The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (24 page)

Malraux himself had little patience for dull minds: “I do not argue with imbeciles.” (Which, by the way, might explain why he was such a bad novelist: what is life, after all, but a long dialogue with imbeciles?) The most intelligent interlocutors, subjected to his rapid-fire monologues in relentless and stupefying bursts, felt like inarticulate fools, and the sharpest wits turned speechless. His rather offensive
machismo
never discouraged bright and talented women from offering him their passionate love. His first wife was a woman of cosmopolitan culture, who supported him intellectually, spiritually and financially. (Malraux quickly managed to gamble and lose her entire fortune on the stock market—and then told her defiantly: “You really don’t think I am going to work now?”) When she dared to entertain literary ambitions of her own, he warned her: “It is better for you to be my wife than a second-rate writer.”

With his fanciful military record, he still succeeded in inspiring the blind loyalty of authentic war heroes. Though singularly devoid of humour, he won the steadfast affection of one of the wittiest women of his time (Louise de Vilmorin). And even General de Gaulle (who appointed him as his Minister for Cultural Affairs) endured his most bizarre and ludicrous initiatives with uncharacteristic patience; his cabinet colleagues were puzzled at first, then concluded philosophically: “Malraux is mad, but he amuses the Général.”

His singular magnetism was originally built on impudent lies, then further enriched by a permanent and compulsive mythomania, expressed in an unremitting verbal flow. But in the end, his theatrical performances became convincing and even respectable, for they were sustained by a gallantry that was not counterfeit. When he ventured
with his young wife into the Cambodian jungle to dismantle and steal monumental Khmer sculptures, and when he had himself flown over Yemen without maps and without adequate fuel supplies in search of the mythical capital of the Queen of Sheba, he was engaging in questionable or hare-brained enterprises, but these also demanded considerable physical courage. He constantly took enormous risks; he led a restless and dramatic life in restless and dramatic times.

* * *

Today, Malraux’s writings are hardly readable
à froid
—they are stilted, pompous, hollow, confused, verbose, obscure. But whenever we encounter the man himself—for instance, in the record of his conversations with Roger Stéphane, his faithful and lively Boswell, or in a good biography such as Cate’s—something of his old magic seems to be operating again. Malraux’s young and beautiful mistress (whose early death in a horrible accident was to shatter him) was once advised by a well-meaning acquaintance to give up a liaison which could hold no future for the daughter of staid bourgeois. She replied: “I prefer a liaison with a fellow like him to a marriage with a tax collector.” Her quixotic choice was to entail much pain and sacrifice, but one can appreciate her wisdom. Malraux could in turns be inspiring and ridiculous, heroic and absurd—he was never mediocre. (And his adventures fired our enthusiasm when we were twenty: if we were to forget this, we would forget the better part of our own youth.)

Cate’s account does not pass judgement, but conveys vividly these contradictions, which makes his book fascinating to read. At times, it can be quite funny too—witness this page describing the encounter between Malraux and Hemingway shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944:

But didn’t Malraux himself warn us? “There are no grown-ups . . .”

T
HE INTIMATE
Orwell? For an article dealing with a volume of his diaries and a selection of his letters—
Diaries
(London: Harvill Secker, 2009);
A Life in Letters
(London: Harvill Secker, 2010)—at first such a title seemed appropriate; yet it could also be misleading inasmuch as it might suggest an artificial distinction—or even an opposition—between Eric Blair, the private man, and George Orwell, the published writer. The former, it is true, was a naturally reserved, reticent, even awkward individual, whereas Orwell, with pen (or gun) in hand, was a bold fighter. In fact—and this becomes even more evident after reading these two volumes—Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality; Blair-Orwell was made of one piece. A recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at close hand was his “terrible simplicity”; he had “the innocence of a savage.” Contrary to what some commentators had earlier assumed (myself included[8]), his adoption of a pen-name was a mere accident and never carried for him any particular significance. Simply, at the time of publishing his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), he wished to spare his parents any potential embarrassment: old Mr. and Mrs. Blair belonged to “the lower-upper-middle class” (i.e. “the upper middle class that is short of money”) and were painfully concerned with social respectability. They could have been distressed to see it publicised that their only son had led the life of an out-of-work drifter and penniless
tramp. His pen-name was thus chosen at random, as an after-thought, at the last minute before publication; but afterwards he kept using it for all his publications—journalism, essays, novels—and somehow remained stuck with it. In his private correspondence, till the very end of his life, he still signed his letters now Eric Blair (or Eric), now George Orwell (or George), simply following the form of address originally used by his various correspondents, who were either early acquaintances or later colleagues and friends. His first wife, Eileen (who died prematurely in 1945), and their adopted son, Richard, both took the name Blair; his second wife, Sonia (whom he married virtually on his deathbed), took the name Orwell. Shortly before the end of his life, he himself explained the matter very clearly to his old Eton tutor (who knew him as Blair): “About my name, I have used the name Orwell as a pen-name for a dozen years or more, and most of the people I know call me George, but I have never actually changed my name and some people still call me Blair. It is getting such a nuisance that I keep meaning to change it by deed-poll; but you have to go to a solicitor, etc., which puts me off.”

* * *

All the diaries of Orwell that are extant (some were lost, and one was stolen during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona by the Stalinist secret police—it may still lie today in some Moscow archive) were first published in 1998 by Peter Davison and included in his monumental edition of
The Complete Works of George Orwell
(20 volumes: 9,000 pages). They are now conveniently regrouped here in one volume, excellently presented and annotated by Davison. The diaries provide a wealth of information on Orwell’s daily activities, concerns and interests; they present considerable documentary value for scholars, but they do not exactly live up to their editor’s claim: “These diaries offer a virtual autobiography of Orwell’s life and opinions for so much of his life.” This assessment—as we shall see in a moment—would much better characterise the utterly fascinating companion volume (also edited by Peter Davison),
George Orwell: A Life in Letters
.

Orwell’s diaries are not confessional: here he very seldom records
his emotions, impressions, moods or feelings, hardly ever his ideas, judgements and opinions. What he jots down is strictly and dryly factual, events happening in the outside world or in his own little vegetable garden: his goat Muriel’s slight diarrhoea may have been caused by eating wet grass; Churchill is returning to cabinet; fighting reported in Manchukuo; rhubarb growing well; Béla Kun reported shot in Moscow; the pansies and red saxifrage are coming into flower; the rat population in Britain is estimated at 4–5 million; in the slang of the East Enders the word
tart
is absolutely interchangeable with
girl
with no implications of “prostitute”—people speak of their daughter or sister as a tart; among the hop-pickers, rhyming slang is not extinct, thus for instance,
a dig in the grave
means
a shave
; (and at the end of July 1940, as the menace of a German invasion becomes very real) “constantly, as I walk down the streets, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests.” The state of the weather is recorded daily as well as the count of eggs laid by his hens and the quantity of milk yielded by his goat. To some extent, the diaries could carry as their epigraph Orwell’s endearing words, from his 1946 essay “Why I Write”: “I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue . . . to love the surface of the earth and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

Very rarely does the diarist formulate a socio-psychological observation—but then it is always strikingly original and perceptive. Thus, for instance, on the sexual life of tramps: “they talk on sexual subjects in a revolting manner. Tramps are disgusting when on this subject because their poverty keeps them off entirely from women, and their minds consequently fester with obscenity. Merely lecherous people are all right, but people who
would like
to be lecherous but don’t get the chance, are horribly degraded by it. They remind me of the dogs that hang enviously round while other dogs are copulating.” In his enquiry into the condition of workers in Northern England during the Depression, he displays sensitive empathy and a remarkable capacity for
attention
to other people’s predicament; thus, for instance, this subtle remark on a specific “discomfort of the working man’s life:
waiting about
. If you receive a salary it is paid into your bank and you draw it out when you want it. If you receive wages, you have to go and get them on somebody else’s time and are probably left hanging about and probably expected to behave as though paying your wages at all was a favour.” Then he describes the long wait in the cold, the hassles and expenses of journeys by tram to and from the pay office: “The result of long training in this kind of thing is that whereas the bourgeois goes through life expecting to get what he wants, within limits, the working man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority. I was impressed by the fact that when I went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for certain statistics, both Brown and Searle [his two local miner-friends]—both of them people of much more forcible character than myself—were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the town clerk would refuse information. They said, ‘He might give it to you, but he wouldn’t to us.’ Actually the town clerk was snooty and I did not get all the information that I asked for. But the point was that I assumed my question would be answered and the other two assumed the contrary.” In turn, these observations develop into broader and bolder considerations:

The writing in the diaries is terse, detached and impersonal. I will give just one example—it is typical, as it expresses both the drastic limitations of the form adopted by the diarist as well as some remarkable
features of his personality. It is the entry of 19 August 1947, dealing with the Corryvreckan Whirlpool accident: the entire episode is disposed of in eight lines—the style is as matter-of-fact and unemotional as that of a police report. It would be all too easy for the uninformed reader to overlook the whole incident, or at least to fail to grasp its dramatic and near-fatal nature. On that day, Orwell, his three-year-old son, his nephew and niece (respectively twenty and sixteen) all escaped near-certain death by drowning in the most terrifying circumstances. Yet to gauge the gravity of the episode (which was reported at the time in the Glasgow press) one must read the full account by Orwell’s nephew (in
Orwell Remembered
, eds A. Coppard and B. Crick, London: BBC Books, 1984, and quoted in large part by B. Crick in
George Orwell: A Life
, London: Secker & Warburg, 1980).