BERNARD CRICK
283
Ultimately, he should be pleased with himself as the super–
reporter. What he has now given us is, in fact, in its temporal order
and with its headnotes, a remarkably full and clear picture of the
public activities of his life. The rest is silence.
To end, most tentatively, on a mischievous or an affectionate
thought? His last novel was a rather lightweight, merry satire called
The Call Girls :
those great men, mainly, who wait for the letter or the
phone to summon them to Alpbach, Pugwash, Villa Bellagio (the
Rockefeller Foundation's earthly paradise), or wherever, the eternal
conference round of internationally famous intellectuals . It was a
very knowing satire. How often had he played that game himself, as
perhaps a widely translated professional writer must. He may have
grown weary of it, found it no longer so useful to him, or even risen
above it; but in the end I suspect that the old journalist simply had to
report on the institution: to send it up simply by describing it.
It
was
like that. He was a great descriptive writer. But what they were
probably all talking about were themes as vast, but at times possibly
as vapid, as some of his "fate of the species" books .
Surely it will be, rightly or wrongly, his earlier political books
for which he will be best and longest remembered. He told the tale so
compellingly of how a man came to look for utopias, but finally grew
skeptical of political activity, except for small clear things: like
abolition of capital punishment.
It
might fairly be objected that
between utopianism and skepticism lies the whole range of practical
politics, from the conservative to the democratic socialist. Orwell
thought that Koestler should have explored the nature of a non–
utopian political theory . But Koestler was not a political thinker.
And no man, not even Koestler, can do everything. Koestler had a
tendency to dramatize things to extremes, the Yogi or the com–
missar, and to exclude obvious mundane middles. He was a reporter
of great themes, however.
If
there were no immediate utopias to
observe in the 1950s from that Graf Zeppelin still hovering over polar
extremes, he would have to report on the evolution of the species
itself. I cannot evaluate his success or not in this matter, only share a
common skepticism, but with a shameful sense of not being brave or
rash enough to try myself. But it does not diminish or change his
earlier work, and one has to hope that he himself takes this view,
either at peace with himself in his old age or properly proud of all the
bricks he made so skillfully and in such difficulties as a great and
dedicated professional writer and superjournalist.
