Arrow in the Blue by Arthur Koestler

Author:Arthur Koestler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2005-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Part Four

THE ROAD TO RESPECTABILITY

1927–1930

Es pocht eine Sehnsucht an die Welt

An der wir sterben müssen.

ELSE LASKER-SCHULER

XXI. King Feisal of Iraq

IN THE SPRING of 1940, shortly before the German invasion of France, detectives from the Préfecture de Police made a search of my Paris flat. They took away, among other things, the collection of newspaper articles that I had published during the preceding fifteen years. The articles were pasted in several bulky scrap-books; I have never seen them since. With the exception of two unpublished manuscripts which they overlooked (one of them was Darkness at Noon), everything that I had written from adolescence to the age of thirty-five was gone.

I was surprised to discover how little I regretted the loss. Though in subsequent years I often worked in public libraries, it never occurred to me to look up my lost articles in their newspaper files. Not until the spring of 1951, when I started writing this book and it became necessary to fill in blank spots in my memory, did I force myself to do so. I went to the New York Public Library and was referred to its down-town Newspaper Division where the back files of the Vossische Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse are kept.

The Newspaper Division occupies two stories in a dreary office building on Twenty-fifth Street; it completely lacks the glamour of the main building on Fifth Avenue. It has a large, grimy and depressing reading-room where bored research workers dig for items of information in the past. I handed in my order form and sat down on a bench at an ink-stained table. It was very hot, the room smelt of sweat, and I was filled with a guilty apprehension—quite unlike the feeling of excitement and curiosity which I had experienced when I went to look up the ‘secular horoscope’ of my day of birth.

After a few minutes a boy laid before me several dusty, brown paper parcels held together with string. I opened the first; out came a cloud of more black dust and what looked like a shower of confetti. At first I thought that mice had nested in the parcel, but the attendant explained that the quarter-century-old newspapers had just disintegrated. Respectable English and American journals are bound into volumes to preserve them. But the venerable Vossische had been bundled helter-skelter—the dates were all mixed up—in common brown paper. Days, weeks and entire months were missing; and a good part of what was left had crumbled into yellow confetti.

To leaf through the remaining pages, which had a tendency to disintegrate under one’s touch, was a melancholy business. When I had worked through two entire months—August and September, 1927—without having come across my name, my apprehension began to verge on panic. Perhaps I had only imagined the past? Or some unknown power had erased every trace of it? I had told the library attendant that I wanted photostats made of my articles. From time to time he looked my way expectantly—there was nothing. Drops

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