FIRST, LET ME don a penitential sackcloth. Like cowards, reviewers try to kill the thing they love with an apothegm instead of a sword. Thus, commenting some months ago on a collection of essays, I said of Arthur Koestler: “On the twentieth-century grid, he is the ultimate waffle.” How fearlessly inadequate! Macmillan’s reissuings of the Koestler oeuvre in the handsome, uniform Danube Edition constitutes an enormous reproach. I had managed to forget that Koestler had taught my generation what we needed to know about the century that grilled him. On the evidence of his novels, essays, and four volumes of autobiography, he is the West’s preeminent journalist. That he is equally uncomfortable with monogamy and ideology may account for his awe-inspiring vagabondage.
By journalist I mean no slur. If his autobiography lacks the literary elegance of Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs, it is more specific and engrossing; nor does K. wrap himself in the Gaullist sheet of “I Am a Historical Enigma.” If novels like Darkness at Noon (the Purge trials), Thieves in the Night (Palestinian terrorism), and Arrival and Departure (portrait of the revolutionary as a Jung man) are romans à thèse, they are still infinitely to be preferred to a bilious roman à clef like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, which did a disservice to K., Camus, Sartre, and even Nelson Algren. If The Ghost in the Machine and Drinkers of Infinity suggest a lamentable lust on K.’s part for material proofs of his metaphysical raptures, at least he seeks proofs, instead of foaming at the mouth about lapwings and absolutes.
Two of the four autobiographical volumes, Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth, were written immediately after a stint in a Franco prison during the Spanish Civil War and a stint in a French concentration camp two years later. They are timebound. But Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing deal with K.’s first forty years recollected in as much tranquility as such a man will ever permit himself. They add up, as he says, to “a typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in the first half of our century,” one of those refugees for whom a new word had to be coined: “Stepmotherland.” Anger, anomaly, irony, and tragedy abound.
Here is K. as a child in Budapest, precocious and paralyzingly shy; an engineering student in Vienna, torn between political action and contemplative sloth; a twenty-year-old Zionist emigrating to Palestine; a Mideast correspondent for the Ullstein newspaper empire; a science editor turned Communist in Berlin at the moment of Hitler’s ascendancy; the only reporter on a marvelous zeppelin expedition to the North Pole. To be followed by K. traveling in the Soviet Union during the famine years of the early thirties; working in Paris as a propagandist for the Willy Münzenberg apparat; seeking in Spain evidence of German-Italian collaboration with Franco; finding in Spain “the reality of the third order”; renouncing the Party, settling in England, writing his novels, surviving… unlike almost all of his friends, who die throughout these thousand pages at the hands of Hitler or Stalin.
Whether he is brooding about language (he went from writing in Hungarian to German to English, not to mention Hebrew and Russian) or attitudes (“The mystic of the nineteen-thirties yearned, as a sign of Grace, for a look at the Dneiper Dam and a three percent increase in the Soviet pig-iron production”) or justice (“a concept of ethical symmetry, and therefore an essentially natural concept—like the design of a crystal”) or English prisons (“It was nice to know that you were at a place where putting a man to death was still regarded as a solemn and exceptional event”), K. is superb.
His inferiority complex, as Otto Katz told him, may be the size of a cathedral. And, as Orwell said, “The chink in K.’s armor is his hedonism.” But he was always where the action was, always scribbling, usually indignant. If his Cassandralike cries embarrassed his friends, they deserved to be embarrassed. (Just this month a magazine whose brows are not quite high enough to let it see much so wholly misses the point of Whittaker Chambers that Chambers, Koestler, Manès Sperber, Gustav Regler, Victor Serge, and André Gide might just as well have recorded their qualms in Quechua.)
As for that rapture, that “reality of the third order,” it occurred to him while under a sentence of death in a Spanish prison. Its logic begins with Euclid’s demonstration that, in the climb up a numerical series of prime numbers, we shall never discover a “virgin”—the highest prime. Therefore, he concluded, “a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means.” Should one object that such statements refer only to a man-made, not an infinite, scheme, one must still cope with K.’s undignified gallivanting after ESP as an antimaterialist proof. Mysticism: The last refuge of an infirm mind?
No. K. rejects any variety of determinism, and had we lived his life, we would, too. But isn’t it possible to believe in choice without subscribing to the theistic swoon? Freud, a year before he died, granted K. an interview. Freud had never experienced the “oceanic feeling” nor seen the “invisible writing.” Says K.: “I wondered with admiration and compassion, how a man can face his death without it.” I submit, with admiration and compassion for the invaluable K., that we must all of us face our deaths without it, learning somehow to swim through what the existentialists have called a “vertigo of possibility.” We have to take the rap for our own freedom.