B 0 0 K S
399
and from the tantalizing vocabularies of the newer psychology. As a
novelist he impresses me as being an expert, perhaps even inspired, mani–
pulator of journalistic quantities. Neither
Darkness at Noon
nor
Arrival
and Departure
has that fictional density and integral control of experience
by which we know the true artist in the narrative medium. The charac–
ters that appear in these novels are not people on their own account
but efficient mouthpieces . Yet even so we should be grateful for their
existence, for they represent the discords of our time in a manner that
is interesting, suggestive, almost
~ifelike
and always pertinent.
In the essay on Richard Hillary, Koestler indirectly touches on his
own status as a literary figure. Now that the era of the bourgeois novel
is drawing to a close, he remarks, a new type of writer seems "to take
over from the cultured middle-class humanist: airmen, revolutionaries,
adventurers, men who live the dangerous life; with a new operative
technique of observation, a curious alfresco introspection and an even
more curious trend of contemplation, even mysticism, born in the dead
centre of the hurricane." As examples he cites Silone, Malraux, Traven,
St. Exupr.ry and others. Koestler is best understood, of course, in relation
to mch figures, Silone and Malraux in particular. By no means their equal
as a
noveli~t,
he strikes one as more astute and trustworthy as an analyst
of ideas in their bearing on politics. One cannot imagine his being so
taken in by the rhetoric of the People's Front as to produce a novel of
such illusory political meaning as Malraux's
Man's Hope;
nor, despite
certain waverings toward the new religiosity, has he ever gone as far
in that direction as Silone did in his last novel.
The political pieces in this collection are the most effective. Espe–
cially fine are the three essays on Soviet Russia, which constitute a
devastating exposure of the Soviet myth.
(If
only the myth-addicts would
read them!) The title-piece of the book appears to be of small conse–
quence insofar as its key-terms, Yogi and Commissar, merely describe
the polarization of belief between the concepts of "Change from Without"
and "Change from Within"; and in another sense these terms come to
little more than a rather sensational re-statement of the old
divertisse–
ment
of the psychologists that divided all of us into introverts and
extroverts. But if not meaningful in the way of uncovering a permanent
human contradiction, these terms do have meaning in their application
to present-day realities. For it is the vileness of what Koestler calls "Com–
missar-ethics," whether of the Fascist or Stalinist variety, that has created
the historical situation determining the movement of so many intellec–
tuals to the ultra-violet pole of the Yogi. (The Yogis in our midst are
continually gaining prestige and new recruits, with sorry results, how–
ever, so far as creative ideas are concerned. Auden, for instance, neglect–
ing his splendid gifts as satirist and observer of the external world, has
gone to school to Kierkegaard and Barth only to emerge as an ex–
ponent of academic anxiety. Marx saw in the spirit of spiritless
