PARTISAN REVIEW
Malraux, since he was not a party member) answered it by keeping
this peculiar spokesman for Communism under constant suspicion,
and spreading a number of slanderous rumors against him. The
writer haughtily ignored the slander, and went his way, maintaining
a self-imposed discipline which consisted of a single rule: he would
call himself a communist, and not raise any political fuss, as long as
it was at all justifiable to consider the C.P. the instrument of a uni–
versal cause, and the Soviet Union as the power center of this cause.
What Malraux expected from Communism was not any leap
from necessity into freedom, but a redeeming transformation of
Western culture. In
1935,
speaking at the antifascist Writers' Con–
gress in London, Malraux described the Communist task as follows:
"To recreate the phantom heritage which lies about us, to open the
eyes of all the sightless statues, to turn hopes into wills and revolts
into revolutions, and to shape thereby, out of tl1e age-old sorrows of
man, a new and glowing consciousness of mankind."
Surely, those were a poet's reasons.
If
one had asked Malraux
how he could prove that there was a necessary connection between
his grandiose vision and the peculiar style of the C.P., between Stalin's
transcendental philistinism and the "sightless statues," the answer
would no doubt have been: "I don't see any other
force
in the world,
today, which could reasonably be connected with the realization of
such a hope. Do you?" A
realistic
vision, then. Or should one say:
a visionary realism? It was, in fact, in the name of an apocalyptic
dream of Hope and Power coming together like the Lion and the
Lamb in Isaiah that Malraux rejected as irrelevant the prosaic warn–
ings of common sense and factual evidence: the objection raised by
the particular against the general.
It was not Hope, however, but the
will to act
in the face of
impending doom, that pushed Malraux. In
1935,
to one of those
pathetic Popular Front crowds that used to meet at the
Salle de
la
Mutualite,
in Paris, he announced not Bread, Peace and Liberty, but
the Coming War. "We may die in it, but we shall not die without
having been in it," he cried.
If
war was inevitable, then surely ideolo–
gies, party lines, and the naive hopes of the crowds, were mere
details. The real question was that of Western culture as a whole, of
Western man and his future: whether, in our time, man could find
a way of mastering history, or would succumb to it.
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