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.