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thinking what a sad thing a human being is. You desire to evolve, per–
sonally, into a new species.
You wince, hearing a man tell the barracks what he did with his wife
while on furlough, not at the details so much as at the shamelessness.
and at what the exhibitionism typifies. You also mind it because you
must go on hearing .it without choice, because you cannot separate your–
self sufficiently, and because it is not impossible that you may descend
to the same level. Of course this is priggish, but how else are you going
to react?
Malaquais anticipates the objection. Though congenitally a lonely
character, he is enough a product of the generation of Hemingway,
Stalinism, MacOrlan, Malraux and Jean Gabin to feel the categorical
imperative to be tough and regular. He worries about his inability to get
along with his fellows, who persecute
him
mildly and accidentally be–
cause he cannot keep himself from remonstrating with them. Derisively,
they call him "the aristocrat." On November 4th, 1939, he writes in his
diary :
"A.
G. [presumably Andre Gide, with whom Malaquais is on
close terms] tells me that I ought to practice evasion. Compromise. Try
to adapt myself to them. Dissimulate. Avoid headon collisions. Play my
subtlest game of wits with people for whom subtlety is a dead letter. All
of which, after all, I am radically incapable of doing. Ah, these great
men, these dispensers of counsel-why don't they begin with them–
selves?" Malaquais fails to solve the problem to his own satisfaction,
takes refuge in bouts of verbose and pretentious philosophizing. But
later, when the actual fighting begins, he breaks out of his isolation by
showing himself to be more enterprising and comradely than the average
under fire. From then on his diary becomes like any other war book, his
reactions as correct as any book-reviewer could desire. Not that this is
stated explicitly. For all his conceit, Malaquais does not dream of dram–
atizing himself in the face of danger.
His experience posed under what were almost laboratory conditions
the problem of the right attitude towards his fellow men, in the flesh,
of the Marxist who is supposed to love them in the abstract. The con–
clusions which I would draw from Malaquais' (and my own) experience
are rather trite. Man is lovable in the abstract and
in
the individual but
not in the mass. Living together in boredom, men exhibit their lowest
common denominator, which in the present state of civilization is usually
their raw human animality, the pool of their most elementary demands.
On November 30th Malaquais complains: "I wonder whether life in
common does not engender some kind of moral virus which has the
property of decaying and rotting the individual. Because each one of
these men taken separately, put back in his own setting, returned to his
native soil, his farm, his shop, is what is ordinarily called a 'good egg.'
But, as someone said-I've forgotten who-that does not suffice to make
a man.'' The rudeness of Malaquais's peasants-and they were as rude
