Malraux was 65 in 1966; he was Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, overwhelmed by business. It was a difficult year for him, both in public and private life - a year of crisis, but also of rebirth.
He left for Asia in June 1965, as his doctors had ordered him to take a rest. The trip belatedly turned into a mission. Malraux was in a state of depression after a series of shocks (a falling out with his daughter, the death of his two sons, the 1962 bombing, a difficult relationship with Madeleine, his wife). He survives on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. Leaving on a cruise, he plans to revive Le Musée imaginaire, but once past Cairo, he frantically launches into Antimémoires. It was a rapture that inaugurated eleven years of uninterrupted writing, his last period. With Antimémoires, Malraux rediscovers his youth. After the Malraux of novels and writings on art, comes the Malraux of memoirs. Les Antimémoires was published in September 1967, the same month as Blanche ou l'oubli, two essential books for us. Both written in 1966, they mark a return to glory after a series of personal and political ups and downs, for both Aragon and Malraux.
But the year for Malraux was also punctuated by four great moments. In March 1966, he gave one of his major speeches in Amiens, for the opening of the Maison de la Culture. Our time replaces the soul with the mind, religion with science. Faced with the machine, Malraux felt the need to react, and wanted to do for culture what the Third Republic had done for education.
Then came three scandals that would punctuate the year: the censorship of Rivette's La Religieuse , initiated by associations of nuns and parents of Catholic schoolchildren. Godard insulted Malraux in Le Nouvel Observateur. Immediately afterwards, Les Paravents, Genet's play staged by Roger Blin at L'Odéon, Jean-Louis Barrault's theater, breaks out. Malraux defended Genet at the National Assembly, comparing him to Baudelaire, Flaubert and Goya, or to the Grünewald altarpiece. Finally, there was a violent quarrel with Boulez, who was as impertinent as Godard towards the Minister. Boulez and the Domaine musical were a veritable gotha of the intelligentsia, an eminent venue for avant-garde encounters, but Malraux appointed Marcel Landowski to head the Direction de la Musique. Boulez saw the appointment as an affront, and announced a strike with "all the official music organizations in France". The affair ended in August with an exchange of extremely dry letters.
Scandals abound throughout the year, but they don't hinder the writing of Antimémoires, which is not a chronicle of 1966: here, we're right at the heart of the timeless. With Malraux, we're constantly on the move between 1966 BC and 1966 AD, far removed from the chronicle and Blanche ou l'oubli.
