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PARTISAN REVIEW
to Berlin and, at twenty-five, made science editor of the group. He
was the only journalist on the Graf Zeppelin's flight to the North
Pole, which brought his name into prominence. Disenchanted with
both pure science and Zionism, Marxism was to. be his next quest for
certainty or "search for synthesis." Hejoined the Communist Party,
visited the USSR, worked for the Party, was a war correspondent in
Spain as an undercover Communist, infiltrated onto the books of the
British liberal
News Chronicle.
Identified and imprisoned by the
Nationalists, he was saved from execution by a mistaken, popular
British campaign to save "British journalists." In a cell in Spain ,
communism evaporated, and a knowing, wise, and deadly anti–
communism succeeded it, first
Spanish Testament
of 1937, and then
the great achievement and fame of
Darkness at Noon
of 1941. By this
time he had escaped from a French concentration camp via Portugal
and reached Britain illegally, where he was at first imprisoned as an
illegal immigrant and then set to work in the Pioneer Corps digging
trenches and tank traps . As a connoisseur of prison life, his praise of
English prisons deserves remembering at a time when the notorious
"H -Block" is in fact a veritable bed of roses compared to grim, stone–
flagged old Pentonville . All things are, indeed, relative.
For a world view, he substitutes at first a passionate English–
ness, becomes the kind of central European emigre who becomes
almost more English than the English, displaying tolerance, love of
tradition , and good political manners, but an ultimate skepticism
about worthwhile political change. Personally kind and helpful
towards less fortunate fellow refugees as his own fortunes repaired ,
yet he had little sympathy or interest in refugee politics, all those
dreams of a return. For a brief while he was like that celebrated old
lady of Boston : "Why travel? I'm here ." Yet after all that risk, pain,
and suffering, three times he was rendered destitute and many times
close to violent death or long imprisonment , his individualism seems
to have revolted at the bureaucracy, drabness , and puritanical ideo–
logy of Attlee's Britain - to the personal annoyance of Orwell who
positively reveled in it and who saw Koestler, perhaps unfairly, as a
backslider from democratic socialism (whereas Koestler would
probably have argued that he was a writer, simply moving on to
different themes, even grander and more complex). So although
naturalized as a British subject, from 1948 to 1952 he traveled
restlessly, acclaimed but unsettled, between "Island Farm" in New
Jersey and "Verte Rive" near Fontainebleau. Freedom was often his
theme, but now equality was a threat to freedom and not , as in
The
Gladiators,
its necessary condition . But then he finally settled in
