Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...