The Conquerors
André Malraux, translated by Stephen Becker
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
198 pp. $7.95
Picasso’s Mask
André Malraux, translated by June Guicharnaud
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
2 88 pp. $10.00
André Malraux
Jean Lacouture, translated by Alan Sheridan
New York: Pantheon
510 pp. $12.95
Malraux: Life and Work
edited by Martine de Courcel
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich $12.95
I.
“Malraux … was an amateur of genius.”
—Clara Malraux in Memoirs
André Malraux wrote about men and places. The men were larger than life and the places distant. Women scarcely figured in his books, and when they did they functioned as backdrops which reflected and glorified their men. In Picasso’s Mask Jacqueline Picasso is the slave of her husband’s memory; in Man’s Fate May’s infidelity adds a dimension to Kyo’s alienation; in Man’s Hope the Spanish women’s voices are “theatrical,” and as such are worthy props for this movie scenario in novel form. But the most illuminating portrait of women occurs in The Conquerors. The revolutionary, Klein, has already been tortured and murdered by the time his mistress arrives:
She falls to her knees. She’s not praying. She’s clutching at the body, her fingers spread, clawing his flanks. It’s as if she’s kneeling beneath the torture all those wounds stand for, the gaping mouth slashed by a saber or a razor. I’m sure she’s not praying. Her whole body trembles. And as suddenly as she fell to her knees, her arms seize the body in a convulsive embrace; she twists her head with an inexpressively anguished roll of her breast and shoulders. With a heart-rending tenderness, yet savagely and without a sob, she rubs her face against the bloody cloth, against the very wounds.
The weeping Magdelan before the martyred Christ.
Oddly enough, politics do not play an essential role in Malraux’s novels. Such a statement may well seem absurd to many of Malraux’s admiring readers, or to those who know the legend of Malraux the revolutionary, the anti-fascist organizer of the Esquadrille Espana in the Spanish Civil War or of the romantic anti-Nazi Colonel Berger of the French Resistance. Yet for Malraux, the novelist and the man, political controversies have always provided the pretext to confront larger, more metaphysical problems. The French title for Man’s Fate is La Condition humaine, and this phrase, gleaned from Pascal, bespeaks a concern with broader issues than what political group would take over China. This novel’s real theme is alienation; which Malraux highlights by having each character, no matter what his nationality, somehow bifurcated: Kyo has a French mother and a Japanese father; Tchen is a Chinese with Mongolian features and educated by a European Protestant minister; Katow is a Russian Jew; and Ferral is a Frenchman condemned to live in China. Like most novels that purport to be “philosophical” in nature, the political ramifications, if any, are profoundly conservative. At the end of Man’s Fate the political situation has altered for the worse, but that is a detail. What has not changed is the human condition; man’s fate remains one of alienation occasionally alleviated by the experience of fraternity.
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