BERNARD CRICK
275
writings? And did hejust have two good novels in him-which came
out,
Darkness at Noon
and
Arrival and Departure-
or has his
abandonment of the novel as a form in favor of scientific specu–
lations about human nature and destiny both lost him an audience
and diminished his art?
In some ways, however, this book makes general judgments
more difficult, not less . For he tries to kill two very different birds
with the same stone: the omnibus is both a remarkably fair selection
from his published books (including those essays republished in book
form) and a substitute autobiography.
It
is fair because the bulk of
these books fall into his postwar scientific, postpolitical period; and
yet if he values them more, he still gives half of this book to the
political period, in professional deference, one suspects, to the
majority of his readers.
It
is a substitute autobiography in that the
extracts, whether from novels or nonfiction, are printed in
chronological order, each with an interesting headnote explaining
how and why each book came to be written . But the balance of
extracts is only a careful editorial compromise.
It
must be wrong
from one or another point of view: the demands of a truthful
autobiography or the demands of a good selection of what he thinks
to be his own best or most important work.
So Koestler has not done the critic's work for him, or even made
a clear first bid. The claim he makes on our attention is still
enigmatic . The character of the writings needs closer examination
before we can accept or reject the younger Koestler or the older one,
Orwell's "political writer" or the scientific writer who is proud to
insert a footnote on the third page of his preface to relate Sir Peter
Medawar's conviction that reading Koestler led him to reconsider
"the conventional Darwinian explanation of evolution." Indeed the
alarming thought could occur, as some of Orwell's friends claimed of
him, perhaps out of discomfort with the content of his writings, that
it is actually the life of the man that is more memorable than the
writings. To say this would obviously be to disparage Koestler's
writings, but it is not a view to be dismissed out of hand. For his
public life has been extraordinary. In 1925 he dropped out as a
student of physics in Vienna, having lost his faith in determinism,
and left for the Holy Land as already a member of a Zionist dueling
fraternity and of
J
abotinsky's League of Zionist Activists (the
forerunner of Begin's Irgun) . Life in a kibbutz was both too hard and
too narrow, but with youthful effrontery and skill, he began his
journalism. He became Middle East correspondent for the Ullstein
Press which, in 1929, sent him to Paris, and in 1930 he was recalled
