MALRAUX (André). - Lot 153

MALRAUX (André). Born in Paris (1901-1976). Writer and politician. Committed intellectual. Minister of Culture. L.A.S. "André Malraux" to the essayist EMMANUEL BERL. S.l.n.d. [1949-50]. 1 page 3/4 in-8 to his address [19bis avenue Victor Hugo. Boulogne S/Seine]. Beautiful letter to the essayist and historian Emmanuel Berl, who had dedicated his first book, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, to him in 1929.Malraux feels ill and ...quite dilapidated. It doesn't seem to me that the universe has gone out of its way to let us finish our little works (because in this bed, I'm still arranging the one-volume edition of La Psycho mis en ordre, which is no small task) [this is La Psychologie de lArt, published from 1947 to 49 by Skira], but in the end you never know. As for "hurrying up", that's a joke. What it really means is being obliged to hurry up and start again... He announces the dispatch of La Monnaie de lAbsolu et Saturne, essay on Goya, and remarks, ...About your theory of political friendship: combat comradeship, yes; but political, I don't know. There's also camaraderie, the constructive agreement of those who precisely refuse any party, when it's for reasons that are parties. I rather think that your temperament is better suited to the warmth of a group than to a passive community of points of view... A journalist and essayist, Emmanuel Berl came from a family of Jewish industrialists and academics. Initially close to the Surrealists, in particular Aragon, and closely associated with Drieu La Rochelle (who committed suicide at the Liberation), Berl fought in the Great War and experienced what Zweig called "yesterday's world": in the 1920s, he met Proust, who fell out with him (the anecdote of this quarrel is recounted in his autobiographical novel "Sylvia"). In 1928, he made the acquaintance of Malraux and dedicated Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (Grasset, 1929), a pamphlet in which he denounced the latency of the intellectual and political thought of his contemporaries, except for the Malraux of "Les Conquérants", whom he praised. In 1932, he launched the weekly Marianne, then Pavés de Paris, which he ran until 1940. Successively in favor of Pétain (for whom he wrote several speeches), he broke with Vichy and fled to Corrèze (July 41), where he was joined by Malraux and his wife Josette Clotis. After the war, he gave up politics to devote himself to writing autobiographical works. In 1967, he was awarded the Grand Prix de littérature by the French Academy of Literature. An intimate of Malraux's, the author of Les Conquérants, La Condition humaine and LEspoir often reproached him for his unwillingness to engage in political action: "Your relationship with politics is bad because you don't want anything "*, he told him. Nevertheless, the two writers struck up a lasting friendship. In interviews with Patrick Modiano at the end of his life, Berl confided to Modiano the reasons for the longevity of his great friendship with Malraux, all intellectualized: "I think there's a link between his metaphysics and mine, without which we wouldn't have been able to put up with each other for so long, so many years, so many hours. There's an obsession with the divine felt as absence, which you have to think about all the time without ever talking about it...". [Interrogatoire, interviews with Patrick Modiano, 1976]* [in Tant que vous penserez à moi, in collaboration with Jean dOrmesson, 1968, p. 60]