if you never did, go and taste it now and see how
it tastes."
"Thank you, South Wind," I say.
"You are welcome," says North Wind, "just keep
your change."
I did. I kept my change. I put it in my pocket
with the other wind.
"You'll learn to help the Judge," says North
Wind, "the next time the Judge needs your help."
"Yes, he'll learn at least to not fight the Judge.
Go out and say the other fellow will put two hams
in the smokehouse where there is one. You ain't got
any hams in the smokehouse where there was one."
I am one of the Lost Tribe that didn't help the
Judge. I walk back across the slippery dead leaves
that brown-star green sprigs of grass under the
shade trees thin-leafed by the creek. I walk back to
Polly. She doesn't want them to see her. She looks
through the thin-leafed hazel sprouts. Polly is not
full of wind. Spring. Summer. Autumn with leaves
turned brown and birds going south. Empty smoke
house. Empty fruit jars. Empty cellar. Empty barn.
Lean milk cow. Life not there. Food not there. Six
mouths to feed, seven not to feed. Seven feeding the
weeds. Seven mouths to feed. Six not feed. Six feed-
ing the weeds. The male bird chirrups on the water
birch. The hen bird sings. Life. Life. The wind. The
Judge. Votes I A lean, hungry wind sifting the thin
snow against the poplar planks in the empty cow-
shed. The hog bladder busted.
"By-by, to you," the winds say.
"I'll see you in the funnies," I say.
"Yes, or on the road to hell," says Polly, coming
from behind the thin-leafed hazel sprouts.
"Keep still," I say to Polly, "this is the dealings
of men."
"It does concern a woman," says Polly. "The new-
born. The empty pockets. The wind. It is something
to concern a woman. We give to the earth. We give
to the earth as land gives to the flowers and brush.
We give life, and more life, and more life."
I say to Polly as we climb the hill back. "Listen to
me please 1 Listen, all of you! Listen, you with the
mellow, hound-dog eyes. You, the hog-tied to the
Judge with the pencil X mark. Listen! You with the
sloven lips. You with the calloused hands. You who
search and never find. Every man a bag of wind.
Every woman a bag of wind. The dog his day."
Polly has white beads of sweat on her face. The
mountain path is hard for her to climb. The sheep
bells tinkle among the trees. The bees buzz on the
milkweeds. Birds sing among the leaves. Earth is
young. Spring is here. We go up the mountain path.
The house is empty now. It is hollow-a lean-to
shell against the wind. Rats talk to the Judge. Rats
have the house. They hear the wind. It does not
matter. Snow flies in flurries through the winter-blue
air. The flakes pitty-patty like mice feet through the
broken windows to the floor. Seven feed the grass.
16
The
Humanism
of
Andre Malraux
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
THE reception given
Man'; Fate
by left-wing cri-
tics when it first appeared in this country, in 1934,
was almost a literary scandal. Smugly assuming that
the values of
]\-Jan's Fate
are nothing more than its
political observations, the reviewers ransacked it for
errors as though it were a pamphlet on China.
"Where are the workers?"; "It doesn't show the
way out I"-were heard from all sides. Fortified by
belligerent "leftist" slogans, these critics were able
to compensate for their insensitiveness to the variety
and novelty of meanings that make up a novel. Their
theories sanctioned an escape from literature. Mal-
raux's novel was revolutionary in the entire range
of its perceptions, while these critics had hypnotized
themselves into the belief that a revolutionary novel
must be a trumpet-call to concrete action. The con-
stant reiteration that art is a reflection of experience,
by some psychotic inversion, caused them to ignore
the specific experience that a novel draws upon.
One of Malraux's generalizations about writing
would seem to be a clue to his own work. In his pref-
ace to his new novel,
Days of Wrath,
*
he says, "if
the work's value, justification, and chances of lasting
reside in its
quality,
then its content-regardless of
the author's intention-alters the existing emotional
scale: without an inexorable necessity for such alter-
ation the work would doubtless not have come into
being." Such a change in the emotional scale seems
to have been made by Malraux: in the direction of
a new
humanism,
emphasizing the dignity, the hero-
ism, the fellowship of man, and the activity to shape
a world in which these qualities would not have to
be fought for. Evidently perceiving that purely com-
munist values in psychology and ethics do not yet
exist, and that the prattle about a pure worker's
world in fiction is a formula for escaping the com-
plexity of human relations, Malraux took as his cen-
tral idea the regeneration of man in revolutionary
situations. In
A1
an's Fate
some typical representa-
tives of various social groups-a French entrepre-
neur, an old Chinese humanist philosopher, a ter-
rorist, a communist leader, a broken-down worker
-are taken through a critical period of the Chi-
nese revolution. A polarizing of their personalities
ensues: those who are steered into the revolution
take on greater human stature; the characters who
are engaged in blocking it are plunged into a mael-
strom of self-deceptions and perversions. In this
sense M
a!fl' s
F
ale
is a saga of rebirth and decay.
• Random House. $1.75.
JUNE,
1936
