Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness
No other writer of the 20th century had Arthur Koestler’s knack for doing odd things, crossing paths with important people and being present when disaster struck. As a 27-year-old Communist he spent the famine winter of 1932-33 in Kharkov, amid millions of starving Ukrainians. Rushing southward through France ahead of the invading Nazi armies in 1940, he ran into the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who shared with him half the morphine tablets Benjamin would use, weeks later, to commit suicide. The Harvard drug guru Timothy Leary gave Koestler psilocybin in the mid-1960s, and Margaret Thatcher solicited his advice in her 1979 election campaign. Simone de Beauvoir slept with him but came to hate him, and in a fictional portrait described a blazing intelligence and a personality capable of sweeping people off their feet.
Arthur Koestler in 1931, on a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.
KOESTLER
The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
By Michael Scammell
Illustrated. 689 pp. Random House. $35.
Yet, although he wrote more than 30 books, Koestler is today known primarily, perhaps exclusively, as the author of “Darkness at Noon,” his gripping short novel of Stalinist coercion. The biographer Michael Scammell wants to put Koestler’s multifaceted intelligence back on display and to show that something more than frivolity or opportunism lay behind his ever-shifting preoccupations and allegiances. As a source of information, “Koestler,” the work of two decades, will never be surpassed. As an argument for the man’s importance, however, it must contend with the eccentricity of Koestler’s preoccupations and — although Scammell does not always seem to realize it — his vices.
Born in Budapest in 1905, Koestler grew up, he later said, “admired for my brains and detested for my character by teachers and schoolfellows alike.” His parents came from the cultured Jewish milieu of the Hapsburg twilight. They were at home in Vienna as well as Budapest, and financially well off until they were wiped out in the 1920s. Koestler’s Jewishness is a puzzle. He was a passionate Zionist, but his estimate of his Jewish contemporaries was low, almost anti-Semitic: they hadn’t “a single spark of true Bildung [cultivation], in Goethe’s sense of the word,” he complained. His hero was the dashing Zeev Jabotinsky, whose Revisionist Zionism would flow into the hard-line Irgun group in the 1940s. Jabotinsky’s machismo offered Koestler, as Scammell insightfully puts it, “freedom from all those traits considered the hallmarks of a Jew.” Forsaking his education, Koestler moved to Palestine.
Allergic to the hard physical labor it took to make the desert bloom, Koestler didn’t last long. Before he left Palestine, though, he had proved himself a brilliant, versatile and indefatigable journalist, and when he returned to Europe, he was swept away by a new enthusiasm. He became a Communist. He traveled to the Soviet Union, posing as a “bourgeois” journalist undergoing a conversion, and closed his eyes to teeming beggars there, not to mention the famine. The Party needed Koestler in Paris, where he worked for the arch-propagandist Willi Münzenberg. He promoted the Communist line in his journalism and books, particularly once the Spanish Civil War started.
Koestler was in Málaga when it fell to Franco in 1937. He was thrown in jail, where on some nights dozens of his fellow inmates were marched away to execution. Because his interrogators did not know he was an actual Communist, it was possible for the Party to secure his release through its front groups. Scammell is masterly on the role of these organizations, putatively just “antifascist” but run by steering committees taking orders from Moscow. They drummed up the campaign, a novelty at the time, for Koestler’s release, turning him into a European celebrity.
Prison changed Koestler. It did not bring him the spiritual blossoming that it brought to, say, Solzhenitsyn and Mandela, but it gave him insights about human character that Europe needed and lacked. “The consciousness of being confined acts like a slow poison, transforming the entire character,” he wrote. “Now it is beginning gradually to dawn on me what the slave mentality really is.” By then, the Moscow show trials were under way, with the Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin confessing in public to crimes he didn’t commit, and calling for his own execution. Koestler’s brother-in-law, a doctor, was arrested in the Soviet Union and accused of injecting his patients with syphilis. Koestler began to see a family resemblance between Communism and fascism. He broke with the party. Interned in France as an undesirable alien in 1939, he began to work on “Darkness at Noon,” the book that revealed, for Western readers, the psychological underpinnings of Communist dictatorship.
By 1944, Koestler understood that the Russians would control Europe east of Berlin after the war. “In two years it will be a natural deduction,” he wrote in his diary. “If I said it aloud today, nobody would believe me and I’d probably be interned.” He became a mainstay of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded with C.I.A. help in 1950 to counter Soviet propaganda and cultural influence. Later discussion of the congress largely concerned whether the intellectuals who started it knew about the source of its financing. Scammell thinks not. Washington, at any rate, would not have helped Koestler. At the time, as Scammell astutely observes, “the C.I.A. was actually pleading for less overt anti-Communism.”
The last hundred pages of Scammell’s book have an epilogue-y feel. In the mid-1950s Koestler fell out of love with international politics. He refused to make a public show of support for either the Hungarian uprising of 1956 or Israel in the 1967 war. It was now science that fascinated him. No previous biographer has been able to pivot with Koestler at this point, but Scammell, a first-class paraphraser, is up to the task. Some of Koestler’s late work is impressive: “The Sleepwalkers” is an account of the pioneers of modern astronomy that Thomas Kuhn credited with having anticipated the ideas in his classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” But there is a consistent note of autodidactic crankiness, too. Koestler’s enthusiasms included Lamarckian evolution, telepathy and ESP, a theory of creation that we would call intelligent design, levitation and the belief — laid out in his late book “The Thirteenth Tribe” — that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars of the North Caucasus.
Not to mention euthanasia. At age 77, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, he resolved to commit suicide. His third wife, Cynthia, whose emotional dependence on him was extreme (“How I long to be bullied mercilessly!” she once wrote), killed herself alongside Koestler. She was still in her 50s and healthy. An earlier biographer, David Cesarani, blames Koestler for failing to dissuade her. Scammell is right to note, though, that Koestler was by then “too feeble and too far gone physically and mentally to have any further control over Cynthia.”
KOESTLER
The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.
By Michael Scammell
Illustrated. 689 pp. Random House. $35.
Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”
In the late 1990s, Jill Craigie, the wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot, told Cesarani that Koestler had raped her decades earlier. The scandal that resulted when Cesarani’s own Koestler biography was published embroiled Scammell, who had defended Koestler in 1995 against an allegation of attempted rape made by Foot. Scammell argues here that “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time” and that “Craigie’s story and Cesarani’s embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler’s reputation far larger than he deserves.”
He is wrong. Posterity has let Koestler off lightly. Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favor of crediting Craigie’s story. Bertrand Russell’s wife claimed Koestler tried to rape her, too. “Without an element of initial rape,” Koestler wrote the woman who would be his second wife, “there is no delight.” One girlfriend called him “an odd mixture of consideration, thoughtfulness and extraordinary brutality.” Certain aspects of Koestler’s sexism — in particular, his expectation that his girlfriends serve him as stenographers and maids — are indeed mitigated by the era in which he lived. His pattern of predation and violence, though, is a vice of a different order. It shocked those who encountered it.
Cyril Connolly was right to see Koestler as a journalist of genius. In this Koestler can be likened to the three contemporaries — Albert Camus, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell — who were his closest allies. If Koestler had a wider intellectual range than they, however, he had a narrower artistic one. It is a strange thing that this person known to the world primarily as a novelist can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body. The critic Leslie Fiedler once remarked that “Promise and Fulfillment,” Koestler’s 1949 book about Israel, should be filed “under K for Koestler, not I for Israel.” The point can be made more generally: In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself. And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West.