Books
KOESTLER'S NEW NOVEL
THIEVES IN THE NIGHT.
By
Arthur Koestler, Macmillan.
$2.75.
K
OESTLER's latest novel is even more negligible as art than his previous
ones. But, as we know, art is not the main question with him. And
yet this is not to say that the
ad hoc
novel, spot-news fiction, of which
he is the most successful practitioner, has nothing whatsoever to do with
art. The vulgarities and makeshifts this genre permits the novelist to get
away with, even in the eyes of serious readers, contribute no little to
the present decline in the general practice of the novel.
The · journalistic novel exploits nonfiction in order to enable the
writer to avoid the more difficult challenges of fiction proper, while on
the other hand it uses fiction to make the shaping, manipulation, and
adulteration of nonfiction easier. Where the genuine artist starts from
a personal, particular experience, the journalist-novelist starts from a gen–
eral, public one, whose automatic cogency relieves him of the necessity
of making it cogent by means of art. His product enjoys the best of both
worlds, and we read with fascinated attention-but only for the mo–
ment: as long, that is, as the
hoc
of the
ad hoc
retains the precise kind
of interest it wears at the moment of writing. Afterwards the shoddiness
of the craft overwhelms everything else.
Koestler is at least good journalism. For anything that, despite vul–
garities, cliches, and oversimplifications, holds our attention as much as
this latest novel of his does must be good as
something.
But the virtues
of journalism, even at its best, are ambiguous. Good journalism can
be
made by reporting without comment the words of a stupid man, pro–
vided that the journalist taking them down organizes them appropriately.
And the journalism becomes all the better if the stupid man talks about
a topic of general and urgent concern. (Were the journalist to take down
the remarks of an intelligent man on the same subject he would be acting
merely as a secretary or rewrite man, not as a journalist.) It is to the
advantage of a journalist if his understanding is superficial, otherwise
he will resist those momentary moods whose excitement flavors his writing,
otherwise he will understand too much to become excited.
Koestler's is the case of a gifted reporter listening to his own remarks,
which come from a man the epidermis of whose brain functions better
than its core, a man highly sensitive as only the superficial can be to the
changing moods of the international, up-to-date, and literate milieu in
which he circulates and according to which he cuts his figure. His talent
