For here if anywhere in contemporary literature is a major effort to counterbalance Existentialism and restore some of its former lustre to the tarnished image of the species Man, or, as Malraux himself puts it, "to make men conscious of the grandeur they ignore in themselves".

1,
Andre Malraux's The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg was written in the early years of the second World War, during a period of enforced leisure when he was taken prisoner by the Germans after the fall of France.
The manuscript, presumably after being smuggled out of the country, was published in Switzerland in 1943.
The work as it stands is not the entire book that Malraux wrote at that time -- it is only the first section of a three-part novel called La Lutte avec l'Ange;
and this first section was somehow preserved (there are always these annoying little mysteries about the actual facts of Malraux's life) when the Gestapo destroyed the rest.
If we are to believe the list of titles printed in Malraux's latest book, La Metamorphose Des Dieux, Vol. 1 (( 1957), he is still engaged in writing a large novel under his original title.
But as he remarks in his preface to The Walnut Trees, "a novel can hardly ever be rewritten", and "when this one appears in its final form, the form of the first part will no doubt be radically changed".
Malraux pretends, perhaps with a trifle too self-conscious a modesty, that his fragmentary work will accordingly "appeal only to the curiosity of bibliophiles" and "to connoisseurs of what might have been".
Even in its present form, however, the first part of Malraux's unrecoverable novel is among the greatest works of mid-twentieth century literature;
and it should be far better known than it is.

The theme of The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg is most closely related to its immediate predecessor in Malraux's array of novels: Man's Hope (1937).
This magnificent but greatly underestimated book, which bodies forth the very form and pressure of its time as no other comparable creation, has suffered severely from having been written about an historical event -- the Spanish Civil War -- that is still capable of fanning the smoldering fires of old political feuds.
Even so apparently impartial a critic as W. H. Frohock has taken for granted that the book was originally intended as a piece of Loyalist propaganda;
and has then gone on to argue, with unimpeachable consistency, that all the obviously non-propagandistic aspects of the book are simply inadvertent "contradictions".

Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth.
The whole purpose of Man's Hope is to portray the tragic dialectic between means and ends inherent in all organized political violence -- and even when such violence is a necessary and legitimate self-defense of liberty, justice and human dignity.
Nowhere before in Malraux's pages have we met such impassioned defenders of a "quality of man" which transcends the realm of politics and even the realm of action altogether -- both the action of Malraux's early anarchist-adventurers like Perken and Garine, and the self-sacrificing action of dedicated Communists like Kyo Gisors and Katow in Man's Fate.
"Man engages only a small part of himself in an action" says old Alvear the art-historian;
"and the more the action claims to be total, the smaller is the part of man engaged".
These lines never cease to haunt the book amidst all the exaltations of combat, and to make an appeal for a larger and more elemental human community than one based on the brutal necessities of war.

It is this larger theme of the "quality of man", a quality that transcends the ideological and flows into "the human", which now forms the pulsating heart of Malraux's artistic universe.
Malraux, to be sure, does not abandon the world of violence, combat and sudden death which has become his hallmark as a creative artist, and which is the only world, apparently, in which his imagination can flame into life.
The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg includes not one war but two, and throws in a Turkish revolution along with some guerrilla fighting in the desert for good measure.
But while war still serves as a catalyst for the values that Malraux wishes to express, these values are no longer linked with the triumph or defeat of any cause -- whether that of an individual assertion of the will-to-power, or a collective attempt to escape from the humiliation of oppression -- as their necessary condition.
On the contrary, the frenzy and furor of combat is only the sombre foil against which the sudden illuminations of the human flash forth with the piercing radiance of a Caravaggio.

2,
The Walnut Trees Of Altenburg is composed in the form of a triptych, with the two small side panels framing and enclosing the main central episode of the novel.
This central episode consists of a series of staccato scenes set in the period from the beginning of the present century up to the first World War.
The framing scenes, on the other hand, both take place in the late Spring of 1940, just at the moment of the defeat of France in the second great world conflict.
The narrator is an Alsatian serving with the French Army, and he has the same name (Berger) that Malraux himself was later to use in the Resistance;
like Malraux he was also serving in the tank corps before being captured, and we learn as well that in civilian life he had been a writer.
These biographical analogies are obvious, and far too much time has been spent speculating on their possible implications.

Much more important is to grasp the feelings of the narrator (whose full name is never given) as he becomes aware of the disorganized and bewildered mass of French prisoners clustered together in a temporary prison camp in and around the cathedral of Chartres.
For as his companions gradually dissolve back into a state of primitive confrontation with elemental necessity, as they lose all the appanage of their acquired culture, he is overcome by the feeling that he is at last being confronted with the essence of mankind.
"As a writer, by what have I been obsessed these last ten years, if not by mankind?
Here I am face to face with the primeval stuff".

The intuition about mankind conveyed in these opening pages is of crucial importance for understanding the remainder of the text;
and we must attend to it more closely than has usually been done.
What does the narrator see and what does he feel?
A good many pages of the first section are taken up with an account of the dogged determination of the prisoners to write to their wives and families -- even when it becomes clear that the Germans are simply allowing the letters to blow away in the wind.
Awkwardly and laboriously, in stiff, unemotional phrases, the soldiers continue to bridge the distance between themselves and those they love;
they instinctively struggle to keep open a road to the future in their hearts.
And by a skillful and unobtrusive use of imagery (the enclosure is called a "Roman-camp stockade", the hastily erected lean-to is a "Babylonian hovel", the men begin to look like "Peruvian mummies" and to acquire "Gothic faces"), Malraux projects a fresco of human endurance -- which is also the endurance of the human -- stretching backward into the dark abyss of time.
The narrator feels himself catching a glimpse of pre-history, learning of man's "age-old familiarity with misfortune", as well as his "equally age-old ingenuity, his secret faith in endurance, however crammed with catastrophes, the same faith perhaps as the cave-men used to have in the face of famine".

This new vision of man that the narrator acquires is also accompanied by a re-vision of his previous view.
"I thought I knew more than my education had taught me," notes the narrator, "because I had encountered the militant mobs of a political or religious faith".
Is this not Malraux himself alluding to his own earlier infatuation with the ideological?
But now he knows "that an intellectual is not only a man to whom books are necessary, he is any man whose reasoning, however elementary it may be, affects and directs his life".
From this point of view the "militant mobs" of the past, stirred into action by one ideology or another, were all composed of "intellectuals" -- and this is not the level on which the essence of mankind can be discovered.
The men around him, observes the narrator, "have been living from day to day for thousands of years".
The human is deeper than a mass ideology, certainly deeper than the isolated individual;
and the narrator recalls the words of his father, Vincent Berger: "It is not by any amount of scratching at the individual that one finally comes down to mankind".

The entire middle section of The Walnut Trees is taken up with the life of Vincent Berger himself, whose fragmentary notes on his "encounters with mankind" are now conveyed by his son.
"He was not much older than myself," writes the narrator, "when he began to feel the impact of that human mystery which now obsesses me, and which makes me begin, perhaps, to understand him".
For the figure of Vincent Berger Malraux has obviously drawn on his studies of T. E. Lawrence (though Berger fights on the side of the Turks instead of against them), and like both Lawrence and Malraux himself he is a fervent admirer of Nietzsche.
A professor at the University of Constantinople, where his first course of lectures was on Nietzsche and the "philosophy of action", Vincent Berger becomes head of the propaganda department of the German Embassy in Turkey.
As an Alsatian before the first World War he was of course of German nationality;
but he quickly involves himself in the Young Turk revolutionary movement to such an extent that his own country begins to doubt his patriotism.
And, after becoming the right-hand man of Enver Pasha, he is sent by the latter to pave the way for a new Turkish Empire embracing "the union of all Turks throughout Central Asia from Adrianople to the Chinese oases on the Silk Trade Route".

Vincent Berger's mission is a failure because the Ottoman nationalism on which Enver Pasha counted does not exist.
Central Asia is sunk in a somnolence from which nothing can awaken it;
and amid a dusty desolation in which nothing human any longer seemed to survive, Vincent Berger begins to dream of the Occident.
"Oh, for the green of Europe!
Trains whistling in the night, the rattle and clatter of cabs."
Finally, after almost being beaten to death by a madman -- he could not fight back because madmen are sacred to Islam -- he throws up his mission and returns to Europe.
This has been his first encounter with mankind, and, although he has now become a legendary figure in the popular European press, it leaves him profoundly dissatisfied.
Despite Berger's report, Enver Pasha refuses to surrender his dream of a Turkish Blood Alliance;
and Vincent Berger learns that political ambition is more apt to hide than to reveal the truth about men.
But as he discovers shortly, on returning among intellectuals obsessed by le culte du moi, his experience of action had also taught him a more positive lesson.
"For six years my father had had to do too much commanding and convincing," writes the narrator, "not to understand that man begins with 'the other'".

And when Vincent Berger returns to Europe, this first result of his encounters with mankind is considerably enriched and deepened by a crucial revelation.
For a dawning sense of illumination occurs in consequence of two events which, as so often in Malraux, suddenly confront a character with the existential question of the nature and value of human life.
One such event is the landing in Europe itself, when the mingled familiarity and strangeness of the Occident, after the blank immensities of Asia, shocks the returning traveller into a realization of the infinite possibilities of human life.