BERNARD AVISHAI
Arthur Koestler: The Consolations of
Communism
A
RTHUR KOESTLER WRITES in his first volume of memoirs,
Arrow
in the Blue,
that he would gladly exchange a hundred readers
from his own time for just one of the next century. That's an
intriguing trade for any writer, and Koestler probably meant it. But it is
only about twenty years since his joint suicide with his wife Cynthia,
and it is hard
to
see where that reader will come from. He was a Cold
War literary celebrity, and the Cold War is over. His politics were shaped
by the mass upheavals of the twentieth century, but the mass technolo–
gies of mass upheaval have been superseded. Jaded by communism, he
argued voluminously against deterministic notions of scientific discov–
ery, but the epistemological wars, fought out in academic circles, have
been won mainly without him.
As a moral writer, Koestler warned of the dangers of devotion-to
the Party, the tribe, scientific "progress"-and yet his younger and
healthy wife ("utterly devoted," his friends said) was found dead by his
side.
Darkness at Noon
was grippingly told, but his other political nov–
els have the quality of a master's thesis with added characters to per–
sonify arguments. His last polemical books in the philosophy of science
did not quite defend, but did attack the attackers of parapsychology and
Lamarckianism. And returning late in life to the Jewish question, he
tried to prove against Zionist wisdom (and as if it mattered) that Euro–
pean Jews were actually descended from Slavic converts. Why bother
with him?
Most who do have found in him a compass pointing away from the
ideological claims of twentieth-century communism and cannot resist
framing his life along these lines . This approach is reasonable enough
but also a missed opportunity. For the appeal of communism was never
simply in the way it organized the political landscape in terms of an
elaborate ideology. Communism's appeal-and Koestler has been
Bernard Avishai is Dean of the Raphael Recanati International School at the
Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel.
