Word: malraux
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...ROYAL WAY-André Malraux- Smith & Haas...
Though all novelists tacitly agree that their proper study is Man, some merely tickle or tattoo their subject. Serious novelists take a knife to him. Author Malraux's, Man's Fate (TIME. June 25), proved him to be of the surgical sort. Since not everyone can calmly witness the bloody business of such an operation, however earnestly and skilfully performed, many drew back from the spectacle of Man's Fate with shuddering dislike. The Royal Way will hardly please them better, though the surface excitement of its melodrama should make it a more popular performance...
Like the late Joseph Conrad, Malraux sets his story against a sinister and savage background, gives it, without Conrad's ambiguity, a deeper than surface significance. Man's fate, he implicitly says, is death, but there is a royal way to it, for those who have the courage to take...
...Perken's philosophy of death Author Malraux seems to voice his own: "It seems to me sometimes that I am staking myself, all that I am, on a single moment -my last." As Claude watches his dying friend he thinks: "Ah, if only they existed, those gods of theirs, and he might, even at the cost of never-ending torment, howl in their faces, like the baying dogs, the bitter truth-that no hope of heaven, no promise of reward, nothing can justify the end of any human life...
...Fate echoed Malraux's experience as a revolutionary in China's bloody years, 1925-27, when he was Commissioner of Propaganda for the government of the South, helped stage the Canton insurrection. He could supply at least the scenery for The Royal Way from his archeological explorations in Cambodia and Siam. A publisher's assistant (house of Gallimard), he takes adventurous holidays, last year flew across the Great Arabian Desert and reported the discovery of the legendary city of Sheba (TIME, March...