193. Martin du Gard, Journal 2, pp. 232–3.
194. Martin, pp. 96–8.
195. PD 2, p. 114.
196. Schlum., p. 368. On that same page, Schlumberger had just noted that Mauriac told him after reading the memoir of Jean Lambert (Gide’s son-in-law), which alluded to the old man’s monomania: “We must face the fact: Gide was truly a sick person, one of those madmen who need to be locked away.” (Once again, it should be recalled that Mauriac was himself a repressed homosexual, and that he had a genuine friendship with Gide.)
197. Gide’s moral blindness and capacity for self-deception staggered even his closest friends. Martin du Gard tells how Gide’s daughter, who was seventeen at the time, had become the object of the timid sentimental attentions of one of her former teachers. Gide was indignant and wanted to write to the man: “Sir, stop bothering this child. I forbid you to meet her again.” The situation, he said, was “odious.” This reaction bemused Martin: “Our good old Gide has in fact spent all his life committing breaches of trust that were far more severe! How many times did he worm his way into a friendly family, multiplying warm approaches to the parents, with the sole purpose of getting closer to their son — sometimes a thirteen-year-old schoolboy — and of joining him in his room, arousing his sexual curiosity, teaching him sensual pleasure! He was more clever than Catherine’s teacher, more diabolic with his temptations, more daring also. How many times did he succeed in hoodwinking the parents, in securing the complicity of the child, in indulging with him in sweet and perverse games? But then, to his mind, there was nothing ‘odious’ in this premeditated debauching of a young boy, whom his parents had entrusted to his friendly care!” (Martin du Gard, Journal 3, pp. 361–2.)
198. PD 4, pp. 253–4.
199. PD 2, p. 406.
200. Béatrix Beck tells in her memoirs: “Some time after the death of Gide, Dominique Drouin (his nephew) told me that the Tiny Lady had confided to him: ‘I have to fetch a little Annamite for him, and when I cannot find any, I act as a substitute.’ And Drouin added: ‘When you think of these two bags of bones.’… I have a strong visual imagination and I somatise easily: I had to vomit on the spot.” (Beck, p. 161.)
201. Schlum., p. 346.
202. PD 4, p. 252.
203. Béatrix Beck, Preface to M. Saint-Clair, Il y a quarante ans, p. iv.
204. Sheridan, pp. 370 and 633.
205. Schlum., p. 96.
206. Schlum., p. 150.
207. PD 2, p. 58.
208. Quoted in PD 3, p. 16.
209. PD 4, p. 204.
210. Saint Augustine: Confessions, X, (xxiii) 34: “Sic amatur veritas, ut quicumque aliud amant, hoc quod amant velint esse veritatem, et quia falli nolent, nolunt convinci quod falli sint. Itaque propter eam rem oderunt veritatem, quam pro veritate amant.”
MALRAUX
1. In November 1996, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, Malraux was awarded the form of immortality which the French nation bestows upon its most illustrious cultural heroes: his mortal remains were moved with great pomp into the Pantheon in Paris.
2. La Tragédie de la révolution chinoise, translation by R. Viénet (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
3. J. Andrieu, “Mais que se sont dit Mao et Malraux?” in Perspectives Chinoises, No. 37, October 1996. (An abridged version of this article was published in Le Nouveau quotidien, Lausanne, 3 December 1996.)
4. G. Duthuit, Le Musée inimaginable (Paris: José Corti, 1956). Duthuit pointed out, with great scholarly accuracy, the countless historical howlers in Malraux’s Musée imaginaire: les voix du silence. He also exposed his hollowness, obscurity, logical non sequiturs, and other factual mistakes. His demonstration (in two volumes of text and one volume of illustrations) was brilliant, rigorous and devastating — but it reached only a small circle of specialised scholars.
5. B.Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here? (London: Picador, 1990), p. 133.
6. The Nabokov — Wilson Letters 1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979), p. 175.
7. J.-P. Sartre, Lettres au Castor (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), Vol. 2, pp. 159, 167, 163, 192.
8. Letter to Roger Nimier, 8 January 1953 (in Jacques Chardonne — Roger Nimier, Correspondance, Paris: Gallimard, 1984, p. 91.) Two samples of Malraux’s galimatias (out of possible hundreds) are provided by Curtis Cate (p. 372): “The language of Phidias’ forms or of those of the pediment of Olympia, humanistic though it is, is also as specific as that of the masters of Chartres and Babylon or of abstract sculptures, because like that of the great Italians of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, it simultaneously modifies the representation and its style.” Or again: “Between Cézanne’s Still Life with Clock, which strives only to be a painting, and his canvases which have become a style, there resurfaces the call which raises up Bach over and against negro music, and Piero della Francesca over and against barbarian arts — the art of mastery, as opposed to that of the miracle.”
9. B. Souvarine, Staline (Paris: Champ Libre, 1977), pp. 11–12.
10. R. Stéphane, André Malraux: entretiens et précisions (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 91.
11. C. Cate, André Malraux: A Biography (New York: Fromm, 1997).
THE INTIMATE ORWELL
1. On this subject, Orwell’s wife, writing to his sister (from Marrakech in 1938) observed with wry amusement: “He did construct one dugout in Spain [during the Civil War] and it fell down on him and his companions’ heads two days later, not under any kind of bombardment, but just from the force of gravity. But the dugout has generally been by way of light relief; his specialities are concentration camps and famine. He buried some potatoes against the famine, and they might have been very useful if they hadn’t gone mouldy at once. To my surprise he does intend to stay here [in Marrakech] whatever happens. In theory this seems too reasonable and even comfortable to be in character.”
2. Orwell and Spender became friends — but on the subject of Spender’s poetry, Orwell’s literary judgement never wavered; he simply chose not to comment.
3. This reminds me of Georges Bernanos (the two writers have much in common besides their fight against Franco). The great French novelist and pamphleteer exiled himself to Brazil shortly before the Second World War — he was disgusted by France’s political and moral decline. He sank all his meagre savings in the purchase of a cattle farm (which was soon to go bankrupt) and at the time wrote to a friend: “I have just bought 200 cows and thus acquired the right to call myself no longer ‘man of letters’ but cattleman, which I much prefer. As a cattleman I shall be able to write what I think.”
4. A young and beautiful woman — though somewhat hare-brained, she managed to edit (with the collaboration of I. Angus) the excellent Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969). These four volumes remain invaluable; not every reader can afford the twenty volumes of Davison’s editions of the Complete Works.
TERROR OF BABEL: EVELYN WAUGH
1. Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Collins, 1975); Auberon Waugh, Will This Do? (London: Arrow, 1991). Postscript of 1998: one more title should be added now to this small bibliography — Selena Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).