As soon as I had read it, charging through it in one night, and then got to know something about the author through a book by Pierre de Boisdeffre, I knew that his was the life that I would have liked to have led. I continued to think this in the sixties in France, when as a journalist I covered the actions, polemics and speeches of the Minister of Culture of the Fifth Republic. I feel the same every time I read his autobiographical accounts, or the biographies that, following the work of Jean Lacouture, have appeared in recent years with new facts about his life, that was as abundant and dramatic as those of the great adventurers of his novels.
I am also a literary fetishist, and I really like to find out everything there is to know about the writers I admire: what they did and did not do, what friends and enemies attributed to them and what they themselves invented for posterity. I am, therefore, overwhelmed by the extraordinary number of public revelations, betrayals, accusations and scandals that are now adding to the already very rich mythology surrounding André Malraux. For here was a man that was not only a great writer, but someone who managed, in his seventy-five years (1901–76), to be present, often in a starring role, at the great events of his century — the Chinese revolution, the anti-colonial struggles in Asia, the antifascist movement in Europe, the war in Spain, the resistance against the Nazis, decolonisation and the reform of France under De Gaulle — and to leave a distinct mark on his time.
He was a Communist travelling companion and a fervent nationalist; a publisher of clandestine pornography; a speculator on the Stock Exchange, where he became rich and later bankrupt in a few months (squandering all his wife’s money); a raider of the statues of the temple of Banteai-Srei, in Cambodia, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison (his precocious literary fame gained him a reprieve); an anti-colonialist conspirator in Saigon; a driving force behind avant-garde literary magazines and a promoter of German Expressionism, Cubism and all the artistic and poetic experiments of the twenties and thirties; one of the first critics and theoreticians of cinema; a participant in and witness to the revolutionary strikes in Canton in 1925; an organiser and member of an expedition (on a toy motorbike) to Arabia in search of the treasure of the Queen of Saba; a committed intellectual and a towering figure in all the congresses and organisations of European antifascist artists and writers; the organiser of the Spain Squadron (that would later be called the André Malraux Squadron) for the defence of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War; a hero of the French resistance and colonel of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade; a political supporter and minister in all the governments of General De Gaulle who, from the time of their first meeting in August 1945, inspired an almost religious devotion in him.
This life is as intense and diverse as it is contradictory, and can be interpreted in many conflicting ways. What there is no doubt about is that his life offers that very rare alliance of thought and action, and at the highest level, because while he participated with such brio in the great events and disasters of his age, he was a man endowed with an exceptional lucidity and creative drive that allowed him to keep an intelligent distance from lived experience and transform it into critical reflection and vigorous fictions. A handful of writers who were his contemporaries were, like Malraux, completely involved in living history: Orwell, Koestler, T. E. Lawrence. These three writers wrote admirable essays on the tragic reality that they were living; but none of them captured it in fiction with the talent of Malraux. All his novels are excellent, although L’Espoir (Days of Hope) is too long and Les Conquérants (The Conquerors), La Voie royale (The Royal Way) and Le Temps du mépris (An Age of Oppression) are too short. Man’s Fate is a masterpiece, worthy to be quoted alongside the work of Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Thomas Mann or Kafka, as one of the most dazzling creations of our time. I say this with the certainty of one who has read it at least a half a dozen times, feeling, each time, the agonised shudder of the terrorist Chen before he plunges his knife into his sleeping victim, and moved to tears by Katow’s magnificent gesture, when he gives his cyanide pill to two young Chinese, condemned, like him, by the torturers of Kuomintang, to be burned alive. Everything in this novel is perfect: the epic story, spiced with romantic interludes; the contrast between personal adventure and ideological debates; the opposing psychologies and cultures of the characters and the foolish actions of Baron Clappique that give a touch of excess and absurdity — or, we might say, unpredictability and freedom — to a life that otherwise could have seemed excessively logical; but above all, the effectiveness of the syncopated, pared-down prose, which forces readers to use their imagination at all times to fill the spaces that are scarcely outlined in the dialogues and the descriptions.
Man’s Fate is based on a real revolution that took place in 1927 in Shanghai, led by the Chinese Communist Party and its allies, the Kuomintang, against the Men of War, as the military autocrats who governed deeply divided China were called, a China in which the Western powers had managed to establish colonial enclaves, by force or corruption. An envoy of Mao, Chou-En-Lai, on whom the character of Kyo is partly based, led this revolution. But, unlike Kyo, Chou-En-Lai was not killed when, after defeating the military government, the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-Chek turned against their Communist allies and, as the novel describes, savagely repressed them; he managed to escape and rejoin Mao, accompanying him on the Long March and remaining his deputy for the rest of his life.
Malraux was not in Shanghai during the time of the events that he narrates (or rather, invents); but he was in Canton during the insurrectionary strikes of 1925, and was a friend and collaborator (it has never been established to what degree), of Borodin, the envoy sent by the Comintern (in other words, by Stalin) to advise the Communist movement in China. This doubtless helped him to convey that sense of a ‘lived’ experience in the novel when he memorably describes the attacks and the street fighting. From an ideological point of view, Man’s Fate is unambiguously pro-Communist. It is not Stalinist, however, but rather Trotskyist, since the story explicitly condemns the orders from Moscow, imposed on the Chinese Communists by the Comintern bureaucrats, to hand over their arms to Chiang Kai-Chek instead of hiding them and defending themselves when their Kuomintang allies turn against them. Let us not forget that these episodes take place in China, while in the Soviet Union the great debate between Stalinists and Trotskyists about permanent revolution or Communism in one country was intensifying (even though the extermination of Trotskyists had already begun).