Men's Fate

After the dazed world had stared a while at the rubble heap that had lately been France, people began to wonder what victims were in the ruins. They wondered first about trapped U. S. citizens, trapped British subjects, French politicians, generals, diplomats, finally got around to wondering about French writers. In particular, they wondered what had become of Aviator-Novelists Andre Malraux, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Surrealist Novelist Louis Aragon, Dadaist Cut-up Jean Cocteau. Thanks to the human dislocation, the censorship, the splitting of France into occupied and unoccupied areas, it was almost impossible to find out.

Last week TIME learned these facts about these writers:

> Andre Malraux (Man's Fate), who served with a French tank division, was wounded on June 16, 1940, later captured. He managed to escape from a Nazi prison camp, found himself in occupied France, for some time was unable to get out. Now Novelist Malraux is living at Hyeres on the Riviera, writing "the most important novel of my career."

> Jean Cocteau (Enfants Terribles, Le Boeuf sur le Toit), who early in World War II considered it the duty of a writer "to make himself . . . into the form of a zero and to pass that ring over the finger of France," was still pretty much a zero.

He was reported to be in Paris, but there were no details.

> Antoine de Saint Exupery (Night Flight; Wind, Sand and Stars), a squadron commander in the French Air Force, made photographic reconnaissance flights over the German lines. Once he was almost shot down by the Nazis, barely got his plane back safely. After France fell, Saint Exupery was decorated. Last week he landed in Manhattan from the steamer Siboney out of Lisbon. In his suitcase was a brand-new manuscript.

> Louis Aragon (Bells of Basel), like Andre Malraux, served in a tank division. His corps was cut off in, Flanders, surrounded. From the beach at Dunkirk, Aragon escaped to England. Two days later he somehow made his way back to France, to the troops still fighting on the Seine and the Loire. Day before the armistice, the Nazis captured him, put him in a prison camp. Like Malraux, he escaped (with 30 others). His hair turned white. Now living at the village of Varetz, south of Limoges, in unoccupied France, Aragon is writing poetry, a novel (non-political). Aragon wrote a novel just before the war started, called it Les Voyageurs de l'Imperiale (l'Imperiale is the name for the top deck of a pre-World War I French double-decker omnibus). Late this spring his book will be published in the U. S. Tentative title: The Century Was Young.

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