A Modern Woman's Autobiography: Clara Malraux

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The largest undertaking within the total literary work of Clara Malraux is her autobiography. To it she would devote more time and thus more artistic attention than to any other publication. But who is Clara Malraux? Does she have anything of significance to say to us at the end of the twentieth century? As the writing of a woman, does her work have interest from the point of view of feminist criticism? Students of twentieth-century French literature may recognize Clara Malraux as Andre Malraux's wife of his youngest years. The biographies of Malraux' tell that she came from a well-to-do GermanJewish family, that she remained officially married to Malraux from 1921 until after the Second World War, that she was his companion on many of his travels during that time, and that they had one daughter in 1936. She was for long years the wife of one of the most fascinating and flamboyant of the French engages authors. The couple's travels and adventures, in Indochina and Spain especially, had developed legendary overtones, but these seemed to cling only to Andre Malraux-with Clara's presence sometimes cut, quite literally, from the emerging pictures. Malraux himself, during their marriage, had discouraged her from writing, and she had tried to submerge her life and work in his. However, she tells us that even as a child she loved to tell stories and she always wanted to write. When she finally began to create a separate existence free of Andre Malraux's shadow, she turned quite naturally to writing. Her first novel, Le portrait de