Malraux's Hope

An eloquent, nervous French voice last week gave an answer to the clamor of crisis. The answer: De Gaulle. It was a startling new voice in the Gaullist camp. Andre Malraux, once one of Communism's most stirring defenders, had become De Gaulle's pressagent. The story of his metamorphosis reflects the mental tribulations of many Europeans, less articulate than Malraux, in the great crisis of their civilization.

The Struggle with the Angel. Malraux had been one of revolution's fighting angels, whose sanguinary sagas related Communism's sweaty glories in China, in Germany, in Spain (Days of Wrath, Man's Fate, Man's Hope).

A wealthy merchant's son, Malraux in his youth went off on an archeological mission to Indo-China. There, he discovered his sympathy for the underdog, helped the colonial rebels against French imperialism. Later, as a member of the Canton Committee of Twelve, he helped the Kuomintang and Communists revolt. All along, he had a romantic streak and a deep concern for the individual, which foreshadowed his later stand against Communism's robot ranks.

In Man's Hope (1937), one of his characters said: "The danger is that every man carries the desire for an apocalypse in himself. . . . By its very nature, the Apocalypse has no future--not even when it pretends to have one. . . . Our modest function . . . is to organize the Apocalypse."

In 1939, at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Malraux finally broke with the Communist Apocalypse. He realized that "what I wanted to defend for twenty years could not be defended by Communists." During the war, he fought in the French underground. It was then that his search grew most desperate. In his wartime novel, La Lutte avec I'Ange (The Struggle with the Angel--so far published only in a limited Swiss edition), he cried out: "Has the notion of man a meaning?"

The Struggle with Disaster. Malraux today is a man with his mind made up, but he is more nervous than ever. His face twitches as he talks. He walks stiffly because of a leg wound he received fighting in the underground. To get across his Gaullist message to the French people, Malraux works daily from 7 a.m. till dinner as De Gaulle's unofficial public relations counsel ("his left-hand man," say friends). In his bright, modernistic apartment at the edge of Paris' Bois de Boulogne, he is entrenched behind a plain wooden table in which he keeps a loaded revolver ("I am high on the list of those with whom the Communists would gladly dispense"); his telephone is out of sight on the floor ("I hate to look at it"). He is still a romantic, considers Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls the greatest love stories since La Chartreuse de Parme. One of the few characteristics he shares with the more ordinary type of pressagent is an occasionally high opinion of himself. Says he: "T. E. Lawrence resembled me in many ways . . . a genuine hero."

Malraux insists: "It is not I who have evolved, but events." He is indignant over charges that De Gaulle is against republican liberties. He cries: "There are 70,000 adherents to De Gaulle's Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais from the Gironde Department alone. Do you think there are 70,000 fascists in the Gironde?"

He does not expect a French civil war because "we shall not start it, and Stalin will not let Thorez start it. He knows too well where civil war would lead--to Communist defeat." Malraux calmly agrees that De Gaulle and he are "prophets of disaster." But he explains: "Because a man in an automobile points out to the driver that there is a huge hole in the road, that doesn't mean he welcomes the hole."

Looking at their paralyzed railroads last week, few Frenchmen doubted that there was a sizable hole ahead. Could the present Government do anything about it? Malraux did not think so: "At the moment, perhaps, Americans prefer the Ramadier solution to the De Gaulle solution, but Ramadier cannot bring a solution." Then, with an old doubter's afterthought: "If he does succeed, of course, then I shall be wrong, and De Gaulle can go back to planting cabbages."

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