Inside the Holocaust

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!

Finally, through a friend, he was hired as a Middle East correspondent for the Ullstein publications of Germany. Ullstein soon sent him to Paris, then yanked him back to Berlin to become, at 25, science editor of an Ullstein newspaper. By the next year, he was also doubling as foreign editor of another, the B.Z, am Mittag (circ. 190,000).

The Morning After. Thereupon, in December 1931, Arthur suffered another metaphysical revolution. He joined the Communist Party. He had, so he thought, good reason. The Nazis were coming to power in Germany, and to Koestler it seemed that only the Communists could hold out against them. More generally, the party offered him a release for his "state of Chronic Indignation" at "a polluted society." Even so, a run of irrelevant bad luck at that time had some other "field that awaits the plow of the Lord."

Around Irma and Sam--and an assortment of turn-of-the-century islanders--Novelist William March fashions a choice tropical romp in the serio-comic vein of Satirists Aubrey Menen and Edgar Mittel-holzer.

Piglets for Rahabaat. The natives have all the sins of the senses, but no sense of sm. They worship Rahabaat, a god who lives in the local volcano, with frank fertility rites. When Sam preaches his Vermont fundamentalism at the men, they giggle and slip away into the underbrush When Irma tries to clothe the women in sacklike dresses of her own design, they cut holes in the tops to bare their breasts.

After a brief vogue, even this ventilated version goes out of fashion. When the natives hear of Irma's virginity, they laughingly dub her "The One Too Slippery to Be Caught."

But Irma has been caught by the languid charm of October Island. While Sam files reports of "no progress" to his superiors, she scouts around the island and one day digs up an hermaphroditic sculpture. Shocked, she heaves it into the volcano. Her Christian mission, she decides is to destroy as many of these pagan relics as possible. The natives find her constant digging odd, but since she tosses everything into Rahabaat's volcano, they find her piety admirable. When, in a moment of hunger, she eats a portion of roast piglet left on the altar of Rahabaat and the god fails to strike her dead, the natives are sufficiently awed to make her the guest of honor at a fecundity festival. "You're a lost woman," comments Sam Barnfield sadly. "And you," she taunts, "are a dirty-minded old man."

Great Breast Mother. Irma's true hour

of glory comes as she is ladling condensed

milk to a sick native out of an old stone

cup she has dug up and failed to destroy.

I he native vaults out of bed shouting-She is here! The Great Breast Mother of

the World is here!" The cup, it seems, is

the one from which Rahabaat drank and

drew power; and Irma Barnfield fits the

legend of the virgin goddess whose coming

will insure October Island a millennium

of peace and plenty. In no time, a mass

conversion to Christianity takes place but

the natives insist on added sacraments

Irma must periodically spoon out milk

from the stone cup.

Lapping up the adulation of her new post as high priestess, Irma is none too happy when Sam takes sick and the mission board orders the couple home for a test. To invoke her return, the natives toss hundreds of piglets into the volcano and finally even their own infants. Sure enough, back in Vermont Sam dies, and Irma heads for the island again.

Everybody is overjoyed. The natives have lost most of their children, are half-Christian, but have their virgin goddess Irma has lost her husband, is half-pagan but has the adoration she loves As for Author March, he has had the pleasure of some deft ironic thrusts, at the expense of almost everybody but the reader nography of irrelevant chatter, its sleep-enticing rhythms, its delight in obsessive enumeration of uninteresting objects, and its aggravating tone of false naivete.

Gertrude Stein began as a literary innovator, helping to break the crusts of conventional literary language. But she took her experiments too seriously and, like many another pioneer, refused to budge from her first discovery. Her manner became a mannerism, her breakthrough a limitation. In her last novel, the old revolutionary proves a rather garrulous bore.

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