Andre Malraux: A Biography

A rarity among adventurers, Malraux (1901-1976) was a swashbuckling, anarchic intellectual. Only last November, French president Jacques Chirac enshrined him in the Pantheon along with Voltaire, Rousseau and France's other greats. Cate, expatriate American biographer of another nearly mythical contemporary, Saint-Exupery, demythologizes the controversial, one-time communist-leaning Malraux, who from 1959 to 1969 was de Gaulle's minister of culture. Living dangerously and surviving by his wits and a little bit of luck, Malraux, Cate shows, turned his earlier experiences into novels: a Mao insurrection in Shanghai became La Condition humaine--Man's Fate, and his Spanish Civil War air squadron's futility (a self-appointed commander, he could not pilot a plane or drive an auto) was transformed into L'Espoire (Man's Hope). Twice a Nazi prisoner during the occupation, he escaped and assumed command of a resistance battalion, then manipulated himself into Gaullist office, along the way writing three influential books on art that later were collected as Les Voix du silence and an idiosyncratic memoir he titled defiantly Antimemoires. In the interstices of his stormy public life, he managed marriages and liaisons, all of which ended badly. Malraux's relationships with his wives were less than admirable, we learn here; his second marriage (to his widowed sister-in-law) broke up when he arrogantly accused her of ""not breathing at the altitude at which I breathe."" A life marked by pretense as well as panache, it is related rather flatly by Cate, who permits the inner man to escape and, rushing to conclude, gives only 60 pages to his subject's 30 tumultuous postwar years. Photos. (Apr.)