ABSTRACT
A biography of André Malraux (1901–1976) creates a fundamentally different impression from that given by a Life of—to name the contemporary to whom he is often compared—Ernest Hemingway. Both novelists were “men of action,” yet Hemingway’s life seems animated by a sort of centripetal force lacking (or at least difficult to pinpoint) in Malraux’s. The various forms of action with which the American author engaged—newspaper-reporting, ambulance-driving, bullfight-watching, hunting, deep-sea-fishing, boxing, and so forth—all feed the novel-writing; whatever the mask, Hemingway quintessentially remains a writer. But Malraux? Was not he somehow more an actor—one who acts, takes action, and engages occasionally in theatrical artifice—than a writer (despite his forty-odd published books)? How similar are these two adventurers who, as Paris was being liberated in 1944, came face to face in a bedroom at the Ritz, each boasting of the number of “patriots” he had commanded and claiming to have arrived in the city first? (A bodyguard supposedly beckoned Hemingway into the bathroom and asked, “Papa, on peut fusiller ce con?”, “Papa, can we shoot this idiot?”)
