Genius Reconsiders

"Arrow in the Blue" is a puzzling book. Often it seems to leave the realm of autobiography to become an elongated essay, a psychological novel, or a volume of modern history. At times only the personal pronoun reminds us that this is Arthur Koestler writing about himself. The casual reader will have a difficult time integrating the many facets of this book, but the more perceptive will realize that this is one of the best pieces of autobiographical writing to emerge in recent years.

To categorize "Arrow in the Blue" as just another confession of a former CP member would be doing Koestler an injustice. Most of those Saturday Evening Post type chronicles picture their writers as poor, misguided aesthetes who took Marx as their personal savior, and who have learned the hard way that McCarthyism is the only road to the good life. Koestler's self-analysis is of a different sort. It is both penetrating and brutal.

"I do not believe that either in life or in literature Puritanism is a virtue. Self-castigation yes. And self-love too, it if is fierce and humble, exacting and resigned . . . as full of awe as love for other creatures should be. He who does not love himself does not love well; and he who does not hate himself, does not hate well; and hatred of evil is as necessary as love if the world is not to come to a standstill."

Many of his passages resembel those of Dostoevsky and Thomas Wolfe at their stream-of-consciousness best. But in a sense he transcends both; for while they mask themselves as characters in novels, Koestler admits that he is laying bare his soul before his readers. He also has the advantage (questionable to be sure) of a familiarity with Freudian psychoanalysis. One wonders whether the author has not gone a bit overboard when he uses this method to explain his youth in Budapest. It is difficult to believe that a man can become so detached from himself as to reveal so much of his personality.

But Koestler does not stop at divulging the internal forces that molded his character and destiny. He tries--too hard--to discuss the world developments between 1905-31 that led him to embrace Zionism an eventually the "progressive schizophrenia" of Communism. Here the reader's interest flags. I think he sacrificed too much continuity to show how much he was the product of his environment.

Some of the historical material taken by itself is good writing, and his two essays--on the pitfalls of autobiography and the lures of Stalinism--are worth the price of the book.

Unfortunately "Arrow in The Blue" ends in mid-air, just when the writer has joined the party. It is the first of two volumes on the Koestler story. If this one was not too much of a catharsis for the author, the sequel should make as exciting and valuable reading.