PARTISAN REVIEW
Trials, Leon Trotsky asked Malraux to state publicly whether or not
he had seen him, Trotsky, in Royan in 1934, Malraux refused to
answer. It was logical, since the writer considered himself bound by
discipline not to say anything on such "controversial" matters as the
trials. But surely, there, logic was preventing M:ilraux from acting
rightly. Since he had always had great admiration for Trotsky, hC?
could hardly have failed to feel the sting of the incident.
In Spain, once again, while siding with man, Malraux pleaded
the case of fate . Spain, however, and the true nature of things, avenged
themselves.
.
Man> s Hope
is a halting, uncertain, fragmentary book.
The case of coldblooded efficiency is argued again and again, incon–
clusively, with nothing like the vigor it had when it was defended by
Garin. There are too many characters, too many people; so many
that it becomes clear that the event
is
anonymous, or rather, a purely
collective one. Hence, the opposition between the communist, the
anarchist and the intellectual, which was so vigorously stated in the
preceding novels, becomes uncertain, and finally breaks down. The
characters seem to be themselves aware that there are too many sides
to the question, too many disturbing details, for any logic to claim a
conclusive victory. Finally, what Malraux has to say is that the first
moment of hope, confidence, and heroism (what he calls the "apo–
calypse") in a popular insurrection is a marvelous and unique mani–
festation which the rationality of war cannot take seriously. What
follows is the wasting away of hope. But this implies that the Com–
munist, the man concerned exclusively with the "means," is, at best,
a taskmaster. He arrives when fate has already spoken, and sets up
a bureau to enforce its decrees.
As
far as the real substance and mean–
ing of the story are concerned, he can only play the part of Doom.
Insurrection
may
be
romantic, but war is, after all, a frightful
({rudgery. Drudgery once accepted, an earnest man cannot avoid the
next discovery, namely that if there is any significance in it, it comes
from the patience, the sorrows, the humble dignity of the people who
are the instruments and the victims of the bloody toil. The individual,
with all his incongruities, and his ungovernable virtues, reasserts his
presence; within the behaviour of the individual, the community's
presence is shown, the bonds between one man and the other, which
no written law has created, and which no taskmaster's injunction
can really control, but only crush. We come upon the mystery of
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