Word: malraux
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...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...
Background. When André 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...
...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...