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PARTISAN REVIEW
writings . But in terms of the sheer bulk of this scientific writing, the
first half of the book, "In Search of Utopia," is in fact dispropor–
tionate. He would like to be remembered as a scientific thinker; but
he is too good a professional writer not to realize where his greater
effect and following still lie. So he presents his literary past fully and
does not appear to rewrite. No Audenesque problems here.
The extracts from the novels fit in easily with the nonfictional
works. The value of
Darkness at Noon
and
Arrival and Departure
is in
their authenticity. Camus's
The Rebel
is a better philosophical
analysis of the totalitarian mind, but it is too abstract for most
readers, just as Arendt's
Origins
of
Totalitarianism
is too pedantic and
monumental. Even Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
impossible though
it is to put down, can be brushed aside as a nightmare or diminished
as an overdrawn satire on postwar Britain. Koestler knows what he
was talking about and is hard to diminish; he is easier to ignore or
foolishly dismiss in New York as a nice "cold war warrior" or in
London as "too clever by half." The issue in the 1940s, as the Party
hacks and the fellow travelers put it, was only whether he was a liar
or not. And plainly he wasn't.
This very factualness is both the clue to and the continuity in
his achievement.
It
is not an esthetic achievement. We read his
books for their matter and to learn something from them. This too
links the old with the new Koestler. We should read the new
scientific Koestler just as we read the earlier political novels: because
he is talking about something we need to know, but all the time
aware that it is a prince of journalists, a cosmic reporter, the doyen
of conferenceurs, who is addressing us as an audience, mingling,
like any good feature writer, personal angles with hard information.
We open the quality press and we are informed, stimulated, but
always on our guard . He writes columns as big and bustling as
Babel, not monographs.
Whether or not Koestler himself believes that he has philo–
sophical or scientific originality (as did Wells, alas) is irrelevant. I
hope he doesn't, but it really doesn't matter. He is one of the greatest
intellectual popularizers of our time, the interpreter for one set of
intellectuals of the concepts of another. And his genuine cosmo–
politan stance has been earned and not easily achieved. One
Koestler speaks more for human unity, despite his rationalist assault
on the cult of Zen and the pretensions of Ghandi, than a dozen com–
mittees of UNESCO. He deeply appreciates national cultural dif–
ferences, but attaches little value to them and adopts each in turn
with a kind of ironic affection .
