472
PARTISAN REVIEW
The storm [he wrote] has ended, yet we are still restless and full
of care.... We have only vague hopes, but clear fears.... We are
aware that the charm of life and its abundance are behind us.... There
is no thinking man who can hope to master this concern, or avoid the
darkness, or even estimate the probable period of deepgoing disturbance.
. . . All the foundations of our world have been shaken.... Something
more essential has worn out than the replaceable parts of a machine. ...
Since that was written, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin have shown
Europe the terrifying spectacle of the uprising of the inner barbarian,
led by the new Man-of-Power, by "Genghiz Khan equipped with the
telegraph" . .. and the atomic bomb. Among Europe's intellectuals
there is a growing conviction that Europe itself is doomed. The "long–
ing" in Koestler's title is despairing, unassuageable longing, longing
with nothing to base itself on, longing without hope or expectation.
Thus it would seem that, alongside the Arthur Koestler who forms
committees to do battle for cultural freedom, there is another Koestler
who nudges the elbow of the first into the automatic writing of a message
that fills the "cultural freedom" Koestler with astonishment and fear.
If
the two Koestlers were in dialogue with each other, the novel
would have possessed more tension. But
The Age
of
Longing
is more
like a monologue of the despairing Koestler without the responses of the
fighting Koestler, a monologue the fragments of which are distributed
with fair impartiality among all the characters of the book.
As the "thesis" has the air of having been carefully distributed,
proposition by proposition, among the personages, so the personages
themselves have the appearance of lay figures especially constructed
to present and represent their portions of the thesis. There is Monsieur
Anatole, old and dying, with his tired last sparks of
esprit,
his tenuous
recollections of the heroic days when the Paris mob stormed the Bastille,
his attenuating lecherous memories of the escapades in which he earned
his cyrrhosis of the liver and swollen prostate. He longs for a "con–
tinuity" that is about to be broken by his death and the death of the
France he represents. There is Hydie Anderson, American girl who
longs for the lost religious faith of her adolescence, vainly seeking a
surrogate in an affair with the Russian "cultural attache" and police
agent, Nikitin, whose faith attracts her by its appearance of being
monolithic and indestructible. There is her father, Colonel Anderson,
"confused liberal" from the United States, busy making a list of the
2,000 most important French men to be flown to safety in America when
the storm breaks. There are French and English demi-vierge intellectuals
who have never dared
to
sleep with "the Revolution" but "pet" with
