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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.