From the 1950s through the early '70s a number of immigrant Jews, refugees from Europe, became the leading public intellectuals in the US and the UK. Among them were Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti and, of course, Arthur Koestler.
Now, however, these original and analytic thinkers have fallen into disrepute. In the past few years, I've read dismissive comments about Arendt; Canetti is completely forgotten (a search reveals that there has been no mention of him in The New Yawkeh this century), and Koestler is now condemned to being remembered only as a sexual predator and rapist, because in
a hostile biography of him by David Cesarani
(a book which has been rendered worthless by this one) some woman suddenly remembered, fifty years after the fact, that Koestler had raped her. Due to the clamor raised by those who had likely never read anything by Koestler or even heard of him, a bust of him was subsequently removed from display at Edinburgh University.
Human beings, at all times and everywhere, are eager for gossip and likely to accept it without considering any evidence. Michael Scammell discusses the rape accusation at length and points out the obvious fact that it was made in 1998, years after Koestler had died, and he weighs what little evidence there is to support it. Scammell is no apologist for Koestler, though, because this biography is highly detailed, and the details confirm one fact: rape or no rape, Arthur Koestler was a cad (or to use a now-quaint phrase, a male-chauvinist pig).
This is a superb book based on a staggering amount of research, and Scammell is a fine stylist, but despite it being an admirable piece of work, I don't recommend that anyone read it, because more than anything else, it will leave you with the impression of what an awful person Arthur Koestler was. If you have read any of Koestler's books, you already adore him, and if you haven't, your appetite for discovering Koestler will be spoiled.
At one time there were certain topics which were off-limits to a biographer, primarily the subject's sex life or sexual orientation. (At the Detroit Public Library, I once saw a biography of Franz Schubert which stated that he died of "a kidney disease," and I immediately made a loud protest to the librarian at having this great man so dishonored.) Now, however, it seems to be the principal duty of the biographer to tell all -- whom with and how many times. Arthur Koestler spent his entire life in a perpetual state of musth, so the list of affairs Scammell has prepared makes for tedious reading. The exception to this is English author
Joan Lee Thompson
who revealed to Scammell that Koestler was a lousy lay. (The only amusing aspect to the affairs of the various authors mentioned --Koestler, Sartre, Camus, et al.-- is that, while each young generation thinks that they're the ones who discovered sex, in those days the Seventh Commandment was observed about as strictly as the Fourth.)
Another possible reason that Arthur Koestler is held in low regard, if he is regarded at all, is that he is now seen as a right-wing ideologue. Consumer-citizens of the USA are unaware that their opinion of communism as a dead ideology is not shared by the rest of the world. There are many, especially in the UK, who yet hold old-left values: not merely that a planned economy is superior to the chaotic market economy, which is always open to debate, but that The Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (meaning Stalin) were fundamentally admirable; that there was no famine caused by forced collectivization; that the Gulags were necessary and a just reward for traitors; that the end justifies the means, and that it was necessary to subvert one's own democracy to advance the worldwide goal of a classless society. (This book provides a timely reminder that there actually was an international communist conspiracy that had infiltrated society to an appalling degree. Arthur Koestler was a communist agent for seven years.) To such partisans, Koestler, once he became rich and famous, betrayed his principles and sold his soul to the Yanqui imperialists, and they were and are eager to berate him at every opportunity.
What were Koestler's politics? I confess that while reading this book, I became alarmed at the passages where Koestler first visits the USA and becomes devoted friends with author
Whittaker Chambers
(who, due to his testimony against Alger Hiss, became the bête noire of the American left; curiously, Chambers later wrote a scathing review of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, calling it "a remarkably silly book"), and he met with Congressman Richard Nixon of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy. It is obvious throughout the book that Scammell greatly admires Koestler and that the book champions his defense, the discussion of rape accusation being a prime example, so I began to wonder if Scammell, whose other work I am unfamiliar with, might be a partisan of America's strident reactionary movement who would defend Koestler for the sole purpose of supporting a famous anti-communist. (I speculated that if there were a Koestler Society its members would all be Objectivists, libertarians and other foes of government, but there is no such Koestler Society. There's an
Arnold Bennett Society
, a
Norman Mailer
Society, but no Koestler Society.) Fortunately, as I read on, I realized that my fears had been unwarranted. Scammell has no agenda beyond his admiration for Koestler, and for that matter, Koestler had no politics. As with the rest of us, Koestler was a leftist in his youth, but as his hair began to turn gray, he grew increasingly tory.
Once Koestler had abandoned politics, he turned to writing about science, and this may have damaged his reputation more than anything else, because Koestler took the most absurd positions imaginable, with each book advocating a more bizarre quackery. He challenged the neo-Darwinians in favor of Lamarckian evolution. When Scammell mentions two instances (or perhaps the same instance is cited twice) in which Koestler bought a measuring device to demonstrate psychic levitation, I began to wonder, Is there is any quackery that Koestler >didn't< embrace? As soon as this thought crossed my mind, I turned the page and discovered that Koestler had considered writing a book about Franz Anton Mesmer, the proponent of *animal magnetism,* an eighteenth-century Parisian fad that was handily debunked by Ben Franklin. At this point, I fully expected to find references to Madame Blavatsky or the autosuggestion therapy of
Émile Coué
(only, with Koestler being such a pessimist, he'd likely have changed the mantra to, *Day-by-day, in every way, we are getting worse and worse.*)
This is another reason not to read this biography. Anyone reading this who has not read any of Koestler's books will surf away, because who wants to read about an eccentric proponent of ESP and the notion that the Jews didn't come from Judea? But reading the biography provided me with the big picture to understanding Koestler.
He never outgrew his adolescent zeal for getting roaring drunk and starting an argument. He usually won, and if he didn't overwhelm his opponent with his rhetorical skills, he resorted to his fists. He was also good at board games such as chess. He liked to win. This also explains his compulsion for venery. He didn't care about women, and (as noted above) he wasn't much of a lover. It was just another notch on his gun. Another win.
Koestler was the supreme contrarian. (Scammell provides this quote from him: "To swim against the current is meritorious, but oh, how tired one's arms become.") Whatever was popular, he fought against. When communism was new and dangerous, he became a communist agent. When many literate people became sympathetic to the idea of a classless society, Koestler turned against communism.
When Israel was new and had a slim chance of surviving, Koestler was there as its champion, even to the degree that he supported the terrorist means of the Irgun as being justified. Once Israel had become established, he became rather indifferent to it and instead promulgated the notion that Ashkenazi Jews had no ancestry in the region. There is some repetition in this biography, and one idea of Koestler's that is mentioned frequently is that Jews should either move to Israel or abandon their traditions and try to pass for Goy.
When psychoanalysis was popular, he mocked that (pg.521), but when Freudian theory was displaced in academia by behaviorism, Koestler devoted a large portion of
The Ghost in the Machine
to attacking behaviorism, which he dismissed as a "pseudo-science." He denounced Ghandi, saying that India would've been better off without him. (Had he lived longer, he likely would've denounced Mother Teresa, too, and I leave to your imagination what he'd have to say about the Higgs boson or President McTrump.)
His success in exposing communism as a sham gave him the confidence to advance to what he considered the most important facet of his career -- being the preeminent ankle-biter of the scientific establishment. But here's a surprise: one of his science books is a masterpiece. The first book I ever read by Koestler was
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
, and it's among my favorite books. I never had much interest in astronomy, but that book is so well-written that it's a joy to read, and not merely once.
The only possible benefits to be had from reading this biography are that Scammell provides a synopsis of each of Koestler's ghastly science books, most of which you are unlikely to read, and the story of Koestler's life remains fascinating. But it seems impossible to finish this biography without having a diminished opinion of him. That's a shame, because Arthur Koestler was a great writer. Despite his lapses in character and despite whatever zany positions he advocated, Arthur Koestler had charisma, which is manifest in his writing. That's why his books are a pleasure to read. Yes, Michael Scammell has written a fine book, but he's no Arthur Koestler, and you'll enjoy
Arrow in the Blue
and
The Invisible Writing
much more than this book. Of course, those rambling autobiographies are told from the author's egotistical view, and you'll miss the sordid details of Scammell's research, but since Koestler managed to be at so many focal points of history, his story is the story of the twentieth century, and that's depressing enough without an account of personal failings.
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Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic Hardcover – December 29, 2009
by
Michael Scammell
(Author)
| Michael Scammell (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers, Koestler is the definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure. Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon, Koestler is here revealed as much more–a man whose personal life was as astonishing as his literary accomplishments.
Koestler portrays the anguished youth of a boy raised in Budapest by a possessive and mercurial mother and an erratic father, marked for life by a forced operation performed without anesthesia when he was five, growing up feeling unloved and unprotected. Here is the young man whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who risked his life from the North Pole to Franco’s Spain, where he was imprisoned and sentenced to death; the committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin’s show trials inspired the superb and angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940. Scammell also provides new details of Koestler’s amazing World War II adventures, including his escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was the first to portray Hitler’s Final Solution.
Without sentimentality, Scammell explores Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, his manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape that posthumously tainted his reputation, and his startling suicide while fatally ill in 1983–an act shared by his healthy third wife, Cynthia–rendered unforgettably as part of his dark and disturbing legacy.
Featuring cameos of famous friends and colleagues including Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Koestler gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Koestler adds up to an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as “one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius.”
Koestler portrays the anguished youth of a boy raised in Budapest by a possessive and mercurial mother and an erratic father, marked for life by a forced operation performed without anesthesia when he was five, growing up feeling unloved and unprotected. Here is the young man whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who risked his life from the North Pole to Franco’s Spain, where he was imprisoned and sentenced to death; the committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin’s show trials inspired the superb and angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940. Scammell also provides new details of Koestler’s amazing World War II adventures, including his escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was the first to portray Hitler’s Final Solution.
Without sentimentality, Scammell explores Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, his manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape that posthumously tainted his reputation, and his startling suicide while fatally ill in 1983–an act shared by his healthy third wife, Cynthia–rendered unforgettably as part of his dark and disturbing legacy.
Featuring cameos of famous friends and colleagues including Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Koestler gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Koestler adds up to an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as “one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius.”
- Print length720 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateDecember 29, 2009
- Dimensions6.45 x 1.7 x 9.55 inches
- ISBN-100394576306
- ISBN-13978-0394576305
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The protean Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) seemed to be at the periphery of great events and movements, from Zionism to the forked world of the cold war. Scammell, author of an award-winning biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, views Koestler with balanced patience in this somewhat overlong but definitive biography. A manic-depressive with a Napoleonic complex, Koestler relished feuds with fellow intellectuals such as B.F. Skinner and Isaiah Berlin. He rubbed elbows with Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and Orwell. Gide, as Scammell points out, stung with his observation that Koestler was better off sticking to journalism. In fact, the last 20 years of Koestler's life were devoted to such flakiness as ESP and levitation. Koestler's dilettantish range of interests is so broad, it's difficult for the biographer to get his hands on his slippery subject. Even after his most successful novels, Darkness at Noon and Thieves in the Night, Koestler never let up. Yet his flip-flops on Zionism and his oddly passive reaction to the Soviet rule of his native Hungary might leave one pondering Koestler's legacy in our vastly different 21st century. 16 pages of photos. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* “Who,” Michael Foot wondered, “will ever forget the first moment he read Darkness at Noon?” Yet behind an unforgettable novel, Scammell finds a forgotten author. With this biography, Scammell forcefully reminds readers why Arthur Koestler still deserves attention. A Hungarian-born intellectual who traversed the globe during his peripatetic career, Koestler repeatedly found himself in the perilous middle of epoch-making history, narrowly avoiding an executioner’s bullet in civil war Spain. But it is Koestler’s radical ideological shifts that make his work a fever chart for modern passions. In turn a Zionist, then an anti-Zionist; a Communist, then an anti-Communist; a pioneering existentialist, then a foe of existentialists; an exponent of empirical science, then a champion of parapsychology—Koestler offers an astounding diversity of perspectives. To be sure, Darkness—Koester’s harrowing exposé of the soul-crushing power of communism—deserves priority. But Scammell challenges the dismissal of Koestler as a one-book wonder, highlighting the enduring power of Dialogue with Death, Scum of the Earth, The Yogi and the Commissar, and other works. Attributing the recent neglect of Koestler’s oeuvre to the controversy surrounding his and his wife’s double suicide and to the malign influence of David Cesarini’s hostile 1998 biography, Scammell has set the stage for the rediscovery of a great writer. --Bryce Christensen
Review
"Arthur Koestler exposed his mind and body to the fearful spectrum of twentieth-century ideology like a healthy man volunteering for a life of radiation therapy. He left behind his books, trays of x-rays in black and white, strangely beautiful and dreadfully revealing. Scammell's admirable biography gives full run to Koestler's body, mind, and work, and so helps us to see modern intellectual politics in its mesmerizing brilliance and depth."—Timothy Snyder, Professor of History, Yale
"There is virtually no current of twentieth-century achievement and conflict to which Arthur Koestler did not contribute in a creative and clairvoyant way. Darkness at Noon may have changed history. To Koestler's manifold passions and anguish this finely researched, incisive biography does justice—where justice is the key and challenging requirement. Michael Scammell has produced a compelling, intensely gripping study. Even the porcupine-tempered Koestler would have been proud."—George Steiner
"Elegant...A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work."—Kirkus, starred review
"Scammell has set the stage for the rediscovery of a great writer."—Booklist, starred review
"As Scammell's fantastic account makes clear, Koestler was hardly a skeptic. He was an impassioned believer who swerved this way and that—Zionism, communism, anticommunism, science, and-pseudoscience—searching for the absolute that would save him (and us all)"—Newsweek
"A prodigy of research in many languages, and a scrupulous piece of fairminded advocacy." —New Yorker
"Scammell’s ‘Koestler’ is unlikely to be surpassed. This is Koestler in full—sins and virtues measured fairly and thoughtfully. Can a man with such flaws be a great man? As a friend noted: ‘Koestler was the embodiment of an uncompromised, unafraid, international idealism.’ There can be no greater compliment." —Wall Street Journal
"Judicious and insightful."—San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn, a Biography,which won the Los Angeles Times and English PEN’s prizes for best biography after its publication. He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia’ s Other Writers, and has translated Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors into English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Harpers, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York.
Michael Scammell has been shortlisted for the LA Times biography prize.
Michael Scammell has been shortlisted for the LA Times biography prize.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
BEGINNINGS
A novelist is someone who hates his mother.
—Georges Simenon
when koestler came to write the first volume of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, he began by casting his “secular horoscope.” He took a copy of the London Times published on September 6, 1905 (one day after his birthday) and studied its contents to discover what “influences” might have been at work on the global environment into which he was born. Skimming the advertisements and some minor news stories of the day, his eye came to rest on two weightier items: “Fierce Fighting in the Caucasus,” about an anti-Jewish pogrom in Baku and the forcible suppression of a strike; and “Disturbances at Kishineff,” describing an attack on Russian workmen and Jews attending the funeral of a murdered woman.
The Russian workers’ movement and the impending revolution of 1905 were both gathering steam at the time of Koestler’s birth, and the situation of the Jews was implicated in both. Equally fascinating to Koestler was a Times editorial on the Treaty of Portsmouth between the Russian tsar and the emperor of Japan to end the Russo-Japanese War. The editorial extolled the virtues of the victorious Japanese, their “subordination of the individual to the tribe and the state,” and their “monastic discipline,” which it contrasted with the “excessive individualism” of the West. For Koestler, who had yet to make his own visit to Japan, the editorial had a sinister ring: “The clock that struck the hour of my birth also announced the end of the era of liberalism and individualism, of that harshly competitive and yet easy-going civilization which had succeeded in reconciling, thanks to a unique kindly-callous compromise, the slogan of ‘survival of the fittest’ with that of ‘laissez faire, laissez aller.’?” After listing some luminaries active in science and culture (Einstein, Freud, Tolstoy, Kipling, Cézanne, and Matisse among others), he concluded pessimistically: “I was born at the moment when the sun was setting on the Age of Reason.”1
The horoscope was a trick, of course. Looking back, Koestler picked out the events that suited him and arranged them to fit what he conceived to be the essential pattern of his life, yet for his biographer it has its uses. Strikes, pogroms, anti-Semitism, wars, the rise of the “first modern totalitarian state,” and the decline of liberal humanism—as well as striking achievements in science and the arts—all were to spark his creativity in the course of his life, while the decline of the Age of Reason became an obsession of his later years. Just as important as the subjects was the nature of the selection he made. Everything Koestler found worthy of inclusion in his horoscope was external, public, social, political. There was nothing inward or intimate in that list, little to hint at the complex psychological life and excruciating personal struggles of the person writing it.
It wasn’t that Koestler considered such things irrelevant. Later he paused to consider the two main motives for writing autobiographies, “the Chronicler’s urge” and the “Ecce homo [behold the man] motive,” both intended to transcend the isolation of the self. The chronicler stressed external events, the contemplative stressed internal processes. A good autobiography needed both. Koestler admitted that though he had once vowed to write an intimate autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau and Cellini, he had shrunk from the “process of self-immolation” that their confessions had entailed. Acknowledging the tortured nature of his own psyche, he declined to investigate it closely, preferring not to look too deeply into the convoluted contours of his mind and motives. It was not uniqueness that Koestler sought in his self-examination but universality, confirmed by his description of the two volumes of his autobiography as “the typical case history of a member of the Central-European educated middle classes, born in the first years of our century.”2
Koestler was writing in a tradition of autobiography that he adapted and improved upon to suit his particular purposes, and that has been all but superseded by the tell-all memoir of our own day, but he didn’t ignore his emotional life altogether, particularly when it came to his childhood. Though his narrative is sparse, he lets his guard down freely in places, for, under Freud’s influence, he came to regard his childhood experiences as the source of his later unhappiness.
A striking example occurs in the opening of chapter four, where Koestler arrives at the moment of his birth. “I was born in the eighth year of my parents’ marriage,” he writes, “their first and only child, when my mother was thirty five. Everything seems to have gone wrong with my birth: I weighed over ten pounds; my mother’s labor lasted two days and almost killed her. The whole unsavory Freudian Olympus, from Oedipus Rex to Orestes, stood watch at my cradle.” Oedipus, be it noted, slept with his mother, and Orestes murdered his, a fair indication of Koestler’s conflicted emotions, so perhaps it’s not surprising he got the details wrong. He was born in the sixth year of his parents’ marriage, not the eighth, and his mother was thirty-four, not thirty-five. Neither error is significant in itself. What is interesting is that Koestler’s mother was alive and well at the time he wrote his autobiography, but he couldn’t bring himself to consult her. He found it extremely hard to write about his childhood at all, and dreaded her reaction. “The awareness that she is going to read this passage in print has the same paralyzing effect which prevented me as a child from keeping a diary—knowing that wherever I hid it, it would be found and read by her.”3
Adele Koestler was eighty and Koestler forty-six when he wrote this, but he still feared her every bit as much as in childhood. Her mother love, according to him, was “excessive, possessive and capricious,” partly because he was a late and only child, but also because she was plagued by ill health and the extreme changes of mood they brought in their wake. Her loving tenderness would give way to violent outbursts of temper, and vice versa. The son claimed he was traumatized. Tossed constantly from “the emotional climate of the tropics to the arctic and back again,” he developed an early conviction of personal guilt and shame that never left him. The very chapter in which Koestler recounts his childhood is called “The Tree of Guilt.”
It’s hard to say how just this is, or when Koestler started to blame his mother for his later miseries. His few childhood letters to her that have survived are conventionally effusive and adoring, but there are very few from her to him, and her frequent absences from home suggest that she was indeed a cold, egotistical, and selfish person, whom he held responsible for his own mood swings, inferiority complex, rootlessness, and obsessive search for nirvana in the arms of countless women. It has been said of Ingmar Bergman that all his relationships with women were built on a desperate craving for mother love, and the same seems to have been true of Koestler. Daphne Henrion, who lived with Koestler for some years and translated Darkness at Noon, said that Koestler thought of his discarded mistresses the way he thought about his mother, and invariably recoiled once he was done with them. Throughout his adult life he remained uniformly hostile to Adele and rarely consented to visit her, though she lived in a boarding house for “Jewish Ladies” (for which he paid) only a few miles from his house in London and survived, as if to spite him, to the ripe old age of ninety-nine. Her existence was kept a close secret from all but his most intimate friends, and when she died, he downed several stiff brandies before attending her funeral, accompanied only by his agent’s secretary.4
Koestler’s father, Henrik, was a different story. Henrik was a businessman in the clothing trade, whom Koestler recalled as “energetic and quick in his movements, impeccably dressed, unfailingly optimistic in business matters and hard-working.” Henrik had a gambler’s instincts and a weakness for get-rich-quick schemes that often got him into trouble, but until the Depression was always able to recover himself. As a child Arthur barely knew him. He thought of him as a remote but kindly figure who “loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance” but with whom he never had an intimate conversation in his entire life. Koestler had little of his father’s optimism, but he inherited his work ethic, his gambler’s willingness to take risks, and his miraculous ability to land on his feet.5
In his autobiography Koestler paints a humorous picture of his family as a bunch of parvenus who came out of nowhere, flourished briefly in Vienna and Budapest in the early years of the twentieth century, and were destined to vanish, either as victims of the Holocaust or through emigration and exile (since he was an only son and childless, he thought of himself as the last of his line). There is some truth to this picture, but it also helped to conceal some details that Koestler preferred not to reveal. For example, he said his paternal grandfather, Leopold Köstler, had been a Russian Social Revolutionary who escaped to Hungary during the Crimean War, perhaps after absconding from the Russian army. This story speaks to Koestler’s love of Russia and has been accepted by everyone who writes about him, but the fact is that revolutionary movements didn’t come into existence in Russia until several years after the Crimean War, and the Social Revolutionaries didn’t appear on the scene until three decades later. Ko...
BEGINNINGS
A novelist is someone who hates his mother.
—Georges Simenon
when koestler came to write the first volume of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, he began by casting his “secular horoscope.” He took a copy of the London Times published on September 6, 1905 (one day after his birthday) and studied its contents to discover what “influences” might have been at work on the global environment into which he was born. Skimming the advertisements and some minor news stories of the day, his eye came to rest on two weightier items: “Fierce Fighting in the Caucasus,” about an anti-Jewish pogrom in Baku and the forcible suppression of a strike; and “Disturbances at Kishineff,” describing an attack on Russian workmen and Jews attending the funeral of a murdered woman.
The Russian workers’ movement and the impending revolution of 1905 were both gathering steam at the time of Koestler’s birth, and the situation of the Jews was implicated in both. Equally fascinating to Koestler was a Times editorial on the Treaty of Portsmouth between the Russian tsar and the emperor of Japan to end the Russo-Japanese War. The editorial extolled the virtues of the victorious Japanese, their “subordination of the individual to the tribe and the state,” and their “monastic discipline,” which it contrasted with the “excessive individualism” of the West. For Koestler, who had yet to make his own visit to Japan, the editorial had a sinister ring: “The clock that struck the hour of my birth also announced the end of the era of liberalism and individualism, of that harshly competitive and yet easy-going civilization which had succeeded in reconciling, thanks to a unique kindly-callous compromise, the slogan of ‘survival of the fittest’ with that of ‘laissez faire, laissez aller.’?” After listing some luminaries active in science and culture (Einstein, Freud, Tolstoy, Kipling, Cézanne, and Matisse among others), he concluded pessimistically: “I was born at the moment when the sun was setting on the Age of Reason.”1
The horoscope was a trick, of course. Looking back, Koestler picked out the events that suited him and arranged them to fit what he conceived to be the essential pattern of his life, yet for his biographer it has its uses. Strikes, pogroms, anti-Semitism, wars, the rise of the “first modern totalitarian state,” and the decline of liberal humanism—as well as striking achievements in science and the arts—all were to spark his creativity in the course of his life, while the decline of the Age of Reason became an obsession of his later years. Just as important as the subjects was the nature of the selection he made. Everything Koestler found worthy of inclusion in his horoscope was external, public, social, political. There was nothing inward or intimate in that list, little to hint at the complex psychological life and excruciating personal struggles of the person writing it.
It wasn’t that Koestler considered such things irrelevant. Later he paused to consider the two main motives for writing autobiographies, “the Chronicler’s urge” and the “Ecce homo [behold the man] motive,” both intended to transcend the isolation of the self. The chronicler stressed external events, the contemplative stressed internal processes. A good autobiography needed both. Koestler admitted that though he had once vowed to write an intimate autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau and Cellini, he had shrunk from the “process of self-immolation” that their confessions had entailed. Acknowledging the tortured nature of his own psyche, he declined to investigate it closely, preferring not to look too deeply into the convoluted contours of his mind and motives. It was not uniqueness that Koestler sought in his self-examination but universality, confirmed by his description of the two volumes of his autobiography as “the typical case history of a member of the Central-European educated middle classes, born in the first years of our century.”2
Koestler was writing in a tradition of autobiography that he adapted and improved upon to suit his particular purposes, and that has been all but superseded by the tell-all memoir of our own day, but he didn’t ignore his emotional life altogether, particularly when it came to his childhood. Though his narrative is sparse, he lets his guard down freely in places, for, under Freud’s influence, he came to regard his childhood experiences as the source of his later unhappiness.
A striking example occurs in the opening of chapter four, where Koestler arrives at the moment of his birth. “I was born in the eighth year of my parents’ marriage,” he writes, “their first and only child, when my mother was thirty five. Everything seems to have gone wrong with my birth: I weighed over ten pounds; my mother’s labor lasted two days and almost killed her. The whole unsavory Freudian Olympus, from Oedipus Rex to Orestes, stood watch at my cradle.” Oedipus, be it noted, slept with his mother, and Orestes murdered his, a fair indication of Koestler’s conflicted emotions, so perhaps it’s not surprising he got the details wrong. He was born in the sixth year of his parents’ marriage, not the eighth, and his mother was thirty-four, not thirty-five. Neither error is significant in itself. What is interesting is that Koestler’s mother was alive and well at the time he wrote his autobiography, but he couldn’t bring himself to consult her. He found it extremely hard to write about his childhood at all, and dreaded her reaction. “The awareness that she is going to read this passage in print has the same paralyzing effect which prevented me as a child from keeping a diary—knowing that wherever I hid it, it would be found and read by her.”3
Adele Koestler was eighty and Koestler forty-six when he wrote this, but he still feared her every bit as much as in childhood. Her mother love, according to him, was “excessive, possessive and capricious,” partly because he was a late and only child, but also because she was plagued by ill health and the extreme changes of mood they brought in their wake. Her loving tenderness would give way to violent outbursts of temper, and vice versa. The son claimed he was traumatized. Tossed constantly from “the emotional climate of the tropics to the arctic and back again,” he developed an early conviction of personal guilt and shame that never left him. The very chapter in which Koestler recounts his childhood is called “The Tree of Guilt.”
It’s hard to say how just this is, or when Koestler started to blame his mother for his later miseries. His few childhood letters to her that have survived are conventionally effusive and adoring, but there are very few from her to him, and her frequent absences from home suggest that she was indeed a cold, egotistical, and selfish person, whom he held responsible for his own mood swings, inferiority complex, rootlessness, and obsessive search for nirvana in the arms of countless women. It has been said of Ingmar Bergman that all his relationships with women were built on a desperate craving for mother love, and the same seems to have been true of Koestler. Daphne Henrion, who lived with Koestler for some years and translated Darkness at Noon, said that Koestler thought of his discarded mistresses the way he thought about his mother, and invariably recoiled once he was done with them. Throughout his adult life he remained uniformly hostile to Adele and rarely consented to visit her, though she lived in a boarding house for “Jewish Ladies” (for which he paid) only a few miles from his house in London and survived, as if to spite him, to the ripe old age of ninety-nine. Her existence was kept a close secret from all but his most intimate friends, and when she died, he downed several stiff brandies before attending her funeral, accompanied only by his agent’s secretary.4
Koestler’s father, Henrik, was a different story. Henrik was a businessman in the clothing trade, whom Koestler recalled as “energetic and quick in his movements, impeccably dressed, unfailingly optimistic in business matters and hard-working.” Henrik had a gambler’s instincts and a weakness for get-rich-quick schemes that often got him into trouble, but until the Depression was always able to recover himself. As a child Arthur barely knew him. He thought of him as a remote but kindly figure who “loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance” but with whom he never had an intimate conversation in his entire life. Koestler had little of his father’s optimism, but he inherited his work ethic, his gambler’s willingness to take risks, and his miraculous ability to land on his feet.5
In his autobiography Koestler paints a humorous picture of his family as a bunch of parvenus who came out of nowhere, flourished briefly in Vienna and Budapest in the early years of the twentieth century, and were destined to vanish, either as victims of the Holocaust or through emigration and exile (since he was an only son and childless, he thought of himself as the last of his line). There is some truth to this picture, but it also helped to conceal some details that Koestler preferred not to reveal. For example, he said his paternal grandfather, Leopold Köstler, had been a Russian Social Revolutionary who escaped to Hungary during the Crimean War, perhaps after absconding from the Russian army. This story speaks to Koestler’s love of Russia and has been accepted by everyone who writes about him, but the fact is that revolutionary movements didn’t come into existence in Russia until several years after the Crimean War, and the Social Revolutionaries didn’t appear on the scene until three decades later. Ko...
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; 1st Edition (December 29, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0394576306
- ISBN-13 : 978-0394576305
- Item Weight : 2.5 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.45 x 1.7 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,527,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,432 in Social Activist Biographies
- #7,093 in Author Biographies
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Michael Scammell, biographer, critic and translator, was born in Lyndhurst, England, and moved permanently to the USA in 1985. He has written award-winning biographies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler, and has translated many books from Russian, including works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn. He is the founder of the British human rights magazine, Index on Censorship, and has taught at Cornell and Columbia universities. He lives in New York City.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 13, 2013
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4.0 out of 5 stars
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others.’’ — Dostoyevsky
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 3, 2019
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others.’’
— Dostoyevsky
This epigraph captures the drama of this work. Koestler lies . . . a lot. However, he later confesses . . . a lot. But more than personal deceit, he persuades himself about ideas — Science, Darwinism, Socialism, etc., — and what makes his life a special drama, is his underlying sincerity drives him to reject these beliefs!
What else impels him?
“His insecurities, and his search for love and acceptance in a cruel world. “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 fulfilment in God.”
Koestler’s story could serve as a stand-in for twentieth-century intellectual poster boy. How did he begin?
“He continued to read voraciously—Shakespeare, Rilke, Goethe, Heine, Byron, and any novel he could lay his hands on—but his four years at the Realiskola confirmed him in the belief that his intellectual loyalties should remain with science. It wasn’t a difficult conclusion to reach, for science enjoyed extraordinarily high prestige in early-twentieth-century Budapest (the scientists von Kármán, de Hevesy, Polanyi, Szilard, Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller, all products of “the Budapest miracle,” came from the same milieu as Koestler).’’
This what’s makes Koestler’s drama fascinating. This new ‘scientific faith’ had captured the brightest, leading intellectual lights of Europe. Koestler was right there, part of this . . . this . . . explosion . . .
“Arthur was sure that mathematics and physics would help him unlock the secrets of the universe. His heroes were “Darwin and Spencer, Kepler, Newton and Mach; Edison, Herz and Marconi—the Buffalo Bills of the frontiers of discovery,” and his “bible” Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe) by Ernst Haeckel, a celebrated German biologist and Darwinist who attempted to apply the doctrine of evolution to problems of philosophy and religion. Haeckel claimed to have “solved” most of the riddles pertaining to the known universe (conveniently denying the importance of those he couldn’t solve, such as the immortality of the soul, the existence of a personal God, the reality of free will). Arthur didn’t accept Haeckel’s claim but absorbed from him a preoccupation with the moral and philosophical dimensions of science that would reassert itself during the later part of his life.’’
‘Moral dimensions of science’. Well . . . this work documents the life one serial seducer, determined adulterer, deeply devious betrayer. Doesn’t look like ‘science’ had the answer or provided the foundation he was looking for.
Notice his fascination with Darwin. Other scholars have noted Haeckel’s influence on German intellectual life. Much deeper than Darwin’s impact in the English world. Think of the consequences . . .
PART ONE: A LONG APPRENTICESHIP The Author as Journalist (1905–1936)
Chapter One: BEGINNINGS
Chapter Two: A BUDAPEST CHILDHOOD
Chapter Three: RISE, JEW, RISE
Chapter Four: ZIONIST
Chapter Five: A RUNAWAY AND A FUGITIVE
Chapter Six: FIRST STEPS IN JOURNALISM
Chapter Seven: HELLO TO BERLIN
Chapter Eight: IN THE GALE OF HISTORY
Chapter Nine: RED DAYS
Chapter Ten: ANTI-FASCIST CRUSADER
Chapter Eleven: MARKING TIME
Chapter Twelve: PRISONER OF FRANCO
Chapter Thirteen: TURNING POINT
PART TWO: FAME AND INFAMY The Author as Novelist (1936–1946)
Chapter Fourteen: THE GOD THAT FAILED
Chapter Fifteen: NO NEW CERTAINTIES
Chapter Sixteen: DARKNESS VISIBLE
Chapter Seventeen: SCUM OF THE EARTH
Chapter Eighteen: DARKNESS UNVEILED
Chapter Nineteen: IN CRUMPLED BATTLEDRESS
Chapter Twenty: THE NOVELIST’S TEMPTATIONS
Chapter Twenty-One: IDENTITY CRISIS
Chapter Twenty-Two: COMMISSAR OR YOGI?
Chapter Twenty-Three: RETURN TO PALESTINE
Chapter Twenty-Four: WELSH INTERLUDE
Chapter Twenty-Five: THE LOGIC OF THE ICE AGE
PART THREE: LOST ILLUSIONS The Author as Activist (1946–1959)
Chapter Twenty-Six: ADVENTURES AMONG THE EXISTENTIALISTS
Chapter Twenty-Seven: FRENCH LESSONS
Chapter Twenty-Eight: DISCOVERING AMERICA
Chapter Twenty-Nine: FAREWELL TO ZIONISM
Chapter Thirty: A MARRIED MAN
Chapter Thirty-One: TO THE BARRICADES
Chapter Thirty-Two: THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM
Chapter Thirty-Three: BACK TO THE USA
Chapter Thirty-Four: POLITICALLY UNRELIABLE
Chapter Thirty-Five: THE LANGUAGE OF DESTINY
Chapter Thirty-Six: THE PHANTOM CHASE
Chapter Thirty-Seven: I KILLED HER
Chapter Thirty-Eight: CASSANDRA GROWS HOARSE
Chapter Thirty-Nine: MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
PART FOUR: ASTRIDE THE TWO CULTURES The Author as Polymath (1959–1983)
Chapter Forty: COSMIC REPORTER
Chapter Forty-One: THE SQUIRE OF ALPBACH
Chapter Forty-Two: RETREAT FROM RATIONALISM?
Chapter Forty-Three: A NAIVE AND SKEPTICAL DISPOSITION
Chapter Forty-Four: SEEKING A CURE
Chapter Forty-Five: WUNDERKIND
Chapter Forty-Six: CHANCE GOVERNS ALL
Chapter Forty-Seven: THE KOESTLER PROBLEM
Chapter Forty-Eight: AN EASY WAY OF DYING
This exhaustive work covers Koestler’s life in detail, in fact, more than I wanted. Some sections relate day-to-day, even hour-to-hour banal events. Some have interest — most don’t. Skipped a lot.
Nevertheless, this could serve as a good introduction (summary) of twentieth-century politics, ideas, conflict — and insight into lots of famous people and ideas.
For search shows Einstein (15), Camus (122), Stalin (73), Darwin (24), Zion (143), Lenin (21), Communism (143), Science (170), Faith (68), Teller (8), Free will (17), Franco (56), Weizmann (44), etc., etc..
This work closer to interesting textbook than dramatic novel.
(Another (better) biography is Bertram Wolfe’s — “A Life in Two Centuries”. He knew Koestler (fellow communists) who also renounced it.)
Extensive bibliography (not linked)
Hundreds of notes (linked)
Each chapter begins with short epigraph (neat)
— Dostoyevsky
This epigraph captures the drama of this work. Koestler lies . . . a lot. However, he later confesses . . . a lot. But more than personal deceit, he persuades himself about ideas — Science, Darwinism, Socialism, etc., — and what makes his life a special drama, is his underlying sincerity drives him to reject these beliefs!
What else impels him?
“His insecurities, and his search for love and acceptance in a cruel world. “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 fulfilment in God.”
Koestler’s story could serve as a stand-in for twentieth-century intellectual poster boy. How did he begin?
“He continued to read voraciously—Shakespeare, Rilke, Goethe, Heine, Byron, and any novel he could lay his hands on—but his four years at the Realiskola confirmed him in the belief that his intellectual loyalties should remain with science. It wasn’t a difficult conclusion to reach, for science enjoyed extraordinarily high prestige in early-twentieth-century Budapest (the scientists von Kármán, de Hevesy, Polanyi, Szilard, Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller, all products of “the Budapest miracle,” came from the same milieu as Koestler).’’
This what’s makes Koestler’s drama fascinating. This new ‘scientific faith’ had captured the brightest, leading intellectual lights of Europe. Koestler was right there, part of this . . . this . . . explosion . . .
“Arthur was sure that mathematics and physics would help him unlock the secrets of the universe. His heroes were “Darwin and Spencer, Kepler, Newton and Mach; Edison, Herz and Marconi—the Buffalo Bills of the frontiers of discovery,” and his “bible” Die Welträtsel (The Riddle of the Universe) by Ernst Haeckel, a celebrated German biologist and Darwinist who attempted to apply the doctrine of evolution to problems of philosophy and religion. Haeckel claimed to have “solved” most of the riddles pertaining to the known universe (conveniently denying the importance of those he couldn’t solve, such as the immortality of the soul, the existence of a personal God, the reality of free will). Arthur didn’t accept Haeckel’s claim but absorbed from him a preoccupation with the moral and philosophical dimensions of science that would reassert itself during the later part of his life.’’
‘Moral dimensions of science’. Well . . . this work documents the life one serial seducer, determined adulterer, deeply devious betrayer. Doesn’t look like ‘science’ had the answer or provided the foundation he was looking for.
Notice his fascination with Darwin. Other scholars have noted Haeckel’s influence on German intellectual life. Much deeper than Darwin’s impact in the English world. Think of the consequences . . .
PART ONE: A LONG APPRENTICESHIP The Author as Journalist (1905–1936)
Chapter One: BEGINNINGS
Chapter Two: A BUDAPEST CHILDHOOD
Chapter Three: RISE, JEW, RISE
Chapter Four: ZIONIST
Chapter Five: A RUNAWAY AND A FUGITIVE
Chapter Six: FIRST STEPS IN JOURNALISM
Chapter Seven: HELLO TO BERLIN
Chapter Eight: IN THE GALE OF HISTORY
Chapter Nine: RED DAYS
Chapter Ten: ANTI-FASCIST CRUSADER
Chapter Eleven: MARKING TIME
Chapter Twelve: PRISONER OF FRANCO
Chapter Thirteen: TURNING POINT
PART TWO: FAME AND INFAMY The Author as Novelist (1936–1946)
Chapter Fourteen: THE GOD THAT FAILED
Chapter Fifteen: NO NEW CERTAINTIES
Chapter Sixteen: DARKNESS VISIBLE
Chapter Seventeen: SCUM OF THE EARTH
Chapter Eighteen: DARKNESS UNVEILED
Chapter Nineteen: IN CRUMPLED BATTLEDRESS
Chapter Twenty: THE NOVELIST’S TEMPTATIONS
Chapter Twenty-One: IDENTITY CRISIS
Chapter Twenty-Two: COMMISSAR OR YOGI?
Chapter Twenty-Three: RETURN TO PALESTINE
Chapter Twenty-Four: WELSH INTERLUDE
Chapter Twenty-Five: THE LOGIC OF THE ICE AGE
PART THREE: LOST ILLUSIONS The Author as Activist (1946–1959)
Chapter Twenty-Six: ADVENTURES AMONG THE EXISTENTIALISTS
Chapter Twenty-Seven: FRENCH LESSONS
Chapter Twenty-Eight: DISCOVERING AMERICA
Chapter Twenty-Nine: FAREWELL TO ZIONISM
Chapter Thirty: A MARRIED MAN
Chapter Thirty-One: TO THE BARRICADES
Chapter Thirty-Two: THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM
Chapter Thirty-Three: BACK TO THE USA
Chapter Thirty-Four: POLITICALLY UNRELIABLE
Chapter Thirty-Five: THE LANGUAGE OF DESTINY
Chapter Thirty-Six: THE PHANTOM CHASE
Chapter Thirty-Seven: I KILLED HER
Chapter Thirty-Eight: CASSANDRA GROWS HOARSE
Chapter Thirty-Nine: MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
PART FOUR: ASTRIDE THE TWO CULTURES The Author as Polymath (1959–1983)
Chapter Forty: COSMIC REPORTER
Chapter Forty-One: THE SQUIRE OF ALPBACH
Chapter Forty-Two: RETREAT FROM RATIONALISM?
Chapter Forty-Three: A NAIVE AND SKEPTICAL DISPOSITION
Chapter Forty-Four: SEEKING A CURE
Chapter Forty-Five: WUNDERKIND
Chapter Forty-Six: CHANCE GOVERNS ALL
Chapter Forty-Seven: THE KOESTLER PROBLEM
Chapter Forty-Eight: AN EASY WAY OF DYING
This exhaustive work covers Koestler’s life in detail, in fact, more than I wanted. Some sections relate day-to-day, even hour-to-hour banal events. Some have interest — most don’t. Skipped a lot.
Nevertheless, this could serve as a good introduction (summary) of twentieth-century politics, ideas, conflict — and insight into lots of famous people and ideas.
For search shows Einstein (15), Camus (122), Stalin (73), Darwin (24), Zion (143), Lenin (21), Communism (143), Science (170), Faith (68), Teller (8), Free will (17), Franco (56), Weizmann (44), etc., etc..
This work closer to interesting textbook than dramatic novel.
(Another (better) biography is Bertram Wolfe’s — “A Life in Two Centuries”. He knew Koestler (fellow communists) who also renounced it.)
Extensive bibliography (not linked)
Hundreds of notes (linked)
Each chapter begins with short epigraph (neat)
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2010
The era in which Arthur Koestler earned his spurs as a journalist, the 1920s and 1930s, could be called the Twilight of the Democracies--a time in which one after the other European democracies collapsed in the face of militant Fascism. Despite the warnings of the Left and social democrats, governments refused to take this threat seriously--and were conquered. Among the dedicated Cassandras was Arthur Koestler, a man of Hungarian/Austrian descent, who worked for the Ullstein newspapers in Germany, as well as secretly for the Soviet Communists as a spy and propagandist.
He was one of a number of Left journalists who worked to defeat Fascism through reportage. But after a period of gullible servility to his Soviet handlers, he suddenly turned against them (a dangerous thing in those days). Thereafter he wrote painfully honest journalism, culminating in his successful novel, "Darkness at Noon." This novel, based on the Stalinist show trials in Russia of the 1930s, went to the heart of Soviet tyranny and mindtwisting. It was a model for Orwell's "1984," and turned many a wavering intellectual away from the siren song of Russian Communism.
Michael Scammell's "Koestler" is a long and incisive biography that lays out the background of Koestler's life and work. The result of detailed research, it is certain to be the authoritative biography of this interesting and important political writer. Koestler is perhaps one of the most insightful European intellectuals to have seen through Soviet communism and written about it convincingly. His other writings, philosophical and scientific, amount to a considerable oeuvre of a man bound on a journey of discovery, though now somewhat neglected.
He was one of a number of Left journalists who worked to defeat Fascism through reportage. But after a period of gullible servility to his Soviet handlers, he suddenly turned against them (a dangerous thing in those days). Thereafter he wrote painfully honest journalism, culminating in his successful novel, "Darkness at Noon." This novel, based on the Stalinist show trials in Russia of the 1930s, went to the heart of Soviet tyranny and mindtwisting. It was a model for Orwell's "1984," and turned many a wavering intellectual away from the siren song of Russian Communism.
Michael Scammell's "Koestler" is a long and incisive biography that lays out the background of Koestler's life and work. The result of detailed research, it is certain to be the authoritative biography of this interesting and important political writer. Koestler is perhaps one of the most insightful European intellectuals to have seen through Soviet communism and written about it convincingly. His other writings, philosophical and scientific, amount to a considerable oeuvre of a man bound on a journey of discovery, though now somewhat neglected.
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Ralph Blumenau
5.0 out of 5 stars
He contained multitudes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 19, 2011
This is a masterly account and analysis of the life of a brilliant polymath, a deep and restless thinker, first, about the political and ethical problems of his time, and, later, about the place of humanity in the universe. He was an ex-Hungarian, an ex-Communist, an ex-Zionist. He was exuberantly "continental", a cosmopolitan, frequently moving homes from one country and even one continent to another; a journalist, a campaigner against capital punishment, a hectoring controversialist, a political novelist, a voluminous autobiographer. He was usually (but not always) selfish, financially generous, arrogant but self-critical, introspective, neurotic, a heavy drinker (and as such involved in several car accidents), manic-depressive, mercurial, sparkling, hot-tempered and uninhibited in behaviour, competitive, both repellent and charismatic, a thrice married, domineering and quarrelsome husband who treated his submissive wives as dogsbodies, a compulsive philanderer (in a notebook he listed "between a hundred and two hundred women" he had slept with by the time he was 35, and he kept this sort of thing up for years). Yet every time we think what a dreadful man he was, we have to remember the enormous number of establishment figures who, for all the quarrels they had with him, sought out his stimulating company and (if female) were open to be seduced by him. At least several of these women had the good sense to decline when, in later life, Koestler, often after the briefest of acquaintanceship, asked them to marry him.
The most dramatic years of his life were the 1930s and 1940s. He was an anti-nationalist journalist in Spain during the Civil War, taken and held prisoner for three months by the nationalists and saved from execution because he was ostensibly reporting for the News Chronicle. The account of his experiences there, "Spanish Testament", was his first major publishing success.
He was held for another three months during the Phoney War in a primitive French internment camp as a suspect communist (though he had resigned from the Party and was in the middle of writing "Darkness at Noon", the novel explaining how the Communists brainwashed Party members into confessions that would result in their executions) and was released when once again influential people in England interceded for him.
Briefly arrested again when the Germans invaded France, he bluffed his way out and was in hiding in Paris until he managed to join the Foreign Legion with false papers (as a Swiss citizen), and, after many heart-stopping moments, reached the South of France, then Oran in Algeria from where he wangled a passage to Lisbon. After two months there (during which he had a stormy affaire with a married American woman and had made a second failed suicide attempt), he got a place on a plane to England. His account of his experiences in France, "Scum of the Earth", would be another huge success.
When he arrived in England, he had his fourth spell (six weeks) in prison as a suspicious character. During that time "Darkness at Noon" was published. From prison he was conscripted into the Pioneer Corps, but pulled strings to get out of it in less than a year to join the Ministry of Information. He was soon part of the circle of the leading writers and thinkers in England, most of them on the Left.
When he visited France in 1946 and 1947, he was even more of a success there, especially in Existentialist circles, at least until his anti-Communism clashed with their sympathies for the Soviet Union. His anti-Communism and his urging that the United States must exert its influence against the Soviet Union had already made him famous in America and led to an invitation to the United States by the liberal Partisan Review; but he allowed himself to be courted also by the cold warriors of the American Right, to the dismay of his original hosts, especially when he sided with Senator McCarthy and with Whittaker Chambers (against Alger Hiss). He would, in its early stages, become the most prominent and most militant figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, created with the help of secret CIA funds (of which Koestler at the time was unaware) to counter the insidious headway made by Soviet propaganda. The irony now was that, being now excoriated by the liberal left, the right regarded him as unreliable because his latest novel, "the Age of Longing", showed the Communists as made of sterner stuff than their opponents.
Isolated as he felt in politics, in around 1955 Koestler gave up political writing and played no public part over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or, despite his earlier writings about Israel ("Thieves in the Night", "Promise and Fulfilment") over the Six Day War in 1967. (And he was to write one more book on a Jewish subject: "The Thirteenth Tribe", in which he maintained that the Jews of Eastern Europe were descendants of the Khazars, and not of the Jews of Biblical Israel.) Instead, he turned to an interest in creativity in science and in the arts (writing "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Act of Creation") and in the nature of consciousness ("The Ghost in the Machine"). In this last book, Koestler saw man's inherent violence as having physiological rather than psychological causes, and, having long been interested in mind-bending drugs, believed that a cure for it would one day lie in chemical compounds. In "The Case of the Midwife Toad" he suggested that Lamarck might not have been "completely and entirely wrong". He took Extra-Sensory Perception seriously in "The Roots of Coincidence". These harmed his reputation in some quarters, but not in all: it was now (1971) that he was awarded the CBE.
A gentler Koestler emerges in the last few pages, as he became old and ill; and it was gently that he and his wife went into that good night together.
The most dramatic years of his life were the 1930s and 1940s. He was an anti-nationalist journalist in Spain during the Civil War, taken and held prisoner for three months by the nationalists and saved from execution because he was ostensibly reporting for the News Chronicle. The account of his experiences there, "Spanish Testament", was his first major publishing success.
He was held for another three months during the Phoney War in a primitive French internment camp as a suspect communist (though he had resigned from the Party and was in the middle of writing "Darkness at Noon", the novel explaining how the Communists brainwashed Party members into confessions that would result in their executions) and was released when once again influential people in England interceded for him.
Briefly arrested again when the Germans invaded France, he bluffed his way out and was in hiding in Paris until he managed to join the Foreign Legion with false papers (as a Swiss citizen), and, after many heart-stopping moments, reached the South of France, then Oran in Algeria from where he wangled a passage to Lisbon. After two months there (during which he had a stormy affaire with a married American woman and had made a second failed suicide attempt), he got a place on a plane to England. His account of his experiences in France, "Scum of the Earth", would be another huge success.
When he arrived in England, he had his fourth spell (six weeks) in prison as a suspicious character. During that time "Darkness at Noon" was published. From prison he was conscripted into the Pioneer Corps, but pulled strings to get out of it in less than a year to join the Ministry of Information. He was soon part of the circle of the leading writers and thinkers in England, most of them on the Left.
When he visited France in 1946 and 1947, he was even more of a success there, especially in Existentialist circles, at least until his anti-Communism clashed with their sympathies for the Soviet Union. His anti-Communism and his urging that the United States must exert its influence against the Soviet Union had already made him famous in America and led to an invitation to the United States by the liberal Partisan Review; but he allowed himself to be courted also by the cold warriors of the American Right, to the dismay of his original hosts, especially when he sided with Senator McCarthy and with Whittaker Chambers (against Alger Hiss). He would, in its early stages, become the most prominent and most militant figure in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, created with the help of secret CIA funds (of which Koestler at the time was unaware) to counter the insidious headway made by Soviet propaganda. The irony now was that, being now excoriated by the liberal left, the right regarded him as unreliable because his latest novel, "the Age of Longing", showed the Communists as made of sterner stuff than their opponents.
Isolated as he felt in politics, in around 1955 Koestler gave up political writing and played no public part over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 or, despite his earlier writings about Israel ("Thieves in the Night", "Promise and Fulfilment") over the Six Day War in 1967. (And he was to write one more book on a Jewish subject: "The Thirteenth Tribe", in which he maintained that the Jews of Eastern Europe were descendants of the Khazars, and not of the Jews of Biblical Israel.) Instead, he turned to an interest in creativity in science and in the arts (writing "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Act of Creation") and in the nature of consciousness ("The Ghost in the Machine"). In this last book, Koestler saw man's inherent violence as having physiological rather than psychological causes, and, having long been interested in mind-bending drugs, believed that a cure for it would one day lie in chemical compounds. In "The Case of the Midwife Toad" he suggested that Lamarck might not have been "completely and entirely wrong". He took Extra-Sensory Perception seriously in "The Roots of Coincidence". These harmed his reputation in some quarters, but not in all: it was now (1971) that he was awarded the CBE.
A gentler Koestler emerges in the last few pages, as he became old and ill; and it was gently that he and his wife went into that good night together.
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Leif Asbjørnsen
5.0 out of 5 stars
A PROVOCATIVE AND CONTROVERSIAL AUTHOR
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 1, 2011
Michael Scammell's voluminous Koestler-biography is a tour de force of research into the life of an extraordinary man and his lifetime (1905-1983). He really succeeds in bringing to life an author who is both brilliant and full of contradictions. With his independent and often extreme views coupled to his constant feeling of being an outsider - of not belonging to his adopted countries - the Hungarian Jew Koestler managed to provoke public opinion in his writings as few other authors of his generation. Not least did he manage to make enemies among the communists whom he attacked with the zeal of a convert. For them he became a disgusting traitor. But he also had some highly controversial views on Jewry and on science which he was not afraid to expose in his writing. This together with the rumours that he was an aggressive - and occasionally brutal - womanizer contributed to give him a bad posthumous reputation. Scammel recounts it all without going into unnecessary details about Koestler's sex life for its own sake, but rather as a means of shedding light on Koestler's complex personality.
When reading the biography I did not always find Koestler a very likeable person. However, I never doubted his honesty. And due to his sharp intellect and social antenna he was always ahead of his time. Besides being an exemplary biography Scammells's book is also a highly relevant cultural history about turbulent times in Europe. As a prominent man of letters Koestler got in touch with leading members of the European intelligentsia. Scammel's account of their meetings and their relationship really makes them come alive with all their idiosyncrasies. This alone makes the book worth reading.
When reading the biography I did not always find Koestler a very likeable person. However, I never doubted his honesty. And due to his sharp intellect and social antenna he was always ahead of his time. Besides being an exemplary biography Scammells's book is also a highly relevant cultural history about turbulent times in Europe. As a prominent man of letters Koestler got in touch with leading members of the European intelligentsia. Scammel's account of their meetings and their relationship really makes them come alive with all their idiosyncrasies. This alone makes the book worth reading.
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A. J. Flint
5.0 out of 5 stars
A model biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 23, 2010
Previous biographical efforts on Koestler have been under researched. Scammell makes up for this in spades: 571 pages plus 79 pages of notes. He has had access to private diaries, correspondence and even declassified official documents from several countries. He describes, sometimes at tedious but necessary length, K's complicated private life, his depression, alcoholism and serial womanising, but there are many arresting details. The title of "Darkness at Noon" was taken from the Book of Job, not Milton's Samson Agonistes and was chosen withou K's knowledge by the English translator in preference to the original title "The Vicious Circle". Sometimes comic - his publisher sent cigarettes to K when he was in Pentonville Prison as an undesirable alien, saying he would deduct the costs from K's royalties. Or the interrogator's report on his arrival in Britain "K is almost certainly a Jew but in view of possible repercussions from the News Chronicle, the question was not put". Read this book to find out on page 212 what K and Dylan Thomas did to Michael Foot's copy of "Darkness at Noon". Though K wrote two autobiographies, Scammell shows what he left out, which was quite a lot. His analysis of the relationship between K's personal experiences and his fiction is masterly.
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jakob
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good in-depth biography
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 13, 2011
An extensive biography - and if you like Koestler's books you will find interestering information to fuel your imagination. Koestler was a complicated man, probably even a pain in the ass, which you will be painstakingly aware of after reading this biography. So the four stars are for meticulous and fair research, but the last star is missing because I don't recognize my own respect for K's writings in the biography. And even though a biography has to be objective, I like to see it fueled by love for the work of the maincharacter.
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Mr. G. J. Fisher
5.0 out of 5 stars
A real achievement
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 11, 2013
600 pages and never flags. What a life! What a man! He was called the last renaissance man and rightly so. The book must have taken a colossal effort to write. Read other books on Koestler, for example the very poor biography by Cesarini, but they just dont compare. If you are interested in this man who influenced history, this is the book to read! Buy!
J Fisher
J Fisher
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