ARROW IN THE BLUE (353 pp.]—Arthur Koestler—Mocm///on ($5).
"At a conservative estimate," writes Arthur Koestler on an early page of his autobiography, "three out of every four people whom I knew before I was thirty were subsequently killed in Spain, or hounded to death at Dachau, or gassed at Belsen or deported to Russia, or liquidated in Russia."
The importance of Arthur Koestler is the importance of a man caught in the heart of a holocaust who survives to bear witness. Koestler's holocaust was also that of much of European civilization, and Koestler has already borne eloquent witness to it in half a dozen political novels (The Gladiators, Darkness at Noon) and several politico-mystical tracts (The Yogi and the Commissar, Insight and Outlook).
Now, at 47, Koestler has chosen to give still more specific testimony in the form of his autobiography. Arrow in the Blue. Volume I. published this week, firmly demonstrates that he was not overbold to attempt a self-summation so early. In this volume alone, which carries him only to his 27th year, Author Koestler lives as many lives as most men do in their full span.
Salvation a la Munchausen. The first of them began in 1905 in Budapest. His father was a promoter and would be inventor who soon struck it rich with a "radioactive" soap. His mother was a hysteric who blew hot & cold until little Arthur had emotional chilblains. To make bad worse, Arthur turned out to be unusually short, yet something of a child prodigy too, "admired for my brains and detested for my character by children and teachers alike." He had little home training in the Jewish faith of his fathers, and early in life his belief in a personal God was overshadowed by his faith in impersonal science.
Dominated by "guilt, fear, and loneliness"—already, in short, exhibiting the characteristic ailments of his era—Arthur at the age of ten discovered all by himself the characteristic cure of his generation. He decided, after reading the story in which Baron Munchausen yanks himself out of the mire by the hair of his own head, that he could save his own soul in the same way.
Not long after, he had a vision of life as an arrow, hurtling upwards into the blue; and not long after that, he had another in which the arrow split lengthwise. One half, as the metaphysical wunderkind interpreted it, was action, the other contemplation.
Action claimed him from 17 to 20, when he zipped through engineering courses at the University of Vienna, joined a fraternity, got himself properly chopped about the chin in a duel, and thoroughly initiated into the bedrooms of the local frauleins. At 20, after a series of undergraduate bull sessions about free will and Zionism, he lit out for Palestine to be a "hewer of wood and a drawer of water."
Unfortunately, the commune to which Arthur was assigned had no place for such a bright (and unmuscular) young man. Arthur was soon selling lemonade on the streets of Haifa—and selling so little that he turned in his equipment after a few days. Then followed a year of semi-starvation, which Arthur softened by composing fairy stories in Hebrew!