ANDRÉ MALRAUX

Meticulously detailed yet disappointing biography of the French activist/art authority/novelist/politician who began his career by trying to smuggle Khmer sculptures out of Indochina and ended up as minister of culture under de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. In the intervening years, Malraux helped establish an anticolonialist newspaper in Saigon, got to know the Communist cadre in China (about whom he wrote in his novel Man's Fate), led an air squadron during the Spanish Civil War (the source of Man's Hope), and was an important member of the French Maquis during WW II. Plenty of colorful raw material, then, but despite his piling up of facts, Murphy, a former staff member of The Economist, is unable to bring his protagonist to life. Part of the problem seems to lie in Malraux's character itself. Cold, egocentric, domineering, he refused to let the outside world penetrate beneath his chilly facade. Even the four major women in his life—Claire, his first wife; Josette, who bore him two sons out of wedlock; Madeleine, his brother's widow, whom he married after the war; and Louise de Vilmorin, his aristocratic mistress during his final years—seem to have been held at arm's distance. The closest Malraux appears to have come to a deep emotional involvement was with de Gaulle. Ironically, it was this attachment that led to Malraux's being vilified as a reactionary during the student riots of 1968. Murphy does provide some interesting insights, however: His analysis of Malraux's growing disillusionment with the Communist cause during the Spanish Civil War is sensitive and convincing, and an anecdote concerning the French minister's being invited to Washington to consult with US officials before Richard Nixon's first trip to China is intriguing (Henry Kissinger found Malraux's opinions hopelessly out-of-date). Heavy on the whos, whats, whens, and wheres; much too light on the whys. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)