Finding the Center

...The remaining six chapters of Part II, written entirely by Cynthia Koestler, cover the period 1951-56 Thus, this volume is largely hers Cynthia Koestler was born in Pretoria in 1921 When she was 22, and living with her mother in Paris, she answered an ad in the Herald Tribune for a part-tune secretary, and thus came to work for Arthur Koestler She seems to have fallen In love with him almost immediately For the next six years she worked for Koestler on and off in France, England, and the United States In 1955 she became his permanent secretary, and in 1965 they were married To say that Cynthia Koestler was devoted to her husband would be an understatement Indeed, her selfeffacement is so extreme that it occasionally becomes off-putting Here is an example In Pans, In the middle of the night, I woke up to find Arthur wandering around lost m the hotel room, calhng the name of an old girlfriend I led hem back to bed, where he muttered to himself in French for a while I had often wondered whether he knew who was beside him at night, for sometimes an arm reached over to feel or he turned his head in the semi-darkness, as ff he wasn't sure I vaguely pondered the mystery Perhaps I should have felt jealous, but I only felt lucky to be shanng his hfe Such declarations of unconditional loyalty, repeated throughout the book, Incline one to think that the lady protesteth too much Yet given her manner of death, there can be no doubting her dedication and her love By all accounts, Koestler loved her in his own way in return Though Stranger on the Square ~s not nearly in the same league as Arrow m the Blue or The Invisible Writing, the second volume of Koestler's autobiography, it contmns much mterestmg information To begin with, there is the portrait of Koestler's life in postwar France It is often forgotten that in the aftermath of the Second World War, the French Communist party emerged as the strongest pohttcal force in the country It dominated the trade unions and the media, and the resistance groups tt controlled carried out a ruthless purge Yet it was at precisely this moment that Darkness at Noon9 P 9 Koestler's great expose of Stahnlsm, was published in French as Le Zero et l'Infimt~ Despite Communist attempts to suppress it, the book enjoyed a sensatlonal success, selling over a quarter of a mllhon copies Some have claimed that the novel played a major role in preventing France from going Communist Unable to suppress Koestler's book, the Communist and fellow-traveling press launched a vicious campaign of defamation against Koestler himself For example, the official party organ, LHumamte, printed a map o f Koestler's village, Fontaine-le-Port, with an arrow pointing at his home, explaining "This is the headquarters of the cold war This is where Chip Bohlen, the American Ambassador, trams his para-milttary Fascist mlhtm " The future Mrs Koestler, however, seems not to have been very pohtlcally minded, and was bhssfully unaware of the controversy surrounding her new employer when she became his temporary secretary She was therefore not alarmed when a "Rumanlan friend" of hers inquired whether Koestler carried a gun When she answered that he did not, the friend was surprised, and wanted to know whether an electric fence surrounded Koestler's house There was no fence, she replied, and the front gates were always open "But I did notice that when I came into his study after lunch to wake him from his short siesta, he always awoke with a start " Fortunately, the young Rumanian had nothing in common with the young Spaniard who befriended Trotsky's secretary, penetrated his Mexican 35...

...Then, continmng portentously, he Coast piece, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," suggests that by now he may be having his passport stamped only in order to confirm unpleasant certmntles Books like The Return of Eva Perdn and Among the Behevers The artist's only service to the dlsmtegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of h~s own 1 foresee m the dark age opemng that the scribes may play the part of the monks after the first barbarian victories They were not satirists From the perspective of 1984, who can doubt that this was just another of [] Waugh's outrageous ironies 9 At the tune of his conversion, Waugh objected to the type of modern sophisticated religion that hesitates to commit itself to any definite beliefs "If added its own mind is not made up," he reasoned, "It can hardly hope to withstand disorder from outside...

...She had asked people from Ghana, now in chaos "You were rich the other day Now you are poor and your country is in a mess Doesn't this worry you~" And they had said, "Yesterday we were all right Today we are poor That's the way It is Tomorrow we may be all right again Or we may not That's the way it is " That was the way ~t was m the upper world The tuner world, the other world, continued whole And that was what mattered Nalpaul seems to have forgotten his own observation about Mobutu's Congolese bureaucrats, made in 1975 "This, for all their talk of authenticity and the ways of the ancestors, was their fear to be returned from the sweet corruptions of KInshasa to the older corruption of the bush, to be returned to Africa " The "night world" certainly didn't explain everything there and then In fact, Nalpaul scorned the way "Mobutlsm simplifies the world " But now he seems as open-mouthed and eager for simplification as Candlde I asked, "When does the world of the night begin 9'' Mr Nmngoran-Bouah said slowly and seriously, "As soon as the sun goes down " (Ask a stupid question ) Mr Joseph ShattantsPohcyandPrograms Nlangoran-Bouah is a teacher of Officer at the State Department's Drummologle at the umversity, the In- Bureau of Human Rights THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 ventor of his own d~sciphne and title His "cause" is proving that "true knowledge of the talking drum gave to Africa the old civilization which Europeans and colomahsts said didn't exist " Upon meeting him the reader is prepared for Mr Nmngoran-Bouah to be treated as a famlhar sort of academic charlatan But as his talk of the night world IS taken m by Nalpaul, satisfying the need for slmphficatlon, he gains an expedient stature "It was impresswe," Naipaul writes "I began to understand the richness of the material he had made his subject, and his passmn to present this materml adequately to Africans and the world " It is a bad sign when a writer assures readers of his good will, and that is what Naipaul seems to be doing here that his book had been misunderstood by some when it first appeared It wasn't a "gratuitous" wallow in "moral squalor" but a "perfectly genuine piece of work" whose ironies were intended to convey both scorn and pity Read The Secret Agent again and write me if you believe hun I never have No amount of protest can undo the extent to which the text behes the introduction Nalpaul's remarks about writing more in wonder than m anger are similarly undone by the rest of his text His credible dlsbehef has often been a bracing antidote to the unselfconfident West's sentimentalities about the developing world But he may have reached a point when it IS time for him to become skeptical of h~s own scorn, to make sure he has not become Indolently imprisoned by his own dlsIn a preface to The Secret Agent9 damful VlSmn Otherwise a severe, career-long polemic may turn into a [] Conrad--to whom Nmpaul has been, with some justice, compared--resisted STRANGER ON THE SQUARE Arthur and Cynttua Koestler/Random House/S16 95 Joseph Shattan ( I t seems to me that I have been more or less free of the fear of death-though not of the fear of the act of dying, with its painful and degrading pamphernaha As I grow older, this latter fear increases, hke the apprehensmn of a painful operation to which one submits only reluctantly--though one knows that it is for one's good " So wrote Arthur Koestler in the first volume of his autobiography, Arrow m the Blue, published m 1952 l On March 3, 1983 the bodies of Koestler and his wife Cynthia were found in the sitting room of their London home Each had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates Koestler was 77 years old, and, as he explained in his suicide note, had been suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemm His wife was 55, and m perfect health Her reason for taking her own life was also contained in the suicide note "I cannot live without Arthur," she wrote, "despite certain inner resources " The manuscript of Stranger on the Square was found among the papers on 'Stem and Day, $19 95/$12 95 paper toothless party piece Koestler's desk It is divided into two parts Part I covers the years 1940-1951, and consists of six chapters, alternately written by Koestler and his wife...

...It was his judgment on the Western world as well This IS why he disclaimed the title of satirist in 1946 arguing that satire is not possible in an unstable society that does not subscribe to "homogenous moral standards " The satirist "seeks to produce shame" and this he thought have earned him the title "the scourge of the Third World" (Newsweek, November 16, 1981), and in this one he does his self-conscious best to hve up to it He says he went to the Ivory Coast because it was supposed to be a political and economic exception to "the mess o f black Africa " But on the same page on which he makes this apFINDING THE CENTER V S Naipaul/Alfred A Knopf/$13 95 Thomas Mallon parently sincere wish to be proved wrong, he sighs that the Frenchness he was hoping to see in the capital city of Abldjan was nowhere to be found "Instead of boulevards there was the African hubbub of 'popular' African areas " It is one thing, and a good one, to mock the spurious "Africantzatlon" of places like Mobutu's Congo, but Nalpaul has been doing it for so long now that he winds up, almost by reflex, whistling some fussy little anthems to colonialism He spends much of his stay in the Nmpaul wrote newspaper articles reveahng that natwe farmers of Hindu origin had defied government regulations for combating cattle diseases and had been subsUtutmg ancaent rites of the goddess Kah to drwe away the illness attacking their V S Naipaurs eighteenth book joins evitably toward fatuity and obvious- grandiose Ivory Coast transformation fixated on the of president's his native ness "To write was to learn Beginning a slender piece of autobiography with village of Yamoussoukro, which ina book, I always felt I was in posses- a rather sketchy account of a visit the cludes the importation of man-eating sion of all the facts about myself, at the writer made to the Ivory Coast a cou- crocodiles which each afternoon are end I was always surprised ") ple of years ago Less a book than t~vo flung a hve chicken in front of observNew Yorker articles being marketed as Naipaul recounts the humiliation his ing tourists Nalpaul devotes a lot of father, himself an exile (an Indian in his tune to finding out what tins bizarre the Caribbean), suffered during his portray Naipaurs early efforts at arrangement designed by an apparently writing side by side with an example of career as a reporter for the 7~mtdad benign president--Houphouet-Boigny his mature subject matter and method Guardian As the New York HemM is no Mobutu--means "The symTribune reported on June 24, 1933, the But whatever string attaches one to the bohsm remained elusive, worrying " In elder other remains banally slack "However finding It all so sinister, so evocatfve of creatively one travels, however deep an the brutal and phony authenticity he experience in childhood or middle age, hoped to see the Ivory Coast avoiding, it takes thought (a sifting of impulses, Nmpaul shows himself too eager to ideas, and references that become more have his worst fears validated His conmultifarious as one grows older) to centratIon on the metaphorical understand what one has lived through crocodiles IS as deliberate as the placehvestock or where one has been " ment of the crocoddes themselves For The writer was told he would develop "Prologue to an Autobiography" a man who goes to discover an exceppolsomng tomorrow, die on Sunday, and be tion, he spends rather a lot of time beburied on Monday unless he offered a goat mg enthralled by the rule sacrlfiC~ Today he yielded to the entreaty of friends and relatwes and made the demanded sacnfic~ such, Fmdmg the Center attempts to places Naipaul in a BBC "freelances' room" three decades ago Having gone to Oxford on a Trinidad government scholarship, he is squeezing out a living with the Corporation's Caribbean Service and discovering (not so surprisIngly) that the colonial world he made strenuous efforts to leave is in fact his richest imaginative capital "To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave Actually to write, it was necessary to go back I t was the beginning o f selfknowledge " (One thing good writers should never write about is their own writing No subject leads them more inNot long after this, he suffered a breakdown and became a kind of wanderer No figure in life or books, from Mr Ramsay to Willy Loman, is more poignant than the ineffectual father, and here, surely, is one of the family wounds that has kept the younger Naipaurs bow trained on whatever mumbo jumbo he hears the Third World mouthing against the First The "subsidiary gift" he thanks his father for is a continuing "fear of Thomas Mallon teaches Enghsh at extinction " Vassar College His new book, A Book of One's Own People and Their Diaries, has just been pubhshed by Nalpaul says he travels "to discover other states of mind," but the Ivory Ttcknor & Fields When he began to travel over twenty years ago, Nalpaul says, he had "no views or opinions, no system " But by now the "gambler's excitement" of his early journeying seems to have been lulled into Inattention by the song of his own grinding axes When a European he meets m Abldjan tells him that Africa is still really ruled by magic, and that all else depends on the Europeans, Nalpaul assures us that this man "was not concerned to score points off Afrlca"--a rather odd assurance to be caught making, one might say, perhaps the betrayal of Nalpaul's own desire to bring home bad news The reporting in this piece lacks diligence and surprise The native waiter trying to act French THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1985 drops a plate, Nmpaul's guide rattles on about the powers offdtwheur~ a local chief is made to look as ridiculous as, well, a First World pol "He gestured with this moneyed hand while he talked From Ume to time, when he opened his legs, to pat his cloth down between his legs, he showed his darkblue shorts " There are zealous attempts to make nearly everything foohsh or simster The chmrs m the lobby of the Hotel President are upholstered "in wrulent blue and green, not restful " Nalpaul applies his inductive whip with such constancy that one loses faith in the nasty details being cowed into the big unsavory p~cture He is so determined to shine a hght into a heart of darkness that he fails to notice that he ~s sometimes just wading around the edge of a muddle What he finds "at the bottom of ~t all" is magic Evil sprats, good magic, sorcery, bad magic, magic mLxed up with Chrlstmn evangelism--all of it coming from a continent that mutates every twelve hours between the world o f day and the world of mght During the mght, distance folds upon Itself and values dissolve into the cosmos Arlette, a woman who works at the umverstty, tells Nmpanl that the two worlds are two ideas of reality that made Africans so apparently indifferent to their material circumstances Men of wealth and potation could return easily to their villages at the weekend, could easily resume the hut life, could welcome that life...

...how fundamental that is Once granted the first step, I can see that everything else follows--Tower of Babel, Babylonian captivity, Incarnation, Church, Bishops, incense, everytinng--but what I couldn't see, and what I can't see now, IS, why did It all beglng" Prendergast raises the fundamental issue but hasn't the will to resolve It Instead, he foolishly jumps at the chance to return to the cloth as a prison chaplain when he discovers the post does not require him to subscnbe to any particular creed at all Of course, such agnostic felicity cannot last Among his caged flock there is a rehglous lunatic unhindered by any doubts at all whose beliefs are as unswerving as they are unexamined Convinced that the angel of the Lord has commissioned him to murder the faithless, this self-styled "hon of the Lord's elect" decides--with some cause--that Chaplain Prendergast IS not a Christian and so murders him by sawing his head from his body with tools conveniently provided him by the prison's enhghtened arts and crafts program which stresses the criminal's need for emotional release through artistic self-expression Prendergast's inability to sustain a coherent religious vision is one of the many Instances in which Waugh satirized the modern abdication of intellectual authority that calls forth the fanatic Whether rehglous or political, these zealots are led by the inner light of untutored emotion alone Surrounded by an ostensibly sane citizenry whose lives lack a rationally defined purpose, their peculiarly mindless dedication gives them a devastating strength Prendergast's grisly end provldes Waugh with one of his central metaphors twentieth century man decapitated, his intellect severed from his will When reason neglects its reign, impulse usurps its place with predictable results Reported casually, Prendergast's fate seems neither all that shocking nor partlcularly lamentable Instead, we are made to feel he got no more than he deserved He is one of Waugh's wellmeaning humanists, personally inoffensive but culturally lethal Without convictions o f any kind, these characters wander through the novels vaguely unnerved by the chaos that surrounds them Their failure to sustain the tradition of which they are the immediate beneficiaries has emptied their world of purpose and left those who are more willful and less scrupulous either to drift into aimless dissipation or to channel their otherwise undirected energy into one of the many perverse ideologies that plague the day This was Waugh's assessment of a culture that has lost confidence in itself and its ability to make sense of the world 34 clearly impossible in a world In which "vice no longer pays lip service to virtue...