Arthur Koestler

George Orwell begins "Arthur Koestler" with a national grievance. English writers had poured out political literature for a dozen years and produced almost nothing of aesthetic value and very little of historical value either; the good books about totalitarianism are all translations. The reason he gives is a difference of experience rather than of talent. In Europe, things had been happening to middle-class people that in England do not happen even to the working class. The writers he lists, Silone and Malraux and Borkenau and Victor Serge and Koestler himself, had broken laws to do politics at all, been imprisoned, crossed frontiers on forged papers. England, he writes, has no concentration-camp literature, and for an Englishman to have written Darkness at Noon would have been as unlikely an accident as a slave-trader writing Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Koestler is a Hungarian who wrote his earlier books in German, and Orwell takes the five published in England in order. Spanish Testament came out of his capture at Malaga in early 1937, when he was the News Chronicle's correspondent, nearly shot out of hand, then held for months in a fortress listening every night to the rifle fire as batches of Republicans were executed. Orwell calls the prison passages remarkable and the rest of the book definitely false in places, coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the moment and possibly doctored for the Left Book Club. The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933, he writes, is that they wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian, and in 1937 Koestler knew that and did not feel free to say it.

The Gladiators put it in a costume. Spartacus builds the City of the Sun, where nobody is to be a slave or hungry or flogged, and the turning point comes when he has to crucify twenty of his oldest followers. Orwell thinks the allegory falters, since the republic is wrecked by hedonism and looting rather than by the impossibility of combining power with righteousness, and that Spartacus is a modern man dressed up. Darkness at Noon he calls the masterpiece. Rubashov confesses to crimes he knows he did not commit, and Koestler chooses the third of the three available explanations: not guilt, not torture, but despair, mental bankruptcy and the habit of loyalty to the Party.

The argument Orwell has with him begins there. To answer why the accused confessed is to make a political decision, and Koestler's answer comes near to saying that revolutions are corrupting by their nature, that Rubashov in power would have been no better than his interrogator, that Lenin leads to Stalin. Scum of the Earth, the account of being interned in France by the Daladier government and imprisoned again on reaching England, moves further in that direction; Arrival and Departure, which Orwell thinks a tract pretending to be a novel, argues that revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic impulses.

Orwell's objection is that motives do not settle results. Marx's ultimate motives may well have been envy and spite, which proves nothing about his conclusions; history has to move in a certain direction even if neurotics push it there. He diagnoses Koestler as a hedonist who cannot give up the Earthly Paradise and cannot believe in it either, and who has settled on calling himself a short-term pessimist. Against that he sets one sentence: all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.