Books
TESTAMENT
OF A
HOMELESS RADICAL
THE Yom AND THE CoMMISSAR.
By
Arthur Koestler. Macmillan.
$2.75.
I
T
IS
above all the quality of relevance in Arthur Koestler which makes
for the lively interest in him. This quality is not to be equated
with the merely topical cr timely. What enters into it, chiefly, is some–
thing far more difficult to capture-a seme of the present in its essence,
a sense of contemporaneity at once compelling and discriminating.
It
is
precisely for lack of this quality that most current writing is so dull and
depressing, putting our intelligence to sleep with its fatal immersion in
backward problems; and where the problems are politically not back–
ward, it is usually the approach that makes them so
(e.g.,
Harold Laski,
Max Lerner and other spokesmen of official, comfortably situated
Leftism).
Koestler, on the other hand, has taken hold with dramatic force of a
large historical theme. He is both the poet and ideologue of the homeless
radical, and his unflagging analysis of this significant latter-day type-of
his dilemma and pathos-has a tonic value compared to which the
"positive contributions" featured in the liberal press seem puerile and
inane. Nothing is ultimately so enervating as unreal positiveness, whether
it takes the form of the ultra-leftist's faith in the imminence of the ideal
revolution or the liberal's acceptance of the Soviet myth in accordance
with all the precepts of "wave of the future" romanticism. Koestler,
despite certain bad slips in the past, is one of the very few writers of
the Left not intimidated by the demand for easy affirmations. Like
Kierkegaard's "subjective existing thinker," he understands the function
of ideas that help "to keep the wound of the negative open."
His prose, on the whole adequate to his theme, COll!bines the sensi–
bility of politics with that of literature in what might be described as a
psycho-political style. Admirable, too, is his capacity to invent new terms
and to order his thought in pithy formulations that sum up an entire
period or the experience of an entire generation. His verbal sense is not
unlike Trotsky's; the writing of both is distinguished by epigrammatic
brilliance. But Koestler is apt to sacrifice precision for the sake of
s~art
ling effects or dramatic finish. He is altogether open to the temptation
that besets the litterateur of letting the phrase go beyond the content.
His language is occasionally too showy for comfort; ahd an element
of the meretricious is to be detected in his all too facile use of dashingly
advanced metaphors and analogies drawn from the natural sciences
