Books
THE CASE OF THE BAFFLED RADICAL
A NEW LITERATURE
seems to have made its appearance-the literature
of conscience of the ex-Communist.
Primarily a movement among journalists, the literary abnegation of
"The Party" has already produced some outstanding novels, notably
Ignazio Silone's
Bread and Wine
and Arthur Koestler's
Darkness At
Noon.
This literature of the Communist backslider has little in common
with the epics of Party conversion known as , "proletarian" writing a
decade ago. The dramas of Bolshevik piety drew their main thinking,
naturally, from the organization into which the initiate was delivering
himself. In contrast, the work of the de-converted Red belongs to the
main stream of modern writing; it is part of the tradition of doubt and
negation which has occupied first place in literature for the past 100
years. Upon the Communist precepts and practices
Koestl~r
lets loose
the disintegrating machinery of skepticism, ambivalence and psychiatry
:_weapons of the type used by Joyce in assaulting Catholic education,
by Mann against the ethics of middle-class duty, or by Gide against the
accepted morality of personal relations.
Measured by the accomplishment of the masters of the past genera–
tion, 'both the art and the skepticism of Koestler are quite thin. But as
one of the best chroniclers of the moral Flight From Moscow, he brings
to the novel something new or long-neglected-political sophistication
and a serious sense of the human drama of public events. Koestler un–
derstands how modern man is defeated in the conference rooms and the
daily press, on the battlefields and in the dungeons of Europe. He is
aware of viciousness and weakness not only, as the older writers knew
it, as something inherent-he knows it also as something
made,
even
made
"according to plan." ... Perhaps the task of the artist today is
rendered more difficult by the increased brutality of our culture; he
is forced to deal with new problems and areas of data from which his
art, as such, will gain nothing-just as the soldier at the front finds it
harder to keep alive though the quality of his life is not raised by these
difficulties.
Kostler's
Arrival and Departure*
is the story of the education of
Peter Slavek, fugitive ex-Communist, in the dubious sources of his own
revolutionary heroism. Upon his arrival in '"Neutralia" (there ought to
*
By
Arthur Koestler. Macmillan.
$2.
100
