Dialogue With Death

By Arthur Koestler

MR. KOESTLER spent one hundred and two days of 1937 in “the hermetically sealed Andalusian mortuaries" that Spanish political prisons became during the Civil War. He experienced two of them: an ancient and noisome establishment in Malaga, where he fell into the hands of the Fascists, and a modern, almost model prison in Seville, which he found in the long run rather more than less horrible. Of his hundred and two days he spent more than half in solitary confinement; and he spent all of them in the expectation of death, for he was constantly given to understand, though never quite officially, that he was condemned, and in Seville he was quartered in the row of condemned cells. (In the preceding summer, as correspondent of the London News-Chronicle, he had enraged Queipo de Llano and other ranking insurgents by publishing information they wished to suppress.) In both prisons he saw, at midnight after midnight, other inmates marched or dragged past his door by twos, by tens, by fifties; and their passage was shortly followed by the volleys of the firing squad. Dialogue with Death is in large part the diary that he kept in these circumstances whenever he was allowed writing materials. Since its subject is chiefly himself — his own mental behavior, the queer but typical tricks and subterfuges his mind resorted to for the sake of a night’s sleep, a day’s forgetfulness, an hour’s illusion — the narrative makes a genuine contribution in an area of morbid psychology that recent history has immensely widened. W. F.