized around specific themes, Clara's thought process is


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anecdotal, associative, and turned toward the individual. Her memoirstherefore 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 isbecause she and Andr struggled at their side that they learned asmuch as they did, even if, she adds lucidly, "We did so only in our owninterest."30

Moreover, Clara who has proudly reclaimed the "we" in their enter-prise, is not so invested in its success that she cannot distance herselfcritically 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 ideasit presented had already and often been developed by Monin and Dejeanin other papers, by Minh and Nguyen Ai-quoc in pamphlets . . . butwhether 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 oftheir activities. Alluding to their embroilment with powerful local edi-tors, she calls these a "guignolade," a form of "ballet-theater" in

which each player had an assigned part. The vaunted struggle againstvillainous adversity at times becomes comical. Even the intense figureof Andr becomes humanized once seen from her perspective. Sheincorporates the testimony of a mutual friend of theirs who remembersAndr during this period as "carefree, a guy full of humor who did nottake himself seriously and others even less so."32 While Clara Malrauxis revolted by injustice and committed to the struggle against itwhich she continued to demonstrate throughout her lifeshe refuses

to obliterate those aspects of a year in Saigon that made it occasionallyfeel like a vacation. She dwells on the excitement of distributing thefirst free issues of L'Indochine in the streets, and on the celebrationwhen the first paying issue sold well. "Our satisfaction manifesteditself in speeches, grandiose visions, and champagne, all of which weindulged in, in the house on the rue Pllerin."33 Recollections ofatmospheres rather than words, of sounds and fragrances, of joyousmoments of apprenticeship and collaboration, are woven around and

through the harder political realities.34 What is also brought into thenarrative is the transformation of Andr from adventurer to conquerorthat Alfred Goessl and Roland Champagne have so convincingly ana-lyzed.35

Clara's intentions in publishing her memoirs were in part to set therecord 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 thathad been overlooked or distorted too often. She reinscribes herself in a

joint venture in which she had been too long the invisible companionand reclaims a past that had been stolen from her by the silences ofAndr 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 ofAndr 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 moreaccurate presentation of the Indochinese period (see, for example, "Interroga-tion 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-Decem-

ber 1928. All of these are cited by Vandegans in a footnote on pages 240 and241 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 Con-

temporary 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 dismissesher first novel, Le Portrait de Griselidis, in a few lines of a footnote.


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42 biography Vol. 12,No. 1

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 Contem-porary Literature (Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 1983).

35. Alfred G. Goessl and Roland A. Champagne, "Clara Malraux's Le Bruit de nospas: Biography and the Question of Women in the 'Case of Malraux' " in Biog-raphy, Vol. 7, No. 3.

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