A Shallow Stream

The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler. Macmillan, $7.95 Lord David Cecil, when I was at Oxford, used to begin one of his lectures on English literature with a story from a South African newspaper about a man who shot his wife, and when the police asked why, said he had mistaken her for a baboon. The point of this anecdote was to show that the same facts might produce either comedy or tragedy, laughter or tears, according to one’s point of view. Arthur Koestler, in his enormous new book, The Act of Creation, devotes the first hundred pages to expounding this not very obscure truth.

He expects us, apparently, to be surprised, and perhaps shocked. “That the Jester should be brother to the Sage,” he says, “may sound like blasphemy.” Well, I suppose it may, but I can’t imagine to whom, except the most solemn of secular egg-heads; an egg-head, what’s more, who has never heard of the jongleur de Dieu or Shakespearean clowns or Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard. To me it sounds more like a cliche.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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The Act of Creation, by Arthur Koestler. Macmillan, $7.95 Lord David Cecil, when I was at Oxford, used to begin one of his lectures on English literature with a story from a South African newspaper about a man who shot his wife, and when the police asked why, said he had mistaken her for a baboon. The point of this anecdote was to show that the same facts might produce either comedy or tragedy, laughter or tears, according to one’s point of view. Arthur Koestler, in his enormous new book, The Act of Creation, devotes the first hundred pages to expounding this not very obscure truth.

He expects us, apparently, to be surprised, and perhaps shocked. “That the Jester should be brother to the Sage,” he says, “may sound like blasphemy.” Well, I suppose it may, but I can’t imagine to whom, except the most solemn of secular egg-heads; an egg-head, what’s more, who has never heard of the jongleur de Dieu or Shakespearean clowns or Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard. To me it sounds more like a cliche.