238
PARTISAN REVIEW
And yet it is equally clear from
Arrow in the Blue
that all of this per–
sonal success seemed disturbingly comic to Koestler. He had made it
to
the very center of German intellectual life, but he had never had a seri–
ous love affair and continued to be both high-strung and retiring. He
was disliked by everyone. His admittedly contrived effort to appear
dashing was fairly transparent. Many years later, friends who talked
with him about this time in Berlin recalled that they had found him
repellently arrogant during the day, embarrassing in his drunken vul–
nerability during the evening. One friend (whom Koestler described as
"shrewd") confessed many years later that he had suspected Koestler of
suffering from schizophrenia. Koestler writes:
At twenty-five, I had accumulated enough experience to make me
into a wise and old man. . . . Yet all this seems not to have brought
me an inch nearer
to
maturity. ... Emotionally I was still nearly as
unbalanced, naive, unsure of myself, ready to fly off at a tangent,
as at sixteen. I sat behind an important desk, had a secretary, two
telephones, several mistresses, and was called Herr Redaktor, but it
was as if I was still surrounded by the taboo-forest of polar bear
rugs and potted palms in the parental flat.
In the middle of this turmoil, during the summer of
1931,
Koestler
undertook the single most glamorous assignment of his tenure with the
Ullstein Trust. He was honored as the only journalist commissioned to
accompany the Graf Zeppelin expedition to the Arctic. On his way
to
the polar circle, Koestler got his first look at the Soviet Union, from a
height of five hundred feet-the ideal vantage point from which to con–
firm the enthusiastic descriptions he had heard from communists and
fellow-travelers back in Berlin.
Arrow in the Blue
reproduces some of
his impressions of Leningrad, which Koestler committed
to
manuscript
in
1933,
after he had himself become a communist: "Look," he would
write, "that is Karl Marx Street, and over there is Engels Boulevard. In
the factory whose belching chimneys you see over there, there is a black
board and a red board on every wall of every workshop, and a bulletin
board with friendly quips at the management."
Then, at last, he came upon the glaciers of Cape Flora and was sud–
denly in the grip of a disturbing vision:
Now the midnight-sun changed to red, and the glaciers of Cape
Flora reflected this colour with the intensity of mirrors. Around the
cape there was a stretch of open sea, and the colour of the water
