Making Ideas Walk Around
SHORTER, KINGSLEY
Making Ideas Walk Around The Call Girls By Arthur Koestler Random House. 167 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Kingsley Shorter Arthur Koestler is a kind of intellectual Everyman, a child of the century...
...But the novel ends rather abruptly, with an air of anticlimax...
...Not many ex-party members managed to convey the impression, as did he, that the battle was fought out in their own persons...
...There is, of course, a masochistic satisfaction to be derived from the contemplation of imminent disaster, a chiliastic thrill at the prospect of the deluge...
...Born in Budapest in 1905, he studied science and psychology in Vienna, worked as a foreign correspondent throughout Europe, was in the thick of the Spanish Civil War, did time both in the Foreign Legion and the British Army, and finally arrived after World War II at a middle age as shorn of ideological ballast as the English among whom he has since made his home...
...I try to keep up as best I can, though, and am already convinced that mankind is rushing toward calamity, that technology plus overpopulation are doing us in...
...Maybe the creative imagination is paralyzed by what are called facts, and cannot appropriate the vast metaphorical resources opened up by modern science...
...Punctuating these proceedings are doom-laden reports of confrontation and escalation in the Near East and Far East...
...Moderator Niko, whose son is off fighting in Vietnam, reminds the conferees of the famous letter Einstein sent Roosevelt, warning that Hitler might be working on the Bomb...
...Koestler is no Dostoevsky...
...Here they are, the best minds man can muster, and they behave no better than baboons...
...Einstein thought thoughts so abstract and difficult that few could follow their intricate dance, but E=mc2 spoke to the inhabitants of Hiroshima in their very flesh...
...After the Apollo Missions, who is now able to dream satisfactory moon dreams...
...The best we have in this genre is thinly veiled journalism, as here...
...But it is futile...
...Two hundred words changed history, he points out, urging them to issue a comparably succinct and portentous message to the governments of the world...
...After a week of listening to each other's pet remedies (antifertility and antiaggression agents in the water supply, mass abreaction therapy, genetic engineering, operant conditioning of infants . . .) they can agree only on the impossibility of agreement...
...Perhaps nothing more is possible...
...Literature it is not...
...His people have little depth, and the convictions they champion issue from their lips like balloons in a strip cartoon...
...An old hand at the popular-science approach to the Human Condition, he still has his finger firmly on the Zeitgeist...
...as one of the contributors to The God That Failed, he depicted the painful move away from Communism...
...The truth is that nobody has yet written great literature about science, still less about the relations between the scientific and political establishments...
...It is now clear, however, that those agonizing political reappraisals were for Koestler only a skirmish in the long war between two antithetical conceptions of man: the Materialist (mindless body) and the Mystic (disembodied mind...
...It is a useful volume for anyone who does not read Scientific American, or even Saturday Review...
...Having been in all the right places at the right time, Koestler was ideally equipped to act as spokesman for a generation of disillusioned intellectuals: In Darkness at Noon he created the classic modern morality play about ends and means, good ends and terrible means, set in "the country of the Revolution" amid the purge trials of the late '30s...
...On this level, The Call Girls is gloomy fun...
...But the fictional setting is contrived, and the "human interest" stuff in between the polemical set-pieces is downright embarrassing...
...Eco-pornography is now an established industry...
...This is not to say that he fails to make the ideas interesting, or that the argument across the conference table is implausible...
...Koestler's own view is familiar enough: Cartesian dualism has brought us to our present pass...
...Nor has he lost the art of making ideas walk around and argue with each other...
...It is all uncomfortably reminiscent of C. P. Snow, though mercifully less pompous...
...Our current predicament, and the growing probability that we shall not emerge from it intact, is the theme of The Call Girls, Koestler's first novel in over 20 years...
...As one of them explains: "It becomes a habit, maybe an addiction...
...Reviewed by Kingsley Shorter Arthur Koestler is a kind of intellectual Everyman, a child of the century par excellence...
...Under the tutelage of Niko Solo-vief ("one of the five or six chief architects of the fission bomb"), a quarrelsome stew of behaviorists, ethologists, psychologists, neurologists and several other -ists discuss what is wrong with man and what can be done to save the race from self-destruction...
...I don't need reminding that the multiplication of specialties, the failure of interdisciplinary communication, the absence of any unifying vision among men of science are all symptoms of our disease...
...These are the "call girls" (has Koestler got his eye on a wider market than his books have previously appealed to...
...To illustrate the point, he brings together a dozen distinguished men and women, each top dog in his or her field, at a week-long symposium held in a village high in the Swiss Alps...
...even race suicide is grist for the media mill...
...As evidence, one need merely consider the titles of some of his other books —The Yogi and the Commissar, The Lotus and the Robot, The Ghost in the Machine...
...The raison d'etre of The Call Girls may well be educational: to inform the layman, painlessly, of the latest advances in the study of man...
...In this most recent work Koestler maintains that even under the shadow of extinction the world's best brains cannot put aside professional self-seeking, cannot stop defending their own particular turf...
...If you are unaware of the basic tenets of behaviorism, say, or recent studies of aggression in man and other animals, if you missed Life's spread on the structure of DNA or the Times' article on remote control of brain impulses (charging bull stopped short by little black box), then Koestler is your man...
...Koestler cultivates an atmosphere of impending apocalypse throughout the book, which chronicles a sort of Creation in reverse—the chapters are titled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.—and one comes to expect some culminating chaos...
...You get a long-distance telephone call from some professional busybody at some foundation or university-'Sincerely hope you can fit it into your schedule—it will be a privilege to have you with us—return fare economy class and a modest honorarium . . .' Or maybe no honorarium at all...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
