The Crisis of Arthur Koestler

...Clinically, this is his own affair...

...But this is the price a writer pays for gifts as imposing as Mr...

...Koestler as a personality, and specifically to the account he gives of his personal history in his recent autobiographical volumes...

...he lived in Palestine both at a time when the Jewish homeland was a dream of power and again when the means of holding this power was a matter of the most urgent moral decision...

...How critical, we ask, can a crisis be which formulates itself so patly, so self-consciously, so unseriously...

...There is, of course, nothing Mr...

...And it is the unhappy fact that far too frequently in Mr...

...To put the matter in non-psychological terms, what Mr...

...Surely Mr...

...but with pain one is forced to point out that even despair is grand only in proportion as it defines the possible grandeur denied us by defeat...

...Since then he has centered his life in the fight for freedom-but, again, a love of freedom, however essential to the life of the spirit, cannot, any more than any other social determinism, be made the source of the free spirit...

...Koestler's writing, to its grave detriment...

...Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change...

...Koestler was impelled to prove that radicalism is a free decision unconditioned by neurosis-an idea which he conceives (wrongly) to be under attack from psychoanalysis-he first took the Freudian enemy into camp and then destroyed it by a process of emotional duplicity and sophistical reasoning gravely discrediting to the high enterprise in hand...

...Times Book Review' For anyone who has followed the developing career of Arthur Koestler with the interest merited by his literary flair and by the nature of the materials to which he has addressed himself, it can be no new question whether or not the actual quality of his production sustains his impressive reputation...

...Koestler has every right to rest from his former labors and concern himself with new intellectual problems or with no problems at all...

...Koestler, despite the adroitness of mind without which he could not have carried out this self-deception and its consequent program of rationalization, has failed to understand that the very attempt to free ourselves from conditions is itself a condition, and that in assigning to intellect such a heavy burden of self-justification he condemns it to a perpetual athleticism...

...the last of the pieces in The Trail of the Dinosaur to deal directly with politics was written in 1950...

...It seems unfair to put too much weight on a single sentence in a book...

...So today Mr...

...It is manifest from his report of his psychoanalysis, together with his subsequent disquisitions on the Freudian discipline, that in dealing with his own psychological problems his method is to parade so much frankness and seeming readiness for self-disclosure as to appear totally exposed and thereby propose the idea that, with so much consciousness of the conditions surrounding the making of a choice, he is himself quite "free" in the choices he makes...

...Polemics is so dependent upon cleverness, and Mr...

...And yet regularly, with each new book from his pen, there has been one's increasing sense of a talent somehow betrayed, of an experience of life received, for all of Mr...

...Because Mr...

...For in the context of intellectual crisis, its journalistic flamboyance rings in the ear with a peculiar inappropriateness, signaling our attention away from the gravity of the situation with which Mr...

...Koestler announces a crisis in his career...

...He tells us that his latest book is his farewell to arms and that he feels he has said all he has to say on the subjects which have obsessed him for more than a quarter-century...

...Reviewed by Diana Trilling Frequent contributor, "Commentary," "Partisan Review," N.Y...

...Koestler writes in his brief foreword, "the bitter passion has burnt itself out...

...In addition, Mr...

...Koestler has reason for pessimism as he considers the likelihood that mankind, as we now know it, may indeed follow the dinosaur into oblivion...

...Koestler has been so worthy and helpful a polemicist in so many causes close to one's heart, that it savors of ingratitude, almost of disloyalty, to press his too great facility as a present-day charge against him...

...Nothing could be clearer from Arrow in the Blue, the first volume of his autobiography, than the fact that Mr...

...And similarly with Arrival and Departure, Mr...

...Koestler itself, as it has been revealed both in his fiction and in his autobiography...

...Granted that the most stalwart warrior can weary of the battle, and that Mr...

...intellectually, it is the affair of his audience, for it is precisely the same method we encounter in so much of Mr...

...There can of course be small doubt that Mr...

...Which merely demonstrates our own insufficiency: Such is our cultural poverty, we ask too much of whoever has a lot, and castigate him for the failure to fulfill a contract he may never have thought to sign...

...Still, this does not validate the language in which he takes his farewell, and we are moved to surmise that perhaps Mr...

...Except for its title essay which bears the date 1955...

...And even in this latest volume, Mr...

...he has even exposed himself??no, that is exactly the point to which I shall presently return: he undertook the exposure but never went through with it-to the modern personal drama of psychoanalysis...

...Now Mr...

...Koestler's, staking its claim in some higher territory of speculation or reasoning, borrows the easy habits of journalism, we do well to be warned that we may find ourselves cheated...

...Thus, Thieves in the Night was brilliant reporting on Palestine, but with its facile solution of the problem of Jewish terrorism and its total avoidance of the larger consequences of moral relativism it was scarcely a reassuring intellectual performance...

...Koestler recognizes the dynamism of certain undue emotional pressures in his intellectual evolution-unless it be the fact that, despite this knowledge, he continues to use his intellect to mask these subjective demands...

...Contemplating the intellectual failure-one had almost said the intellectual cheapness-of Arrival and Departure, inevitably one is urged to an examination of Mr...

...Koestler's mature work we have been given merely a superior order of journalism, not the thoughtfulness we anticipate in a spokesman for an intellectual vanguard...

...Koestler writes, not even an essay on science fiction, which does not indirectly involve his acute social-political awareness...

...Koestler's is one of the major talents of our time, if by talent we mean an uncommon energy of mind and spirit and the availability of an artistic medium suitable to its exercise...

...Koestler can be said to have been missing throughout his career is philosophy-by which I do not mean a formal philosophy or a political philosophy, but, simply, that solid ground in which is rooted one's sense of oneself...

...But when fiction or criticism like Mr...

...We conclude that Mr...

...he has lived in America, England, France...

...Koestler's notable zest, not full in the face (to borrow Henry James's vivid phrase) but obliquely, with the head half-ducked, of an instinct for self-protection (I do not mean self-preservation...

...Now the errors are atoned for," Mr...

...Koestler is presumably engaged to the personality of Mr...

...Koestler's: If he does less than the best we had hoped of him, we give him but poor thanks for services rendered...

...Yet one lingers long and casts back repeatedly to the sentence I have just quoted...

...Koestler despairs...

...I have no wish to denigrate journalism, the profession of literary facility, which has its own honorable use...

...for that one can only be grateful) operating at a level so primitive as to be quite immune even to the most conscious effort of self-confrontation...

...Koestler is less at the mercy of a society whose doom he has cried so passionately than at the mercy of his own facility...

...Koestler deploys his polemical talents in a way we must appreciate-for instance, in his virtuose summary of the political anomalies of coexistence in his title essay, or in his provocative essay on the decision which now faces the Jews of the world, either to become Israelis or to give up their Jewish-ness...

...he was in the Spanish War...

...Koestler's novel about the relation between neurosis and the radical impulse...

...But even to this ultimate consideration he brings no suggestion of tragic dimension, only a very great cleverness...

...Koestler has been uniquely placed, or has been able uniquely to place himself, where the dominant forces of modern society have announced themselves most dramatically: He was a Communist in Germany during the rise of Nazism...

...As a young man, he looked to Communism to provide this solid underpinning, until the Communist ground was cut from under him, until that God failed-but of course the "solution" he had sought in Communism is more than one has a right to ask of any social system...