26
PARTISAN REVIEW
junction of moral principles which, in the real world, would of course
refuse to combine.
Alan's Fate
is accordingly more a dramatization
of an intellectual predicament than a realistic study of the peculiar
psychology of the revolutionary movement itself. And this, in fact,
describes Malraux's work as a whole, defining at the same time his
relation to the social forces of his time. The revolution is a value to
him chiefly as it affects the world of ideas-the world, that is, of the
intelligentsia. He does not throw in his lot with the proletariat but, like
most writers, remains with a foot in both camps. The revolution is
not static, however; it ebbs and flows with the motions of the world
proletariat and the fortunes of its parties. And the intelligentsia, slung
between two classes, materially dependent on the bourgeoisie, but
facing spiritually towards the proletariat, vibrates to the rhythm of
advances and retreats in the working class. And Malraux's career
reflects, more faithfully than that of most writers, the periodic crises
of the European intellectuals in a period when the revolutionary
movement, dominated by the Comintern, has itself set the world an
example in mutability.
Given the. death-action antithesis, his heritage of romanticism,
Malraux seems to have worked out a special rationale to justify his
shifting relations with the revolutionary movement and its various
factions. The clue to it may be found in
Man's Fate,
in Kyo's words
to the Comintern representative: "In Marxism there is the sense of
a fatality, and also the exaltation of a will. Every time fatality comes
before will I'm suspicious." Kyo says this in criticism of the Comin-
tern for refusing to take steps to forestall Chiang Kai-shek, who is
obviously preparing to crush the Communists. The political incidence
of
lvlan's Fate
thus appears to be anti-Comintern and would seem to
embody a semi-Trotskyist criticism of the Stalinist policy of unprin-
cipled collaboration with the Kuomintan~, which Malraux had ex-
hibited so sympathetically in
The Conquerors.
But there is a good deal
more than this to the story of Malraux's politics.
Man's Fate
was writ-
ten some five years after
The Conquerors.
The political situation had
meanwhile changed profoundly. Reacting from the Chinese disaster,
the Comintern had entered on its so-called Third Period, a phase of
extreme sectarianism, and its influence was now negligible. Trotsky,
however, with his appeals for a workers front against fascism, seems
to have exerted some influence over Malraux at this period, and it
may be that he now identified the "will to action" with the exiled
Bolshevik, "fatalism" with the quiescent Comintern. But once the
Comintern, confronted by Hitler in power, reverted to its old policy
and proclaimed the people's front, it seems to have recaptured its
title to the Marxist "will"; and Malraux once more reversed his sym-
