DURING THE DECADE BEFORE THE WAR, when the tradition of Lenin was still alive and Marxism had still its prestige as a moral and intellectual force, there appeared in Europe two first-rate novelists who, though quite different in other ways, both presented the contemporary world in terms of the Marxist class conflict: the Frenchman André Malraux and the Italian Ignazio Silone.
Malraux and Silone belong to the same European generation: there is only a year between them, Malraux having been born in Paris in 1900 and Silone in a little town of the Abruzzi in 1901. Malraux, who studied Oriental languages and went to the East as an archaeologist, became interested in the Chinese revolution, in which, from 1925 to 1927, he played an active role. He worked with the Communist Kuomintang and was a member of the Committee of Twelve, which organized the Canton uprising. He wrote, out of this experience, his two novels Les Conquérants and La Condition Humaine, and the first of them brought him to the attention of Trotsky, whose acquaintance he made in the years when Trotsky was living in France and who tried to correct what he regarded as Malraux’s out-of-date French romanticism and reconstruct him as an unambiguous Marxist. Later, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, Malraux took part on the Loyalist side as chief of an escadrille and accepted the direction of Moscow in its strategy and policy for Spain. Otherwise, in a way exceptional for a participant in far-Left revolutionary movements, he has managed to remain independent of both Trotskyist and Stalinist influence.
Silone, on the other hand, had been an active revolutionary worker from 1917, when, at the age of seventeen, he became secretary of the peasant movement, syndicalist in its political complexion, which had been launched in his native Abruzzi. Soon thereafter, he went to Rome, where he was, first, editor of a Socialist paper and then one of the founders, under the inspiration of Moscow, of the Communist Youth International, and where he took part, in 1921, in organizing the Italian Communist Party. In the years between 1925 and 1929, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party, doing underground work in Italy under the Mussolini regime and representing the Party in Moscow during a period when its leader was in jail and at such times as Silone himself did not happen to be in jail. When it was evident, at the end of the twenties, that the Russians in the Communist International were beginning to dictate policy from the point of view of Russian interests at the expense of the freedom of the Communists of the parties of other nations to determine their own lines of action, Silone resigned, with a group which included about half the Italians; nor did he afterwards associate himself with the followers of either Bukharin or Trotsky, who had set up split-off Communist groups, for he felt, as he says, that these groups had all the defects of the Stalinist parties without the power of Moscow behind them. He left Italy at the end of the twenties and went into retirement in Switzerland, where for the first time he began to write novels and where he remained until 1944, when, after the fall of the Fascists, he returned to live in Rome.
The temperaments of Malraux and Silone present in certain respects a very sharp contrast. Malraux, though he served in Spain in the army of international Communism, has had, especially in his earlier career, an element of the international adventurer—part explorer of the ancient Oriental world, whose most exciting sensation was to find there the twentieth-century class struggle; part Byronic egoist and actor, driven by an obscure compulsion to assert his will for its own sake—whereas Silone, since he has broken with Moscow, has been assuming a personality which combines in a peculiar way the traditional severity of the Communist with the compassion of a parish priest. For Malraux, the conception of the class struggle gave him a vision of the drama of history, in which he could play a role, fierce, courageous, perhaps noble; for Silone, it drew clear moral issues which showed him how to direct his energies toward ends that would benefit his fellows. Malraux is largely preoccupied with the tactics and significance of action, Silone with ethical problems. But both, during the critical years of their youth, accepted the Marxist assumptions as a guide to the contemporary world and worked for the Communist objectives, and this phase of their lives has supplied the themes of their most important books.
Now, for the sincere Marxist revolutionary who was able to think for himself and not afraid to follow his judgment, further belief in the Soviet Union as a power that worked for international socialism—if it had not been discouraged already—did definitely become impossible with the signing in August, 1939, of the Hitler-Stalin pact. There is an observation in Malraux’s new novel which, though there applied to something else, sounds as if it had been inspired by the illusions of foreign Communists and Communist sympathizers about the conditions of life in the Soviet Union: “It is as impossible,” he makes one of his characters say, “to see a country which embodies a myth in which one believes as it is to see a woman with whom one is in love.” And the horror of the destruction of Europe and the degradation of human values, protracted through the five and a half years of this war, made the realization of the socialist hope seem more and more remote and doubtful. For writers like Malraux and Silone, their natural line of development was broken; but, confronted with the scene of wreckage—living in the debris of defeated France under the German domination or isolated in Switzerland in an exile which must at moments have seemed likely to be permanent—they had to lay hold on the new situation and find some way of making something of it for the honor of their old ideals; and what they have made is of exceptional interest.
Malraux’s novel, La Lutte avec l’Ange (evidently referring to the ordeal of Jacob in Genesis 32, which was published in Switzerland in 1943 in an edition of but fifteen hundred copies,* is offered as the first section of a larger work—a work which could hardly have been finished, given the historical immediacy of the subject, before the war had come to an end, and which Malraux, who after the expulsion of the Germans was on active duty as colonel of a regiment, could hardly have had a chance to finish. It is impossible, thus, to judge this instalment in any conclusive way, since it is concerned with presenting situations of which we are not yet able to see the upshot and propounding far-reaching questions to which the answers have not yet been found. The book develops a double story of two generations of an Alsatian family: the career of the German father, a diplomat in the German service, who has seen something of World War I, and the adventures of the half-French son, who, in World War II, fights for the French. It is this son who is supposed to put together the whole rather complicated chronicle. Taken prisoner at the fall of France and sent to a concentration camp at Chartres, he goes back over his own experience and reflects on his father’s exploits as he has learned of them through a set of notes which has come into his hands after the latter’s death. The father, a capable and clever man, has that insatiable love of adventure, half-quixotic and half-perverse, which is characteristic of Malraux’s heroes. Malraux analyzes his motives in a passage which explains his interest, passionate though apparently gratuitous, in the Young Turk movement of the beginning of the century: “His need to get away from Europe, the solicitation of history, the fanatical desire to leave a scar on the earth, the fascination of a project which he had contributed not a little to shape, the fellowship of combat, and friendship.” (It is worth noting that the protagonist of an earlier book, La Voie Royale, a superman explorer with very little interest in politics, says also, in explaining the impulse by which he has been driven in his exploits: “I want to leave a scar on this map.”) In Turkey, this accomplished Alsatian comes under the influence of the propaganda of the Pan-Turanian movement, which aimed at uniting in a great Turkish empire all those peoples who were assumed to be of Turkish stock; but as he travels in Afghanistan and finds only a “people of sleepwalkers” quite unconscious of their Turanianism, the whole myth suddenly fades away. He returns and gives up his mission and presently lapses back into working for the Germans, with whom he is always a little restive. Just before the First World War he is present at a cross-examination, by the head of the Secret Service, of a supposed Russian woman spy, when they bring in her little son to try to make her betray herself, and later, when the war has begun, he assists at a pioneering experiment with the use of poison gas. The German soldiers, on this occasion, finding the Russians asphyxiated, yield to a primitive human instinct and, instead of taking the Russian position, try to rescue the dying men. The Alsatian, himself half-intoxicated with gas, is soon irresistibly impelled to behave as the others are doing: he picks up a gasping Russian and starts to carry him back toward the field hospital. In him, as in the soldiers, there is something which revolts and balks against the cruel methods of warfare that the German General Staff is developing. But the scene now shifts back to his son, and, following immediately after the episode of the gas attack, we get an episode out of World War II—a tank advance by the French—in which the young man had figured before he was captured by the Germans. We are taken inside the tank; it is lumbering and groping at night through a heavy barrage of shellfire, and it slumps into an unseen trench, where it seems to lie heavily helpless. Modern warfare has gone on getting worse, more crushing and more abasing. Nothing has been done to curb it, and the human race itself seems to have fallen, like the men in the tank, to the bottom of a dark ditch, imprisoned and overwhelmed by a great mass of antihuman machinery. Nor does there appear in the second of these episodes, as there did in the gas attack, any sign of a fraternal solidarity between the soldiers of the hostile armies.
Here the volume ends, but a larger vista of interest has been opened up for the reader than this bare outline of the action would indicate. The narrator has a remarkable great-uncle, an intellectual, rather a dilettante but in a serious German way. He has been a correspondent of Nietzsche’s and sometimes entertains Freud. At his house he holds periodical conferences, to which he invites a varied company of savants and at which set subjects are discussed. The father of the narrator, returned from his travels, arrives in time for one of these conferences, at which a great German anthropologist, who has been working for fifteen years on a book, is expected to explain his views in a revelation of special importance. But it turns out that he has just decided not to publish the book. This had been an Hegelian affair which led up to the proposition that the civilization of the Germans was the supreme end-product of history; but the author has now ceased to believe this because he has ceased to believe that what he calls “the human adventure” has any consistent significance. The more he has come to examine the various kinds of society which the human race has produced, the more he has been driven to question the continuity of human history and the logic of human effort. He tells the company about the people who were for centuries firmly convinced that the person of their ruler was the moon, that his power waxed and waned with it and that when the moon went into eclipse the king had to be strangled by his subjects; and those natives of the Melanesian Islands who have never made any connection between childbearing and sexual intercourse, refuting attempts to enlighten them by pointing out that it is by no means true that the former always results from the latter. Just as the narrator’s father has lost the racial conception of Turanianism in the presence of the Afghan tribes, so the German anthropologist has been losing the sense of the unity of human ideals and purpose among the mutually exclusive delusions on which human civilizations have been based. And are we not still, Western man, he asks, enveloped in some such delusion, and no more capable of realizing this than is the goldfish of conceiving its aquarium, which to the goldfish must give the illusion of comprising the whole world, though it is nothing but a small glass box? And if this is our true situation, what, then, is our basic delusion? Nationalism, someone suggests. No, not merely nationalism—our false but all-pervading and inescapable notion may well be our idea of history and the conception of Time that goes with it. “Has the notion of man a meaning? In other words: beneath the beliefs, the myths, especially under the multiplicity of mental structures, is it possible to distinguish a permanent idea or direction [Malraux uses the characteristically French and essentially intellectual word donnée], which retains its validity through history and upon which a concept of man can be based?”
The question is never answered. These perplexities, one supposes, are the struggle with the angel, which left Jacob, it will be remembered, a prince who had “power with God and with men”; and the whole discussion, though not very typical of the time at which it is made to take place, the early years of the century, when the nations seemed to be prospering under capitalism and few doubted the inevitability of progress, serves to bring to a clear formulation the kind of misgivings that has been tugging at our minds during these years which have upset our assumptions. Malraux has here sidestepped completely all the obvious melodrama of the triumphs and the defeats of the Fascist regimes, which our novelists in the United States, comfortably far from the battle, have been exploiting with so much fervor and cashing in on with so much success. Malraux’s hero is half-French and half-German, and his theme is not the struggle with the Nazis, or even any longer the Marxist struggle of classes, which gave the confrontation of forces in his earlier books, but the justification of man himself.
La Lutte avec l’Ange is not, from the point of view of architecture and writing, one of the most satisfactory of Malraux’s books. It seems rather to show the marks of having been written, against pressures and under difficulties, only by dint of determined application. Both the style and the mode of presentation give sometimes—through overwriting or congestion—a certain effect of effort. An admiration for English literature has apparently been responsible here for some results that seem awkward in French. Malraux has been praised by Gide, in deploring the femininity of French fiction, for writing books which, by their masculine qualities, come closer to such Anglo-Saxon novels as Tom Jones and Moby Dick, and he is said, during the last years of the war, to have become a strong Anglophile. Certainly, in La Lutte avec l’Ange, he has managed to reproduce—though usually with bad effect—some of the most flagrantly non-French traits of his favorite English authors: Kipling’s knowing international allusiveness, Meredith’s elliptical expression and Conrad’s discontinuous narrative method. Malraux, who is said at one point to have escaped getting shot by the Germans by impersonating an English officer, thus almost appears, in a literary way, as one of those “displaced persons” whom a department of the Allied Commission is now making efforts to repatriate.
But any effort to get outside the formulas which, in preserving the French classical elegance, have tended lately to keep French literature stereotyped and thereby rather provincial is undoubtedly an excellent thing, and one finds in La Lutte avec l’Ange passages of sinewy and searching thought, strokes of dramatic imagination, of which only a man of genius would have been capable. Above all, there is a seriousness, an undulled perspicuity, about the large problems of human destiny, that has become the rarest thing in the world. This novel is both the most impressive and the most exciting piece of literature that I have yet seen inspired by the war.
The typical heroes of the novels of both Malraux and Silone have been workers for Marxist revolution, but the two writers have strikingly differed in their attitudes toward what the Communists used to call “the masses.” Certainly, Malraux himself did not reach the revolution primarily through sympathy for the underdog, but rather, like his protagonist in Les Conquérants, through disgust with the bourgeoisie—to which, in the author’s case, must be added the motivation of a very strong sense of what non-Communists call “human decency.” All the main characters in Malraux’s novels are more or less extraordinary or exceptional men, and the Communist’s self-identification with the hardships and interests of the working class has been the aspect of the social struggle which was least adequately rendered in his novels. Now, however, in La Lutte avec l’Ange, he has taken some special pains to try to make the common man sympathetic; yet these scenes are not his most successful. The conversations between the soldiers just before the gas attack seem a little gotten-up and labored, the reflections to which they give rise on the narrator’s part a little self-conscious and sententious; the whole thing has a suggestion, at moments, of a pastiche of the Barbusse of Le Feu. The gas attack in which the German soldiers show their human solidarity with the Russians is not so effectively done as the tank battle in which the man of intellect loses control of his monstrous machine.
Silone, on the other hand, has tended to be mainly preoccupied with the relation of the dedicated revolutionist to the people whom he is supposed to be serving. When the Communist line loses touch with the people, he comes to the conclusion that there is something wrong, and though his protagonist, Pietro Spina, in his novel Pane e Vino, never wearies of renewing his efforts to make connections between the peasantry and the Communist Party, his failures bring him constantly closer, at the expense of the Marxist doctrine, to the point of view of the peasants. Pietro Spina, impatient of the exile into which he has been driven by the Fascists, returns, disguised as a priest, to his native Abruzzi mountains in an attempt to rouse the people against Fascism and to build a revolutionary movement, but he finds himself baffled at every turn by the primitive mentality of the Italians, who see the world in terms of sins and pardons, saints and miracles, prayers and rites. He finds that, in spite of his efforts, he can make his only contact with them, not through his appeal to their class-consciousness, but through his natural sympathy for them, the sobriety of his life in their midst, a moral rectitude and a spiritual candor which they recognize and to which they respond.
And just as the false priest of Pane e Vino is, in the course of his relations with these peasants, half transformed into a real priest, to whom they look for forgiveness and guidance, whom they believe to possess powers of healing, while he, on his side, is coming to preach to them less as a mere political agitator than as a militant disciple of Christ, so Silone himself has drawn closer to the conceptions of primitive Christianity and has been trying to make a kind of merger between the ideals of modern socialism and these. “In the modern drama,” he writes in the foreword to his new book, “a new element has appeared as a protagonist: the proletarian. Not new in the sense of not already having existed in antiquity, but because his ordeal and his destiny were not then considered suitable subjects for history, thought and art. If to us moderns the situation of this character seems the nearest to the human truth, it is because, in the last analysis, between the ancients and us there has been Jesus.” This new book, first published in Switzerland in 1944 and now just brought out in Rome as the first of Silone’s productions to be published in his native country, is a long play called Ed Egli Si Nascose—And He Did Hide Himself, a quotation from John 12 (it is interesting that both Malraux and Silone should have gone to the Bible for titles), in which it is recorded that Jesus withdrew and disappeared from among his followers, after preaching: “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.” Ed Egli Si Nascose develops, on a larger scale and with a different implication, one of the incidents in Pane e Vino. In that novel there was a young man from the country who had gone to study in Rome and who, falling in love with an anti-Fascist girl, had associated himself with a revolutionary group. When his small supply of funds gave out, he resorted, in order to finish his courses, to taking money from the Fascist police for information against his companions. But he has been horribly tormented by conscience and, when he is caught in the country by the local police, who believe him to be a real revolutionist, he allows them to kill him on the spot. His death is thus an expiation and, in the account of it and the scene of his funeral, there are echoes of the Last Supper, the Passion and the Crucifixion. Now, in Ed Egli Si Nascose, Silone has made this episode his central theme. The young man is here driven to redeem himself by the much more positive gesture of actually printing and distributing a proletarian manifesto, and his murder at the hands of the Fascist police proves the stimulus—where Spina has failed—that rouses the people against the regime and leads them to organize a united opposition. His death brings the play to a climax with a kind of liturgical drama, which has its Joseph and Mary, its Magdalen, its John the Baptist and its Holy Communion, all worked out in a systematic parallel. Silone has explained in his foreword his belief that “the revolution of our epoch, which has been promoted by politicians and economists,” presents “the appearance of a ‘sacred mystery,’ in which the very fate of man is at stake.” “In the sacred history of man on earth, we are as yet, alas, only at Good Friday. The men who ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’ are still being derided and persecuted and put to death. The spirit is still forced to hide in order to save itself.”
In Pane e Vino, Silone had already had Pietro Spina ask the same question as Malraux’s anthropologist: “What is man? What is this human life?” “Every revolution,” he tells young Murica, the informer who is to expiate his treason, “always turns on this elementary question.” And, “in this horrible society,” where man is “mutilated, disgraced, deformed, insulted,” the problem is to become “a new man,” or, rather, to become for the first time “a man in the true sense of the word.” Silone’s way of finding a continuity in the vicissitudes of human history is to conceive it as a vast enactment of a drama to which the life of Jesus has given the symbolic clue.
Ed Egli Si Nascose, as a work of art, is less successful than Pane e Vino. The novel, in its chronicle of the adventures of Spina and its procession of Italian characters, had something in common with the great panoramas like Huckleberry Finn and Dead Souls, and Silone has not shown in this play a dramatic sense comparable to his narrative one. The emergence, furthermore, of the mystery play from the milieu of the modern Abruzzi may be found distasteful by readers who are remote from the Catholic religion; certainly it will be found dismaying by the old secularist type of Socialist. But the piece is full of excellent things: particularly the post-mortem discussions of the psychology of Communist activity in the period before the war. “The underground character of the movement,” the young renegade is made to explain, “offers to the weak man the important and deceptive advantage of secrecy. He lives in sacrilege and shudders at it, but this is all concealed from the world. He is outside the hateful and terrifying law, but the guardians of the law do not know it. His denial of the established order remains an intimate and secret thing, as if it took place in a dream, and precisely on that account is likely to run to ideas that are drastic, catastrophic and bloody; but his external behavior remains unchanged. In his habitual relations this kind of weak man remains as timid, silly and nervous as before. He conspires against the government in the same way that he may be in the habit of dreaming that he is strangling his father, with whom he will sit down to breakfast in the morning.” And there is an equally merciless passage on revolutionary work as a drug. The Communist’s life is so dangerous and hard, one of the underground workers explains, that the only way to accomplish anything is to eliminate the strain on your nerves, and to do this is to induce a narcosis. “But,” one of the women characters objects, “excuse me if I ask a stupid question. How can we be true and brave fighters for the revolution and be drugged at the same time? Shall we turn into a movement of sleepwalkers?…If we come to the revolutionary cause precisely through our sensibility—because our sensibility has been wounded by the savagery, the injustice, the brutality which we have found in present-day society? If we neutralize our sensibility, aren’t we destroying in ourselves the very feelings that have brought us to the revolution?” The narcotized revolutionist may become unscrupulous and cruel and lose sight of the ends that he set out to serve, and the weak man who loves concealment may find it easy, under pressure of terrorism, to betray the underground movement and to keep this betrayal concealed. When young Murica has turned stool pigeon for the Fascists, he begins to be tortured by the notion that, if no one ever finds him out, he will never be punished for his treason, and it is a horror of this idea that good and bad may be mere matters of practical expediency which drives him, in moral protest, to do something that will get him into trouble. For Silone is here grappling with a problem that is one aspect of Malraux’s problem: the justification of a human morality at this moment when the religions are losing their force and man, who now finds himself alone on the earth, has to recognize that it is he who decides what should and what should not be done. The situation of the German Nazis was precisely that of young Murica: why worry about moral principles if you are never to be called to account?—and, unlike Silone’s young student, they could not see that they did have to worry.
Silone, confronting this question, has reverted to the Christian religion in a special non-ecclesiastical form, a version which one may find it easier to sympathize with than the formal and official versions of some of the recent Protestant converts to Catholicism. His point of view is a curious one. He makes one of his characters speak of “the new idea of good and evil” of “those who do not believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus but do believe in his agony,” and he has explained to the present writer that he does not accept what he calls “the mythology of Christianity,” that the liturgical form of his play and the analogies with the Gospel in his novels have come to him, in the most natural way, as a result of having known in his childhood no literature except the Bible and of never, till he was seventeen, having seen any drama except the Mass. Yet certainly the life of Jesus has still for him a mystical meaning, and, in a paper read recently in Rome before the Associazione per il Progresso degli Studi Morali e Religiosi—I quote from the newspaper account—he dissociated his present position from that of the Russian ex-Socialist “God-seekers” after the defeat of the 1905 revolution, but asserted that he belonged among “those of whom St. Bernard speaks, those whom God pursues, and whom, when He overtakes them, He tears to pieces and chews and swallows.” All this does not, however, prevent him from taking a very active part in the work of the Socialist Party as a member of its Central Committee.
Malraux and Silone thus seem to stand today almost alone in Europe as writers of first-rate talent who have continued to take imaginative literature with the utmost seriousness and who have never lost their hold on the social developments, larger and more fundamental, that lie behind national conflicts. They have survived the intellectual starvation, the spiritual panic of the war, and they are among the most valuable forces still alive on their devastated continent. Still they are trying to perform through their writing what Malraux makes one of his characters describe as the function of art: “a rectification of the world…. It seems to me that the cardinal confusion has arisen from our having assumed—in our conception of Greek tragedy it’s striking—that to represent a doom is to suffer it. But that’s not true: rather, it’s almost to possess it. The very power of being able to represent it, to conceive it, allows it to escape from its real fate, from the implacable divine scale; brings it down to the human scale. In what is essential, our art is a humanization of the world.” This is a much humbler point of view than that of the defiant Romantics of the first half of the nineteenth century or of the professional Titans of the second half, but it trusts in human strength and vindicates human pride as the writers of our day have not always done. “The greatest mystery,” says Malraux in another fine passage of his novel, “is not that we should have been thrown up by chance between the profusion of matter and the profusion of the stars, but that, in this prison, we should produce from ourselves images sufficiently powerful to deny our insignificance.”
* Later published in France as Les Noyers d’Altenburg.