Word: koestlers
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Simone-Like Heroine. Readers of The Mandarins need not expect a good story or flashy writing. But anyone wanting to know what interesting people like Sartre, Novelist Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler and others were thinking at war's end about France, Russia, the U.S., Communism and life generally will find the answers here in abundance. Her setting is Paris just after the liberation, her characters writers and intellectuals who live to talk and make love as though they were being put through their paces by an observant Kinsey. They also say just what Author de Beauvoir wants them...
Outside the Soviet Union a vast literature, topped by Koestler's Darkness at Noon, grew up around the explanation of why the Old Bolsheviks had made Stalin's leap to absolute power easy by confessing (whether it was true or not) to a conspiracy against him. It was conjectured that they had done so 1) for ideological reasons, i.e., to preserve the monolithic party front, or 2) because their consciences were poisoned by the common guilt of Communist intrigue, or 3) to indicate obliquely, by admitting the incredible and fantastic, that they were being murdered. Later study...
...Chambers, the Villain, he pours irresistible common sense on the woozled thinking of those who argue that Alger Hiss may have been guilty, but still scorn Whittaker Chambers as an "informer." Says Koestler: "To talk of betrayal [by Chambers of Hiss] where loyalty would mean persistence in crime [is] to defend the agents of an evil regime on the grounds that those who denounce it are no saints." ¶The Seven Deadly Fallacies (e.g., confusion of Left and East, the anti-anti attitude) and a brilliant Guide to Political Neuroses (e.g., collective amnesia, eternal adolescence) are probably his most valuable...
Goodbye, Cassandra. Koestler's main theme: the big issues that agitated intellectuals for two generations-right v. left, capitalism v. socialism-have today become less relevant than they were. The great issue now, as any man of reason must see it, says Koestler, is relative freedom v. absolute tyranny. As for the notion cherished by the left that private property is the chief obstacle to human progress and brotherhood, this has in fact been answered by the Soviet Union, which has set up in the name of socialism a more hypocritical and merciless tyranny than any state in history...
...they ever learn their lesson, it will not be from Arthur Koestler. He has had it. Says Koestler: "This ... is a farewell to arms ... I have said all I had to say on these questions [that have] obsessed me, in various ways, for the best part of a quarter century. Now the errors are atoned for, the bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse, and is due for a vocational change." As to what the vocational change might be, for a man who is proud that his books have been burned behind him, the reader must guess...