The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (40 page)

Yet the historian must remember that “the modern ages did not proceed from the medieval by normal succession” but “Unheralded, it founded a new order of things under a law of innovation.” Modern history was born in revolution, in the revolutions of Columbus, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, and Copernicus—each of whom “broke the chain of authority and tradition.” So the long continuity of history, for Acton, was a process of permanent revolution. This was his name for progress, and justified his optimism for humanity despite the evils of the self-serving power of individuals.

But how justify the existence of evil under a beneficent God? Acton, faced with Job’s problem, was seeking his own solution. Which he found ingeniously, not in the omnipotence of God but in his own sacred theme of liberty. “Liberty is so holy a thing,” Acton observed, “that God was forced to permit Evil, that it might exist.”

So, after all, still not achieving his own great work, Acton brought together the best historians of his day to collaborate on the
Cambridge Modern History.
Advancing beyond “conventional history,” they would not be confined in the history of nations, but would chronicle the grand leading ideas that unified humankind:

By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden to the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.

It was significant that, while Acton left a rich miscellaneous legacy of his own essays, lectures, and ideas, his monument of scholarship was the collaboration of other historians of his age, seeking in a work of surprising objectivity.

Despite Acton’s optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as “one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces.” “Nationality,” newly flourishing in Europe in Acton’s day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. “The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality. . . . Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational. . . . The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom.” And the State (as in Bismarck’s Prussia)—the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism—was “a vast abstraction above all other things” (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives.

Malraux’s Charms of Anti-Destiny

Marx had sought his clues to destiny in the industrial Manchester of his friend Friedrich Engels, in the plight of the oppressed surrounding him in Western Europe, and in the arcane science of economics. André Malraux (1901-1976) set out to find his meaning for history in the artwork of the buried past halfway around the world in Indochina. Yet he would risk his life in revolutionary movements foreshadowed by Marx’s science, and would write enduring sagas of the adventure of revolution in his time. Malraux saw human fulfillment in the kinship of past and present everywhere and in individual acts of heroism, in war or art. “Art,” he insisted, “is an anti-destiny,” the fulfillment of man’s unique and universal spirit. Obsessed by the passion and drama of history in his time, he found elegant refuge in his
Voices of Silence,
in the legacy of artists of all times and places.

Malraux was born in 1901 to a wealthy family in Paris. His father’s heroes were the pioneers of technology—de Lesseps, Eiffel, Citroen, Blériot. He attended the lycée but never completed the program, and grew up in Paris where he worked for rare-book dealers. He read widely and especially admired Dumas. His father was a tank officer in World War I, which André considered “very romantic.” The boy André glimpsed the carnage of battle in trains returning with heavy casualties. Never attending university, he acquired an amazing grasp of world art, history, and literature on his own. At eighteen his first publication,
The Origins of Cubist Poetry,
gave a clue to his lifelong interest in the surprising and the marginal. Stimulated by the effervescent community of Paris intellectuals, the impressionable Malraux explored mystical experiences, sought out works of erotica and exotica for publishers, and acquired a taste for Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, which he never lost.

When he was twenty-one, Malraux enlisted his new bride, Clara Goldschmidt, on an expedition to Indochina in search of the ancient Khmer ruins about which he had read in an archaeological review. In the jungle he hoped to find the abandoned ruins of a temple that might rival the famous Angkor Wat. He had already given his own explanation of the special value of individual works recovered from the past—in his theory of confrontation, which he would develop thirty years later in his
Voices of Silence.
“The Greek genius,” he had written, “is better understood by opposing one Greek statue to an Egyptian or Asian statue than by getting to know a hundred Greek statues.” He secured a letter from the Minister of Colonies for French Indochina authorizing him to explore the site of the Khmer temples, his only obligation being to give an account on his return.

After a month’s sea voyage from Marseilles, André and Clara briefly savored the exotic life of Saigon and of Hanoi, administrative capital of French Indochina. A riverboat took them to Siem Reap, the port for Angkor Wat, where they equipped themselves with tropical helmets, drinking water, and a local guide. After a two-day trek into the jungle with four bullock carts of supplies they found a neglected trail that led to the ruins mentioned in the archaeological review. In
The Royal Way,
Malraux would describe their finds—“bas reliefs of the best period, marked by Indian influence . . . but very beautiful.” Still embedded in the walls were huge blocks of the treasured sculptures, which Malraux and his crew spent two days and several broken saws hacking loose. They estimated that the blocks would bring $100,000 on delivery in New York. The pieces they had cut out formed four blocks of bas-relief of dancing goddesses and men seated in lotus position. Their thousand pounds of treasure was loaded on a river steamer to a forwarding agent in Saigon. When the boat tied up at Phnom Penh, André and Clara stayed on board. They were awakened before midnight and placed under arrest.

The ruins that André and his crew had exploited had been among the “discovered and undiscovered” sites protected by the governor general’s regulations and recent Paris decrees. During the six months before their trial, “the Angkor Wat robbers” became a cause célèbre in Paris and New York. Clara feigned suicide, was stricken by a tropical fever, and began a hunger strike. Despite uncertainty whether these Banteai Srey ruins had really been legally classified and protected as historical monuments, the judge convicted Malraux, sentencing him to three years in prison and five years’ banishment from residence in Indochina. After months of pressure, petitions from eminent Europeans, and lengthy appeals, Malraux’s sentence was reduced and he never had to go to prison. Malraux still wanted to appeal again, because, he said, he wanted his statues. But they were not to be his. In 1925 the statues were replaced in the temple wall, where they stayed until the whole area was leveled in a North Vietnamese-Khmer Rouge attack in 1970.

On his twenty-third birthday Malraux sailed for Marseilles. For him, seeking was never a purely aesthetic experience. Finding his very own way to every idea, he drew some surprising conclusions from his archaeological misadventure. “My revolutionary commitment,” he would later explain, “was in reaction to colonialism. Until then I had never taken sides and Indochina was the touchstone to my becoming aware of—let’s simplify ‘social justice.’ I became involved when I realized that for the peoples of Southeast Asia only a revolutionary movement would bring them a liberal status.” After a brief stay in Paris to finance his next Indochina adventure, Malraux and Clara returned to Saigon in 1925. There they founded a “free” anticolonialist newspaper,
L’Indochine.
This put Malraux in touch with the left wing of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party in China. Meanwhile an enterprising Paris publisher had given him an advance and a contract for three novels.

The government in Saigon made trouble for him. He found it hard even to secure type to print his “free” newspaper, and it folded after a few months. Malraux gave new expression to his anticolonialist passion by founding
L’Indochine enchainée
(Indochina in Chains). Then he played a legendary role in the brewing revolution in China, perhaps as a “people’s commissar” in the Canton uprising of 1925 and in the Shanghai insurrection of 1927. But his new publishing venture also folded, and Malraux was soon back in Paris in the brilliant circle of writers and artists that included Gide, Valéry, and Joyce. In the next few years he wrote three novels of revolution
—The Conquerors
(1928) and
Man’s Fate
(1933) on China, and
Man’s Hope
(1937) on Spain. The fame of these works made him a spokesman for Communist intellectuals in the West. He wrote other novels, too, and some cryptic impressionistic pieces on the future of civilization and the relation between East and West.

Malraux’s quixotic passion for archaeology remained alive, and the sale of his novels supplied the means for new expeditions. Intrigued by the tales of the Queen of Sheba, he went in search of her ancient capital. Enlisting a friendly aviator, Malraux directed an air survey of the Arabian desert, where he found a site that he impetuously declared to be the Queen of Sheba’s mythical capital. Confirmation on the ground was still to come. And these frolics were interrupted again by his revolutionary passion. In 1934 at the All-Soviet Writers Congress in Leningrad, Malraux played a leading and slightly defiant role in the very year when Stalin’s purge would begin. “The fundamental adventure for a writer,” Malraux the Seeker told Maksim Gorky, “is his own astonishment in the face of life. . . . behind every artist you find the question, ‘What is life, what does it mean?’ ” He titled his challenging speech “Art Is a Conquest,” and he explained:

Art is not an act of submission but a conquest. A conquest of what? Nearly always of the unconscious and quite often of logic. Your classic writers give a richer and more complex picture of the inner life than the Soviet novelists, and so it sometimes happens that a reader will feel that Tolstoy is more real to them than many of the novelists attending this congress.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War again summoned the revolutionary in Malraux. In 1936 he arrived in Madrid in a private plane piloted by the friend who had discovered the capital of Sheba three years before. No longer a mere journalist, he soon commanded the España Squadron in the air. He was risking his life in battle for the Republican cause, which now included the Communists. When Malraux toured the United States to arouse support for the Republican cause in Spain, he was lionized in New York and Hollywood. Asked why he had risked his life in Spain when he could have relaxed in his fame as an author in France, he responded, “Because I do not like myself.” And when asked why he found fighting more important than writing, he answered, “Because death is a greater triumph.” And he defended Stalin. “Just as the Inquisition didn’t detract from the fundamental dignity of Christianity,” he declared at a dinner given by
The Nation
in New York, “so the Moscow trials didn’t detract from the fundamental dignity of communism.”

Still, in his novels of the Chinese Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, Malraux was anything but the ideologue. He found the meaning of these struggles in individual acts of heroism, just as he had found the meaning of art in the individual work confronted by others. At the outbreak of World War II, he returned to France and joined the French army as a private. Captured by the Germans, he escaped from prison camp, and was active in organizing the Resistance. After the war he served de Gaulle as minister of information, then for ten years as minister of culture. This was a time when Malraux felt his country and the world needed “a new idea of man,” and he saw the arts as the vehicle of that idea.

In 1951 Malraux finally offered his new view of man in his
Voices of Silence,
which he said he had worked on all his life. Every work of art, he believed, was “an encounter with time.” And since about 1870, Western man had the new opportunity to envision all that humanity had known and accomplished.

The difference between ours and other civilizations is quite obviously the machine and the fact that we are without precedent. Other cultures rarely knew the societies preceding them—the Renaissance knew Antiquity, yes; but Rome wasn’t the inheritor of Egypt, much less of the Celts—whereas we are the sum of all the others, the first planetary civilization. This is something momentous that started around 1870 when so-called cultivated humanity realized that it was the inheritor of the whole planet. The next step is obviously to conceive humanity as one. . . .
Culturally, this means there are no more secrets. We don’t know what hasn’t been discovered, of course—ruins never unearthed, but we know everything that exists and has been. (From Malraux’s Foreword to the French translation of T. E. Lawrence,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
)

Malraux now dared to inventory and assess this whole inheritance. His
Voices of Silence,
copiously illustrated, began with the history of museums, recounting how by making reproduction possible, modern technology had created the “Museum Without Walls,” where a viewer anywhere could confront the whole heritage of art. And so ended the unchallenged sovereignty of Italy.

Our heritage is the product of a vast metamorphosis, where Greek statues have turned white and all the remote past reaches us colorless. So styles have replaced schools and the film has liberated individualist painting from movement and narration. Then “The Metamorphosis of Apollo,” in the Medieval Retrogression and Byzantium, brought a Christian art that, unlike Greek art, individualized human destinies and was based on specific events. “The Creative Process” explained how the artist’s eyesight was put to the service of his style, and how art was a process of reduction—“Every great style a reduction of the Cosmos to Man’s measure.”