Comrades' Fate

DAYS OF WRATH -- Andre Malraux -- Random House ($1.75). New authors, like clouds no bigger than a man's hand, appear frequently on the literary horizon, and never lack for meteorologists to predict their growth into the greatest storm yet seen. Andre Malraux is such a cloud. Before he swam into U. S. ken, transatlantic reports from his native France indicated that his thunder & lightning had awed many a seasoned observer there, and that the hailstones he had begun to pour down were of a majestic size and aspect unparalleled. When his Man's Fate (TIME, June 25, 1934) reached the U. S., readers felt that they had indeed been caught in a storm. Few enjoyed the experience but most admitted that the storm was of No. 1 velocity and power. Malraux's third translated book. The Royal Way (TIME, Feb. 18, 1935), seemed a regression, was in fact written earlier. Days of Wrath is a short book, hardly longer than a short story: even with an author's foreword and a fearsome introduction by Waldo Frank, it runs to only 184 pages. But readers who were not frightened by Waldo Frank's imitation thunder might have gathered that in Malraux's stormy tale they would feel more than met the eye. Like Malraux's other books, Days of Wrath is a fable; its story is topical but it carries implications as wide as the modern world.

Hero of the tale is Kassner, a Communist intellectual, an important party organizer, who has just been arrested by the Nazis. He has false identification papers, and luckily does not much resemble the photograph of himself his captors compare him with. But they suspect him of being Kassner, and he knows if he admits his identity he will be killed. Be cause they are not perfectly sure who he is, the Nazis at the concentration camp do not kill him out of hand but shut him up in solitary confinement. Now & then S. A. guards come into his cell and beat him unconscious. In the pitch darkness he loses track of the days, worries about whether his wife in Prague is still alive, about whether he will go mad and betray himself, his comrades. In the darkness, he makes speeches, imagines music. After a while he feels the risk of insanity too near, decides to kill himself. But his finger nails are not yet sharp enough to open a vein; he tries to sharpen them on the wall, then sees he will have to let them grow a little longer. Finally he hears a tapping on the wall, makes out the fragment of a message: TAKE COURAGE ONE CAN ... The message is interrupted by the muffled noises of guards beating someone; there are no more taps. With no explanation, Kassner is suddenly released, after what seemed a lifetime but turns out to have been only nine days. He gathers that some nameless comrade has given himself up as Kassner, has doubtless already been beaten to death or shot. Given 48 hours to leave Germany, Kassner has one chance of getting safely away: a rickety plane piloted by a fellow-Communist. Though the weather is so stormy that all passenger planes are grounded, they take off. beat through a blinding storm to Prague. There Kassner sees once more his wife and child, gets a breathing space before going back to his Party's work in Germany and his own inevitable death.

Days of Wrath, with Poet Robert Frost's A Further Range (to be reviewed next week), is the Book-of-the-Month Club choice for June.

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