BERNARD AVISHAI
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voluptuousness; the Anglo-Saxon idea of a Paris house is equally wide
of the mark.")
Where sex was traded, it ceased
to
be a mystery and, implicitly, the
focus of any grand desire. For Koestler, this insight became a pathway to
understanding the sheer power of the romantic imagination. Only the
unknown becomes an object of desire, a vessel to receive what is pent–
up. A whore puts on her clothes and changes from a tramp to femme
fatale . Koestler remembers one young woman reporting to him that men
would offer her ten times more when she was on her way home than
clients would pay in the house: "And they would tell me how clever I am,
how
spirituelle
I am, and that I am the woman they've always dreamt
of-so much noise for an omelet.
It
is because they see a mystery where
there is only a corset with elastic panels.
Oh les pauvres malheureux."
Koestler was hardly immune himself. He explores the point, and its
political implications, a little later in
Arrow in the Blue-his
firs t crack
at unpacking the Helena obsession:
The phantom that I was after is as old as man: victory over loneli–
ness through perfect physical and spiritual union. Surely a modest
aim? And certainly not an original one. Yet the pattern of one's life
depends to a large extent on the manner in which one organizes
one's own particular phantom chase.
Nor does the chase bring diminishing returns to a man of certain
character. The distinction between true and false applies to ideas, not
emotions. "An emotion may be cheap," Koestler writes, "but never
untrue." As the number of experiences grows, it does not really affect
the power of the illusion, which is merely "withdrawn from one object
and projected onto another, carrying the same luminosity." Indeed, the
creation of the illusion responds to a need as deep, inexhaustible, and
recurrent as the addict's craving for his drug. As for politics, the long–
ing to embrace the perfect cause turned him, he writes, into a
"Casanova of Causes." The quest for the secret of the arrow was fol–
lowed by the search for the knowing shaman, then by the pursuit of
Utopia.
Koestler does not do so himself, but it is hard to resist juxtaposing
these last reflections with his view of the second kind of whore, those
who were not
serieuses.
Here was a darker problem, which made him
queasy, but drew him like a moth
to
fire. At the center of the life of the
not
serieuses
was the awful power of the pimp-the "seedy, weedy,
greasy, swaggering" man, often ugly and impotent and short, devoid of
