Reader's Choice

IN HIS biography and in his work, Arthur Koestler reflects to a remarkable degree the crucial European experiences and searchings of his age — once upon a time, Koestler married Contemporary History and they have lived together intimately and unhappily ever after. A wanderer since his youth, he has been an inmate of the concentration camp and the prison cell. After ardently embracing, then ardently repudiating, the great pseudo religion of the century, he has probed science, psychoanalysis, history, and philosophy, has pondered the saintliness of the Yogi and the satanic pragmatism of the Commissar, in a search for diagnoses of and prescriptions for our time’s distempers. A brilliant .journalist with a first-rate intellectual equipment and a considerable talent for fiction, he is above all a writer with a husband-wife relationship to Crisis. His novels — this is what makes them so arresting and at times so irritating — sound like bulletins from history’s bedchamber.

Koestler’s latest novel, The Age of Longing (Macmillan, $3.50), explores— with the immediacy of today’s newspaper— the moral temper of Western Europe: the situation which Koestler has elsewhere described as “a picnic in no-man’s land. Set in Paris, the story opens on Bastille Day 195 . . . and closes the following February, with the air raid sirens announcing the East Judgment— or maybe just another air raid exercise.

The Age of Longing assembles a group of characters who exemplify a variety of viewpoints, and whose talk and conduct dramatize the author’s ideas. Fedya Nikitin, the young cultural attaché (M.V.D. agent) of the Commonwealth of Freedom Loving Nations (formerly U.S.S.R.), is a marvelously convincing portrait of the Russian official who has grown up under Communism — the “Neanderthaler with a modern robotbrain.” Hydie Anderson, daughter of an American Colonel and an alcoholic mother, has lost the religious belief of her convent school days and suffers from “the bug of longing.” A sophisticated innocent, she is physically attracted to Nikitin by his masterful certainty, and lapses into near hysteria when she gets wise to certain home truths about her lover. The large east includes several eminent pro-Comjnunists; an exCommunisl poet (Koestler’s chief mouthpiece) whose tone is one of “arrogant heartbrokenness”; a celebrated philosopher, founder of the Neo-nihilist movement and now a leading advocate of “neutralism” for France; a novelist “knight-errant” (also taken, almost readymade, from life) who is organizing élite Troupers In resist the Russians, just for the sake of the gesture; a Russian “Hero of Culture,” long disillusioned, who suddenly repudiates the Commonwealth, then goes to seed under the burden of freedom; and the author of a pornographic best seller, Voyage Autour de mon Bidet, who is immensely pious, chaste, and a fellow traveler.

The general picture is of “a dying patient between two attacks,” and the diagnosis is that Western Europe has too long been without a faith. Dumb longing for a god made men eager to idealize Communism, and now, too, there are many who reason, “If you . . . are going to be raped, you might as well convince yourself that your ravisher is the man of your dreams.” Western Europe is doomed. But to light evil—like the novelist knight-errant—remains the ethical imperative.

Whether or not Koestler’s acrid defeatism is factually justified, the intellectual fabric out of which it is tailored is shot through with flashy dogmatism: probability is treated as inevitability; and where there is a variety of possibilities, Koestler sees only a simple either or — unquestioning faith or no faith at all; Nikitin’s smug assurance of certainty or inner desolation. Koestler seems blind to the fact that individuals and nations have retained their moral stamina without an authoritarian faith. lake most of the ex-Communists, he appears not to have shaken off the anxiety complex about freedom which originally turned him towards Communism. The argument of his novel appears to boil down to this: Now is the time for all good Europeans to die for the lost cause of Freedom. Why was it lost? Because to live in freedom is either unbearable or morally debilitating.

Notwithstanding these questionings and the too theatrical dialogue, The Age of Longing remains a novel of outstanding interest. Koestler’s documentary talent is at its best in his picture of the Paris international intelligentsia, and the action is stagemanaged with a keen sense of drama. While its “truth” may be less than the whole truth, there is much in it. that hits the center of the target.

“The publishers believe that the appearance of this novel is of comparable importance to the publication of This is Side of Paradise or Look Homeward. Angel. . . . [It] introduces a writer who will take a commanding place in American literaltue.” The book launched with this pronunciamento by the temperate and discerning House of Scribner is an 860-page novel about the Regular Army, From Hera to Eternity (Scribner’s, $4.50). The author, James Jones, an ex-soldier of twenty-nine, was discovered and helped along his long road by that great editor, the late Maxwell Perkins.

The setting of Jones’s story is Schofield Barracks. Hawaii, in 1041, and the focus is mainly on the world of the enlisted man. The book is certainly a milestone of sorts in realistic fiction; no novelist has documented army life quite so thoroughly or recorded the crudities of soldier talk so faithfully.

The two dominant protagonists in an extensive cast are Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt and First Sergeant Milton Warden, Prewitt has found his “Call” as a bugler. But bis deepest passion is a stubborn pride, and injured pride causes him to transfer Irom the Bugle Corps to the infantry. Here, too, pride puts him on his company commander’s blacklist; and Sergeant Warden is told to give him “The Treatment" until he comes to heel. Warden is a crack professional soldier — a demon for work, hard and cynical, but basically fair-minded. He bears down heavily on Prewitt but there is a subtle bond between them. Both men love the army and it has forged in both of them an inner core of steel.

Prewitt’s refusal to let himself be “broken" is the central drama in a book of many strands. There is Prewitt‘s love affair with a prostitute, and Warden’s with his captain’s wife. a deeply scarred woman who has given herself promiscuously in a despairing search for love. There is the close-up of life in the barracks; the close-up of the concentration camp regime in the Stockade; and there are the wild nights on the town. A Brigadier General preaches the principles of fascism. A kind of hobointellectual, the hero of the Stockade, argues that God is Evolution and preaches a credo of Acceptance. As a climax, there is the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mr. Jones has grappled with a variety of materials and he handles some of them less successfully than others. There is a good deal of weak stuff in the two love affairs and the characterizations of the women, and the sorties into the field of general ideas are unimpressive. The book as a whole, however, is a spectacular achievement: it has tremendous vitality and driving power and graphic authenticity. Prewitt and Warden are magnificent creations, who take possession of the reader, and half a dozen or more of the secondary figures are arrestingly well drawn.

From Here to Eternity, in my estimate, is a better novel than The Noked and the Dead. Mailer’s people and plot betrayed signs of being painstakingly modeled to dramatize a thesis; in Jones’s book you feel that the novelist has let his inner vision express its own undoctored truth. I have one strong reservation about the author’s talent, however considerable it may be. It looks to me as if he is another of those emotionally retarded he-men to whom toughness is the supreme Good, and who see life as synonymous with total war.

Notwithstanding these questionings and the too theatrical dialogue, The Age of Longing remains a novel of outstanding interest. Koestler’s documentary talent is at its best in his picture of the Paris international intelligentsia, and the action is stagemanaged with a keen sense of drama. While its “truth” may be less than the whole truth, there is much in it. that hits the center of the target.

Public interest in the welfare of the ordinary soldier was first effectively mobilized, about a hundred years ago, by Florence Nightingale’s nursing mission in the Crimean War and the horrors it brought to light. Miss Nightingale, immortalized in the history books as a pioneer in nursing, was that and much more: she brought about far-reaching improvements in the living conditions of the British soldier and her counsel was solicited by several foreign governments. The truditional image of the “ Lady with a Lamp" — gliding through the awfulness of the hospital at Scutari and by her angelic presence easing the anguish of the dying — conveys no inkling of the complex, obsessed personality and astonishing life of this quite extraordinary woman. She is currently the subject of a new biography, Florence Nightingale (McGraw-Hill, $4.50) by Cecil Woodham-Smith, a distinguished and fascinating book which is to be a June selection of the Literary Guild.

Born into a wealthy family and demurely beautiful. Miss Nightingale became a great success in the fashionable society of London, Paris, and Florence. She loved finery, dancing, and music. She was also remarkably well educated, and impressed scholars with the brilliance of her mind. Her inner life was an altogether different story, and she poured it into “private notes” which she carefully hoarded. In her seventeenth year (it was 1837), Miss Nightingale, like Joan of Are, heard a voice — “God spoke to me and called me to His Service.” Her mission, however, was not disclosed and eight years passed before she discovered it. There followed another eight years of bitter conflict with her family, who held the prevailing view that nursing was a job for low-class sluts. Miss Nightingale daydreamed of doing great things, was tortured by guilt-feelings, and feared she would go mad. “In my thirty-first year.” she wrote, “I see nothing desirable but death.” Meanwhile she had turned down, once after prolonged stalling, several enviable proposals of marriage.

Once her apprenticeship to nursing started, nursing became her entire life: she trained in three countries, pored over medical documents, and could not, she said, look at her family’s country house without thinking of how she would turn it into a hospital. Her work in the Crimean catastrophe is one of the really great tales of human fortitude and achievement. In addition to the unspeakable hospital conditions and the ravages of cholera, she had lo contend with the obstructionism of the topranking army doctors. The “angel of mercy” proved herself a shrewd diplomatist as well as an administrative genius, and she apparently retained an astringent sense of humor: when Queen Victoria offered to send a consignment of cologne to the wounded, she said someone had better tell the Queen that gin would be more popular.

At the war’s end, public adoration of Miss Nightingale had reached an extraordinary pitch — her mail arrived in “hail storms.” But. she would not make a public appearance or issue any public statements, and a profound change occurred in her character — she became self-pitying, angry, and withdrawn. Alter an illness in 1857, she pronounced herself an invalid and refused to see her family on the ground that she must conserve her strength for work. The “invalid lived on to ninety, and for forty-three years in hersiekroom led a busier life than even Eleanor Roosevelt’s. She battled directly with the Government for army reforms: she amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of health problems, wrote reports, pioneered the use of statistical diagrams. She became so respected that a new Viceroy of India would come to her for “briefing before taking up his post. And she grew so passionately concerned with bettcring the management of the world that she had to admonish herself: “I MUST remember that God is not my private secret ary.”Nabokoy’s material is at bottom on the slender side: what sustains Old Friends and New Music so engagingly is the author’s civilized and altractive personality. Warmly interested in people and deeply devoted to music, he is also a keen-eyed observer with a lively sense of humor, and a critic who voices his dislikes con brio. He uses the English language with remarkable felicity, and his writing has a highly individual charm. A Russian by birth, a cosmopolitan, and an American by adoption, he has a three-angled viewpoint which capture’s the element of comedy wherever it is lurking.

“He was our darling, our genius, our fool ... a kind of king of our American youth,”Glenwny Wescott wrote when F. Scott Fitzgerald died, at forty-four, in December, 1940. At that time, few of Fitzgerald’s books were in print. For some years, he had been such a back number that when Budd Schulberg. starting out in Hollywood in 1939, was told that Fitzgerald was to be his collaborator, Schulberg exclaimed: “I thought he was dead.”Today, Fitzgerald seems to be very much alive again. More of his work is in print than at any time of his life. High-brow criticism, which contemptuously dismissed him in the thirties, treats him with respect and even tenderness. A novel whose hero is patterned after Fitzgerald has for some time been a leading best seller. And now Arthur Mizener has given us the first Fitzgerald biography: The Far Side of Paradise (Houghton Mifflin, $3.73).

A good many Atlantic readers already know that it is a first-rate and fascinating work. The portraiture is warm and vital but always clear-eyed and psychologically acute, and the same applies to the erilical appraisal of Fitzgerald’s writings. I found the book so absorbing that I wished it were longer, and normally I have a deep affection for brevity.

Fitzgerald once said that as a small boy he was always trying to realize “a great dream.”For the major part of his life he retained much of the emotional outlook of childhood. His “great dream" became a naively romantic vision of the Good Life — to be a big shot at Princeton, and later, a social success wherever he went; to know rich and “interesting people, and enjoy to the full “the eternal Carnival by the sea"; to be “one of the greatest writers who have ever lived.”To all those things and Zelda, too, his beautiful ” barbarian Princess from the South,”he gave himself with undiseriminal mg intensity.

But Fitzgerald, ns Mizener so forcibly brings out, was only partly the enthusiastic young romantic: partly he was what he once called himself, “a spoiled priest,” who wanted to stand aside and study life.

Hero is the source of that double vision which makes the best of Fitzgerald’s work much more than a picture of the Jazz Age. One sees this quulilN most eloark perhaps in The Great Gatsby, of which Fitzgerald might have said, as Flaubert said of Bovnry, “Gatsby, c’est moi.”

Another book excerpted in the Atlantic—Nicolas Nabokov’s Old Friends and New Music (AtlanticLittle, Brown, $3.50) — has given me such pleasure that I cannot let it pass without a warm salute. Mr. Nabokov has achieved a captivating fusion of autobiography, portraiture of great musical figures, and musical evaluation free of jargon. Beginning with vivid glimpses of a music-filled childhood in an upper-class family of Tsarist Russia, he writes about Diaghilev and his constellation in the Paris of the twenties; an evening with the deranged specter of Nijinsky, glassy-eyed and mute; friendship with Prokofiey, his musical achievement and his treatment by the Soviet government; a visit to Koussevitzky; and music-cum-politics in post-war Berlin. Mr. Nabokov pauses on his way to evoke the unreality of Monte Carlo, with its puppetlike dettperadim of the gaming tables and its lapis lazuli harbor — a “smorgasbord of cliches.”Or to slip in a note on a Parisian house of pleasure so popular with nineteenth-century royalty that it became, while still in business, a kind of Monument Historique of France.