All posts tagged Neutralia

Scott-King’s Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh (1947)

Nowadays it is not what you do that counts, but who informs against you.

Scott-King’s Modern Europe is a short, high spirited, at times farcically crude satire on the state of Britain and Europe just after the Second World War. I found it humorous and enjoyable all the way through and, as so often with Waugh, also packed with fascinating social and political history.

Waugh’s worldview

Born in 1903, Waugh had been to a good public school and Oxford, experiences which had trained him to be a snobbish, superior, social climber. In all the pre-war novels this attitude doesn’t come over as offensive because the aim of the novels is to mock, satirise, caricature and lampoon the pranks, foibles, eccentricities, cruelty and amorality of just these same upper classes.

However, the Second World War forced Waugh, like so many other people in the arts and the broader population, to really think about what they were fighting for. For a large part of the British population this crystallised into a determination that the country would never go back to the mass unemployment and poverty seen in the 1930s. The mood was captured in the famous Beveridge Report of 1942, which proposed widespread reforms to social welfare system in order to address the big five issues of ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.’

So, well before the war ended the Labour Party made it known it proposed a programme of mass housebuilding, nationalising the medical profession to create a national health service, reforming and extending the state school system, and introducing comprehensive unemployment insurance and state pensions.

Sensible though these ideas might seem to you and me (and they were widely adopted in most other European countries at the time) someone like Waugh could only see the negative sides of these sweeping changes: beautiful countryside disappearing under horrible council estates; dictatorial state intervention into medicine and other professions; the promotion of ghastly grammar school types into the civil service and other professions; the triumph of the crude and common lower middle classes; all to be paid for by ruinously high taxes and, in particular, the introduction of death duties, designed by socialists to ensure the ‘redistribution of wealth’, meaning that old and venerable families, owners of the big estates and country houses so beloved of Waugh, would find themselves financially ruined and having to sell off their property in order to pay the new death tax.

So by mid-way through the war which he and his peers had so enthusiastically joined up to fight in (as described in Put Out More Flags and the Sword of Honour trilogy) Waugh and his peers could see which way the wind was blowing: in the direction of crushing the upper classes, the fox-hunting landed gentry and the high society party society he loved, and replacing it with a more meritocratic, grammar school-run, council housing and welfare state society, paid for by the ruination of everything he loved.

Brideshead Revisited

Thus, as he turned 40, Waugh hardened his heart against every aspect of the modern world and this finds its fullest expression in his longest novel, Brideshead Revisited, which amounts to a prolonged, often self-indulgent, over-written lament for the old ways. It is, in a way, a reprise of his first novel, Decline and Fall, but whereas that was written with all the carefree high spirits of youth, Brideshead is written in a grim mood of middle-aged melancholy. Brideshead is Decline and Fall without the lolz.

This trajectory of fall and collapse is clearly enacted in the main storylines:

  • the decline of Sebastian Flyte from high-spirited undergraduate in Oxford to wrecked alcoholic in North Africa
  • the long drawn-out decline of the Marchmain family through generations of infidelity (first Lord Marchmain’s and then Julia’s), symbolised by:
  • the death of old Marchmain and the inheritance of the estate by the eldest son who has married a ghastly middle-class (and barren, post-menopausal) woman
  • the way their pad in London, Marchmain House, one of the last grand old family houses in London (so the gloomy narrator tells us) is sold off to developers who tear it down to build yet another anonymous block of flats
  • and then The War and the way that their entire world of fine feelings, fine meals, fine wine and fine theological scruples is swept away in the vast deluge of the war in which the venerable old house is requisitioned by the army and treated appallingly, trees cut down, terrace badly damaged, interiors of all the rooms boarded over or desecrated, and all swarmed over by chavvy squaddies half-heartedly supervised by scruffy NCOs like the demon figure, Hooper, Hooper, the long-haired, unshaven, lackadaisical junior officer whose lack of backbone, discipline or morality comes to epitomise for the narrator the shabby new world which is taking over
  • and the other negative figure, the brash, confident Canadian careerist Rex Mottram, whose  admittedly impressive efficiency in dealing with the authorities, his loudmouth friends and political ambitions seemed to be going nowhere in peacetime but suddenly come into their own with the arrival of war

So in its outline and mood Brideshead is a surprisingly grim and downbeat novel – venerable old families decline and disintegrate to be replaced by the swarming mob of the new social welfare state. Nonetheless, there are many moments of humour and some passages recapturing Waugh’s old-style, high-spirited comedy.

A grumpy old man complaining about the modern world

But despite its gloom Brideshead can also be seen as beginning to include a new source of comedy, which is the pose of a grumpy-old-man complaining about all aspects of the modern world. As with grumpy old men in general, it’s not clear whether Waugh is genuinely vexed by elements of the modern world or playing up to the role of grumpy old man who can’t be doing with all these new-fangled gadgets and rules. There is an element of exaggeration for comic effect.

This new thread in his comedy is most obvious in the passage set in New York whither the narrator, Charles Ryder, has returned from a long trek through South America before boarding a transatlantic liner back to Blighty. He loathes American hotels and American service. He hates the way Americans, unbidden and uninvited, embark on long soliloquies about their lives on train journeys (‘Their matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in American railway trains’).

He loathes the way his New York hotel room is overheated but, if he opens the window to get relief, is assailed by the unceasing noise of New York’s streets. This growing dislike of America and Americans reflects the resentment of (some of) Waugh’s generation at the way American manners and idioms were infecting British culture at all levels, most obviously through the medium of the movies, the cinema, which he and his characters enjoyed in the 1930s but which came to symbolise the unstoppable rise of common, vulgar culture (he laments the modern townscape with its ‘close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas‘; the over-the-top party his wife arranges for him is, in a phrase obviously intended to convey contempt for shallow, meretricious glamour, ‘a cinema actor’s dream.’)

On this transatlantic liner all kinds of things vex the narrator, not least the impractical tackiness of the big ice swan containing caviar which his wife organises as the centrepiece of an overcrowded party. But his irritation with the modern world is maybe epitomised by the utterly trivial but symptomatic way that the ship claims to offer every convenience of the modern world and yet he can’t get a simple whiskey and soda without ice because all the soda water on the ship is iced, that’s the American way, sorry sir.

Scott-King’s Modern Europe

At just 50 pages in the Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh and 17,285 words long, Scott-King’s Modern Europe is longer than a short story but far short of being a novel. If anything it reads like a prose version for a screenplay for a particularly madcap Ealing Comedy.

The novella takes the thousand and one aspects of the horrible modern world which the grumpy old man described above detests, and plays them entirely for laughs, high spirited satirical laughs although (as always with Waugh) with an increasing sense of bite.

As to the plot, Scott-King is a dusty old failure of a dull-as-ditchwater classics teacher at some public school, Grantchester who the boys nickname ‘Scotty’ and the other teachers ignore. He has devoted his spare time to the fabulously pointless task of translating an epic poem by the unknown 17th century poet Bellorius into Spenserian stanzas (i.e. the stanza form used in the genuinely wonderful English epic poem The Faerie Queene by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser). The key thing about this fictional poet Bellorius is he is made to come from the utterly fictional nation of ‘Neutralia‘.

Once Scott-King has completed his opus he sends it off to a few literary magazines who politely rebuff him and there the matter lies until he receives an unexpected invitation. A smart envelope contains an invitation with an embossed coat of arms from ‘His Excellency Dr Bogdan Antonic, international secretary of the Committee, Simona University, Neutralia.’ Turns out it’s the tercentenary of the death of the great Bellorius and, to his surprise, Scotty-King discovers that he has been invited to attend an academic conference about Bellorius’s Great National Poet. Fortunately the little week-long break falls during the school vacation and so Scott-King accepts the invitation, secures permission from the headmaster, packs his bags and reports to the airport for to collect the ticket which has been bought for him.

Neutralia

You won’t be surprised to learn that just about everything which can possibly go wrong, does go wrong. For a start, where is ‘Neutralia’? Waugh cleverly blends aspects of central, eastern and south-eastern (Balkan) nations, but when he says that the current military ruler of the country, The Marshall, shrewdly kept Neutralia out of the Second World War (hence its name) the reader suspects there’s a strong element of Franco’s Spain. Its capital:

Simona, stands within sight of the Mediterranean on the foothills of the great massif which fills half the map of Neutralia.

The text describes Neutralia’s history in a kind of St Trinian’s, Ealing Comedy caricature:

For three hundred years since Bellorius’s death his country has suffered every conceivable ill the body politic is heir to. Dynastic wars, foreign invasion, disputed successions, revolting colonies, endemic syphilis, impoverished soil, masonic intrigues, revolutions, restorations, cabals, juntas, pronunciamentos, liberations, constitutions, coups d’etat, dictatorships, assassinations, agrarian reforms, popular elections, foreign intervention, repudiation of loans, inflations of currency, trades unions, massacres, arson, atheism, secret societies—make the list full, slip in as many personal foibles as you will, you will find all these in the last three centuries of Neutralian history. Out of it emerged the present republic of Neutralia, a typical modern state, governed by a single party, acclaiming a dominant Marshal, supporting a vast ill-paid bureaucracy whose work is tempered and humanized by corruption.

At the airport Scotty hates being treated as a ‘VIP’. He hates being strapped into his plane seat like a chicken  in an oven, he hates the safety demonstration the smooth and insincere air stewardesses give.

She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner.

Dripping with grumpy old man condescension. Anyway, Scott-King befriends another British academic flying out, Whitemaid, but soon discovers he knows next to nothing about Bellorius and is along for the freebie. There’s a pushy woman journalist, Miss Bombaum, another type who rubs the grumpy old man up the wrong way:

She did not look a lady; she did not even look quite respectable, but he could not reconcile her typewriter with the callings of actress or courtesan; nor for that matter the sharp little sexless face under the too feminine hat and the lavish style of hair-dressing. He came near the truth in suspecting her of being, what he had often heard of but never seen in the life, a female novelist.

When you read a paragraph like that you realise that Waugh has concocted the character of a fuddy-duddy old Classics master in order to give his narrative maximum scope for grumpiness and complaint. And you realise the enormous scope the pose of grumpiness gives you. If you stop trying to keep up with all the changes in the modern world and resign yourself to settling into a kind of permanent sulk against everything – well, it’s surprisingly easy, it’s very reassuring, and by turning the attitude up a little you can soon have friends and family laughing at your grouchy soliloquies.

Viewed from another angle, you can see how Scott-King is a middle-aged version of the naive young Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, only stumbling into a world with far more shadows and darkness. So that thought gives rise to the question: was the external world, the world situation, significantly gloomier in 1946 than it was when Decline and Fall was conceived, in around 1927? I.e. is Waugh’s grumpy aversion to the world of 1946 genuinely justified ? Or purely a result of growing old and resenting change? Discuss.

It’s a darker vision than the earlier books because, beneath under the various running jokes and the comic mishaps of the various characters, is a half serious description of life under a modern dictatorship. The Marshall speaks, and so all the newspapers and media of Neutralia echo his speeches, about ‘Revolution and Youth and Technical Progress and the National Genius’, and all the Neutralians have to parrot the Party line about the wisdom of the Marshall and his regime.

But the shabby reality that Scott-King encounters is poverty and starvation, fear and political manipulation. The host of the motley group of academics and hangers on from all over Europe who assemble for the so-called conference are hosted by Arturo Fe, doctor of Bellacita University. On the bus journey from the airport into the capital Dr Fe casually tells them that Neutralia has lovely food, it’s a shame only the very rich can afford it. Dr Fe explains that everyone who is anyone has to have at least five jobs to keep their heads above water. Thus Dr Fe is not only a scholar,

he is also a lawyer, a judge of the Lower Court. He edits the Historical Review. He has a high position in the Ministry of Rest and Culture, also at the Foreign Office and the Bureau of Enlightenment and Tourism. He speaks often on the radio about the international situation. He owns one-third share in the Sporting Club.

Among the other guests at the reception and gala dinner is the very funny comic figure of an ice blonde from Sweden named Svenginen.

He had taken notice of her in London where she had towered some six inches above the heads of the crowd.
‘I come,’ she said.
Dr Fe bowed. ‘Fe,’ he said.
‘Sveningen,’ she answered.
‘You are one of us? Of the Bellorius Association?’ asked Dr Fe.
‘I speak not English well. I come.’
Dr Fe tried her in Neutralian, French, Italian and German. She replied in her own remote Nordic tongue. Dr Fe raised hands and eyes in a pantomime of despair.
‘You speak much English. I speak little English. So we speak English, yes? I come.’
‘You come?’ said Dr Fe.
‘I come.’
‘We are honoured,’ said Dr Fe.

There is plenty more comedy. The Brits are introduced to a range of comic foreign types, for example, Engineer Garcia (yes, definitely Spain) who once worked for seven years with the firm Green, Gorridge and Wright Limited at Salford and is convinced all the guests must have heard of it and know Salford well, an assumption in which he is sadly disappointed.

But at the same time the sky slowly darkens and things start to unravel. At the night of the gala dinner both Scott-King and Whitemaid get plastered as a result of having travelled all day and had nothing to eat. A few days later they are taken to Bellorius’s home town and forced to be present at the unveiling of a statue of Bellorius which turns out to be the worst thing Scottie has ever seen.

More sinisterly, they are driven some distance out of town to a vast memorial to the war dead and told to lay a wreath in honour of the national poet while being photographed by a rank of photographers – only realising too late that the photos are used by the Neutralian press to show ‘foreign dignitaries’ laying wreaths at the tomb of the dead in the most recent Neutralian civil war.

Slowly they realise the entire conference is a sham and an elaborate public relations exercise in which they are being used by the regime to bolster its international credentials. Scottie enters the hotel drawing room to find the other guests (from numerous European countries) in a dark mood:

The cause of offence emerged through many words and the haze of tobacco smoke. In brief it was this: the Bellorius Association had been made dupes of the politicians.

When he meets Dr Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary of the Bellorius Association, who invited him, he discovers him to be a very anxious man, a Croat not a Neutralian at all, worried that the authorities are closing in on him, convinced there are spies everywhere. As another Neutralian attending the gala dinner tells him:

‘There is jealousy and intrigue everywhere.’

Two of the delegates to the ‘conference’, a Swiss Professor and a Chinese, go for a little drive in a rented car and are kidnapped by partisans, left over from Neutralia’s civil war. Chances are the two foreigners will be murdered.

In a similar dark vein, as Scott-King’s stay progresses Dr Fe comes under increasing pressure to deliver positive results. He tells Scott-King that there is a plot against his (Dr Fe’s) life and, towards the end of the story, is rumoured to have displeased the Marshal and so ‘disappears’.

Catastrophe

Unfortunately, with the disappearance of Dr Fe go all arrangements for Scott-King’s hotel stay and, more importantly, his return flight. He goes from one government office to another with no joy, in a sample of the bureaucratic obstructionism of new, model post war dictatorships.

Worse is to come because when Scott-King visits the British Consul (the contemptuously named Horace Smudge) he discovers that, since he didn’t register his visit with the British government and does not have all the requisite visas, he is not officially in Neutralia and so the Consul can do nothing to help. Well, how long will it take to apply for a visa, Scottie asks. Ooh could be a long time, old boy; 3, 4 weeks.

But Scott-King only has £75, nowhere near enough to live in the hotel where he’s staying. The consul tells him they’ve already had one sticky case, man named Whitemaid who tries to evade the money-changing laws. Tut tut. Very sad.

Scott-King staggers out of the Consul’s office a broken man. Well, maybe he’ll just stay at the conference hotel till his money runs out and then…?

Scott-King has another, longer meeting with depressed Dr Antonic, supposed host of the Bellorius conference, who takes him to see his even more pessimistic wife in their shabby flat in a tower block whose lift has, in the classic style, broken down. There Scotty sees Neutralian life in all its despair and paranoia:

Do you think,’ he asked, ‘that in Neutralia Western Culture might be born again? That this country has been preserved by Destiny from the horrors of war so that it can become a beacon of hope for the world?’
‘No,’ said Scott-King.
‘Do you not?’ asked Dr Antonic anxiously. ‘Do you not? Neither do I.’

This is coming across as bleak, and it is, but various moments are also very funny. Black humour. But also because it is a return to the clipped and often heartless dialogue of his best comic novels such as Vile Bodies, the comedy of hopelessness.

Anyway, luckily for Scott-King that evening in the hotel restaurant he bumps into Miss Bombaum, the go-getting modern lady journalist, tells her his problem, and she reveals the existence of ‘the Underground’. This is on the model of the underground networks which smuggled Allied airmen out of occupied Europe (or, further back, of the Underground Railway which smuggled slaves out of the American South into the free North)

Bombaum she takes him to meet a man who takes him to meet another man, who turns out to be a ‘major’ in the police, leading the breaking of one of his own laws in an acme of the kind of corruption which flourishes in this kind of repressive state. The policeman agrees to smuggle him out of the country in exchange for all his money, he does it all the time.

In a comically brutal aside, the major also tells Scottie that he has a deal with the government to help ‘disappear’ inconvenient persons.

‘I also have a valued connexion with the Neutralian government. Troublesome fellows whom they want to disappear pass through my hands in large numbers.’

So that’s how later that night Scott-King finds himself travelling in a packed charabanc with six other escapees all dressed up as Ursuline nuns (!). They are taken to a warehouse down by the docks in the port of Santa Maria where he waits for over a week in very hot, very unhygienic conditions. He gives a comically exaggerated but still very pungent sense of post-war Europe, which for several years after the end of the war continued in a state of chaos, with huge numbers of displaced persons (DPs) travelling in all directions:

There were a detachment of Slovene royalists, a few Algerian nationals, the remnants of a Syrian anarchist association, ten patient Turkish prostitutes, four French Pétainist millionaires, a few Bulgarian terrorists, a half-dozen former Gestapo men, an Italian air-marshal and his suite, a Hungarian ballet, some Portuguese Trotskyites. The English-speaking group consisted chiefly of armed deserters from the American and British Armies of Liberation. They had huge sums of money distributed about the linings of their clothes, the reward of many months’ traffic round the docks of the central sea.

One day there’s a panic when it becomes clear that a new police chief has been appointed who isn’t as corrupt as the old one (yet) and is on his way to raid the warehouse. With the result that all the waiting evacuees are rounded up and loaded onto the one boat moored for them in the harbour, far more than it was ever designed for.

Scott-King is locked below decks with this gang of desperados with no food or drink for three very long days as the ship sails the hot Mediterranean. At last the ship docks, the hatches are opened and Scott-King and the others stagger into the dazzling Mediterranean sun. But where is he?

There are soldiers; there is barbed wire; there is a waiting lorry; there is a drive through a sandy landscape, more soldiers, more wire. All the time Scott-King is in a daze. He is first fully conscious in a tent, sitting stark naked while a man in khaki drill taps his knee with a ruler.
‘I say, Doc, I know this man.’ He looks up into a vaguely familiar face. ‘You are Mr Scott-King, aren’t you? What on earth are you doing with this bunch, sir?’
‘Lockwood! Good gracious, you used to be in my Greek set! Where am I?’
‘No. 64 Jewish Illicit Immigrants’ Camp, Palestine.’

Home sweet home

And then, as in so many Waugh the text cuts drastically and completely and we are back in the common room at Grantchester and so, after no doubt difficult diplomatic complications, is Scott-King.

There’s a joke that all the other teachers are swapping yarns about the adventures they had on their summer holidays which all, of course, pale into insignificance to the trauma of what Scott-King has been through but is too shy, or traumatised, to mention. And so everyone carries on thinking what a dull dog ‘Scottie’ is.

Later the headmaster asks him into his study and informs him there’ll be fewer students for the classics class than ever before. Parents are going off the subject. ‘They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?’

But Scott-King does blame them. He is determined to teach classics for as long as he possibly can. For him they represent humane values, civilisation and culture. And as to preparing boys for the modern world, well after what he’s seen of the modern world this summer, he declares:

‘It would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.’

Grumpy old man

Scott-King is made to be exactly the same age as Waugh when he wrote this lampoon, 43. He serves several ends. As a fusty classics teachers he is a kind of grumpy old man par excellence, for whom every aspect of the modern world is displeasing. His retired situation also allows him to be naive and simple, a fool abroad, in the time honoured manner of this kind of comic picaresque.

Lastly, Scott-King can be made, however improbably, into a champion of the very best of Western culture – if, that is, you accept the notion that the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome represent the best of Western culture – so that his stubborn refusal to relinquish teaching classics, his determination to hold out for these values of clarity and civilisation as long as he can, and his disgust at the idea that education is about fitting boys to the disgusting ‘modern world’, can be depicted as heroic.

The pleasure of the text

Maybe Waugh’s attitude is risible but it has the merit of being a coherent worldview. Easier to analyse and argue with a worldview which is, at least, coherent, even if you disagree with it.

But also, opinions don’t necessarily matter if their ultimate purpose is to give rise to comedy. An artist may pain the same thing over and over again until you are completely familiar with the subject – take Cézanne’s obsessive painting and repainting of Mont Sainte-Victoire: the point is not that it’s a mountain, the point is the experiments in light and shade and tone and, ultimately, the pleasure of painting itself, the joy of technique.

Something similar with Waugh. On one level you can take issue with his politics, his religion and his general worldview, revealed with increasing grumpiness as he got older. But on another level, you can simply enjoy the absurdity of the farce and, above all, the pleasure of his prose. Almost everything Waugh ever wrote is a joy to read:

The little Mediterranean seaport of Santa Maria lay very near the heart of Europe. An Athenian colony had thrived there in the days of Pericles and built a shrine to Poseidon; Carthaginian slaves had built the breakwater and deepened the basin; Romans had brought fresh water from the mountain springs; Dominican friars had raised the great church which gave the place its present name; the Habsburgs had laid out the elaborate little piazza; one of Napoleon’s marshals had made it his base and left a classical garden there. The footprints of all these gentler conquerors were still plain to see, but Scott-King saw nothing as, at dawn, he bowled over the cobbles to the water-front.

Credit

Scott-King’s Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2011 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on December 24, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Literature, Novella
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 24, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/24/scott-kings-modern-europe-evelyn-waugh/

Arrival and Departure by Arthur Koestler (1943)

Warning: This review contains disturbing content about sexual violence and the Holocaust.

Arthur Koestler, a potted biography

Arthur Koestler was born to a Jewish mother in Budapest, capital of the Hungarian part of the the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1905. So he was 14 when the short-lived Hungarian communist government of Bela Kun seized power in 1919 and Koestler later remembered his teenage high hopes for it and for a better future. The Bela Kun regime was crushed and replaced by the authoritarian rule of Admiral Horthy, but Koestler retained that youthful idealism

Koestler became a journalist and travelled widely in the late 1920s and early 1930s, reporting from the Soviet Union, Palestine and Germany, for a variety of German newspapers. He joined the German Communist Party in 1931.

In 1936, early in the Spanish Civil War, Koestler got access, as an accredited journalist, to General Franco’s headquarters and gathered evidence of the support the regime was getting from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which was published, a great scoop at the time. This and other experiences were incorporated into his book Spanish Testament.

On a second trip in 1937, Koestler was caught in Málaga when it fell to Mussolini’s troops, was arrested, and convicted for spying because of the revelations from the Franco HQ. He was sentenced to death and from February to June 1937 he was imprisoned in Seville under sentence of death.

Quite an experience, which he also wrote about in Dialogue with Death. Eventually he was released in a prisoner exchange for the wife of one of Franco’s favourite flying aces.

Koestler moved to Paris where in 1938 he completed The Gladiators, a novel about the rising of ancient Roman slaves under Spartacus. The same year he quit the Communist Party and began writing the novel he’s most famous for, Darkness at Noon. His then girlfriend, English sculptor Daphne Hardy, translated Darkness at Noon from German into English and smuggled it out of France when she left ahead of the German occupation (June 1940).

Koestler’s life story is extremely colourful. First he was arrested by the French authorities in late 1939 and held in a French internment camp as an enemy alien. He described this experience in the hastily written memoir Scum of the Earth. He was eventually released at the request of the British authorities and as the result of intense lobbying by Hardy.

But how to get out of France without official papers, which the sclerotic French bureaucracy wouldn’t give him because he was ‘an enemy alien’? Koestler came up with a mad scheme. On the very day the French surrendered to the invading Germans, in May 1940, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion in a desperate expedient to get out of the country.

He was accepted, trained and packed off to North Africa where he promptly deserted, made his way to Lisbon and so by boat to Britain. However, because he arrived without an entry permit, Koestler was again imprisoned.

Surely the only major writer to have been imprisoned in three different countries.

Koestler was still in prison when Daphne Hardy’s English translation of Darkness at Noon was published in Britain in early 1941 to great acclaim. This, and influential friends, helped get Koestler released from prison and he immediately volunteered to fight for the British Army, serving 12 months in the Pioneer Corps.

In March 1942 Koestler was assigned to the Ministry of Information, where he worked as a scriptwriter for propaganda broadcasts and films. During his spare time he wrote Arrival and Departure, the third in what had now become a trilogy of ‘political’ novels that began with The Gladiators and continued with Darkness at Noon.

Arrival and Departure

Although Darkness at Noon is transparently about the grotesque show trials which Stalin organised in the Soviet Union to discredit and liquidate all the old Bolshevik leaders who could be a threat to him, a striking feature of the book is that it nowhere actually mentions Russia, the Soviet Union or Stalin, preferring to use generic terms such as ‘the Party’ or ‘Number One’.

Clearly, Koestler felt there was value in trying to generalise the experience he was describing. Presumably the same wish not to be tied down by details and specifics underlies his approach in Arrival and Departure which continues to use some of the same generic terms.

Arrival and Departure is arranged in five parts which also bear very general titles.

Part 1: Arrival

The book opens mysteriously with an unnamed male protagonist leaping from the deck of a ship carrying a waterproof bundle. He swims to the anchor chain of the large ship, a cargo ship, the Speranza, which he’s been stowing away in while he orientates himself. He’s been hiding in the cargo hold for fifteen long days and nights. Now he can see a shoreline not too far away and swims towards it, eventually hitting the sloping shoreline and walking up through the waves onto the beach. He hides in one of the long row of bathing huts. His nose has been broken, his two front teeth smashed. His body has cigarette burns at various places (we later learn there are three: on one heel, behind one knee and on his penis), the result of torture. He is 22.

On the beach were sandcastles made by children. One of them carried a little toy flag, the flag of ‘Neutralia’ – so that’s where he is. Hidden in the beach cabin he weeps with relief.

Next day, things feel very relaxed. His clothes have dried overnight, it is very bright and sunny, he walks into town along a road lined with palms, there’s a square, he manages to change some of the money he had in his bundle, sits at a cafe table and orders a slap-up breakfast.

A family sitting nearby recognise him. They’re waiting to get visas to move on. So are friends. They tell him where the consulate is. As he walks on people recognise him. We learn from a woman in a queue that his name is Peter Slavek, he was a leading figure in the Party, and was arrested. Her husband mutters it’s best not to remember anything. Nonetheless the woman remembers that ‘they’ broke his nose, smashed his teeth out and extinguished cigarettes on his body. ‘He was the hero of our generation’.

Another woman, Dr Sonia Bolgar, watches Peter pass. She tells her companion Peter’s mother was a friend of hers. She thought ‘they’ had shot him. She says an accident happened in his family when the boy was just five and he has blamed himself ever since. He was a star student at the university, joined the party and was arrested a couple of times.

The combination of extreme heat (‘blazing street’, ‘hard glare’, ‘the sun was like a furnace’) and tropical fruit in the market stalls Peter passes made me wonder if it’s set in a North African colony. The waiter and others speak French, so a French colony – Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria.

Peter walks to the consulate and tries to persuade the officials that he wants to enlist in their army. Their country is at war. The official (incongruously named Mr, not Monsieur, Wilson) accepts Peter but shrugs and says it’s for ‘the authorities at home’ to decide. The problem is Peter comes from a nation which is an ally of the country the country he’s in is fighting. (Hungary? Allied with Nazi Germany? against France?) Mr Wilson says he’ll see what he can do but off the record suggests he tries the American consulate.

He sees Nazi posters in the shops but, in line with the ‘allegorical’ approach, the posters which describe a New Europe dominated by a newly arisen Central Power, under its stern-faced leader – neither the country nor leader are actually named. Walking on Peter comes to another shop window which shows photos of the New Nation’s opponents, led by their king and a cabinet minister in a bowler hat who flashes a V sign.

Peter bumps into the couple who discussed him earlier. He refers to the man as Comrade Thomas. They were both once part of the Movement. But the Movement has tacked and veered and changed directions so many times it has strangled itself. Presumably he is talking about the Soviet Union and the staggering impact it had on communists around the world when Stalin abruptly announced the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939.

He had thought it would be so easy. Stowaway. Get to a safe destination. Find the consulate. Volunteer for their army. Be greeted with open arms, taken right in, given somewhere to sleep and papers. But no. None of that. He’s out walking the blazing hot streets, rejected with officialdom, with nowhere to stay and no papers.

By about this stage I realised it’s Casablanca, Casablanca for intellectuals. There’s an extended community of refugees from all over Europe

Part 2: The Present

Five weeks later, Peter is in the queue at the American consulate. Dr Sonia joins him. He is evidently feverish and weak. She realises he is starving, making one loaf of bread last four days. She takes him back to her flat, feeds and washes him, and he moves in. It isn’t a sexual thing. She is huge (her size is repeatedly emphasised) and was a friend of his mother’s i.e. twice his age.

Sonia is a practising psychotherapist. Half the refugees in town come to her for advice and comfort, even representatives of ‘the other side’. The young woman Odette often comes to visit and the two women make it plain they expect Peter to leave.

Over the coming days Peter slowly falls in love with Odette, well, develops a one-sided obsession with her.

One day she calls round when Sonia is out, one thing leads to another, she gets up to walk out, he slams the door shut, she struggles, he grips her, they stumble to the floor and in a red mist he rapes her. I didn’t see that coming.

Peter doesn’t acknowledge the enormity of what he’s done, he insists that he loves her while the raped woman remains in a foetal position on the sofa facing the wall, crying.

But after a while of Peter pleading, Odette loses her temper and tells him to shut up. He holds her hands and insists that he loves her and after a while she stops crying and start commenting sarcastically on this so-called ‘love’, on men and their brutish ways, how they beat a woman down, bullying and nagging until she eventually says, ‘After all – why not?’ And as he lowers himself towards her again, she says that to him: ‘After all – why not’, indicating her self-abandonment. Athough she adds: ‘But don’t hurt me this time.’

For ten days he lives in a sensual paradise, absolutely head over in heels in love. Every day he spends at Odette’s room in a her boarding house, they have sex, then laze around chatting, then get dressed and go for mussels and local wine at a harbourside restaurant. Paradise. On the tenth day he knocks and immediately sense the flat’s emptiness. Inside it has been stripped bare. A note on the table says she got her visa, had a place booked on a ship and has left.

Part 3: The Past

Peter undergoes a complete nervous collapse. He can’t walk. He has deep dreams and waking hallucinations. Deliriously he thinks he’s flying a fighter plane. He has snapped. Sonia calls Dr Huxter who does a thorough physical. Nothing wrong. It is mental. Huxter describes himself as ‘an old Jew’, ‘a general practitioner of the old school’, and is sceptical of Dr Sonia’s depth therapy methods, in fact he sees her as a huge beast, Leviathan from the Bible, dabbling in arcane and unhealthy powers.

Peter is delirious for three days. When he comes out of it he is very weak. Big Sonia nurses him but also does therapy. In his delirium he repeated a psalm about Jerusalem. Now he remembers an incident from his childhood when the family had a pet rabbit, and he overheard the cook say they were going to eat it, and he decided to save it, and his mother repeated the psalm and the little boy picked up the word Jerusalem and applied it to the rabbit and knew that, so long as he thought about Jerusalem the rabbit would be safe. But one day at the park he saw a little girl his age by the pond and fell in love with her and forgot all about Jerusalem, When he got home hungry he wolfed down the chicken stew and only then did the family cook (it was that kind of bourgeois family) tell him it was rabbit stew. He vomited.

Now he remembers that story.

But much worse follows. Suddenly, from pages 78 to 87 he gives a detailed account of the time he was taken out of prison and sent (by mistake it turns out) on a mixed transport, a long train of cattle trucks which included ‘Useless Jews’, women who’d been selected to become prostitutes for Nazi officers, and gypsies who were going to be sterilised.

Only a few pages ago we were reading about the sensual bliss of being young and in love. Now Koestler delivers a really stomach-churning account of how the journey takes days, each truck too packed for people to sit down, then all treading in each other’s excrement, before they are parked in a siding by a disused quarry and here, his truck load watch the ‘Useless Jews’ be forced along a corridor of guards and up steps into removal-type vans which have airtight doors, and in which the Jews are gassed to death in batches.

It takes all afternoon and long into the night, and in their cattle trucks and then as they are hustled along to the vans, the Jews sing, sing defiantly, a song about the return of the Messiah as they are led to be murdered.

Then the scene switches: Peter describes being caught. He was distributing leaflets for the Movement in a working class area near a mill when cops spotted them and gave chase. His three colleagues fell behind, but Peter made it to the main street, jumped on a tram, switched to a bus, made it home to the apartment where he lived with his poorly mother and the maid, a peasant girl. Later the same day, three detectives arrive. The take the place to pieces, ripping open pillows and cushions and sofas, smashing lamps, breaking chairs, looking for evidence. Then they take him away, handcuffing him and punching him in the face. It was the last time he saw his mother.

Peter explains the arrest was nothing to do with the leafleting. It was because he was on the executive committee of ‘the Movement’ at the university.

He is taken in to be questioned by the legendary interrogator, Raditsch, in his deep-carpeted interview room. Raditsch is a burly peasant who has risen to the top of his career. He disarms Peter by revealing he knows all about his career, and knows the identities of half the members of the Movement, who the authorities are about to arrest. He explains that this country will never go communist because it is a land of peasants. Raditsch understands them, he came from a peasant family.

Worse, Raditsch then proceeds to enumerate the failings of Marxism during which it becomes clear that he knows and understands its theory, history and practice fact better than peter does. Raditsch is familiar with Rosa Luxemberg’s arguments with Bukharin, with the shortcomings of the labour theory of value, he explains to Peter how the theory of working class consciousness is based on an inadequate theory of psychology (p.100).

In other words Raditsch quietly and confidently strips Peter of all his intellectual and organisational protection. Then he gives him thirty seconds to confess, thirty seconds to avoid being taken away and tortured and puts his pocket watch on the table and they both watch the second hand tick round.

At the end of 30 seconds Peter has kept silent and so with a sigh Raditsch orders him to be taken away, down stairs, along a corridor and into a room with six strong men dressed in black who in a friendly ungrudging way proceed to beat him black and blue, breaking his nose, smashing his face, stretching him across a table and whipping him with some metal implement that makes it feel like his body’s been cut in two. He screams, he wets himself, he shits himself, his face is covered in blood and tears and snot, he passes out.

All this is in flashback. Peter pieces together the scene over a series of sessions with Sonia, who sits quietly and rather formally, apparently doing her knitting, only occasionally asking a question to prompt Peter, to help him over a bump in the road.

All kinds of mental images and memories and layers overlap and interpenetrate. For example, Peter explains that despite the most outrageous torture he refuses to ‘confess’ not because of Party discipline, he’s long forgotten the Movement, it’s something deeper, a sense that he has already betrayed the Party with a thousand little mental infidelities and witholdings, which he’s told Sonia about. On page 119 he makes a list for Sonia of all his betrayals, starting with feeling guilty about getting away after the leafleting episode when his three comrades were captured, for breaking his mother’s heart, for being powerless to help the Jews as they walked off to be gassed, working backwards through a long list of excuses for guilt.

Anyway, the text gives a very detailed description of the four days of intense torture, beatings, whippings, waterboarding and bastinado that he received, very detailed and stomach-churning, not for the faint-hearted.

But all this is only really preparatory to Sonia’s psychotherapy. Peter was to emerge as a hero for the Movement, a legend because he didn’t break under torture. But he had nothing to confess because in his heart he had already betrayed everyone. It is the root of this guilt which Sonia is really interested in, she calls it his Christmas tree of guilt on which he has spent his life (he is now 23 years old) hanging all kinds of decorations. Backwards she goes through his memories till we reach the real bedrock.

When he was five he was playing half-maliciously with his younger brother in a disused rowing boat by the sea on a family holiday, when they both tripped and fell forward and his little brother’s eye was impaled on a rusty rowlock, permanently blinding him. But even that isn’t it, because digging deeper we learn that aged just three he remembers reaching into the cot of the little baby, the newcomer who had taken everyone’s love and affection away from him. Not long before a beloved toy of his, a teddy bear, had been taken away supposedly because its eyes had fallen out. Now, aged just three, little Peter thought that if he put the eyes out of the screaming baby it, too, would be taken away and he would be restored to the centre of his mother’s love. He was disturbed in the mere beginnings of the attempt, but the memory of the murderous impulse remained with him, and when the accident in the rowing boat happened he was stricken, because it felt like his murderous wish had come true.

And for the whole of the rest of his life, he had sought pretexts and excuses for blaming himself for everything. Feeling guilty at the way the cops trashed his mother’s apartment, feeling guilty about his comrades being arrested – these are just decorations on the really deep, swarming, brooding feeling of worthlessness and guilt pullulating at the core of his mind. As Dr Sonia says:

‘The hardest sentences are those which people inflict on themselves or imaginary sins.’ (p.97)

Peter’s nightmares disappear. His leg begins to move again. His fever goes. He feels calm and awake. He is cured.

And not only cured of his personal demons. He had joined but then abandoned the Movement, disillusioned, but these complicated personal motivations, the memories, the guilt and the cataclysm of the torture, had kept him tied to it. Now he has exorcised both chains which held him back.

That was over. He was cured; never again would he make a fool of himself. He was cured of his illusions, both about objective aims and subjective motives. The two lines had converged and met. No more debts to pay, no more commands to obey. Let the dead bury their dead. For him, Peter Slavek, the crusade had come to an end. (p.128)

Outside of Freud’s own case studies, I think this is the most extended, detailed and compelling account of a psychotherapeutic cure of neurosis I’ve ever read.

Part 4: The Future

Just as he fell ill, Peter had received a letter to go see Mr Wilson at the Consulate. There he received the papers he needed to apply at the American consulate for permission to emigrate. Now he has been given permission to travel to the United States, and immediately visits a travel agency and books a berth in a ship sailing from Neutralia to the US in three weeks time.

Sonia has left on a boat to the New World. He stays on in her flat. He is in limbo. She has exorcised him of the past, but the new world has yet to begin. This part is made up of scattered scenes set against his mounting anticipation of boarding the precious ship.

By far the most interesting is the long scene (pp.136-151) where ‘Bernard’ drops by to collect some books he’d loaned Sonia. Peter politely lets him in and their conversation immediately turns into a schematic confrontation. Bernard is a Nazi (nobody uses that word, but that’s what he is), a fervent Nazi, a believer that it is Germany’s destiny to carry the next stage of human evolution which will sweep away all traditions, parliaments and liberal notions of individual liberty, it will sweep away old nations and national boundaries and usher in a world built entirely on the rational use of Europe’s resources for a racially purified population.

There’s much more to it than that. Bernard skewers the compromised motives of all the upper-class university-educated liberals who claim to be one of the ‘workers’, while many of those ‘workers’ actually flocked to the Nazi party because they wanted a way out of their proletariat destiny. He accurately describes a lot of revolutionaries as neurotic middle-class mummy’s boys. They argue back and forth about the legacy of the French Revolution. Bernard puts the view that the Thirty Years War set back German nationhood by 150 years, but this means she is coming to the notion of nationhood completely new and unshackled by nineteenth century ideas, free to create a new future for all mankind.

What’s vivid and exciting about this passage is the plausibility of much of what he says – about the bankruptcy of old economic systems, the ineffectiveness of old parliaments, and the vigour of new scientific discoveries and technologies, not least genetics and selective breeding. If of plants, why not of humans? And when he goes on to explain how similar the Soviet Union is to Nazi Germany, particularly in their totalitarian systems designed to crush individual liberty in the name of a greater social good, Peter is uncomfortably aware of the similarities and overlaps.

There are other short sections. Peter has a drink at a cafe with Mr Taylor from the Consulate who introduces him to ‘Andrew’, a young man who’s been horribly burned flying planes during an early phase of the war, and his face reassembled with skin grafts from other parts of his body, with grotesque results. Worse, Andrew is cynical about people’s motives for fighting. Everyone feels guilty about someone else who is doing more, is closer to the action, is more at risk, he says. Maybe this four-page section is a coda to the de-guilting of Peter during the psychotherapy scenes.

Peter dreams dreams. The book is full of dreams. Before his therapy, they were anxiety dreams and nightmares. During his therapy they are hideously vivid memories of torture, guilt and self-hatred. After his therapy he continues to have them but they are now diffuse and mysterious.

He dreams of reuniting with Odette. Her letter to him, the one explaining that she’d abruptly left with no goodbye, had left it open whether he wanted to follow her, be reunited with her. Now he is obsessing about that possibility, he dreams of her and her naked body.

Cleaning out the drawers on his last few days before leaving he comes across a fragment of letter written from Odette to Sonia which strongly hints that they were lesbian lovers. He’d sort of guessed that from the way he had to leave the flat every time Odette came round but, it exacerbates his uncertainties about leaving (p.166).

Bernard drops by for another brief fascinating exchange in which he makes the telling point that Marxism has preserved the class divisions of the nineteenth century in aspic and brought them into the 20th, where they are utterly irrelevant. His movement on the other hand is more dynamic and fluid. Nobody can deny that large sections of the so-called working classes have gone over wholesale to the fascists while, conversely, a lot of the upper-class intelligentsia have gone over to communism. In short, a class-based analysis is hopelessly out of date for modern conditions. Bernard is badgering him because he wants to recruit him to work for ‘them’ in America. He drops the bombshell that he will be sailing on Peter’s ship (the Leviathan).

On the day of departure Peter arrives early, is checked on board and dismayed to discover how cramped Third Class quarters and the pitiful lower deck promenade. To cover his anxiety he drinks two bottles of wine for lunch and passes out in a deckchair. When he regains consciousness, it is to discover the deck heaving like a Bank Holiday crowd. He looks up just in time to see Bernard walking up the gangplank and waving down at him. He bursts free, goes down to his hot sweaty cabin and feels like throwing up. Through the porthole he sees a former party member, Comrade Thomas and his wife and Ossie (!) the comrade he thought had been caught by the police at the leafleting fiasco.

Suddenly he feels morally sick. He rushes out the cabin, up the crowded staircases, across the deck to the gangplank and, as the final hoots of the enormous funnel sound above him, safe onto shore, runs to the ticket booth (empty) and then runs runs runs back into the city.

He runs all the way to Mr Wilson’s office. The latter is disappointed to see him but not altogether surprised and happens to have a military man visiting. On the spot Peter manages to volunteer to fight, to fight the enemy. He walks back into the city enormously relieved. Sometimes decisions just have to be taken. Maybe he is motivated by romantic idealism. But if, like him, you have seen the Jews being herded towards the gas vans in the name of a shiny new technocratic Europe, then it behoves you to take up arms against it. When he had joined the Movement, he hadn’t been fully aware of his motives, which were largely personal. Now he is aware of his motives, which are just as flawed and personal but it is a fully conscious decision.

Peter has been writing short stories. In the last few days before he’s called up he writes a short story about the Last Judgement. It is a very powerful fable, very impressive. The Last Judgement is the nightly court of the unconscious which we are all called to and to which we must all return every night of our lives.

Part 5: Departure

The novel concludes with a five-page envoi (‘an author’s concluding words’). Peter is driven to an English RAF aerodrome, shown into officers quarters, introduced to his pilot, given a cup of tea. He waits. In the other room the pilots are playing ping-pong. He is being parachuted into enemy territory. He just has time to finish a hurried letter to Odette telling her he will lover her always. then the pilot appears and it is time to go.

Some hours later he jumps out of the plane and into the night just as he did at the start of the novel when he jumped from the deck of the Speranza into the dark, but this time he knows why and is determined to see it through.

Wow. What a brilliant ending.

Style

Koestler the Hungarian has an infinitely clearer, cleaner and more enjoyable prose style than the other two, English novelists from the same period who I’ve been reading, Rex Warner and Edward Upward. He just describes things in cool, clear flowing prose.

Out in the blazing street again, Peter had to narrow his eyes against the impact of the hard glare on walls and pavement. He felt in his breast-pocket for a cigarette and his hand touched the flag in his buttonhole. He automatically put it away in his pocket and strolled slowly uphill through the steep, narrow street towards the main Avenue. (pp.25-26)

This directness and clarity means that when he comes to describe the two really harrowing scenes – the Mixed Transport and gassing of the Jews, and Peter’s torture – he is able to do it with factual, unsentimental phrasing which makes it all the more harrowing, I mean really harrowing.

If you are squeamish you shouldn’t read this book. On day three the torturers tie Peter naked and spread-eagled to a table and then just look at his bruised bleeding broken body.

This silence, fraught with the expectation of the unknown, brought him nearer to breaking down than the physical pain they had inflicted upon him the previous days. Pain had its limits, fear had none. It was all-pervading like a sustained electric shock, it made his bared teeth vibrate although he clenched his jaws to prevent them from clattering. (p.112)

In these scenes you are right there, inside the character’s terrified mind, feeling every new bolt of shattering pain.

And it means that when Koestler discusses ideas, or has Peter and Bernard argue about the historical, philosophical, economic and psychological basis of Nazism, he does it crisply and logically, making the arguments in sharp clear sentences which are readable and powerful to this day.

Science metaphors

Koestler wrote a lot. Trained as a journalist, he churned out words every day and produced a wealth of articles, essays and books. But it’s notable that after Arrival and Departure he more or less abandoned fiction. He wrote memoirs and books against communism and about Zionism and the Jews in Palestine – but most of his later books are about science or pseudo-science, beginning with an account of the astronomy of Kepler and moving on to tackle Lamarckism, psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia. By the time I started reading in the mid-70s a lot of these books had been discredited and Koestler was seen as an eccentric or fringe character.

You can see the scientific side of his mind already at work in his fondness for scientific metaphors throughout Arrival and Departure.

Touched with the magic rod of cause and effect, the actions of men were emptied of their so-called moral contents as a Leyden jar is discharged by the touch of a conductor. (p.116)

[Peter] listened to [Sonia] with eager excitement, as one listens, at the end of a crime-story, to the detective explaining the clues which had been all the time before one’s eyes; and as at last they begin to yield their meaning, one feels a new pattern of understanding emerge, like symmetrical crystals in a liquid solution. (p.120)

He felt the exultation of his early student days, when he suddenly grasped the principle of Kepler’s laws of planetary movement and the chaotic world around him was tamed. (p.126)

His interest in scientific metaphors can be considered just one aspect of Koestler’s obvious quest for a factual, unrhetorical style and approach, for a clear-headed factual approach – one which eventually led him out of fiction altogether.

N.B.

It is interesting that Arrival and Departure keeps faith not only with the ‘allegorical’ method of Darkness at Noon but with some of the same nomenclature. Neither Germany nor Russia nor the Communist party nor the Nazi party nor Hitler or Stalin are mentioned by name. As in Darkness the ruler of the people’s state is referred to simply as ‘Number One’, and Bernard jovially agrees that his own country (the one bent on uniting Europe and cleansing it of the mentally and racially impure i.e. Germany) has its own ‘Number One’.

We all know who he’s referring to but this use of generic terms keeps the story floating just above actual historical reality, giving it an allegorical, generalised power.

Conclusion

Arrival and Departure – with its detailed description of torture, its harrowing account of the murder of the Jews, with its complex treatment of the psychotherapy of the traumatised central character, and the clear and powerful arguments between Bernard and Peter about the merits of communism and fascism – is a far more varied, powerful and intellectually stimulating novel than Darkness At Noon.

Related reviews about totalitarianism

Holocaust reviews

Alan Furst’s ‘Night Soldier’ novels

Alan Furst’s ‘Night Soldier’ series of novels are unashamed thrillers, but they are set in the same murky world of spies, and communist and fascist agitators in Eastern and central Europe in the mid and late-1930s which Koestler is depicting, and the best of them (arguably, the first two) capture the mood of paranoia and fear (and brutal violence) which is the subject of Arrival and Departure.

4 Comments
by Simon on June 26, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Novel, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 26, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/arrival-and-departure-arthur-koestler/

%d bloggers like this: