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PARTISAN REVIEW
finds the subject matter of his new books in contemplation, rather
than in action, or in reading about science, not in recounting his
own experiences, as in
Spanish Testament
and
Arrow in the Blue,
or
even in imaginatively reshaping them, as in
The Gladiators
and
Dark–
ness at Noon.
And also he is probably saying, with the decent reti–
cence of a distinguished English man of letters living in Montpelier
Square, SW7, that he simply does not want to write about his
private life.
In some ways one sympathizes. Not through Marx, not through
Einstein, but through Freud, the reading public has grown naughty
and demands more than Koestler would wish to offer or probably
allow. Improper and irrelevant demands should, of course, be
frustrated. The private life of some writers and most scientists, even
many statesmen, may in fact have little relationship with the
meaning of their published work; and even accounts of how and why
they produce their work can be irrelevant if there are no ambiguities
of meaning or intent to be clarified by accounts of antecedents. But
these are hard conditions to meet, particularly for writers like
Koestler and Orwell who have both become a legend in their lifetime
and have, albeit on different occasions, and for specific purposes (not
to help future biographers), written a lot about themselves, using
their own legend, in some of their best works. To be fair, Koestler
has allowed a biography of himself to be commissioned and is
cooperating with it, although he does not mention this in his preface .
As someone who was careful to insist, before beginning work on
Orwell,
on a contractual right to see all papers and to publish
anything, I would be fascinated to know what the conditions of the
Koestler commission were. Certainly, a biography in anyone's life–
time is difficult - I go no further, for widows and heirs to copyright
are not always easy either. Nonetheless, it is strange that, having
written so much and so interestingly in an autobiographic vein in his
"red" period, he has not done so in, as it were, his "blue" period; and
has, as I've said, produced this fascinating but nonetheless com–
promised, commentated, chronological anthology. One sympathizes
if he has a distaste for doing a Bertie Russell and writing so frankly
and egocentrically about his amours, marriages, and quarrels, as
well as his ideas and activities, as if the feelings of others do not
matter a damn if self-revelation is complete. But if so purely intellec–
tual, why not an intellectual autobiography? Perhaps the difficulty is
not one of either writing to conceal or needing to parade a private
life, but a painful uncertainty about where his real achievement lies
in his public life as a writer, a contradiction between his ideal image
