Hot Head, Cold Heart
Arrow In The Blue
By Arthur Koestler.
Macmillan. 353 pp. $5.00
In setting out to write his autobiography, of which this is the first volume, Arthur Koestler first retrospectively cast his “secular horoscope”—i.e., he looked up the issue of the London Times of the morning following his birth, which took place in Budapest on September 5, 1905, to see what constellation of events was then in the ascendant. He began with the advertisements; these yielded only a period flavor. Next came reports of such innocent events as a dinner party given by King Edward at the Kursaal in Marienbad and the capture of an Englishman by brigands in Macedonia. A quotation from a bellicose comment by the Paris Temps on the Moroccan crisis made him perk up (“This is becoming significant. Mars enters the Second House”). Significances followed thick and fast with a dispatch from Tiflis about disorders in Baku (the Russian revolution of 1905) and a report of “Disturbances at Kishineff” (a pogrom). Koestler felt his horoscope was complete when he read the day’s editorial: a comment on the Russo-Japanese treaty of peace, signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the very hour of his coming into the world, and containing an enthusiastic eulogy of victorious Japan’s totalitarian system of bringing up the individual in perfect subordination to “the tribe and the State.”
“The clock that struck the hour of my birth,” he writes, “also announced the end of the era of liberalism and individualism, of that harshly competitive and yet easy-going civilization. . . . I was born at the moment when the sun was setting on the Age of Reason.”
This is a good illustration of the Koestlerian method of autobiography, which consists in seeing the subject, himself, against the backdrop of an important abstraction, historical or psychological.
My first thought was, “This is to treat oneself with a certain air. What vanity, to make History dance attendance on his birth.” But reading on in the autobiography showed the thought to be unkind, and the opposite of the truth: it is the impressive abstraction that occupies the center of the stage; the “I” is a modest figure in the foreground serving only to illustrate it. Part One of the book has for epigraph a quotation from Tolstoy: “And he went on talking about himself, not realizing that this was not as interesting to the others as it was to him.” Arrow in the Blue, for all its surface assurance, is that somewhat contradictory thing, the autobiography of a truly diffident man; one who, convinced at bottom that he is personally of little account, finds significance in his life only as it annotates some general notion.
The thirst for the absolute is a stigma which marks those unable to find satisfaction in the relative world of the now and here. My obsession with the arrow [at the age of 16, lying on a hill slope in Buda, he had seen in a vision a super-arrow winging its way into the blue of space, on and on—and so grasped for the first time the notion of infinity] was merely the first phase of the quest. When it proved sterile, the Infinite as a target was replaced by Utopias of one kind or another. It was the same quest and the same all-or-nothing mentality which drove me to the Promised Land and into the Communist Party. In other ages aspirations of this kind found their natural fulfilment in God. . . . Now, however, after the shattering catastrophes which have brought the Age of Reason and Progress to a close, the void has made itself felt. I grew up . . . [in] an age of disillusions and an age of longing.
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But an autobiography is about oneself; surely Koestler doesn’t go on forever about the sunset of the Age of Reason and the sunrise of the Age of Longing? As his personal history is a footnote to Universal History, so his individual psyche serves him as a case study in general psychology. Koestler sets up ingenious psychological categories to describe himself; but these eclipse the very personality they are supposed to convey, self-analysis turning into a kind of self-effacement. His childhood, we learn, was a constant struggle between “Ahor” (the Archaic Horror) and “Babo” (the Baron in the Bog), a clever-sounding antithesis he invents to express the irrational fears that beset him, and the resolution he summoned up out of his very weakness (like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the bog by his own hair) to overcome them. But between the millstones of Ahor and Babo, very little of the child survives. His mature personality, he tells us, is split into an active half and a contemplative half, a Commissar and a Yogi. The first suffers from Chronic Indignation, which sets the adrenalin to flowing and sends him out into the world to right its wrongs. But then indignation gives way to the “self-dissolving stillness of the ‘oceanic feeling,’” and the Yogi takes over. The struggle is never resolved. But in this seesaw of the Yogi and the Commissar, we lose the man.
Even where Koestler appears to be most cand, the candor is mostly sophistication. He esn’t so much tell the plain truth about him-lf as cleverly forestall a psychoanalytic “aha!” the reader’s part by getting in there first th the analysis. In all the neat and sardonic ppositions that he sets up, there is little roomr those slack and irregular but living things at make up the truly personal. “Shyness and insecurity have remained my silent companions to this day.” He is an autobiographer with no confidence at all in his autobiography except as it serves an idea larger than self.
I find this self-depreciation very Jewish. Pushed to an extreme, it becomes self-hatred; and indeed we find this feeling more or less coloring everything that Koestler has to say about the Jews. It is true that he blames the faults of the Jews on external circumstances, especially their homelessness; but this doesn’t mitigate the stridency or correct the imbalance of his criticisms. His remarks on the Jews have a special nastiness about them that comes from their being aimed at himself. The homelessness of the Jews, he writes (himself a man who has drifted about from place to place),
. . . increased the protective adaptability of their surface, and petrified their inner core. Constant friction polished their many facets: reduced to drift-sand, they had to glitter if they wanted to avoid being trodden on. . . . Their natural selector was the whip: it whipped the life out of the feeble and whipped the spasm of ambition into the fit.
Reading this (which he quotes from Thieves in the Night), you immediately think: Glitter and ambitiousness are two qualities very much in evidence in Koestler’s own work. He tries to lose himself in generalizations, so it is in generalizations that we must look for his really personal statements; the ostensibly autobiographical portions are thin and unrevealing.
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Arrow In The Blue, though unsuccessful as an autobiography, is not a boring book. Nothing Koestler writes is ever boring. (This is as much a fault, in his case, as it is a virtue; to be so unfailingly entertaining argues shallowness and even vulgarity.) His autobiography, however, is not entertaining because it tells the story of an exciting life, just as it is not their plots that make his novels crackle with tension. Koestler’s life seems to have been varied and exciting enough, but it is never the excitement of life that you find in a Koestler book. Nor are the people (or places) we meet painted with any particular depth or vividness. Like the characters of his novels, they are hit off with a certain facility, but remain bare and minimal and, really, unregarded. People leave him cold, it is for ideas that he burns. As the Yiddish saying has it, his is a cold heart and a hot head.
The excitement of Koestler’s books is an ideological excitement. They are not about men and women, but about Communists and ex-Communists, Zionists and ex-Zionists, Freudians and ex-Freudians. In his world everybody is either joining or quitting a party; it is a world of movements and members, and the loud crash you hear is of the idea running head on into reality. Koestler remarks that the irrepressible propagandizing Commissar in him has spoiled all his novels. This lack of pride of authorship is nice, but he couldn’t be more wrong; it is their “propaganda,” or ideological excitement, that gives his novels their distinctive quality. Koestler’s books are so very up to date because modern history is mostly the history of movements. They will lose their interest as these movements recede into the past. But meanwhile they continue to fascinate, by their extreme relevance, the educated, movement-joining middle class.
The impression Koestler makes on one through his autobiography is not a particularly sympathetic one. You are put off by his glibness, smart-aleckiness, and eternal ding-dong superficial antithesizing. It comes as no great surprise to learn that he was once science editor for a big Berlin newspaper and turned out popular science articles full of synthetic intellectual drama; in his literary work he is a popular scientist of ideologies. He is good on Communism, though he oversimplifies; his best title to fame is as a teacher, along with George Orwell (whom he does not otherwise resemble), about the true nature of Communism.
He is too uneasy about himself to be really candid, and yet he has the candor to tell you about his uneasiness.
There are various types of false personalities; the one to which I belong is recognizable, among other things, by the fact that he feels sure of himself when addressing a meeting or holding forth at a crowded party, but becomes the more insecure the smaller the audience, and reveals his basic timidity when alone with one other person. Genuine people are mostly the other way around.
The word you think of for Koestler is “clever,” a word that both concedes him his talents and scores him off. But then you discover in his autobiography that he has beaten you to it and already scored himself off with that same word. He is pretty much of a cold fish, but he is also honest. That is something.
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