Koestler's Story of His Fervent Quest for Utopia
Ever since his birth [Arthur Koestler] has lived as it were in the maelstrom of contemporary history, turning in a continual vortex even as he wrote, and with an unerring instinct homing toward the place of trouble which will affect us all very soon. His environment is the whirlpool, and his creativity explodes out of violence.
His virtue, however, is not just restlessness and love of the vortex of contemporary history. It lies in his capacity for entering into what I can only call the conscience of contemporary events. That this is a shifting conscience, which tells him at one time to be on one side or at one place and another at a quite different one, is disconcerting and bitter to his political allies, but it is what really makes for his significance as a man and a writer. Mr. Koestler is a restless instrument who attaches himself to a conflict and gives us a kind of reading of the moral issues involved. He reminds us that the reading may be different at different times. Communism was a better cause in 1933 than it is in 1952.
He also has his own personal problem, which is to discover some center within himself which is not shifting, to which he can attach his values and his faith. His danger is to make a heroic virtue out of the changeability which has made him a public success. The weakness of [Arrow in the Blue, the first volume of Koestler's autobiography] is that he still seems to regard ruthless, analytic honesty as the supreme virtue. When applied to his own personality his rather mechanical self-analysis tends to wither up what is good, and to overemphasize what is erroneous. He analyzes the bad, but he tends to analyze away the good by explaining it in terms of more or less pathological motives.
What is best in him is genuine moral indignation (which he treats here as a kind of illness), a passionate self-identification with the underdog and an infectious love of adventure. (pp. 101-02)
The basic defect of the book is that it is theory-ridden. Not only is it stuffed with ideas which have featured in Mr. Koestler's other books … but also there is a theory as to why Mr. Koestler's mind is laid as wide open to ideologies as his father's was to inventions. The explanation is implicit in his title, Arrow in the Blue…. [He describes how] it occurred to him that:
You could shoot a super-arrow into the blue with a super-force which would carry it beyond the earth's gravity … and on … and on…. there would be nothing to stop it…. [The] infinite as 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 Holy Land and into the Communist party.
(p. 103)
[The] book alternates between a narrative of events in which he has participated and passages of self-analysis. Whether as narrator or autopsychologist, the analytic method always triumphs. The reader may feel that Mr. Koestler has altogether too much confidence in a science which is often perilously close to science-fiction, and that he has an almost fatal gift for minting clichés. Since he is certainly at his most trenchant when attacking analytic systems like those of Marx and Freud, it seems strange that he has such confidence in the pattern-fabricating method of describing behavior.
At moments one suspects that Mr. Koestler thinks that a pattern of behavior is the same as an existence, just as he appears to think that the pursuit of a goal is the same as attaining one, and that the "search for principles of law and order in the universe" is "an essentially religious endeavor" (in a passage written to prove that scientists are religious). Nor would it occur to him that one of his most quoted phrases—"Crusader without a Cross"—is strictly meaningless, since a crusader without a cross would not be a crusader. He would be a tourist. The infinity into which the super-arrow is directed by a super-force is a super-vacuum. (pp. 103-04)
The religious, the artists, the poets and the novelists have written about human beings in order to discover a point within human behavior where it acquires an indefinable essence of being, a mystery of life. To Mr. Koestler, though, the pattern is everything, and when he has explained it away the essence has evaporated.
The problem raised by the Koestler pattern of analysis is that it has the effect first of schematizing the behavior of other people until they appear mere abstractions, and lastly (it would seem, from this book) of making Mr. Koestler himself appear entirely "predictable" to the reader, with the result that his real personality disappears into the brickwork patterning, like the Cheshire cat. (p. 104)
Mr. Koestler is penetrating, acute, humorous, fearless, adventurous and often amusing. What he lacks is simply the element of love and this makes his own personality seem a blank in the story of his life. (p. 105)
[Adding] up the whole sum of his autobiography [both Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing], we should recognize that it is a very great achievement to have such a typical case history and to insist so violently on retaining an identity that tries his contemporaries to the point of exasperation. (p. 106)
The true nature of his inner struggle seems covered over by much analytic terminology. At heart Koestler seems to me a religious man in search of penitence, homesick for a communion of saints. And in spite of his courageous self-examination, he does not seem to have discovered that his basic fault is pride. (p. 108)
Stephen Spender, "Koestler's Story of His Fervent Quest for Utopia" (1952) and "In Search of Penitence" (1954), in The New York Times Book Review (© 1952, 1954 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), September 21, 1952 and October 10, 1954 (and reprinted together as "In Search of Penitence," in Arthur Koestler: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Murray A. Sperber, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977, pp. 100-08).
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