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01-08-2015 | Profile

Jean Malaquais: A French Orwell?

Authors: John Rodden, John P. Rossi

Published in: Society | Issue 4/2015

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Abstract

This essay discusses the uncanny parallels, paradoxes, and puzzles in the lives and careers of author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the famous George Orwell, and the virtually unknown French writer and political radical, Jean Malaquais. The striking affinities between Orwell and Malaquais, both of whom came to literary maturity in the 1930s, involve both their themes and genres. Both men fully engaged the issues of their times as independent leftists. Both also wrote political novels, documentary reportage, war diaries, and anti-utopias that addressed the conditions of the poor and working class (especially miners), the agonies of war-torn Europe, and the dangers of a totalitarian dystopia in the near future. Their remarkable affinities even extended to participation as volunteer soldiers in the same militia during the Spanish Civil War, the POUM (United Marxist Workers’ Party). Yet no biographer or scholar has ever compared the two men or even noted their numerous, arresting similarities. The divergent “afterlives” of Orwell and Malaquais raise large questions about cultural memory, the literary Zeitgeist, and Clio’s caprice.

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Genevieve Nakach, Malaquais rebelle. Paris: le cherche midi, 2011.

There are a number of fine biographies of Orwell: Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life. New York: Penguin Books, 1980; Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: Harper Collins, 1991, Jeffrey Meyers, The Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Routledge, 1997; Gordon Bowker, Inside George Orwell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; and D.J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2003.

The French version, and subsequent French translations of Orwell’s writings, was carried out by Yvonne Davet, an intimate of André Gide as well as a friend of Malaquais.

Victor Gollancz, a publisher of books aimed at a left-wing readership in England, established the highly successful Left Book Club in 1936 and published a number of Orwell’s books. The two later had a falling out over the proper view of the Soviet Union and communism. As a result, Gollancz missed the opportunity to publish Orwell’s two masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Prix Renaudot was established in 1925 and given to the author of “the most original French novel.”

Trotsky’s review in English appeared in a New York communist journal, The Fourth International. He included the review in Litterature et Revolution de Trotski, “Un Nouveau Grand Écrivain: Jean Malaquais,” Spring 1938, UGE, Paris. 333–346. Malaquais told Andre Gidé that he was “extremement flatteuses” by Trotsky’s comments. See Pierre Masson and Genevieve Nakach, Andre Gide-Jean Malaquais Correspondance, 1935–1950, Paris: Phebus, 2000, 88. Grateful for the review as he was, however, Malaquais came by the mid-1940s to despise the Trotskyists too, regarding them as politically expedient and foolishly romantic. Malaquais was an ideological purist who regarded his politics in later years as anarcho-syndicalist. Whatever his affiliation, however, he was always an ultra-leftist who proudly viewed himself as an independent radical and revolutionary Marxist.

The seven books were: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938), and Coming Up For Air (1939). The first two were published in the United States by Harpers; Gollancz published six of the seven in England. He rejected Homage to Catalonia because of its criticisms of communism. It was published by Secker & Warburg.

The letter that Malaquais wrote to Gide has been lost, but years later Norman Mailer reconstructed the key passage as he recalled Malaquais explaining it to him in the 1940s: “You ought to get down on your knees and pray to that God you occasionally pretend to believe in that he has let you be a comfortable bourgeois so you can make your art.”

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1938.

Orwell to Connolly, June 8, 1937, in Peter Davison, The Collected Works of George Orwell, Vol. 11, 28.

Peter Davison, ed. George Orwell: Diaries. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2012.

Jean Malaquais, War Diary. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1943.

Isaac Rosenfeld, “Man from Nowhere,” The New Republic, 12 April 1943, 288–90. Rosenfeld bemoaned Malaquais’ “aloofness” that never rose to “detachment.” But Malaquais’ “sincerity,” above all his willingness to show “the mind’s failure to understand the heart,” rendered his book a valuable document of personal testimony. Is this failure—which is far more a “moral” than a “literary” matter—the occupational hazard of the intellectual as witness and journal keeper? It was, in any case, a failure of Malaquais’ own, and it damaged or destroyed many friendships throughout his life.

For his review of Les Javanais, see Lionel Trilling, “The Lower Depths,” The Nation, April 24, 1943, 602–603. Malaquais would probably have sneered at the plaudits from the literary intellectuals associated with Partisan Review such as Rosenfeld and Trilling. Even before the onset of the Cold War, he would have regarded them, at best, as armchair intellectuals in retreat—and as hypocritical sell-outs at worst.

Victor Serge was a former communist intellectual and author who fled France for Mexico in 1942. He and Malaquais fell out over the proper policy to follow toward the war.

Quoted in Jean Luc Douin, “Jean Malaquais: Revolutionnaire d’ instinct,” Le Monde, December 26, 1998, 7.

Jean Malaquais, World Without Visa. New York: Doubleday, 1948.

Time, “End of a World,” May 24, 1948, 110–111.

Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Peter Rutkoff, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research. New York: The Free Press, 1986.

Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He’s Seen,” in J. Michael Lennon (ed.). Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Company, 1986, 60–61.

Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1951.

Steven Marcus, “Norman Mailer: An Interview, 1964,” in J. Michael Lennon (ed.), Conversations With Norman Mailer. Jackson, Mississippi and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1988, 85. Christopher Hitchens, “Norman Mailer: A Minority of One,” New Left Review, March/April 1997, 115 and 119.

The French title was Les Nus et les Morts.

Benjamin Ivry, “A Rebel Reviewed by Trotsky,” The Jewish Forward, February 15, 2012.

Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House, 1991, 50. Malaquais also derided both Mailer’s pursuit of notoriety and his fascination with popular culture as signs of a lack of seriousness. A few years before his death Malaquais had a bitter argument with Mailer over his alleged failure to become a serious writer. Malaquais accused him of being “just a commodity” whose pursuit of television celebrity status revealed his “infantile malady.” The truth was that Malaquais scorned with increasing intensity every tawdry “success” of Mailer’s that brought him higher and higher in the literary demimonde. Mailer once described Malaquais as “an intellectual Sultan,” and by the 1980s Mailer had grown tired of Malaquais’ patronizing. Mailer told the convicted murderer, Jack Abbott, that he was moving away from Malaquais’ influence because “I found it unendurably arid.”

Mailer even chastened the younger self of his twenties, admitting that he didn’t like the book when he first read it, in fact was aghast and found it disappointing. On a second reading he now saw it more positively. The Joker had appeared twenty years too soon. Now the world was ready to understand it. What looked like fantasy in 1953, Mailer wrote, stands forth in the 1970s as prophecy.

Norman Mailer, “A Preface to The Joker,” 11–25, in Jean Malaquais, The Joker, New York: Warner, 1974. Mailer once offered an explanation as to why Malaquais abruptly stopped writing fiction that resonates with our own conjectures in this essay. Mailer’s fanciful prose notwithstanding, his speculation is that the failure of The Joker to win even a small following was the final experience of disillusion and ushered forth in literary death. “Just as it is the human fate to die, so it may be the novelist’s date to stop writing—it comes finally out of the baggage of disappointment in one’s life, a species of cumulative nothingness, and Malaquais’ fictional talents have indeed been [since 1953] silent.”

From the outside, the mystery as to why Malaquais turned to Kierkegaard remains. Indeed it is almost as if the subtitle of his dissertation is self-referential, or at least indicates his veiled relationship to the philosopher: “faith and paradox.” For it is surely a paradox that this avowed atheist and abstract thinker who embraced a materialist version of Hegel’s metaphysical system should dedicate several years of his life to an intensive study (including even learning Danish) of a man of burning faith. Yet these paradoxes point toward an explanation: self-analysis, even self-disclosure. Indeed, from the inside, the specific choice of Kierkegaard, the proud “individualist,” also possesses a certain biographical or psychological raison d’être. Doubtless some part of “Malaquais rebelle” identified with the recalcitrant, defiant Dane.

Perhaps one factor that accounts for Malaquais’ decision to stop imaginative writing is that, in the end, he was far more an abstract, theoretical thinker than a creative writer possessed of a mind that dwelt in particularities. Which is to say that he was far more an intellectual at home with Marxist dialectics than a born novelist à la Gide, let alone Flaubert. In this light, the trajectory of Malaquais’ writing, which finally arrives at the academic treatise, is a plausible, even inevitable evolution. And the selection of a subject matter such as “faith and paradox” in the existentialist philosophy of Kierkegaard is a (failed?) attempt to resist any totalizing Abstraction and System, and instead to preserve some margin of psychic space for the Particular and Imagination.

Mailer once described him as “a man locked in chains when it came to writing.” Mailer elaborated:

Only a soul paying in this life for outrages it had performed in another could pass through such suffering….He would sit at his desk for ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day, every day. It was his boast that he would not get up, not pace around, not break for a meal, no, he would sit, contemplate his page, and would write…to the tune of two or three hundred words a day. Two hundred words in ten hours! It is twenty words an hours, or a new word every three minutes. Can any torture be more horrifically designed for a man who could deliver a extempore lecture complete in thought, example, and syntax, a work of seven or eight thousand words in less than an hour….How could he dare to write about anything? Given his profound contempt for authors who rushed to place their shoddy artifacts into that small temple where only a few perfect works ought to be installed, how could he presume to add to the excrementa?

Malaquais described his own writing process as pisser le sang. That is to say: Every drop of ink that flowed from Malaquais’ pen in composing The Joker was like pissing blood. It may possess biographical significance that Dr. Babitch thrills when state authorities honor him with a vial of ink, and he dreams of the day when he soon will also be awarded an inkpot.

Emilie Bickerton, “Planet Malaquais,” New Left Review, Nov/Dec 2013, 139–151.

Jean Malaquais, “George Orwell: La Route de Wigan Pier: mineurs et chomeurs au pays de galles,” Le Debat, IX, nu. 16, November 1981, 118–128.

The publication of the Gide-Malaquais correspondence, edited by Pierre Masson and Genevieve Millot-Nakach, was part of the French publisher Phebus’s effort to revive interest in Malaquais.

John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George “Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. John Rodden, Scenes From An Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell, Wilmington, Del., ISI Books, Wilmington, 2003.

Title: Jean Malaquais: A French Orwell?
Authors: John Rodden
John P. Rossi
Publication date: 01-08-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society / Issue 4/2015
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9912-4

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