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any manly stature, but who (so Koestler reports being told) thrilled his
women with a touch and inspired fanatic loyalty. Koestler concluded
reluctantly that the secret of this pathological relationship lay in the
pimp's very brutality:
It
is a calculating and nauseating kind of brutality, which has its
own ritual and cant.... [I]ts obvious function is to satisfy the
tramp's craving for punishment-a craving the more consistent as
it is mostly unconscious. ... "Punishment" consists mostly in slaps
and kicks or mere verbal abuse; overtly sadistic practices hardly
ever occur. They would defeat the purpose of the whole relation–
ship, which is based on the axiom that the punishment is an act of
justice that the victim deserves for being "bad." In short, the pros–
titute creates her own ritual of penance; the kick on the shin or the
slap in the face represent the act of absolution.
The experience taught Koestler a lesson of which he became fully
conscious only years later.
It
was derived from meeting up with the sense
of guilt in its crudest, most primitive and tangible form: "The pimp is
the real hero of the show. He is the false messiah of the fallen woman,
who makes her suffer without offering redemption."
It
was startling, he
writes, to see how powerfully this complex of guilt acted on creatures
apparently devoid of any sense of moral responsibility (though no more
startling, we think, than Cynthia falling in love with Koestler as he dic–
tated these words to her in his study at Fontaine Le Port).
IV. COSMIC REJECTION
KOESTLER SOLDIERED ON, preparing foreign dispatches for the Ullstein's
many papers and, discretely (like many other liberal journalists), for the
Social Democratic Party's News Agency, a relationship which soured
him considerably on the Social Democrats' aloofness and staleness.
("Their voice was the voice of the pamphlet, or the lecturer in the
evening schooL") As his talents became more and more noticed,
Koestler wrote features on film, the arts, politics, and science-which
particularly caught the attention of his editors. His greatest triumph that
year was an article on (including an exclusive interview with) the Due
de Broglie, whose theory of light had just won the Nobel Prize.
Koestler's unusually competent grasp of the new physics and obvious
facility in writing about science for the general public gained him the
paternal interest of Franz Ullstein, who was soon
to
be engaged in a
