Man's Fate

383 Pages·1984·7.39 MB·English

by  Andre Malraux

MAN'S FATE

(LA CONDITION HUMAINE)

FATE

,
ANDRE MALRAUX

TRANSLATED BY HAAKON M. CHEVALIER

WITH A FOREWORD BY JOHN LEONARD

AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY MADELINE SOREL

RANDOM HOUSE, NEW YORK

frontiJpiece: Kyo GiJOf'J

Copyright I 934 by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc.
Copyright renewed, 1961, by Random House, Inc.
Foreword copyright © l 984 by John Leonard
Illustrations copyright © l 984 by Madeline Sorel
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Malraux, Andre, 1901-1976.
Man's fate= La condition humaine.
I. China-Hisrory-1912-1937-Ficcion.
I. Title.

PQ2625.A716C53
1984
843'.912
84-17944
ISBN 0-394-54379-3

Manufactured in the United Stares of America

For Eddy du Perron

PART ONE

CONTENTS

Principal Characters
ix
Foreword by John Leonard
x1

MARCH 2 l, l 9 2 7
Twelve-thirty midnight
3

PART TWO

Four o'clock in the morning
55
Half past four in the morning
70

MARCH 2 2
Eleven o'clock in the morning
79

One o'clock in the afternoon
91

Five o'clock in the afternoon
109

The next day, four o'clock in the
afternoon
125

PART THREE

MARCH 29
137

PART FOUR

APRIL l l
Twelve-thirty noon
167

One o'clock in the afternoon
172
Three o'clock in the afternoon
195
Three-thirty in the afternoon
2 l 3
Six o'clock in the evening
219
Half past ten at night
243

PAR_T FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

Quarter past eleven at night
249
Half past eleven at night
261
Midnight
265
Half past one in the morning
271
Five o'clock in the morning
284

Ten o'clock in the morning
295
Four o'clock in the afternoon
307

Six o'clock in the evening
313
The next day
328

PARIS, JULY
335

KOBE
350

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MADELINE SOREL

Frontispiece
Kyo Gisors
11

Part One
May Gisors
l

Part Two
Katov
77
Part Three
Ch'en TaErh
135

Part Four
Ferr al
165

Part Five
Baron de Clappique
247
Part Six
Hemme/rich
293
Part Seven
Old Gisors
333

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

CH'EN TA ERH
a Chinese terrorist

KYO GISORS
half French and half
Japanese, one of the
organizers of the
Shanghai insurrection

OLD GISORS
Kyo's father, one-time
Professor of Sociology at the

University of Peking

MAY GISORS
Kyo's wife

KATOV

a Russian, one of the organizers
of the insurrection

HEMMELRICH
a German,

a phonograph-dealer

LU YU HSU AN
his partner

BARON DE CLAPPIQUE

a Frenchman, a dealer in antiques,
opium and smuggled wares

KAMA
a Japanese painter, old Gisors'
brother-in-law

FERRAL
President of the French Chamber

of Commerce and head of the
Franco-Asiatic Consortium

VALl~RIE

Ferral's mistress

MARTIAL

Chief of the Shanghai Police

KONIG
Chief of Chiang Kai-shek's Police

VOLOGIN & POSSOZ
Communist officials at Hankow

PEI&SUAN

young Chinese terrorists

FOREWORD

by] ohn Leonard

ANDRE MALRAUX chose not to level with us about himself
in his various autobiographies. "The importance of the self is in
decline," he says. He juggles time. He free-associates im-
plausibly. Where he might be expected to clear up a few nag-
ging questions of fact, he quotes from his fiction. Instead of the
intimate, we get the oracular. Not a word on Clara, his first
wife, who made such fun of his legend in her memoirs. His sons
died before him; and so did their mother Josette; and his grand-
father split his own skull with a double-edged ax; and his father
was a suicide; and Malraux, looking back, averts his eyes and
purses his lips. Even the rainbow arc of his long career-from
swashbuckler to bureaucrat, from the red flag to the Cross of
Lorraine-seems mystifying and mirage-like. It happened; but
why? He explains every metamorphosis but Malraux's. Strange,
since he was his own best character.
Imagine the only child, one year younger than his century,
green-eyed, hawk-nosed, floppy-haired, with a nervous tic. And
the seventeen-year-old lycee dropout, gorging himself on Dos-
toyevsky, Nietzsche and Spengler. And the twenty-year-old
chain-smoking pistol-packing Paris dandy, with moleskin
gloves and a cape like Baudelaire's. And the twenty-two-year-
old bankrupt Hotspur who could, said Braque, "smell good
painting with both his nostrils," and who would, with Clara,

Xl

decamp to Southeast Asia, the first of his Dickensian blacking
factories. In Cambodia, in 1923, he would steal bas-reliefs
from a Khmer temple, and stand trial in Phnom Penh. In Sai-
gon, in 1924, he would edit an anti-colonial newspaper, until
the French authorities shut him down. In between, he may
have helped organize the Young Annam League, precursor of
the Viet Minh, but he did not, this time around, meet Mao or
Chou or the Comintern agent Borodin, no matter what he
would like us to believe. The closest he came to the Chinese
revolution was Hong Kong, in 1925, during a general strike.
If, in the novels, his characters wave their ideas like flags, in
the life of the novelist those ideas were handkerchiefs and
hummingbirds. The young novelist was, ah, vivid. At age thirty-
two he was ready to dazzle Europe with his masterpiece. Man's
Fate would win the Prix Goncourt and be translated into thirty-
five languages. Some fifty years later, it is in better shape than
the civilization whose decline it prophesied.

II

No one can endure his own solitude. Whether it is through
love, fantasy, gambling, power, revolt, heroism, comradeship,
opium, contemplation or sex, it is against this fundamental
angst that consciously or not, the characters of this novel
-communists, fascists, terrorists, adventurers, police chiefs,
junkies, artists and the women with whom they are involved-
are def ending themselves, engaged as they are to the point of
torture and suicide in the Chinese Revolution, upon which for
some years the destiny of the Asian world and perhaps the
West depended.

xn

The words were Malraux's, in effect his jacket copy, written
for an advertisement in N ouvelte revue franfaise, the magazine
in which Man's Fate was serialized in 1933. They convey, effi-
ciently, some information. They leave out all the art and most
of the political daring. With Man's Fate, ideology came of age
in Western fiction-the revolution left the drawing-rooms of
The Princess Cassamassima and Under Western Eyes, for the
streets; the masses entered history-and the images were of
water and light moving through broken time.
It was as if in earlier books he had been practicing, and
concluded that the test of self, however heroic, was ultimately
parochial. In The Temptation of the West a young European
and a young Oriental, traveling in opposite directions, ex-
change tiresome metaphysical progress reports; there is no ac-
tion; history, like Asian art, is somehow "immobile." In The
Conquerors, Garine isn't really a revolutionary; he seeks in-
stead to steal the sex of somebody else's politics; because power
itself is his aphrodisiac he might just as well have sided in
Canton with the British. In The Royal Way, Becke's ambition is
no more complicated, and no less fierce, than to put "a scar on
the map," any scar on any map; he will achieve his peculiar
manhood by living through to the end of torture.

Such febrile, chatty, solipsistic sensibilities! No wonder Trot-
sky complained, on reviewing The Conquerors, of Malraux's
"excess of individualism" and "aesthetic caprice," of his "blase
superiority, seeming to excuse himself for his transient contact
with the insurrection of the Chinese people, as much perhaps to
himself as to the academic mandarins in France and the
traffickers in spiritual opium."

To which Malraux replied with his new novel of collective

xnt

immersion, Man's Fate. Its time is April, 1927. Its place is
Shanghai, in a China of warlords and foreign concessions.
Against these local and imperialist bandits stands the Kuomin-
tang, the National People's Party, divided since the death of
Sun Y at-sen into the predominant "blues," led by Chiang Kai-
shek, and the minority "reds," who will follow Mao Tse-tung
on his Long March seven years later. In April, 1927, blues
and reds arise to seize their captive nation-after which
Chiang cuts a deal with the French and the British and his own
merchant class; and the reds, on bad advice from Moscow,
allow themselves to be slaughtered. Those who die include the
leftwing workers of Shanghai and the intellectuals who or-
ganized their revolt, half knowing that the cause was doomed.
These intellectuals are Malraux's characters. Most of them
are not Chinese. Kyo, the humanist, is half-Japanese, half-
French. May, his doctor-wife, is German. Katov, the profes-
sional revolutionary, is Russian. Hemmelrich is Belgian.
Among the principals only the terrorist Ch' en is Chinese, and
even Ch' en is at least half a creature of American Calvinism.
The opposition of Asia and the West is also, psychologically, a
pair. (Or, if you will, a dialectic.) Within this historical opposi-
tion are divided selves, internal contradictions of personality,
public and private roles of husband, father, lover, teacher,
lurching forward into the event, falling back to compunctions,
through shadows of all the big and messy isms, tethered as they
swing, moons in orbit.
Like all Malraux characters, they talk a lot, and often bril-
liantly, of sex, money, work, fear, pity, shame, grace, Marx,
farm credits, Christ, railroads, Buddha, machine-guns. But they
are not chatty. Their talk is a kind of isometrics, an articulation

XIV