News from Spain

(See Cover) MAN'S HOPE--Andre Malraux--Random House ($2.50).

When news of the Fascist uprising reached Barcelona, two years ago, factory whistles all over the city began to blow. In the grey dawn, while the street lights were still burning, one whistle sounded, then another, then a hundred--steadily, mournfully, as in the old days the belfries clamored together in times of peril. Fascist troops were marching on the centre of the city.

They held the Colon Hotel. Two field guns protected it, and before the guns were soldiers with machine guns and rifles, sweeping the wide avenue from end to end. As the tumult of the whistles died away, two Cadillacs driven by anarchists zigzagged madly up the street toward the guns, making 70 m.p.h., their horns screaming. Like monstrous torpedoes they plowed through the line of soldiers, charged the gun crews, piled into a wall beside them in black, blood-spattered heaps of wreckage. Their drivers were dead. But the guns were silenced.

To recapture such violent moments of the Spanish Civil War, and to suggest their meaning, is the task of Andre Malraux in Man's Hope. His fifth novel, it establishes more plainly than ever that Malraux is the world's foremost novelist of revolution and one of the most exciting and provocative of living writers. Unlike most modern novels, Man's Hope was written on the scene of action, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, describes real characters and events that actually occurred. And unlike most modern novelists, Andre Malraux is also a man of action, a revolutionist, an explorer, the man who organized and commanded the first Loyalist air force.

Thus Man's Hope is a new kind of book, at once a literal report of the Loyalist side of the Civil War and a novel tracing the fates of some 20 leading characters who fight in it. It combines vivid journalistic observation with extraordinary imaginative flights, consequently stands out, not only as a novel but as the best piece of reporting that has come out of the Spanish Civil War. And as such it illustrates Malraux's theory of fiction--that the real news of the modern world can be better told in novels than in newspapers; that novelists, if they are to save their art from puerility, must fight for their beliefs, take part in events, and in lulls between the battles jot down their records of what they have actually seen.

Background. When Andre Malraux met Ernest Hemingway in Spain (so the story goes), they divided the Spanish Civil War between them. Malraux took the story up to the Loyalist victory at Guadalajara, Hemingway after it. From the Loyalist as well as the literary viewpoint, it looks as if Malraux got the better part. For while Hemingway's section (not yet published) is to deal with the clash of the two organized armies. Malraux's, covering the early period, is a swift, tumultuous affair of assaults on barracks, street-fighting, bombing, sniping, chaos, breakneck confusion, which somehow resolves itself into organization and ends in victory.

It is a story of a Fascist coup d'etat which miscarried because it was met with a counterattack as savage as the charge of the Cadillacs driven by the Barcelona volunteers; of militiamen using as weapons anything that came to hand--old automobiles, old airplanes, revolvers, dynamite, makeshift armored trains. Largely written in Spain between July and November 1936, it was turned out, diary-fashion, while Malraux was leading the Loyalist air force. After flights over Franco's ter ritory, he shut himself up in Madrid's Hotel Florida, wrote in five or six-hour spurts, making few corrections.

At that time the Loyalist air force consisted largely of a formidable collection of antiquated fighting planes -- old Breguets, built in 1921, a Dewoitine, a Hawker Fury, a Gipsy Dragon -- which Malraux had purchased for the Government. There was a twin-engined, high-wing Potez which carried a crew of five and in which Malraux flew as copilot. There was a modern, fast Boeing, useful only as a threat be cause the machine gun could not be synchronized to fire through the propeller. No match for Franco's air force, Malraux's fliers dodged behind clouds, avoided combat as much as possible. Crews were made up of professional fliers hired on contract, volunteers with more enthusiasm than experience, a few skilled men like Malraux's friend Abel Guidez, who brought down six Fascist planes in the early weeks of the war, was eventually shot down near Bilbao after he had left the air force and was flying a French commercial-line passenger plane. Intense and nervous, with limited flying experience himself, Malraux made 65 flights over Fascist territory, was twice injured in crashes. His daily routine while writing Man's Hope was that of other Loyalist fliers--getting up before dawn, taking a bus from the Hotel Florida to the big municipal airport at Barajas, holding a conference on the day's plans, then taking off or waiting for a squadron to return. Hard-bitten Loyalist aviators recall Malraux's nervousness, his anxiety when planes did not get back on time, his animated conversation about everything but himself.

The Book. Man's Hope shows as irremovably as a birthmark the strain under which it was written. A big, fast-paced, sprawling, 511-page novel, divided into 58 episodes, it begins in Madrid, where arms are being distributed to militiamen, shifts to Barcelona, where a dwarf-like, sturdy little anarchist named Puig is leading 300 anarchists against Fascist troops. From a sequence of desperate, suicidal, lunging events, smoky with action, grisly with bloodshed, the leading characters emerge:

Colonel Ximenes, commander of the Barcelona Civil Guard, fights alongside the anarchists he had formerly imprisoned, remains a devout Catholic who prays in churches his comrades have burned.

Manuel, a hard, determined Communist, trained by Ximenes, becomes a brigade commander, checks the rout at Aranjuez, begins to learn war after he orders the execution of panicky deserters and is told by Ximenes: "You'll get used even to that!"

Magnin, philosophical, poetic, middle-aged French commander of the air force, harassed by conflicts among rival political parties, fights despite his fear that the discipline of the army may destroy the freedom he is fighting to preserve.

Hernandez, courtly, old-line army officer who looks like Charles the Fifth, conducts the siege of the Alcazar, treats his enemies chivalrously, is executed when Toledo is captured. On a ridge outside the city the prisoners are shot, three at a time, somersaulting backwards into a ditch, Hernandez reflecting in a pain-filled, embarrassed silence that they line up stiffly like people having their pictures taken.

Some characters are called by their real names. Puig was a Barcelona anarchist killed early in the Civil War; Captain Hernandez was actually in command at Toledo. Others are thinly disguised: Abel Guidez is called Gardet in the novel; Ramon Sender, leading Spanish novelist, is the original of Manuel.

Biggest achievement of Man's Hope is not in its characterizations but in the graphic intensity of isolated scenes. A bomber emerging into calm moonlight after blowing up the gasworks at Talavera de la Reina; a fire fighter in Madrid atop his ladder, turning his fire hose in a last, hopeless, defiant gesture against an airplane machine-gunning him; Asturian dinamiteros, "the last body of men who can face the machine on equal terms," crawling forward to meet advancing tanks outside Toledo; the crew of a wrecked bomber carried out of the mountains by peasants, the long, winding, anguished procession stretching through vast ravines like a living symbol of the peasants' view of war--such flashes as these make Man's Hope more memorable than its story or its message.

The Belief. The real and the imaginary have always been mixed in Malraux's novels. His first, The Conquerors, pictured revolution in Canton, followed the course of actual events, included real characters like Revolutionist Michael Borodin, Mao Tse-tung, head of the Chinese Soviets.

Malraux's masterpiece, Man's Fate, stayed close to the history of the Shanghai revolution of 1927, in its final chapters reached heights of intensity so moving that the book immediately took its place with the best of post-War fiction. In Man's Hope Malraux follows the same practice, but this time traces history in the making, convincingly dramatizes his theory that reporting by way of novels can result in works of art.

Because history is at best violent, violence crowds his books. In Man's Hope, as in his previous work, he writes most intensely of those moments when hope has finally vanished from men's lives--when the revolution has failed or the plans fallen through, when escape has been frustrated, pardon refused, when even suicide has been prevented and nothing remains but the certainty of execution. The questions that haunt his novels like a strain of sombre music are these: What happens to men when they know they will die with no chance to struggle against their fate? How do they meet their death? What remains in them when the last aspiration of their personal careers, their last hope for their cause, has disappeared? Thus he pictures the hero of Man's Fate, awaiting execution in a crowd of doomed men:

"He had fought for what in his own time was charged with the deepest meaning and the greatest hope; he was dying among those men with whom he would have wanted to live; he was dying, like each of these men, because he had given a meaning to his life. What would have been the value of a life for which he would not have been willing to die? . . . An assembly of the vanquished in which multitudes would recognize their martyrs, a bloody legend of which the golden legends are made!"

Malraux's novels have little of the slack, humble, half-awake ordinariness in which so much of life is spent, still less of the habitual round of domestic squabbles and pleasures that make peace sweet for most men. They deal with war, and usually with the vanquished; with violence, and usually with those who suffer by it. To many a reader, as a result, they seem as lurid and shocking as a street accident. This criticism Malraux answers by pointing out that these accidents do happen, that in our own time they are everyday occurrences, that he is reporting the bloody legends of the modern world out of which, he hopes and believes, the golden legends will some day come.

The Author. Volatile, restless, sharp-eyed, thin-featured, Andre Malraux is known slightly by many people, well by very few. He talks a great deal, and very rapidly, smokes constantly, is disturbed by a facial tic which stayed with him after illness in China. Gloomily handsome, mildly sardonic, he enjoys the companionship of pretty women. Born in Paris on November 3, 1901, of well-to-do parents, he went to five schools as War drove his family in and out of the city, graduated from the famed Lycee Condorcet, which schooled Proust, then studied Sanskrit at the Paris School of Oriental Languages. He had published a thin book of prose poems, married Clara Goldschmidt, the daughter of a well-to-do German Jewish family, when at 22 he sailed for Indo-China on an archeological expedition.

Among archeologists, Indo-China is famous for its immense, moldering, bat-infested ruins of Khmer civilization, of which Angkor Wat is the best known. Among economists, Indo-China is equally famous as one of the world's worst-run colonies. For a year young Malraux dug through ruins, crawled over fallen temples which reeked with the decayed jungle vegetation of eight centuries, collected Khmer statuary, then abruptly lost interest in Indo-China's past, became interested in Indo-China's present. Working with a group known as the Young Annam League, which fought for dominion status for Indo-China, he was soon in trouble. He had collected Khmer statuary which the authorities insisted should be turned over to the Government. Malraux refused, lost a suit in the lower courts but won an appeal when it was learned that the documents submitted in the case dealt not with art but with Malraux's connection with the Young Annam League.

Between 1923 and 1927 Malraux shuttled back & forth between Paris and the Far East, published a magazine in Saigon, helped natives get out newspapers the Government suppressed. At 24 he was associate secretary general of the Kuomintang for Cochin-China. At 25 he was a member of the Committee of Twelve (Chiang Kai-shek was another member) which directed the Canton insurrection during the Chinese revolution, Malraux's post being propaganda commissioner for the key provinces of Kwangsi and Kwangtung.

A revolutionary secret agent in the Far East in 1926 was a little like a soldier who cannot be sure his allies will not go over to the enemy in the middle of battle. Malraux was no Communist, but worked with the Kuomintang in the period of the united front between the Kuomintang and the Third International. When Chiang Kai-shek broke with his Communist allies in 1927, and the Chinese Revolution ended in a swirl of executions, betrayals, assassinations, Malraux left China for good, accompanied an archeological expedition through Persia and Afghanistan on his way back to France. The expedition picked up some important specimens of Greco-Buddhist art, gave Malraux his most tangible accomplishment in archeology. He had already begun to write, publishing The Conquerors at 27 and taking a job as editor of the de luxe editions of a French publishing house.

The Conquerors was an immediate critical success but sold badly. Living with his wife and two servants in a little apartment on the Rue du Bac -- four rooms filled with Khmer statuary, Oriental books and hand-painted Persian linen panels on the walls -- Malraux remained as secretive in Paris as he had been in Saigon, met Indo-Chinese conspirators, Chinese revolutionists in his office, had so few contacts with the French literary world that even his closest friends did not know where he lived. The Conquerors was followed by a mediocre adventure story laid in Indo-China, The Royal Way. In 1933 his wife, who translates books from German into French, bore him a daughter, Florence. When Man's Fate won the Goncourt Prize the same year, Malraux's popular success was assured. In the U. S. and England a good part of its popularity came from its superb translation, by University of California Professor Haakon Chevalier, who captured the distinctive quality of Malraux's prose, made it in English as it is in French a masterly instrument for communicating scenes of violence or a sense of impending calamity, at once lyrical, cadenced and strong.

In Man's Hope the aviator Magnin explains that, while no revolutionist, he is drawn more closely to revolutionists when they suffer defeat. The observation is true of Malraux himself. At odds with the Communists after 1927, embodying severe criticisms of Comintern policy and tactics in Man's Fate and championing Trotsky, he swung around after Hitler seized power in Germany, wrote an anti-fascist novel, Days of Wrath, has been roundly denounced by Trotsky as a Stalinist agent. Learning to fly in 1934, he flew with his instructor over the Arabian Desert, discovered a ruined city which he said was the ancient home of the Queen of Sheba, but about which experts were noncommittal. A natural scholar, Malraux knows Spanish, English, German, Italian, Russian, as well as Sanskrit, Chinese and minor Oriental tongues, was working on a big book of esthetic theory, The Psychology of Art, when the Spanish Civil War broke out.

This week, while Man's Hope was being published in Manhattan, Malraux was celebrating his 37th birthday, living at the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona. He has been working with Cameraman Louis Page, who filmed Carnival in Flanders, directing a film of the Civil War, based in part on Man's Hope and intended largely for South American audiences. Now separated from his wife, Malraux still holds his publishing job, spends less time in Paris than ever, has few intimates outside a family circle consisting of himself, two halfbrothers, Claude and Roland, his stepmother.

Last year he visited the U. S. to raise money for Spain. To big audiences he talked with almost untranslatable rapidity and eloquence; to small groups of writers from Princeton to Hollywood he preached his favorite literary message: the value to literature of active political careers by its creators. Long an admirer of U. S. literature (he introduced William Faulkner to France, considers him the first U. S. novelist, likes Hemingway and the novels of Dashiell Hammett), he was amazed at the remoteness of U. S. writing men from world problems. In Hollywood he made three money-raising speeches, made a bigger impression on Hollywood's writing colony than any recent visiting celebrity except Hemingway. Aloof, he would speak only through an interpreter, cocked a quizzical, disapproving eye when his French was badly translated. His hosts saw him unbend only when he ate his first alligator pear and when he got tight in Los Angeles' Olvera Street.

When esthetes asked him how he could write in Spain with the War going on, he replied, ''It gets dark at night." The ivory tower, he told them forcibly, was no place for writers who had in democracy a cause they could fight for. If they lived, he insisted, their writing would be better for the experience gained in the fight; if they died, their deaths would make more living documents than anything they could write if they remained in ivory towers. But it is doubtful if this grim invitation had as much influence on them as Man's Hope will have. Whether the life of action would benefit all writers, there is no doubt that it has inspired Malraux, has given him a subject, a passion in expressing it, an imaginative intensity unmatched by any novelist of his generation.

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