Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

“LA CONDITION HUMAINE” by ANDRE MALRAUX  (published in the original French in 1933; published in English in various translations as “Man’s Fate” or “Man’s Estate’”)

 

            Sitting on my shelf is an old French paperback edition of Andre Malraux’s La Condition Humaine. On its back cover is a list of all the French critics telling me that the novel is one of the greatest works of all time. I really must be a peasant because I disagree. I first read the novel years ago when I was a student and I found it hard going, but I assumed it must be an important book because so many people said so. Recently I re-read it and again found it hard-going in places, but this time I saw many flaws in it, not the least being the contorted prose style that Malraux uses so often. I admit that sometimes I resorted to an English translation of the novel, but even in English, Malraux’s ideas were muddled, obscure and sometimes downright foolish. And yet there are passages of greatness. How annoying.

A quick synopsis. La Condition Humaine is set in China in 1927. The downtrodden mass of Chinese workers in Shanghai are ready for revolt. They are exploited, forced to work around the clock in unsanitary conditions, underpaid and living on starvation wages. Chinese Communist groups become their leaders. They manage to organise the proletariat, gather many caches of firearms, and are ready for a major uprising. Victory seems possible. But the Kuomintang (the Nationalist ruling party), with the approval of the European companies that dominate the city’s economy, proceed to crush the uprising. The Kuomintang is lead by Chiang Kai-shek, a seasoned soldier who is in effect a dictator. Chiang Kai-shek has a whole army behind him. Through March and April, the uprising is quelled with brutality. Many thousands of the insurgents are killed in the fighting, many are jailed, tortured by Chiang Kai-shek’s police, and executed. It amounts to a huge massacre.

The novel is told hour-by-our of the unfolding of events. Pages are headed with the times and days. The workers are depicted as heroic but doomed. The most vivid moments in the novel are of such things as the storming and burning down of the Communist headquarters, with much machine-gun firing; the attempts of trapped people to find shelter; the very few moments when small victories seem at hand.

Of course it is a tragedy. But it is also a story of betrayal. Home-grown Chinese were one thing. But the Soviet Comintern, under Stalin’s orders, was another. Some Communists had been accepted into the Kuomintang. Stalin, who had sold munitions to Chiang Kai-shek, wanted Communists to gradually infiltrate the Kuomintang and take it over. That was his long-term strategy and he did not want an uprising – so he sent the word that the insurgents should be disarmed. Many handed over their rifles before the shooting began, so their chances were even bleaker than they could have been. And when the fighting was over, Chiang Kai-shek proceeded to weed out and execute those few Communists who were in the Kuomintang.

But while the novel is about the proletariat’s defeat, nearly all the novel’s main characters are either middle-class Chinese or foreigners. The Chinese workers are anonymous masses. Perhaps Malraux was admitting that he was seeing this true history though occidental eyes.

To prove the point, here are the major characters. There is Kyo who is half-Japanese and has absorbed the Japanese culture of dying heroically. He wants the uprising to be orderly and well-planned. In contrast there is the Chen, who is Chinese. He is a hothead, regarded by other Communists as a “terrorist”. The novel’s famous opening has him murdering a trader who deals in arms [It is done in darkness, like an old film noir.] Once Chen was brought up as a Christian. Now his main aim is to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek. As it happens, both Kyo and Chen finally end up dead in horrible ways. Gisors, who is of mixed race, is Kyo’s father. He has been an academic and a writer, but now he spends much of his time smoking opium and offering, through his opium fumes, philosophic advice. He consorts with both Left and Right, revolutionaries and capitalists. So we have a strategist, a fanatic and a non-committed. Of the Europeans there is Katow , the Russian Communist who follows Stalin’s orders and urges the proletariat to hand over their  rifles. Hemmalrich is a Belgian, on the side of the insurgents and offering a safe place for Communists to gather, but he is as much concerned with protecting the poor woman and her sick son who live upstairs. Konig is Chiang Kai-shek’s sadistic German chief of police. In the later section of the novel, he interrogates and has tortured Communists who have been rounded-up, including long sequences of the horrors of prison. Yet Malraux gives some reason for the way perverse Konig behaves. Konig has fought on the side of the Whites against the Reds in Russia’s long civil war. He had been captured by the Bolsheviks and severely tortured by them. For Konig, Communists are the very devil.

From very early in the novel, Malraux has shown us how decadent were many wealthy Europeans in Shanghai. There were brothels galore (shoddy ones or exclusive ones), perversity of all tastes, whores on every corner, wild parties, massive cash thown away in gambling and casinos … all of which is a true account of rich foreigners in Shanghai in the 1920s. Malraux chooses two Frenchmen to prove the case. Ferral is an entrepreneur, investor  banker and in Shanghai President of the French Chamber of Commerce, always looking to see how the stock-market is going. He is very good at his job and he often consults Gisors. He has style. But when his mistress Valerie jilts him, he takes an elaborate revenge on her - the sort of thing that only a man with more money than sense could do. Much worse is the Baron Clappique who, after having lost badly at gambling, goes on a rampage picking up as many cheap whores as he can.

Speaking of women, Malraux was notorious for having difficulty in depicting women in his novels. His first two novels Les Conquerants and La Voie Royale are bereft of women, the latter of which has a character who rants viciously against women. The author has sometimes been seen as a misogynist. There are women in La Condition Humaine but their roles are minor – the woman with the sick child; Ferral’s mistress Valerie; and Kyo’s wife May who, late in the story, decides to leave him, even if she is seeking to do something heroic.

Though the novel focuses on people other than the toiling workers, it does represent a panorama of believable “types”, even if  there is a tinge of cynicism [or scepticism] in the final chapters. Most of the swine are able to get away from the city’s chaos and go back to their original country, like the Baron Clappique who by devious means stows away on a ship. In a gathering of capitalists in Paris, Ferral is able to expound his ideas on how capital should be spread so that all banks may prosper in China. Mind you, Malraux comes near to admiring Ferral who, after all, is a very competent banker who has built his own company. Malraux admired that sort of  hero…

But if near-misogyny and some cynicism are a real minus in this novel, there is something much worse. Even more than in his second novel La Voie Royale, Malraux unleashes long, redundant, pseudo-philosophic passages, usually presented as the ideas passing through the minds of some of his characters. They are about the inevitability of death [is this the Condition of Man - La Condition Humaine?]; the necessity to be ready for pain and suffering; the need for strength; the importance of “force” and heroes etc. all of which may be important ideas but which are bathed in a vocabulary that is almost impenetrable .  The English-language crib I resorted to contained at the end an “Appreciation” by the critic David Price-Jones. He criticised Malraux’s vocabulary here noting that  “one of the more lasting French literary traditions is a metaphysics  of grandeur based primarily on the writer’s style” He was right. In these pseudo-philosophic passages, Malraux says thing that could be said more concisely, more honestly, more readable than his messing with redundant overblown style.

Is La Condition Humaine really a classic? Apart from the moments of intellectual verbal soup and shallow ideas of Nietzschian power, it does have much going for it - the vivid episodes of the uprising and its being strangled; the intense discussions about strategies among the Communists; the decadence of the wealthy and their opportunism. But there falls the reality that this is a story from a century ago, and much of it reads as a period book. Though mainly reporting accurately about China, that was then and this is now. The Second World War, the invasion by Japan that had to be fought, the take-over by Mao Tsi-Tung and the massive famines he brought, the purely destructive “Red Guards” in the 1960s and finally [so far] under the name of still being Communist, China became basically a capitalist marketing state – even if it is still ruled by one totalitarian system. And amazingly, when Communist China for years had reviled Chiang Kai-shek as a monster and slayer of the workers, in Communist China he has recently been rehabilitated as a great soldier and brave fighter against the Japanese invasion. [Or is this a ruse to satisfy those in Taiwan – which Communist China wants to take-over?]