"
ANDRE MALRAUX
F. W.
Dupee
MATTHEW ARNOLD
once said of Byron that the
Zeitgeist
had
worked in his favor; but of Andre Malraux, who has put so much of
recent history into his novels, it might be better said that he works for
the
Zeitgeist.
His latest novel* is about the still unfinished war in
Spain, which Malraux, as an organizer of the government air forces,
experienced at first hand. The subject is controversial: a novelist
would scarcely lay hold of it unless he had an axe to sharpen. An~
L'
Espoir
(Hope), partisan in it,>analysis of the war, partisan in its
attitudes and values, is frankly a work of the higher factional publi-
cism. But let us say at once that it is not the work of a journalist;
it is the book of an artist who, far from forsaking his characteristic
ideas, tone and methods, has simply adapted them to a new situation.
He starts out from a point which is recognizable enough to those
who know his fanner work. Where he ends up is another question.
Malraux underwent several years ago a partial conversion to
revolutionary values, and he has since shifted his political allegiance
more than once. But the twin obsessions of death and action have
remained rooted in his mind throughout, conditioning at each stage
of his development the special form of his ideas. His first important
novel,
The Royal Way,
was a rather literal projection of his obsessions.
Its world was an undifferentiated void of death and violence. Its char-
acters were all of a piece. And although nominally laid in the jungles
of Indo-China in the 20th century, the novel was in effect as little
fixed in space as in time. But the abstract heroics of
The Royal Way
were soon abandoned for another mode. The heroic element per-
sisted, but in
The Conquerors
it had already acquired a base in the
contemporary world. The base, however, was largely a pedestal
for the Communist Garine, who, solitary, ruthless, full of contempt
for men and for history, repudiated the very cause he risked his life
to serve: the revolution. The China of 1926, of general strikes and
peasant uprisings, of imperialist manoeuvers, of the Kuomintang and
the Comintern, was for Garine, despite his professional Communist
*
L'Espoir,
Gallimard, Paris.
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