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PARTISAN REVIEW
women and "study life"-pretending to both an appropriate worldli–
ness and an unfamiliarity with the locale. ("At last the husband, with a
demonstrative yawn, pulls out his watch and proposes that it is time
to
go to bed. To save his masculine pride, he accompanies the word 'bed'
with a pathetically roguish twinkle.... ") The only difference between
the house and a cafe was that the women of the night would sit through
such conversations almost entirely in the nude. They were mostly aspi–
rants
to
bourgeois respectability themselves, and many of them would
reach it.
Even in retrospect, Koestler saw in the civilized sex trade of the
serieuses
an important symbol of civil society. The sale of any human
faculty as a commodity was degrading
to
some degree, but trading one's
embraces for money-as opposed to trading one's mind-was a differ–
ence of degree, not kind. For Koestler, the fact that we abhor sexual
prostitution more than literary (or political, or managerial) prostitution
revealed only that people in the West are weird enough to value their
bodies more than their spirit. Koestler remained so taken by this insight
that, in time, he turned it into the premise of his most forgettable book,
The Call-Girls-a
1972
spoof on the international academic circuit, in
which writers and scholars sell their talk ("return fare economy class
and a modest honorarium") for a week in Switzerland:
[One] studied the faces of the call-girls along the table. Nikolai was
doodling with his lower lip pushed forward like a chimpanzee's
... . Von Halder has his right hand cupped behind his ear, a sure
sign that he was not listening. Harriet kept handing notes to Tony,
which he acknowledged with polite smiles.... Wyndham'S benign
smile was so sustained that he seemed to be risking cramp in his
dimples.
Actually, Koestler's mature view of the
seneuses
was not entirely
sophomoric. In
Arrow in the Blue,
he explains why in retrospect he
favored their work over the sermons and strictures that promised to
overcome the raggedness of human nature. He writes (and you can
almost hear him addressing both Commissar and Mother here): "The
off-spring of the marriage of Eros and Logos is tolerance, and the
knowledge that the stability of society rests on its system of safety
valves." Indeed, what impressed Koestler most about the brothels–
both at the time and also writing about them in retrospect-was how
obviously neutralizing the effect of sexual abundance was. {"In the ado–
lescent's imagination the shared bed of marriage is a scene of permanent
