Mortal Research

DIALOGUE WITH DEATH--Arthur Koestler--Macmillan ($2).

In Darkness At Noon (TIME, May 26, 1941) Arthur Koestler made, of a man in a Soviet prison cell, one of the great symbols of humanity in our time. In Dialogue With Death* Koestler himself is that symbol. During the Spanish Civil War Koestler went to Spain as correspondent for the London News Chronicle, was captured by Franco's forces. Later the British Government got him out of Spain. But for 102 days (February to May 1937), in prisons at Malaga and Seville, Koestler learned what it means to be sure from hour to hour (yet never sure enough), that at any time (yet at no certain time), you may be taken out and shot.

"To die," writes Koestler, "even in the service of an impersonal cause--is always a personal and intimate affair. Thus it was inevitable that this book, written for the most part in the actual expectancy and fear of death, should bear a private character."

It is also universally relevant, for the 20th Century has brought the experience it records within the reach of everyone. Imprisonment and violent death, which civilization believed that it had abolished for all but criminals, have become a common experience of our time. No one in this "century of the great social wars" is safe from them. But few writers have Novelist Koestler's talent for recreating their minute-by-minute impact on the raw nerves of sensitive, civilized man, his extraordinary ability to observe and record the details of suffering while he is suffering.

The Door Shuts. Arrest came to Author Koestler with the words "Hands up!", and he learned how it feels to have a revolver chilling the back of one's neck. Near the base of his skull he felt "a faint itching, a sort of sucking void, not entirely unpleasant." At the police station his hypodermic needles and morphine tablets (for suicide) and his golf stockings (he wore them because he dislikes garters) caused a minor sensation. He was registered as wearing women's stockings. Then the cell door slammed shut. Koestler's description of what happens to prisoners after the cell door shuts reduces the dignity of man to the twitching of a laboratory rat.

First there is the quick glance around, the swift inventory of "the iron bedstead, the washbasin, the W.C., the barred window." Next, invariably, the prisoner tries "to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out. He fails . . . but decides to . . . master the art of pulling himself up by his hands." He dusts the wall-plaster off his suit. He "pulls a face, being determined to prove that he is full of courage and confidence." Suddenly he notices, at the spyhole of his cell door, an eye. It is an eye without a man attached to it, and for a few moments the prisoner's heart stops beating.

He "experiences that almost maniac desire for activity that from now on will alternate continually with melancholia and depression." He tries to hang himself with his belt. The job is too unpleasant. He begins to feel the true weight of "utter, bleak silence. It is only in prisons that air is so deaf."

Once Koestler found a splinter of glass, decided on suicide, thought it would be better to wait until night. This brought on an Olympian calm, which he later saw through. It was not the result "of the decision itself, but of my having set a time-limit of twelve hours." Misery replaced his calm.

Death at the Door. In Koestler's few days at Malaga, 600 of his fellow-prisoners (and 5,000 in fallen Malaga) were shot. He was transferred to Seville, to a modern prison built by the Republic, as efficient as "the engine-room of a warship." There, gradually, when the prisoners in the courtyard ignored his shouts and signals, Koestler realized that he had been condemned to death. After that it was good that the light in his cell burned all night long. He had "an awful fright" when his watch stopped. "I thought to myself that if there were no longer any ladder-rungs of hours and minutes on which to cling, I should be bound to sink beyond hope of salvation into the stupefying sameness of time."

His official sentence arrived in the strange guise of a female Hearst correspondent in a neat Phalangist uniform, acting in behalf of the Propaganda Department. With an American twang, she drawled the word "dea-ea-h-th." She suggested that a kind statement about Franco, signed, might save Koestler's life. Koestler "had not the moral strength to resist" but at the last moment, realizing that he would be signing his "moral death sentence," he chilled his words.

Hope became an obsession. But hope and daily routine, even in prison, "cannot sustain for long the melodrama of despair. . . . Uneasiness and not unhappiness is the most common form of human suffering. Until an acute attack comes on." And then, "when the drill touches the nerve of fear, one cannot stand it for long. One has to take a pill. Every man needs a different pill."

Koestler drugged himself with a phrase of Thomas Mann's or, through "sharp abstract speculation," worked himself into "feverish exaltation." "The healing power of both methods was derived from the same device: that of merging the stark image of the firing-squad with the general problem of life and death, of merging my individual misery with the biological misery of the universe." Koestler began to realize that he "had actually no fear of the moment of execution; I only feared the fear which would precede that moment." Later he thought: "one's disbelief in death grows in proportion to its approach. . . . I don't believe that since the world began a human being has ever died consciously."

Time & The End. Slowly Koestler began to learn about time. It was a hunger strike that taught him how slowly time--"the main problem of existence for prisoners, whether of biological or of social chaos"--can move. "Now I know that an inexorable law prevails: increasing awareness of time slows down its pace, complete awareness of time would bring it to a standstill. Only in death does the present become reality; time freezes; he who succeeds in experiencing 'pure time' experiences nothingness."

A sudden epidemic of executions brought nothingness very near. All down the corridor Koestler heard the warder, and the priest with his bell, the sleepy questions, the weeping, defiance, horror of the unwarned victims. Once the priest rattled his door, and Koestler heard the warder say: "No, not this one." All through that night he woke up trembling.

When a letter from the British Consul gave Koestler new hope, he was "at first mad with delight," then, instantly, "overcome by nausea," as he realized that hope merely made him thoughtless of the other prisoners. He felt "the urge to bear the burden of the others," and an "equally ardent desire to slay the greasy little black priest who rings the sanctus bell at nights." Koestler's fear of death and his apathy alternated with a new feeling: "insane qualms of conscience and mental purification rites after the Dominican model."

One day Koestler was freed in an exchange of prisoners. "Between the siesta and the evening meal the cell door flew open and freedom was hurled at me like a club; I was stunned, and stumbled back into life just as, had things taken another course, I should have stumbled into death."

But he could not free himself from the memory of the men he had seen executed. "I was there when they died. They died in tears, crying vainly for help, and in great weakness, as men must die. For dying is a confoundedly serious thing, one shouldn't make a melodrama of it. Pilate did not say 'Ecce heros' he said 'Ecce homo.' "

* Part of Koestler's Spanish Testament, heretofore published only in Europe.

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