Arthur Koestler - The Trail of the Dinosaur

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The Call-Girls
The Trail of the Dinosaur
Thieves in the Night

Arthur Koestler CBE (1905 - 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame.

Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize for outstanding contribution to European culture and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinsons disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.

Arthur Koestler

The preface to the first edition of The Trail of the Dinosaur is dated February, 1955, the preface to Reflections on Hanging, October 3 of the same year. That year marks a turning point in my curriculum as a writer: a farewell to politics and a return to my earlier interests, as a student, in psychology and the sciences of life. The end of the first preface mentioned reads: The bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change. The bitter passion refers to the disillusioned ex-Communists attitude towards the Stalinite regime of totalitarian terror, the sufferings it inflicted on the people under its rule, and the threat it represented to the rest of the world. To refer to oneself as a hoarse Cassandra may sound like self-dramatisation, but so many hostile critics had called me that name so insistently that I felt justified in adopting it for once.

The essays in The Trail of the Dinosaur cover the decade 194655the early or classical period of the Cold War. In that confrontation the West was on the defensive, and the majority of its progressive intellectuals was still turning a benevolently blind eye on Soviet foreign policy and the facts of life behind the Iron Curtain (see The Seven Deadly Fallacies). In the dramatic contest between Whitaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, which has been called the Dreyfus Affair of our century, progressive opinion stood firmly behind Hiss. And when, in the New York Times, I took Chambers part, I became, if possible, even more unpopular among self-styled progressives than I had been before. The intellectual climate of that period was even worse in France, and provided the background for The Age of Longingthe novel which is published in the Danube Edition simultaneously with the present volume.

The Trail of the Dinosaur was meant to be the end of this involvement, and its preface amounted to a kind of public vow to that effect. I have actually managed to keep to it, with a very few occasional lapses. The vocational change announced in the passage quoted above resulted in a trilogy (The SleepwalkersThe Act of CreationThe Ghost in the Machine) which attempted a scientific analysis of the creativity and pathology of man. Those three books took over ten years to write; but nobody who has led a politically active life can sit for ten years at his desk in scholarly quietude. Thus from time to time there were bursts of hectic activity, and the first of these was devoted to the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, which was launched by the late Victor Gollancz, Canon John Collins and myself on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1955, when I paid a visit to Gollancz country house. It took fifteen years to achieve its aim, and even at the time of writing these lines there are forces at work, backed by the majority of the public, which advocate a return of the hangman. This, however, is not the main reason for including a substantial part of Reflections on Hanging in this collection. It was originally intended as a pamphlet, but grew into a full-sized book as I became more and more fascinatedand horrifiedby the historical, psychological and philosophical background and implications of the death penalty in general, and its theory and practice in England. Thus Reflections on Hanging became, for better or worse, an essay on a lurid, but significant, aspect of English cultural history.

A.K.

London

March, 1970

The essays, lectures and broadcast talks in this book date from 1946 to 1955 and are a sequel to a previous collection, The Yogi and the Commissar, completed in 1944. At that time the Western world lived in the euphoria of approaching victory, and the pessimistic forecasts in that volume were almost unanimously rejected as fantasies of a morbid imagination. In the ten years that have passed since The Yogi and the Commissar was published, all its pessimistic and seemingly absurd predictions have come true, but none of its optimistic and seemingly plausible onesfew and cautious though the latter were.

The typical career of the French politician, I wrote some years ago, reads like a book, from left to right. Though I am not a French politician, the evolution reflected in these essays could be regarded as a confirmation of that ruleif the words left and right still possessed any concrete political meaning. One of the submissions of the present volume is that they have lost that meaning, and that man, if he is to survive, must shift the focus of his eyes to more vital questions.

This book, then, is a farewell to arms. The last essays and speeches in it that deal directly with political questions date from 1950, and are now five years old. Since then I felt that I have said all I had to say on these questions which had obsessed me, in various ways, for the best part of a quarter-century. Now the errors are atoned for, the bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse, and is due for a vocational change.

London

February, 1955

I would like to start with a story which you all know, but it will lead us straight to the heart of our problem.

On the 18th of January, 1912, Captain Scott and his four companions reached the South Pole, after a march of sixty-nine days. On the return journey Petty Officer Evans fell ill, and became a burden to the party. Captain Scott had to make a decision. Either he carried the sick man along, slowed down the march and risked perdition for all; or he let Evans die alone in the wilderness and tried to save the rest. Scott took the first course; they dragged Evans along until he died. The delay proved fatal. The blizzards overtook them; Oates, too, fell ill and sacrificed himself; their rations were exhausted; and the frozen bodies of the four men were found six months later only ten miles, or one days march, from the next depot which they had been unable to reach. Had they sacrificed Evans, they would probably have been saved.

This dilemma, which faced Scott under eighty degrees of latitude, symbolises the eternal predicament of man, the tragic conflict inherent in his nature. It is the conflict between expediency and morality. I shall try to show that this conflict is at the root of our political and social crisis, that it contains in a nutshell the challenge of our time.