Word: malraux
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...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...
...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 Saïgon, 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...
...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...
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...
...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...