Andre Malraux's "Man's Hope"

As I wrote in recent review of Man’s Fate by this same author as a young man in the late 1920’s many held out high hopes that French writer Andre Malraux would become an accomplished revolutionary writer, or at least an extraordinary writer of revolutionary sagas. No less a communist literary critic than Leon Trotsky, the consummate man of action and letters, praised his early work. Man’s Hope is another prime example of the reason that leftist critics praised his work, although it is a more uneven work which reflects the author’s ambiguity toward the events of the subject of the novel, the Spanish Civil. Although later events would destroy Malraux’s reputation as a writer and as a man of action on the left this novel takes its place in the pantheon of well written expressions of the dilemma of modern humankind confronted as it is with one half of itself mired in the mundane bourgeois world and the other half striving toward a more just and equitable society. This was a central preoccupation of 20^th century leftist literary endeavor, and early Malraux was one of the better exponents of that thesis.

The action of the novel takes place in the throes of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, a decisive event in pre-World War II history, especially international working class history. Malraux, himself, had organized an air force squadron of international volunteers on behalf of the Republican forces early on and so this novel benefits from a more realistic interpretation of the action described in the novel. Moreover, like Russia and China before it, everyone knew that the events which led up to 1936 Fascist uprising against the elected Popular Front Republican government in Spain portended a revolutionary outcome. The only question at that point was whether it was to be a fascist counter-revolution like in Germany and Italy or a socialist revolution that would go a long way to helping the Soviet Union of the 1930’s break out of its isolation after various unsuccessful revolutionary attempts in the West had failed. We know the outcome, to our regret. This tension, and especially the tensions produced among the Communists who were under orders from the Communist International, and hence Moscow, to subordinate themselves to the various Popular Front governments, is what drives the action.

 

The novel is also a snapshot of what the Communist International’s ‘high policy’ looks like as it was implemented on the ground among the secondary cadre and rank and filers of the Spanish Communist Party, their allies, semi-allies, adversaries and the merely indifferent. But more than struggle that the novel betrays in its dialogue among the leading characters something of Malraux's disillusionment with leftist politics at this time. Hereafter Malraux would become something of a ‘premature’ existentialist and searcher after the ‘great men’ of history like Stalin and DeGaulle.

Yes, war is hell. Yes, war is banal. Yes, war does not bring out the better instincts of humankind, even in just wars like Spain. Despite the caveat mentioned above, Malraux nevertheless tells that part of the story well, in the tradition of Hemingway and Dos Passos. That is fast company, indeed. Read on.