COMMENT
THE POLITICS OF DESPERATION
In the last few decades politics has made greater
claims
on intellectual life than ever before in modern history. The reason,
of course, is that our intellectual fate has been closely bound up
with our political fate; and what with the succession of crises, wars,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions that marched back and forth
across Europe and America, 'our political fate has been constantly
at stake.
It has been a time of extreme situations. And one of its most
typical figures has been Andre Malraux, who might be described as
a writer with a flair for the extreme. At almost every turn, he played
an active and dramatic role; hence his career, both in
his
life and
his
work, reads to some extent like a timetable of the period. In the
thirties Malraux was one of the literary spokesmen of the Communist
party, and
his
novel
Man's Fate
presented a Marxist version of the
struggle for power in China. Somewhat later, in the period of the
Popular Front, Malraux wrote
Man's Hope,
an antifascist story that
followed rather closely the Stalinist line. Mter the Nazi-Soviet pact
Malraux broke with the Communists, though
his
precise activity or
position during this time is not generally known. Nor do we know
very much about Malraux's role in the Resistance, except that it
was an active and courageous 'one. Now that we are in another politi–
cal crisis, marked by a reshuffling of the anti-Stalinist forces in an
attempt to stop the Russian advance, we find Malraux once again
in the thick of things, this time as the leading apologist for the Gaullist
movement in France. Once again Malraux has cast himself in an
extreme and desperate situation.
Up to now we have known very little in
this
country about
De Gaulle and his movement, though what we have known has been
enough to make us, to say the least, quite wary of it. And while
we have not been disposed, as many leftists have been, to pin the
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