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  • In Search of Sheba: An Arabian Adventure — André Malraux and Édouard Corniglion-Molinier, Yemen, 1934
  • Christopher Shorley
In Search of Sheba: An Arabian Adventure — André Malraux and Édouard Corniglion-Molinier, Yemen, 1934. By Walter G. Langlois. Knoxville, The Malraux Society, 2006.

Contemporary Malraux critics, inevitably mindful of their subject's notorious mythomanie, have generally marginalized the foray into Yemen in search of the Queen of Sheba's city — if they have not disregarded it altogether. However, in retracing the events and issues surrounding this episode, as so often before, Walter G. Langlois convincingly demonstrates the indispensable values of painstaking first-hand research. As Henri Peyre observes in one of Langlois's epigraphs, 'a serious literary scholar need never feel apologetic about an interest in history'. On the contrary. The early stages of the book, which brings together material previously published in separately in Revue André Malraux Review, offer a meticulous reconstruction, supported by impeccable footnotes, of three months of Malraux's life from the beginning of 1934. In so doing they yield not only a finely detailed account of the expedition itself, but fascinating glimpses into the day-to-day doings of a Gallimard employee, newly announced Goncourt winner, man-about-Paris, compelling raconteur, nascent art-critic, troubled husband, anti-Fascist orator and much else, and give valuable sidelights on the Stavisky affair and the politics of the French aircraft industry in the early 1930s. The Sheba story itself had begun several years earlier, with Malraux intrigued by tales of Yemeni ruins he heard from storytellers [End Page 545] in the Persian Gulf, and it developed as he consulted documentary sources, such as Thomas Arnaud, and talked to travellers including Joseph Kessel, with a view to an overland journey. Yet it really gets under way when Malraux meets Corniglion-Molinier at a dinner given by François Mauriac in November 1933. While initially doubtful, Corniglion, an almost impossibly heroic — and modest — figure, is gradually drawn into the revised — airborne — project, eventually agrees to be its pilot, and finally becomes integral to its outcome, thus fully justifying his inclusion in Langlois's title. At the heart of the narrative are the chapters devoted to the journey itself, in a modified Farman 190, from Toussus-le-Noble to Djibouti via Naples, Gabès and Cairo, and then, on 7 March, along the Kharid watercourse to the Yemeni desert, culminating in the dramatic sight of a ruined city and a vast cemetery on the edge of the steppes, before an increasingly worried Corniglion insists on a return to base. In the remaining chapters Langlois changes focus to document the various ways in which the adventure was acclaimed and recorded, including a visit to Heile Selassie in neighbouring Ethiopia, an early interview in Cairo, and eventually the serialized report in L'Intransigeant, which Malraux would later integrate into the Antimémoires. Langlois then goes over the sources, Western and Islamic, written and oral, before arriving at his final judgment. Setting aside the somewhat spartan presentation and the meagre reproduction of the few illustrations, Langlois's book, 'probably my last major scholarly project', stands as admirable testimony to the career of a man of great modesty and outstanding achievement. If the ultimate meaning of the expedition may remain a matter for debate, Langlois's study means that the Sheba episode can never again be relegated as it used to be.

Christopher Shorley
Queen's University Belfast
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