Days of Wrath,
a story of the imprisonment of a
communist functionary in a Nazi concentration camp,
and his release through the substitution of another
communist for him, is less a recreation of Nazi Ger-
many than an idyll of fortitude and loyalty. These
traditional virtues of man have been sung in every
Christian choir, but in the novels of Malraux they
emerge from the psychological tensions that a world
in change produces. For the most part, Malraux's
humanism is a process of human development, rather
than a roster of ideals, giving his work great driving
waves of power as some character is impelied to a
cataclysmic act by the force of external events and
by the urge to psychological completion of his char-
acter. But often the fusion of idea and event-as in
the central conception of destiny in
Man's Fate-is
imperfect, with the result that events sometimes ap-
pear to be lagging behind the unfolding of character.
When this happens we are left with the impression
that Malraux is directing the events of tomorrow
with the philosophy of yesterday.
!vIan's Fate
is built on a philosophy of fatalism.
Che'en, the terrorist, is doomed from his first as-
sassination at the opening of the book. Fearing
death, yet morbidly fascinated by it, he is finally
liberated when, bomb in hand, he throws himself
under a car supposedly carrying Chiang Kai-shek.
In an atmosphere laden with political and tactical
necessities, Che'en's exemption from political influ-
ences restraining' him from his final adventure, take
him out of the motivations of the book. And Kyo's
suicide in prison, though connected more directly
with the failure of the revolution, is a little too de-
pendent on Clapique's failure to warn him of the
plan to arrest him. In his last acts, Kyo, depressed
by expectancy of the impending annihilation of the
communists, moves on, like a tired actor, to his fate.
Detachments of workers fight their last battles, cer-
tain of defeat; against hopelessly overwhelming
odds, for no intelligent political reason. It would
almost seem that a mood of defeat swept the clos-
ing events onward. Even the failure of the revolu-
tion, attributed by Malraux to the tactic of not
breaking with the Kuomintang, is not sufficiently ex-
plained to make Malraux's version credible. Here,
too, it is the sense of tragic defeat which is the
deus,
ex machina.
Curiously, old Gisor, the father of Kyo,
is the articulate spokesman for the idea of fate. And
he is presented as the theoretical side of Kyo, as it
were, for after Kyo's. death, old Gisor remarks that
Marxism no longer exists as a vital force for him,
that his connection with it existed solely through the
activity of his son whom he loved.
Of course, granting Malraux's premises, or ignor-
ing them, since these conceptions do not define the
novel, but are merely a pull toward a tangent, it is
obvious that
Man's Fate
is a magnificent book. Mal-
raux's humanism permits the scaling of emotional
PARTISAN
REVIEW
heights, by the characters. When Hemmelrich, a
frustrated,
cowed worker, comes upon the torn
bodies of his wife and child, the hope of revenge
and the release from fear for his family transfix him
with a savage hatred for Chiang Kai-shek. After
Kyo's death, his wife pushes everything out of her
life to devote herself, with the austerity of a nun,
to the revolution. And Malraux achieves a kind of
neurotic intensity in almost every situation, because
every act, every conversation is at some junction of
a person's career. Take the opening scene, where
Che'en is hovering over the bed of an official ready
to plunge his dagger into him. Here Che'en's decom-
position begins; the political tone of the book is set;
and we are launched headlong into a sea of battle
and conspiracy. And the tragic intensity with which
the novel concludes, reaching its symbolic peak in the
losing of the cyanide in jail, is set in motion like a
great tide toward about the middle of the book.
During the first half we see the accumulation of the
forces of revolt, and the revolutionists crowd the
foreground.
As the failure of the revolution
becomes clear, however, French and Chinese deca-
dents are brought forward. There is Clapique,
that shattered petty trader, pretending to be on the
verge of suicide in order to get a more exotic pleas-
ure with a prostitute; Ferral, the French merchant
who dreams of empires and schemes with thugs;
and old Gisor, pouring his life into his son, while
preserving his spirit for the quiescence of opium.
The emotional cadences are pitched to the mood of
the moment and to the stage of development of the
characters.
Days of Wrath
has the same qualities of psycho-
logical intensity, with each moment made crucial by
the gravity of associations poured into it. Malraux's
description of Kassner's airplane ride from Germany
into Czechoslovakia weaves together a sense of fel-
lowship with the pilot who is sacrificing his life on
the flight, Kassner's dizzy feeling of freedom merged
with the loss of bearings in the storm, and his con-
stant recollection that another man is dying in his
place. There is even greater lyric concentration than
in
A1un's Fate
on the character's state of mind, as in
Kassner's fight against the waves of insanity that
pulse through his brain. In his introduction to
Days
of Wrath,
Waldo Frank aptly describes this quality:
"Because the events of his life have been chiefly
psychological, his quest for the seeds of the true
person has remained analytical; his works, although
fully formed as esthetic bodies, are intimate lyrical
projections." In compactness and circumscribed subt-
lety
Days of Wrath
reminds one of Andreyev's
Seven That W ere Hanged.
But, for all its power,
it comes dangerously close to being a
tour-de-force.
Few of the philosophic ideals that persist outside
of
Alan's Fate
hover over
Days of Wrath.
Mal-
raux's humanism is here largely embodied in the
