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Arthur Koestler's Hope in the Unseen: Twentieth-Century Efforts to Retrieve the Spirit of Liberalism" (2005)

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Arthur Koestler's Hope in the Unseen: Twentieth-Century Efforts to Retrieve the Spirit of Liberalism Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 Arthur Koestler's hope in the unseen: twentieth- century efforts to retrieve the spirit of liberalism Kirk Michael Steen Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Steen, Kirk Michael, "Arthur Koestler's hope in the unseen: twentieth-century efforts to retrieve the spirit of liberalism" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1669. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1669 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. ARTHUR KOESTLER’S HOPE IN THE UNSEEN: TWENTIETH-CENTURY EFFORTS TO RETRIEVE THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Kirk Steen B. A., University of New Orleans, 1974 M. A., University of New Orleans, 1986 August 2005 ©Copyright 2005 Kirk Michael Steen All rights reserved ii Arthur Koestler at his desk during the 1930s iii Dedication The efforts that produced this investigation of Arthur Koestler I offer to my wife, Christel Katherine Roesch, for her patient support and for the value and respect she holds for liberal education. The two of us share one fundamental belief that justifies the changes in our lifestyle necessitated by my earning a terminal degree and completing the narrative that follows. It is the conviction that among teachers, particularly among humanities teachers, their own personal academic growth and the deepening appreciation of the world that such growth engenders attaches to definite and positive consequences for their students. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor David Lindenfeld for his willingness to work with a non-traditional graduate student. Without his flexibility and his dedication to liberal arts education my work at Louisiana State University would have been impossible. I deeply appreciate the intelligence and care with which Professor Lindenfeld chose my readings for the independent study I did with him as well as the leadership he offered as I investigated Arthur Koestler and European history for this paper. The seriousness with which he treated my individuality must be mentioned. His attitude in this regard enabled me to follow my inclinations. One result of this attitude is the inquiry that follows. Throughout my studies Professor Lindenfeld left the universe open for me. The flexibility of Louisiana State University’s Graduate School with regard to my circumstances as a working secondary schoolteacher is another reality without which I could not have completed this dissertation. I must also thank the other members of my examining committee. Professor Suzanne Marchand’s willingness to be part of the committee and her plea for more biographical narrative proved invaluable to the final draft of this paper. It is difficult to thank Professor Steven Ross enough for his extremely close reading of the early draft of this analysis of Arthur Koestler. His clarification of certain references in Koestler’s fiction to realities of the ancient Mediterranean world saved me much embarrassment. I feel quite fortunate to have had the benefit of Professor Bainard Cowan’s encouragement both during his course on science and literature and during the committee’s critique of this paper. Finally, Professor David Perlmutter’s insights into Koestler as a working v journalist helped me rethink my subject as I wrote the final draft of this project. Again I feel lucky, in this case to have had him appointed to my examining committee. I have to give credit to my colleagues at Alfred Bonnabel High School for their generous attitudes and the small daily gifts of time and energy they have given me. Thanks are due to all three of my fellow teachers in the Gifted Department. I fondly recall Ann Kent’s encouragement during the early stages of my doctoral coursework as well as her offer to team teach the largest class of American literature students our department has ever had. Ann’s purchase of some of Arthur Koestler’s books for me during the early stages of my research typifies her good will. On numerous occasions Ms. Catherine Cooke strove hard to make my teaching schedule accommodate the writing phase of my dissertation. Gwen Leonhard, chair of the department, has always been willing to find ways to make the bureaucratic aspects of our jobs less painful. Her efforts in this regard were of no little consequence as I worked on this project. Finally I owe a great debt to the person to whom I dedicate this work. Christy, thank you for respecting my desire to study European history and for coping with my days in Baton Rouge and hours in my library. I appreciate your generous attitude and good nature that enabled you to accept the shift in our comfortable routine. Your patience with my periodic absence even when I was near you was remarkable. vi Preface I believe that the key to understanding Arthur Koestler is the tenacity with which he held certain nineteenth-century beliefs. Nineteenth-century bourgeois values formed the context of his early life. They were the cultural forces that shaped his attitudes and definitions of the world before he encountered that world during what became a turbulent time for Europeans, the period between 1914 and the 1950s. Acculturation and socialization are both channels of continuity which retain the flexibility that alone enables humans to respond and adjust to the discontinuous developments in social life. In this paper I have chosen to accentuate certain nineteenth-century continuities of values that appear in Koestler’s writing as he responded to twentieth-century events. Chief among these was his devotion to the nineteenth-century conception of the innate value of the individual person in society. He was not alone during his lifetime in this plea for what have come to be called human rights. However, what distinguishes Koestler’s writing is the connections he made between the nightmarish aspects of Stalinism and fascism and other, more mundane, aspects of human existence. He could create expository prose that revealed the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War as well as he could create psychological fiction that revealed how the ideals that gripped the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were transformed into the surrealistic deformations of the Moscow Purge Trials. He could also write pieces that possessed broader relevance. During a campaign against the death penalty in Britain, his writing revealed the contradictions of determinism and free will in justifications of capital punishment. The way Koestler put it, he could operate as a writer on the tragic plane as well as on the trivial plane. Therefore, he could just as vii easily, and with just as much seriousness, write pieces that revealed the cruelties suffered by dogs and their owners in Great Britain under the tyrannical fear of rabies that maintained laws that required a six-month-long quarantine of canines entering or reentering the kingdom. Somewhere between the tragic and the trivial were Koestler’s science pieces. Generally these explored the human aspects of the practice of science. Particularly in the case of psychology and natural selection, his science pieces could expose deterministic conceptions of behavior and evolution that were tied to his fear of determinism in politics. Even his science writing could veer toward either end of the tragic-trivial continuum, however. It investigated the tragic consequences of a particular scientist’s work being rejected by his peers as well as the trivial and petty jealousies of scientists who adhered to different schools of thought in academia. Koestler’s broad interests are another characteristic of his life that held affinities for the nineteenth century. He was a generalist who eschewed specialization. Koestler’s attraction to the possibilities that the paranormal might be verified by science gave some of his writing yet another nineteenth- century quality in that it approached the attitude of the romantic. Koestler is remembered as a writer both about politics and science. He is recalled chiefly for his investigation of the Moscow Trials in Darkness at Noon and for his look at the creation of the heliocentric theory of the universe in The Sleepwalkers. Recently several writers have acknowledged the connections between his political and scientific writing, but Koestler is rarely viewed as addressing these subjects from the perspective of the nineteenth century. The latter is precisely what I will attempt in this narrative. viii Arrival and Departure, Koestler’s fictionalized account of his escape from fascism and his decision not to immigrate to the United States in 1940, discovers the root cause of middle-class devotion to radical political movements to be psychological displacement of motives. Koestler has one of this book’s characters, psychiatrist Sonia Bolgar, announce to the novel’s protagonist who is on the verge of a spiritual epiphany characterized by optimism, that “there is a geometry of fate which sees to it that a straight line cuts parallels always at the same angle.” Bolgar’s point is that even in an open universe one appears to be fated or destined at times for certain choices and behaviors, and no matter which road one chooses, they seem to all lead to the same terminus. Halfway through the present investigation of Arthur Koestler and the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, I realized that similar metaphorical tangents had cut equivalent angles between Koestler’s universe and my own.
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