Value of thought lies in action

Value of thought lies in action

By Sumitro Djojohadikusumo

The following article is based on a presentation given in a
seminar at the French Cultural Center on Nov. 12, 1996 on the
occasion of the 20th anniversary of the death of Andre Malraux, a
great French novelist.

JAKARTA: It is with great hesitation that I proffer my
observations on Andre Malraux. To pretend having known the great
man would be preposterous and presumptuous.

I met Malraux a few times at a crucial moment of history,
during the fatal year of 1938, on the eve of World War II. I was
a very young person then, having just passed my 21st birthday in
Paris where at the time I worked as a waiter at the Hotel
Lancaster in the rue de Berry off the Champs de Elyssees. By
then, Andre Malraux, although "only" 16 years older, was already
a living legend at the age of 37, a hero of the Spanish Civil War
and a role model for a whole generation of my age group. It is in
that context that my remarks on Malraux must be viewed as
personal impressions and recollections and therefore as highly
subjective interpretations of his thoughts, writings and actions.

To put those impressions and interpretations in perspective,
it is well to recall very briefly the couleur locale pertaining
to the turbulent political and social circumstances and events
throughout the decade of the 1930's. I referred to 1938 as a
fatal year. The year of the "Anschluss" of Austria within
Germany, followed by the German armies' occupation of
Czechoslovakia and culminating in Neville Chamberlin surrender
("peace in our lifetime") to Hitler in Munich. They were the
cumulative result of the preceding year's events and at the same
time portentous omens of worse things to come.

It started with Japan's invasion of China in 1931/1932 and the
bombings and occupation of Shanghai; then the emergence of Nazi
Germany in 1933 with Hitler as Reichskanzler; Mussolini's
expeditionary adventures in 1935 into Abyssinia (present-day
Ethiopia and Eritrea) and in the following year, Franco's coup
d'etat with the Spanish Civil War as the testing ground for
German and Italian warplanes in support of his troops. As to its
outcome, by 1938, we saw the writing already on the wall.

It was then that I happened to meet Andre Malraux in person.
The occasion was a small gathering of people in order to discuss
and to organize fund-raising for Spain (on behalf of Republican
Spain to be sure).

I was taken there by my friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and his
first wife, the late Ratna Murindia and if I remember correctly,
also the Afro-American poet Langston Hughes. My friendship with
Cartier-Bresson dates from that period and we have remained close
friends ever since up to this day. Malraux was there and
instantly inspired us to undertake, in conjunction with other
similar groups, various activities in support of the Republican
combatants in Spain. My limited contribution was to perform on
several occasions, together with Ratna Cartier-Bresson,
Indonesian dances for audiences of various kinds where we
collected the direly needed funds. It was on some such occasions
that I had the privilege of meeting with Malraux, at times
listening with wrapt attention to what he had to say on Spain
and, unavoidably, on many other burning issues of the day.

Malraux had by then come out of the Spanish Civil War, where
he joined the Republican side in 1936 soon after Franco's putsch.
He organized the Republican Air Force as the commander of the
Espania squadron. The planes and other equipment at his disposal
were of a flimsy kind, perhaps primitive war tools even, compared
to the Messerschmitts and the Stukas used by the opposing forces.
And yet, Malraux's air force played an active role in the battles
of Toledo and Madrid. He flew some 60 missions or more and was
wounded a couple of times.

Was it any wonder then, that Andre Malraux became a near myth
and a role model to me and to my copains of the time? The year
before I met him, I tried to enlist in the International Brigade,
following in the footsteps of Jef Last, a Dutch author and
radical socialist whom I befriended during my student days. After
a brief stint of preparations in Catalonia, to my mortification I
was rejected, because I was found out to be still a minor (20
years old).

Hence meeting Malraux in person was a psychological and
emotional consolation of no small importance.

My first immediate impression of Malraux: a bundle of nervous
energy, cigarette perennially dangling from his mouth or
intermittently between his fingers; and whenever a subject caught
his attention, there came the flow of thoughts expressed in
beautifully phrased sentences, half of them we the younger
listeners could not even absorb as if hypnotized by his magnetic
personality. And yet, he was able to maintain an amiable rapport
with the young. Somehow, he had the capacity to make us feel at
ease in his presence by his innate courtesy and simplicity.

It was not merely his physical engagements in historical
events and his utter contempt of danger, ever undaunted in
adversity, that caused us to look up at him with admiration and
awe. I was already acquainted with his writings of the late 1920s
and the early 1930s: Les Conquerants (1928), La Voie Royale
(1930) and La Condition Humaine (1933) for which he received the
Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award.
Particularly, the latter made a deep and lasting impression on
me. I dare say that it exerted an immense influence on
contemporaries as well as on later generations.

In reflecting on Malraux's life and his part in the history of
this century, or at least during an important part of it, we are
struck, immediately and inexorably, by the complete harmony
between Malraux's thoughts, his writings and his life as man of
action, the perpetual consistency between thought and action at
various times under different circumstances, be it in Indo-China
and in China as a young activist in the 1920s and early 1930s, in
the Spanish Civil War, and during the years of World War II,
first as a Maquis in the Dordogne and La Correzza, where in his
own words, he became one of "the people of the night" (peuple de
la nuit), later to emerge as Colonel Berger, commander of the
Brigade Alsace-Lorraine, engaged in 1944 in the battles of Saint-
Odille and Strassbourg, and much later again in full daylight as
a member of De Gaulle's Council of Ministers (minister of
information in 1945 and in a much-later stage in 1959 as ministre
d'etat in charge of cultural affairs).

It was not for Malraux to remain a mere observer of and
passive witness to the course of history. He had to be an actor
and active participant in an attempt to make his mark on the
pattern and the direction of events. From Malraux's literary
works and his life as a man of action, my generation has learned
that the test to the value of a thought lies in the action that
follows: thought and action should be in harmony as the
intertwined aspects of our being. From Malraux too --
philosopher, author, man of action -- we can derive the meaning
of style as the esthetics of action, and not just as a set of
artificial outward embellishments. It would therefore appear so
true in character, at least to me, that after the war, Malraux
refused to join the group of intellectuals around Sartre, who
with all their display of intellectualistic brilliance, somehow
always managed to feel sorry for themselves.

Probably the most important aspect of Malraux's influence on
my friends and on myself was in providing an answer to
fundamental questions regarding the essence of our existence and
the meaning and the purpose of our life's decisions, amid the
turbulence of the realities and the uncertainties around us.

The world of philosophy during the first half of this century
was dominated by Henri Bergson, in particular by his work
L'Evolution Creatrice, a study of the problem of existence.
Suffice it here to mention that the core element ("building
blocs") of Bergson's philosophy constitutes his concepts of
duration and continuing movement and change, while the true
nature of things is apprehended by intuition. Bergson's teaching
greatly appealed to me (and to a great number of my generation),
given what we could observe in the real world, with its unending
process of destruction and reconstruction. Yet there was still
something missing, as regards the guiding principles and the
justification for our decisions in life as active subjects. Are
we mainly passive elements thrown in the cycle of duration and
intertwined movement and change? Are our life's activities
essentially action for action's sake or for bringing about change
for the mere sake of changing condition, and in all that guided
mainly by intuition?

It is here that to my mind Andre Malraux has filled a void
(and I have admitted before that my interpretations are personal
and highly subjective). He has never espoused, either by word or
deed, action for action's sake. From Malraux's writings as well
as by his variegated activities throughout the vicissitudes of
history in his lifetime, we can discern very clearly the values
that are of the essence in man's existence, to wit: human dignity
and social justice. Hence the role of l'homme engage, engaged in
and committed to the defense of the dignity of man and of justice
in his societal context.

Although Andre Malraux is usually presented as a corryphee of
European civilization, his vision and the actual propagation of
his views cut across geographical boundaries and they encompass
the whole spectrum of political ideologies, from extreme left to
right of center. In his early 20s, as editor of the journal
L'Indochine, and later L'Indochine Enchainee, he stood up against
the colonial overlords and the colonial system in defense of the
Annamites.

His activities in China and the story of Kio in La Condition
Humaine represented an eloquent and passionate protest against
the ferociously oppressive practices of Chiang Kai-Shek's troops
in Shanghai. I have already mentioned his daring exploits in
Spain during the civil war, as well as his part in the resistance
during World War II.

When the Communist party asked Malraux in 1934 to issue a
petition to Hitler's regime against the detention of Dimitrov and
Thaelman, he did so readily and vigorously.

Much later in his life, as minister of state for cultural
affairs, Andre Malraux through his patronage and activities in
the realm of art and culture, enhanced the quality of life, as
man's dignity cannot depend on bread alone.

L'homme engage in defense of human dignity and social justice
was thus the leitmotive in all what Malraux wrote and did. He
proved in his lifetime that those values can and must be adhered
to, even when the world's existence is marked by duration,
movement and change.

I would like to end my observations on Andre Malraux by
referring to what he had to say about man and civilization, and
therefore directly and indirectly related to the dignity of man
and justice in a civilized society. Thus were his words in a
Discours aux ecrivains in 1935 (with the dark forces already
looming, leading to the apocalypses of World War II):

La Civilization c'est de mettre de la force des hommes au
service de leurs reves;

Ce ne'st pas mettre leurs reves au service de la force.
(Civilization is placing the force of men at the service of their
dreams. It's not placing their dreams at the service of force).

Dr. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo is a prominent economist.