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PARTISAN REVIEW
crowd, I had the feeling that this was but a repetition of a situation
I had already lived through-that of being tied, gagged, and delivered
to a malign power." Anything that a man would write after going
through experiences such as these should be read with sympathy and
understanding.
He goes into the question of the psychological troubles that have
always afflicted him, in some detail and with considerable frankness.
"In addition," he writes, "there was a circumstance which for some
time tortured me more than anything else: at sixteen I was the shortest
boy but one in class, and that one happened to be a dwarf. ... Next
to shortness," he continues, "my inferiority complex fastened on my
preposterously juvenile appearance. At 16 I looked like 14, at 20 like
16, at 30 like 21." And finally, "Shyness and insecurity have remained
my silent companions to this day." These small things, coupled with
the collapse of the family fortune at an early date, undoubtedly go
a long way toward explaining his constant search for a faith in which
he could lose himself. His decision to take up the cause of Zionism,
for example, was inspired largely by a sense of homelessness and root–
lessness in himself, and a feeling that the Jewish race suffered primarily
from the same deprivation. The homelessness and rootlessness of the
entire Jewish people had led to the ghetto and the ghetto mentality.
It
was Koestler's dislike of this mentality that led him to distrust the
methods of Chaim Weizmann and to accept with enthusiasm the
straightforward "knocking on the front door," as he puts it, of Vladimir
J abotinski.
The Paris period of his life is treated with more gaiety. He gives
an amusing thumbnail sketch of "Bebe"-one of the few women in his
life whom he attempts to characterize at all; and his chapter on pros–
titutes and bawdy houses is both penetrating and sensible. His analysis
of the role of the pimp in the lives of the more debased of the
"Iitles
de joie"
is excellent; and his imaginary conversation between a respect–
able bourgeoise, who has come with her husband out of curiosity to
see what the inside of a "house" is like, and one of the girls, very demure
and correct, in spite of being stark naked, is good comedy and comes
closer than anything else in the book to showing us the novelist in
Koestler.
But he is serious for the most part, and in a way that wins our . \
respect. "The phantom that I was after," he writes, "is as old as man:
victory over loneliness through the perfect physical and spiritual union.
Surely a modest aim? And certainly not an original one. Yet the pat-
