Allegory of the '50s

THE AGE OF LONGING (362 pp.)--Arthur Koestler--Macmlllan ($3.50).

The biggest thing that ever happened to Novelist Arthur Koestler was becoming a Communist in 1931. The second biggest was his divorce from Communism in 1938. As with a lot of other ex-Communist writers, this cyclic experience is his whole stock in trade. From it came the one first-rate book of the dozen he has written, Darkness at Noon (TIME, May 26, 1941)

a book so much better than any of his others that it hardly seems to have been written by the same man; a book that has already become a classic in the modern tragedy of the godless humanitarian.* His latest novel, The Age of Longing, makes it plain that Arthur Koestler is one of those unhappy intellectuals obviously in need of a moral and spiritual boss. When he forswore Communism, he was left spiritually homeless, stranded between the Yogi and the Commissar, and believing in neither.

This personal dilemma, reflected in his book, is the source of its greatest weakness as a novel. His characters are Koestler-controlled puppets in a grim ideological allegory which takes for granted a war between Communism and the West, preaches the unoriginal warning that to defeat Russia, the West must find a more appealing faith than Marxism. For disillusioned intellectuals of Koestler's type, democracy as a function of liberty is unintelligible, and liberty itself a hopeless unknown.

Irresistible Fyodor. The Age of Longing is set in Paris, some time during "the middle 1950s." By that time, war has become an almost immediate certainty. Pocket Geiger-counters and protective radiation umbrellas are in all the shops. France and the rest of the West are more confused and divided than ever, helpless before the poised divisions of the "Commonwealth of Freedomloving People" (Russia). For Fyodor Nikitin, however, cultural attache at the Free Commonwealth embassy, life holds neither personal nor political problems. Communism is his crutch and his faith. When Paris nightclubs, dressing gowns and mistresses begin to turn him a little soft, he has only to read a page or two of Marx and Engels to stiffen up again.

Hydie, the conventtrained, divorced daughter of a U.S. Army colonel, finds Fyodor irresistible; he seems to her the only man of will, purpose and direction in sight. The rest are just silly Americans, broken refugees and ridiculous Paris intellectuals who bicker endlessly over brandies in trite dialectical lingo.

Like Koestler when he turned from

Communism, Hydie has been rootless ever since she gave up Catholicism. Hydie finds her substitute in an affair with Fyodor, whose lovemaking makes her feel "as if she had been run over by an express train." When his ruthlessness and a revelation of his mission show her the true nature of Communism (he is working up a Paris purge list against the day when his masters take over France), she shoots him, but merely wounds him. Fyodor is s.ent back to Russia to avoid a scandal, and Hydie gets ready to go back to the U.S. War is about to begin.

Missing Moral. In all this, the Koestler view of things is made abundantly clear:

1) the French, and presumably all Europe, lack the will to fight Communism;

2) the U.S., offering military power without intellectual or moral power, can never command Europe's respect; 3) man cannot be at ease in the world without a faith to sustain him.

As fiction, The Age of Longing is as unsuccessful as any tract whose characters are drawn from an ideological casting bureau. As reporting, it is generally stimulating and occasionally brilliant. The gallery of French intellectuals is particularly well drawn, the futility of their bickering sharply exposed. And no one now writing can get inside the Communist mind with Koestler's sureness. Inside that mind are all the answers. Koestler no longer believes in those answers, but he remembers that when he did believe in them, he was happy. He hugs the cold comfort of democracy ("a half-truth," as he calls it) and tries not to feel nostalgia for the wholehearted Communist lie.

*With Claude Rains brilliantly playing its tragic hero, the dramatized version of Darkness at Noon is currently the most moving play on Broadway.

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