Afterthought .
By ALAN BRIEN • As an avid, engrossed, self-identified reader of Arthur Koestler's auto- biographies, I feel I know him very well. In many ways, he is the modern author I should have most liked to be—left-wing agi- tator, world-drifter, politi- cal novelist, polymath populariser, dynamiter of orthodoxies—if I were not so afraid of being poor, exiled, persecuted, not to mention in danger of having my fingernails drawn with pincers and being led out of solitary confinement to face a firing squad at dawn. His literary personality is very like his physical ap- pearance, which enemies have characterised as rat-like. We admirers cannot entirely reject the resemblance—but this is a very striking and winning rat with a rodent energy for digging up forgotten evidence; a restless scampering curiosity which defies signs saying 'Members Only' and barbed-wire barricades marked 'Danger —Keep Out'; a keen sharp nose, close to the ground, which does not ignore smells because they are unpleasant or unmentionable; an in- tellectual appetite which can convert the driest fodder into a source of cerebral energy.
Mr.. Koestler is founder-president of the scholar-journalists, a blackleg determined to sub- vert the closed shop of academicians and an enemy of all restrictive practices among the dons' trade union. He believes that the common man not only has a right to know, but also the ability to understand, the laws which govern the uni- verse he inhabits. He is a yogi among commissars, a stakhanovite among gurus, and a lotus among robots. He is the ombudsman of the layman who refuses to be overawed by the jargon and the double-talk of psychologists, historians, physicists, theologians and literary pundits. If you boiled down Leavis and Snow in one pot, and Haldane and Orwell in another, then dis- tilled the product, you might have the essence of Koettlerism.
I have met him in person only twice. And, on each occasion, my first unfavourable reactions transmuted themselves on subsequent considera- tion into sympathetic allegiance. The first was in 1943 when he came to Oxford to deliver a' fighting attack on the irrational roots of Com- munist philosophy to a student society. Holding then the left-wing position which he himself had evacuated, I led a counter-attack from the audience at question time which turned on the validity of an analogy he had produced from atomic physics. I knew practically nothing about the subject, but I was surrounded by a body- guard of brilliant young scientists (then secretly engaged on the research which led to the bomb on Hiroshima), and I manipulated the prompts they gave me with a bluffing skill. I pretended, of course, to be neutral about his conclusions but to be aiming, as an independent seeker after Pure truth, to correct his fallacious reasoning. My criticisms were, I think, impeccable; my motives suspect. Mr. Koestler quickly saw through the trick, refused to debate his illustra- tions, repeated his denunciation of Communism even more violently, and, pointing an angry finger at me, shouted; 'These are the tactics of Stalinism.' He was right, of course, though I was unable to admit it to myself at the time.
The second 'time, nearly twenty years later, was
at a dinner party where I attempted to open up a topic of common interest by seeking his opinion of Brecht's Galileo. He waved his arms about like a man beating off a stream of midges and said curtly-1 have dealt with Galileo in a long book published in 1959. You should read it.' This was a conversation-stopper and plunged me into silence for at least five minutes. I came to the conclusion that, like many paper experts, Mr. Koestler was unable after such a lapse of time to summon up, and ad lib off the cuff, the in- formation he had once so carefully and pains- takingly laid down in print.
A few weeks ago, the book was reprinted in paperback (The Sleepwalkers, Penguin, 8s. 6d.) and I was forced once more to revise my sum- ming-up. This history of man's changing view of his cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton is so meaty and so rich in ideas, so packed with fascinating biographical anecdotes and un- expected historical sidelights, so full of paradoxes and perversities, that I quite see it would be im- possible to do justice to its thesis in a casual cocktail conversation—especially between a man who had not read it and the man who had writ- ten it. I will not attempt to render it down now (you too should read it) but I would like to take up one of the points in his 'Epilogue' which set all the little wheels in my brain spinning. In so far as I have a philosophical stance, it is modelled upon the battling rationalists of the nineteenth century. I assume that science has given a body blow to religion, and that anthropology and psychology have filled in the grave. It was like discovering the ground has suddenly become transparent, the earth a perspex ball, to find a sceptic like Arthur Koestler backing up the semi- mystical suggestion of Sir James Jeans that the new physics has produced a universe which begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we arc beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm.
Mr. Koestler points out that it is not enough simply to accept that the ground we walk on is a nearly perfect vacuum—a buzzing complex of miniature solar systems with electrons for planets—but that it is scarcely permissible even to say that an electron occupies space at all. It does not even move in time. It is equally everywhere.
Why then, asks the indomitable, unembarrass- able Koestler, should conservative scientists retain their dogmatic, quasi-religious belief in a materialist philosophy when matter itself has evaporated? If electrons can move without cross- ing space, why should 'Extra-Sensory Preception' not transmit and receive signals without physical intervention? Musing on this, I picked up a brain wave. The trouble about the experiments of Pro- fessor Rhine and his followers has always seemed that their results only contradicted the law of averages by small proportions. If ESP is to have any significance, I felt, the receiver should be guaranteed to pick up at least a quarter of the patterns broadcast. But how, I mused, if ESP is a primitive, pre-linguistic phenomenon, more animal than human, which radiates emotions rather than symbols or pictures like the infection
of panic or blood-lust in a mob? Accordingly I suggest an experiment. Take a hundred volun-
teers in locked, sound-proof, windowless boxes who, can all be wired up for sound and vision to a control room. Tell fifty that the building is on fire and they must escape by their own devices.
Then monitor the other fifty to see whether they show signs of what would be an irrational desire to break out to safety. If the basic instinct of self- preservation and survival is not communicable by E,SP then surely nothing is.
(Older readers from days of yore may be won- dering what happened to the aphorism contest, .let alone the great cuckold's horns hunt. I hope to print the results of both investigations in the next issue—our Bumper Christmas Number.)
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