The Invisible Writing

"Koestler may have had flaws as a human being – which his biographers have examined – but he is a giant figure, and has something to teach us today which is not at all dated by the Cold War. This is the second volume of his autobiography, The Invisible Writing , dating from 1932 to 1940, which were the years of his deep immersion in communism and his emerging out of it before moving to Britain in 1940. He responds to a view by [the critic] Raymond Mortimer that Koestler’s writings assume events to be normal which Mortimer considers abnormal. This drew from Koestler an angry and well justified reply at the end of this volume of memoirs that his life, on which he based his writing and thinking, was completely normal for people in most of Europe at that time. It was normal to fear the loss of one’s life savings. It was normal to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night and be carted off. It was normal to fear that one would be executed as a writer or journalist or ordinary person caught up in the conflict. Koestler was delighted when he fled to England and lived in a society in which these things were abnormal. What is important about that – which is still adamantly denied by liberal humanists – is that the piecemeal, incremental, melioristic advance of which those humanists speak was entirely impossible in the historical context in which Koestler found himself. So utopianism doesn’t just apply to schemes of radical political renewal of the sort that the Bolsheviks attempted. Meliorism can also be utopian, because it presupposes a background of institutions and reconcilable groups in society that very well may not exist. In most of human history, progress in this cumulative sense is impossible, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve defended a more cyclical view of history. I was long an anti-communist myself, but I don’t condemn Koestler for becoming a communist when he did, and he saw pretty early – by the end of the thirties – that the Soviet Union was an illusion. The communists said there would be wars, famines, periods of dictatorship, even of mass murder, but out of this, they thought – and Koestler thought this too, for a while – something incomparably better would emerge, something better than anything that had existed. There was indeed mass murder and dictatorship and horrific experiments but it produced absolutely nothing, only human suffering on a vast scale. So Koestler repudiated it, and that was his intellectual as well as moral and physical courage. He is associated with that, and Darkness at Noon is of course a great book – not only for Koestler’s disillusionment with communism but for his insights into the psychology of belief. But the period The Invisible Writing covers, from 1932 to 1940, was the most dramatic time of his life. The milieu of adventurers, agents, spies, journalists and refugees in which he moved is absolutely fascinating. He was on the run; he was captured and sentenced to death, then exchanged in a hostage swap; he knew everyone in the overt and covert communist movements of the period; he witnessed the fall of France. It’s fresh, vivid, very analytical and wonderfully written. It’s a revealing book not only about that period in history, but about a highly cultivated, bold and intrepid mind, right in the middle of one of the crucibles of 20th century conflict and horror, trying to make sense of it. Koestler survived it mentally and physically, wasn’t broken by it, and went on thinking and writing to produce one of the most profound commentaries on the 20th century experience which has the message today which is as unwelcome as it was in the forties – that these things are normal elements of human experience. And I think he’s absolutely right. It’s restrainable by civilisation, and that would take us neatly to Freud."