Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a
Twentieth-Century Skeptic
By Michael Scammell
(Random House, 689 pages, $35)
Arthur Koestler’s both a necessary and a troublesome subject for
biography: necessary because his best works rank among the classics
of literature, and troublesome because of the varied quality of his
other writing and the dark turbulence of his personal life.
Darkness at Noon, his 1940 novel about an aging
revolutionary facing a show trial in Soviet Russia, was listed at
number 11 on Modern Library’s list of the best 100 novels of the
20th century; furthermore, he wrote several autobiographical works
and political essays that earned him an eminent place among
pro-Western Cold War intellectuals. Yet by the end of his life,
Koestler was somewhat ambivalent about his legacy as a political
novelist and journalist, preferring instead to write about psi
waves and ESP, and to fund studies in parapsychology. And his
intellectual wanderings were accompanied by romantic ones, for this
self-described “Casanova of causes” was a Casanova as well — with
a string of relationships and marriages built and broken, and
sometimes rebuilt, and sometimes rebroken.
Fortunately, he’s found a talented and diligent biographer in
Michael Scammell, whose 1985 biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a PEN Center
prize. Scammell writes dispassionately and evenhandedly about this
passionate man and his uneven career; he resists the temptation to
throw stones, but still leaves no stone unturned. Consequently,
this biography feels definitive, in the definitive sense: one can
come to it knowing a lot or a little about its subject and come
away sated, with no desire and — more importantly — no need to
read any other biography. And yet one does end up wanting to read
more of Koestler’s writing, the memorably incisive political essays
and the forgettable lesser novels, the highly acclaimed
autobiographies and the oft-derided scientific and
pseudo-scientific tracts.
“Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his
intellectual ambition, he was never comfortable in his own skin,
doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility, like one of
those mercurial Russians in the novels of Dostoyevsky, whom
Koestler so admired and wished to emulate,” Scammell writes in the
course of his masterful introduction. Perhaps because of this
dissatisfaction, Koestler wandered the wastelands of the 20th
century in search of a variety of promised lands: physical,
intellectual, and spiritual. And yet every one he found, he found
wanting — and if it was not that way when he got there, he made it
so through his own conduct, good and bad: his intellectual rigor
and his demanding nature, his perverse willingness to alienate
those who also called it home, and his zeal in searching for
something more for them, and for himself.
As a young man he was a committed Zionist, but he alienated many
Jews by saying that all should either move to Palestine or
assimilate. He later became a Communist, but grew disenchanted with
his comrades’ willingness to make the present imperfect for the
sake of an imagined perfect future, a theme he later explored in
Darkness at Noon. (During this period, he was also
imprisoned by Franco’s forces while reporting on the Spanish Civil
War, an experience which added verisimilitude to his masterwork.)
After the Second World War, he found a home among Western Europe’s
leftist intellectuals, but found them more concerned with being
fashionably anti-American than with true intellectual rigor.
(For many on the left, it is the height of intellectual
sophistication to look for parallels between totalitarian regimes
and their foes, and to either abandon both by conferring moral
equivalency upon them, or sing the praises of the totalitarian
regime while enjoying the freedoms of the West. Koestler, who had
lost friends in the purges, had the moral courage to pick the right
side in the Cold War — unlike, say, his friend Sartre, who
professed to be pro-Soviet and anti-American even though his books
were widely read in the latter country and banned in the former
one.)
After the Second World War, Koestler again dabbled in Zionism,
even writing a novel that many claimed was a justification of
terrorism on behalf of the nascent Jewish state, but far later in
life he published The Thirteenth Tribe, a controversial
best-seller that claimed most Eastern European Jews were not
descended from the original Israelites, but from a tribe from the
Caucasus called the Khazars. (This book was seized upon by
neo-Nazis and some Arabs as negating the need for a Jewish state;
meanwhile, one Jewish journalist called Koestler “a typical,
old-fashioned, self-hating assimilationist.”) By this time, too,
Koestler had toured Asia — long before it was popular to do so —
as well as abandoned politics for science, and then abandoned
science for the pseudo-scientific.
Scammell does an admirable job making sense of this
restlessness, both quoting Koestler’s highly acclaimed
autobiographies and stepping back to add perspective. Koestler saw
his own “thirst for the absolute as ‘a kind of stigma,’ condemning
him never to find satisfaction in the world around him, and he came
to think that it was informed by his intense unhappiness as a
child, his insecurities, and his search for love and acceptance in
a cruel world,” Scammell writes, then cites Koestler’s own
observations on the subject: “‘It was the same quest and the same
all-or-nothing mentality which drove me to the Promised Land and
into the Communist Party. In other ages aspirations of this kind
found their natural fulfillment in God.’”
As Scammell notes, Koestler was no simple follower of trends.
Rather, he tended to embrace causes before they were popular, then
abandon them once they had become so. This desire to be (in the
words of another biographer) “a man against” sometimes had a
notable influence on the world around him; one observer credited
Darkness at Noon’s popularity in France as being “the most
important factor tipping the vote against the Communists” during
that country’s constitutional referendum in May 1946, which saw the
Communists defeated by a 52-48 margin. Similarly, Koestler became a
leading early advocate for abolishing capital punishment in his
adopted home, the United Kingdom. However, this same oppositional
streak, this same tendency to become dissatisfied with what had
once enchanted him, was perhaps responsible for Koestler’s
relentless womanizing. “Like everyone who talks of ethics all day
long one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife, one’s
best friend, one’s manuscripts, or one’s wine merchant,” one
contemporary said. “[H]e despises everybody and can’t conceal the
fact when he is drunk, yet I believe he is probably one of the most
powerful forces for good in the country.”
This tension between Koestler’s often-admirable public life and
his less-than-admirable private one makes for lively biography;
some of his drunken escapades with Sartre, Camus, and their various
wives and girlfriends make for scenes of surreal hilarity, in which
the three intellectuals ended up coming off more like the Three
Stooges. During one night of carousing, Sartre propositioned
Koestler’s soon-to-be second wife, Mamaine. Koestler “scrambled up
the stairs on all fours, still determined to tackle Sartre over
Mamaine. When Camus tried to intervene, Koestler lashed out, giving
Camus a black eye. Camus leaped at Koestler and had to be clawed
off by the others, and Koestler disappeared into the night.” To his
credit, Scammell pauses here and there to tear apart Koestler’s
occasionally self-serving or evasive excuses for such behavior, but
doesn’t use those excuses as an excuse to tear down the man
himself. Scammell seems determined to keep his subject in check for
the sake of honesty and accuracy, rather than destroying him for
the sake of the biographer’s own ego; he even takes the time to
dispute some of the less scrupulous claims from earlier
biographers, rather than settling for easy potshots of his own.
If there’s a problem in this biography, it lies less with the
biographer and more with the life being chronicled; Koestler’s life
had a sort of reverse dramatic arc. His early years were spent
engaged in a variety of dramatic pursuits — journalism in
Palestine, an odyssey above the Arctic on the Graf
Zeppelin, a trip across the Soviet Union during which he
roomed with Langston Hughes — and his middle years saw him
actively engaged in fighting the Cold War on the intellectual
front, but his later days saw him settled into an uneasy
domesticity with his third wife, Cynthia, while his prestige and
influence waned. Dabblings in parapsychology aside, Koestler’s
later years were uneventful — that is, until the March evening in
1983 when he and his wife settled down for their normal pre-dinner
cocktails, which they consumed with a prodigious dose of sleeping
pills. They ended their lives in a peaceful and meticulously
planned double suicide which nonetheless, like so much else in
Koestler’s life, stirred up controversy; while he was in his 70s
and in failing health, his wife was in her mid-50s, and presumably
facing many more healthy years; despite her explanation of her
decision on a postscript to his suicide note, his critics contended
he had used his influence over her to cheat her out of a full
life.
Scammell uses this incident to open the book in dramatic
fashion, which is somewhat unfortunate in that it diminishes its
impact at the end and further flattens the dramatic arc. Also, his
introduction to the book is stunning, but this leaves the ending
and conclusions feeling a little flat by comparison. One is
inclined to complain a little, but it feels like nitpicking-worthy
of Koestler, perhaps, but nitpicking all the same. For this issue
is a mere trifle when placed against Scammell’s considerable
accomplishment in taking Koestler’s story off the dusty pages of
his own writings, fleshing it out with prodigious research and
meticulous interviews, breathing new life into it through his own
excellent writing and analysis, and making the man feel full and
real once more.
