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A new statue of Arthur
Koestler,
Yesterday’s
Man? February
11, 2010 by Anne
Applebaum. Koestler:
The Literary and
Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by
Michael Scammell Random
House, 689 pp., $35.00 He
began his education in the
twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental
kindergarten in Along
the way he had lunch
with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George
Orwell,
flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era. Nor
were these shallow
passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky, to his analyst, and to an extraordinary series of women. He was also consumed by violent hatreds—starting with his mother—and pursued many vendettas, against fellow writers (he was fiercely jealous of Hemingway, loathed Bertrand Russell) as well as romantic rivals (including Edmund Wilson) and ex-husbands. Eventually, he offended almost everyone he knew, but only after getting drunk with them first. Even
his entertainments often
went to extremes, as this superb new biography well illustrates. Far
and away
my favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler
moments—is
Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which
Koestler and
his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking
with
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife,
Francine.
The festivities began with dinner in an Algerian bistro, continued in a
dance
hall “lit with pink and blue neon lights,” and then, at Koestler’s
insistence,
progressed to Schéhérazade, a nightclub filled with “violinists
wandering about
playing soulful Russian music into the guests’ ears.” There were
arguments
about communism, and about friendship. “If only it were possible to
tell the
truth,” exclaimed Camus at one point. At
about 4 AM, Koestler was
pried away from the nightclub, and the group “repaired to Chez Victor
in Les
Halles for onion soup, oysters, and white wine.” Roaring drunk,
Koestler threw
a crust of bread across the table and hit Mamaine in the eye; Sartre,
equally
drunk, poured salt and pepper into napkins that he put in his pocket
and said
he had to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in the morning on “The
Responsibility of the Writer.” Camus said, “Well, you’ll have to speak
without
me” (“Alors, tu parleras sans moi “). Sartre said he wished he “could
speak
without me too” (“Je voudrais bien pouvoir parler sans moi “) and
collapsed
into giggles. Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening’s conclusion: They
broke up at dawn. Alone
with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed “over the tragedy of the human condition,”
then
leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Leaving
aside its
entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting
questions.
We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of
things. Yet
much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable
public
behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent
contemporary
American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson,
and David
Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone
weeping
over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the
Seine at
the end of it. More to
the point, Koestler
was, in our contemporary definition of these things, an alcoholic, as
were many
of the people around him. He was also, in our contemporary definition
of these
things, a sexual predator. He was blatantly unfaithful to all of his
three
wives, as well as to the other women he lived with. He flirted
outrageously,
and sometimes aggressively, with other men’s wives too. Just a few days
before
the evening at Schéhérazade and Chez Victor, Koestler actually went to
bed with
Simone de Beauvoir. David
Cesarani, a previous biographer
of Koestler, has even described him as a “serial rapist.”1 Scammell
disputes
that accusation at some length. In the end, only one woman—Jill
Craigie, the
wife of the British Labour leader Michael Foot—ever actually accused
him of
rape, and there are some ambiguities about her story. She made the
charge when
she was in her eighties, and Koestler was dead. Others, including her
husband,
remembered the incident differently. Scammell notes these
discrepancies, and
convincingly dismisses some of Cesarani’s other accusations as
unfounded. He
also notes that the charge has nevertheless deeply tarnished Koestler’s
posthumous reputation. This is not at all surprising. Even if “rape” is
not the
right word, some of the sexual behavior Scammell describes would, in
the
contemporary world, be considered absolutely beyond the pale—and
probably
illegal as well. Nor are
the rules of public
behavior the only things that have changed. The professionalization of
literary
and intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime, and he
chafed
against it. He disliked the lecture circuit and never had any real
interest in
teaching. He had very little time for universities in general. He also
refused
to be categorized as a simple “novelist” or “journalist,” and in the
latter
part of his career wrote books about science, philosophy, history, and
psychology. He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader
sense than
we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields
in which
he had no professional expertise whatsoever. This approach to the life
of the
mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply
looks
amateurish from the perspective of the present. As a result, many of
his later
books have slipped off the radar and are long out of print. Others,
notably The
Thirteenth Tribe, are considered curiosities that appeal to conspiracy
theorists, not scholars. The
most important change,
however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between
communism
and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not
only no
longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening
of
archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still
investigating
the history of the What
that means, though, is
that the entire political context in which Koest- ler, Sartre, and
Camus
functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is
now
gone. In the years following their debauched evening in What
was true of Sartre was
true of many, many others, and not only those on the far left. In his
superb
recent account of the publication of Darkness at Noon and its impact on
the
Western public, Koestler
had an almost unique
ability to shake such people to their foundations. Unlike right-wing
and even
liberal critics of communism, he had a certain status on the cultural
left. He
was a victim of fascism, an ex-refugee, a familiar face in Comintern
circles, a
former combatant in the Spanish civil war. His devastating critique of
the As for
Darkness at Noon, it
was not just a popular book, it was one of the primary reasons that the
Communist Party never came to power in For all of those reasons, Michael Scammell cannot have found this an easy book to write, and indeed it took him a very long time to write it. Scammell is the author of the definitive and deservedly celebrated biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1984.3 A few years after it was finished, he set out to follow up with a biography of Koestler. This turned out to be a major feat of endurance scholarship. By his own admission, he “followed [Koestler] to fourteen countries on three continents,” interviewed hundreds of people, and read through many boxes of archives. This effort has certainly paid off. Because
he has looked at all
possible forms of documentation, he is able to reconstruct complicated
scenes
from Koestler’s life with real historical and literary flair. More than
once,
he tells us what is happening from several perspectives: what Koestler
said,
what Koestler’s then girlfriend said, what another person at the party
remembered twenty years later, and how another writer depicted the
event in his
diaries. Scammell is also a scholar of Russian literature, and this
shows too.
Although this is a long book, it feels compact. None of the carefully
selected
details or quotations seems extraneous. The main characters are shown
from
every angle, with all of their faults and virtues. Koestler himself
seems at
times so alive he might leap off the page. And yet
the passage of time
is a problem, if not for Scammell then for his readers. An elderly
Central
European acquaintance recently told me that in his youth, nothing was
considered so tacky and outdated as art nouveau furniture. Something
similar
has happened to Koestler. At the moment, he still seems like
yesterday’s man,
unfashionable and obsolete. His better qualities might eventually be
visible to
a younger generation, just as an elegantly restored art nouveau table
now
appeals to collectors and connoisseurs. But a good deal of historical
and
literary work will have to be done, and more time may have to pass,
before that
is possible. In the
case of Koestler, a
number of other things are also working against his posthumous
reputation. One
of these is the nature of his death, a double suicide, carried out in
tandem
with his wife. Koestler himself was seventy-seven years old and dying
of
leukemia. But his wife, Cynthia, was fifty-five and healthy. Unlike his
previous wives, she was neither beautiful nor accomplished. She had
been his
secretary—in effect his servant—before they were married. Above all he
admired her
ability to take dictation. Though it seems that in the last part of
their lives
the power balance between them evened out, and though it is very clear
that she
was in full possession of her faculties at the time—she even had the
presence
of mind to cancel the newspapers—it is impossible to escape the
suspicion that
somehow, in an effort to achieve a spectacular grand finale, he bullied
her
into killing herself alongside him. Cynthia’s
death was not only
distasteful to the public, it left Koestler’s literary estate without
an
obvious manager. Having persuaded numerous women to have abortions, he
had no
children, with the possible exception of one unacknowledged daughter
(who had
nothing to do with him, or he with her). By the time of his death he
had fallen
out with those of his contemporaries who were still alive. Most of his
later
books were financially and critically unsuccessful. His final legacy,
that gift
of money for the study of parapsychology, didn’t exactly enhance his
reputation
either. Nor did he have, as Orwell did, an obvious national audience.
As a
Hungarian Jew and native German speaker who wrote in English, he isn’t
a
natural part of anybody’s literary canon. There is an Orwell Society at
Eton,
but I doubt very much that there is a Koestler Society at any school in
As a
result, Koestler’s
reputation has waned dramatically since his death. Although Darkness at
Noon
remains high on lists of “great books of the twentieth century,” his
journalism, which in its time was at least as significant as that of
Orwell, is
hardly known at all. Before coming to write this review, I had not read
Scum of
the Earth, Koestler’s autobiographical and journalistic account of the
fate of
refugees in wartime Scammell has clearly set out to make this happen, and in that sense, this is more than a biography. It is an argument in defense of Koestler’s literary oeuvre, if not entirely in defense of Koestler himself. Scammell does not make excuses for his subject, and does not gloss over his many faults. But by recreating the historical setting in which Koestler lived and worked, by fitting him squarely in the middle of the great debates of the twentieth century, he makes his achievements much clearer to a contemporary reader—and thus there is a chance, at least, that he will succeed. Letters Koestler
Comes Back March 11,
2010 by
Thomas Baroth In
response to: Yesterday's
Man? from the
February 11, 2010 issue A new
statue of Arthur
Koestler, To the
Editors: Anne
Applebaum writes in her
review [“Yesterday’s Man,” NYR, February 11] that she doubts that there
is a
“Koestler Society in any school in Thomas
Baroth
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