Out of the Labyrinth

THE INVISIBLE WRITING (431 pp.)—Arthur Koestler—Macmillon ($5).

It was perhaps a comradely warning when seedy Otto Katz (who was later purged in Prague) told seedy Arthur Koestler (who lived to write about it) that everyone had inferiority complexes of various sizes but that Koestler's was not a complex. It was a cathedral.

The time was 1937. The place: Paris. Both men were Communist functionaries. Koestler, in fact, had just been sprung from a Franco prison and, as a liberal martyr, was welcomed with flowers at the Gare du Nord. But by then Comrade Koestler had already changed ideological trains. The moment had come during the Spanish Civil War when he was in jail as a Red spy. In cell 40, Seville Prison, the wisdom of Marx and Freud proved nothing against the presence of death and the pity for those who went nightly, crying "Madre"before the firing squads. Into the ear of a warden, Prisoner Koestler whispered"I am no longer a rojo." Henceforth he recognized that the text of reality had been written by no man, and that he would spend the rest of his life trying, in rare moments of grace, to decipher its invisible writing.

Sad Sagittarii. In Volume 1 of his auto biography (TIME, Sept. 22, 1952), Koestler started chasing after his "arrow in the blue." He was pursuing "the absolute cause, the magic formula which would produce the Golden Age." In Europe of 1931, such sad Sagittarii were foredoomed to Communism: duly, at 26, the Hungarian ex-duelist, ex-Zionist and perpetual student joined the party that promised to heal all wounds, including inferiority complexes. The Invisible Writing tells the next stage of Koestler's intellectual vaga bondage, through the labyrinthine ways of Marxism, to safe harbor in London, where he will "live happily ever after, until the Great Mushroom appears in the skies." Along the way Koestler compiles from skulls, rusted barbed wire and interviews with shattered survivors, the history of his old regiment—the commissars, apparatchiki, intellectual spivs, poets, peasants, pimps, betrayers and betrayed, who composed his "crusade without a cross."

Journalist Koestler made his pilgrimage to Russia just in time for the great 1932 famine, and traveled all the way to fabled Bokhara, where the muezzin had been replaced by the morning loudspeaker ("Get up, get up, empty your bowels, do your exercises . . ."). When he fell in love with a breathtakingly beautiful employee of the Baku Water Supply Board (whom he later denounced to the police as a suspected spy), Koestler found in her pathetic ignorance of the outside world his first seeds of disgust with Soviet Russia. But he still had a long way to travel before he was free. The journey took him across the face of Europe which he was helping to devastate, doing assorted party propaganda jobs, watching the Reichstag fire and the Soviet purges from afar, living in cheap hotels, and writing his first novel (a story about collectivism in a children's home, from which Koestler now prints excerpts for the first time; it sounds somewhat like The Rover Boys as rewritten by Howard Fast). He also found time, as "Dr. A. Costler." to write a potboiling Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge, and to pay some attention to the neurotic women's auxiliaries of the class-war army.