Arthur Koestler: the consolations of communism.(Critical Essay)

ARTHUR KOESTLER WRITES in his first volume of memoirs, Arrow in the Blue, that he would gladly exchange a hundred readers from his own time for just one of the next century. That's an intriguing trade for any writer, and Koestler probably meant it. But it is only about twenty years since his joint suicide with his wife Cynthia, and it is hard to see where that reader will come from. He was a Cold War literary celebrity, and the Cold War is over. His politics were shaped by the mass upheavals of the twentieth century, but the mass technologies of mass upheaval have been superseded. Jaded by communism, he argued voluminously against deterministic notions of scientific discovery, but the epistemological wars, fought out in academic circles, have been won mainly without him.

As a moral writer, Koestler warned of the dangers of devotion--to the Party, the tribe, scientific "progress"--and yet his younger and healthy wife ("utterly devoted," his friends said) was found dead by his side. Darkness at Noon was grippingly told, but his other political novels have the quality of a master's thesis with added characters to personify arguments. His last polemical books in the philosophy of science did not quite defend, but did attack the attackers of parapsychology and Lamarckianism. And returning late in life to the Jewish question, he tried to prove against Zionist wisdom (and as if it mattered) that European Jews were actually descended from Slavic converts. Why bother with him?

Most who do have found in him a compass pointing away from the ideological claims of twentieth-century communism and cannot resist framing his life along these lines. This approach is reasonable enough but also a missed opportunity. For the appeal of communism was never simply in the way it organized the political landscape in terms of an elaborate ideology. Communism's appeal--and Koestler has been indispensable to our seeing this--was also to a particular kind of internal landscape, to a cast of mind that is drawn to the order promised by elaborate ideology itself and, indeed, may be most distinctive for the way it denies internal landscapes altogether. Communism may be gone, but the appeal of secular religions is not. Neither, for that matter, is the appeal of orderly answers to sublime questions.

So now that we are in the next century, what makes Koestler worth reading, if at all, is his self-conscious exposure of an exemplary self-consciousness, something like what Koestler himself found in Rousseau's Confessions, a book he tried to emulate when writing Arrow in the Blue. With Koestler, we see the subordination of an outside to an inside, see how powerfully what we see can be absorbed into what we hope. These vexing connections are not easily teased out, except perhaps by one's analyst on a good day (and indeed, Koestler at times compared writing to the analyst's couch). In Koestler's case, the most interesting connection may be between his confessed emotional fragility and his romance with communist bosses--not a political dream, exactly, but the dream of an authoritative scientific community, mastering history, who he hoped would exercise an engulfing political power. This was, so he would later say (when the term was still fresh and a little risque), a "neurotic" attraction. Becoming a communist had for him the quality of a conversion to a religious orthodoxy, a positivist trance, a love of "objectivity," which still claims many proselytes.

When we review how Koestler accounts for his becoming a communist, we do not find a person with (now quaint) visions of proletarian revolutionary consciousness. Rather, we find one with both the training to expose and the opportunity to oppose the scientific pretensions of communism--and who nevertheless wholeheartedly supported it. For we also find a lonely young man with an impulse to intellectual rigidities and pack-fellowship. Koestler's communism, in other words, was the culmination of his hubris, a marker on his journey to what may be called, in any century, faith.

I. SHRINK TO INSIGNIFICANCE

REVIEW THE CASE NOTES as Koestler himself writes them in Arrow in the Blue. A young Jewish intellectual, approaching his twenty-sixth birthday, often depressed, as accomplished as he is troubled, is living in Berlin during Hitler's rise. His conversion, though imminent, is hardly a foregone conclusion; indeed, reasonable people might think this the furthest thing from his mind. As a child in Bela Kun's Budapest, then Freud's Vienna, he had been the prince of his mother's ambitions and the foil for her touchiness--both roles carrying a vaguely erotic charge. He had been little shielded by his father, whose distant, cheerful, wishful thinking--and botched commercial adventures--had come to seem inherently irresponsible. The child, in this retrospective account, comes into manhood with richly mixed feelings: a terror of loneliness and the fear of suffocation, leaking rages and exaggerated empathy for the underdog, a yearning for "absolute" commitments and an impulse to break vessels. He does not trust himself.