102
PARTISAN REVIEW
The final episodes of
Arrival and Departure
indicate clearly the
poles of Koestler's thinking-they are the same as those that appear in
the works of Thomas Mann and a good deal of other modern literature.
On the one hand, the road of a relaxed yielding to events, cessation of
struggle, and personal self-indulgence (identified with love) : "After all
-why not?" On the other, a leap in the direction of "duty," duty
felt,
not arrived at by reason and even opposed to reason: "Here we go" is
the phrase Koestler uses as a key.
"Don't you think," the shot-up British flier asks Peter, "that it's rather
a boring game trying to find out one's reasons for doing something?"
Thus, as Castorp in
The Magic Mountain
is last seen advancing across
No Man's Land, the baffled Peter reaches action and even consciousness
of possessing moral values when he leaps out over enemy country in a
parachute. At the last moment, he had quitted the ship that was to take
him to America and the immoral Odette-since duty is better than
giving way. And he had made the final discovery that reasons are a thing
of the past, for we live at the end of the age of science and "a new god
is about to be born." "Here w,e go," trusting ourselves happily to the
void in the cradle of a parachute; perhaps out of this act of self-aban–
donment the future deity will take shape.
Because of the intelligence, and particularly the
relevance,
of his
novels, it is easier to praise Koestler than to indicate the correct propor–
tion of his lack. His thinking tackles boldly some of the most real dra–
matic situations of our time. And it never forgets the personal sufferings
of those who are caught in them. At the same time there is a pervading
glibness in Koestler, the journalist satisfying himself with devices aimed
at the reader's opinions. This glibness is not altogether a vice, since it
permits the author to put down quickly and cleanly events whose
meanings a more painstaking investigation might not reveal for a
long time or might even find to be out of reach entirely. Haste is
especially important for the chronicler of political conscience, since the
background of the drama changes so rapidly today that details of
doubt recorded about, say, Spain in 1935 no longer have the same
point if described in 1943.
But for the readiness of his formulas, Koestler pays a high price.
For instance, his handling of the psychoanalytical process is extremely
well planned, but the quality of the symbols is uneven; some are subtly
selected personal images, others are text-book cliches. The writing, too,
is marred by easily acquired phrases and ideas: phrases like "another
symbolic toy which he had hung on the Christmas tree of his guilt";
ideas like the theatrical notion of Peter that he has the duty to save
mankind and th;:tt at the time of the Flood "there should have been at
least one who ran back into the rain, to perish with those who had no
planks under their feet."
Also, for all its philosophical fashionableness, the conclusion of
Arrival and Departure,
with its assertion of the
necessary
failure of the
