Michael Scammell prefaces this monumental book with a quotation from George Steiner: “There are men and women who, in addition to having special gifts, seem to embody the times in which they live. Somehow their biographies take on and make more visible to the rest of us the shape and meaning of the age. Even if Arthur Koestler had not been a significant writer and publicist, future historians would be fascinated by his career. It touches, with uncanny precision, the hopes and nightmares, on the places and events, which have given the 20th century its flavour.”
In his biographical and critical study of Koestler, based on considerable interview material, diaries, letters and various government archives including the CIA, MI5 and French Sûreté as well as German and communist Russian sources, Scammell has assembled enough evidence, one would like to think, to enable one to come to some sort of conclusion about that puzzling, dazzling polymath and adventurer Arthur Koestler.
Because Koestler’s life, in its various stages, illuminates the political-socio-cultural context and is invariably marked by a publication which significantly assesses and marks its moment.
He was born in Budapest in 1905, studied sciences in Vienna, and then his committed Zionism took him to a kibbutz in Palestine where he embarked on a lifelong career as a journalist and correspondent – he was a prolific writer – following a variety of causes and intellectual pursuits. As Scammell notes, Zionism was his response to “and a reaction against anti-Semitism. He’d expected that Palestine would provide a solution not only for his persecuted race but also for him, and that he would participate in founding a society based on the ethical principles of brotherhood and unity”. Experience tempered his idealism but, as Middle Eastern correspondent for a German newspaper, he had discovered his calling.
He returned to Europe in 1929, initially to Paris to work in a news agency, as well as publishing political and popular science features, but additionally beginning a career as an endless womanizer and active fornicator, with a lingering reputation for sexual activity of the rougher sort.
Then to Berlin, during Adolf Hitler’s early political triumphs. Berlin, very heaven for a journalist, published 21 daily papers and 400 weeklies. He was a natural polymath in the right place at the right time, the hectic centre of European cultural, technical and scientific endeavour. Like many an intellectual before (and since) he turned for a sense of purpose to communism and joined the German Communist Party. He visited Russia and met notable Marxists including Walter Benjamin, Hans Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. Additionally, he was deeply engaged in contemporary developments in quantum mechanics and classical physics and was fascinated by probability theory and, probably, pondering extra-sensory perception and parapsychology (a feature of his later interests). At this period he seemed to believe in the ultimate achievement of a Wellsian technological and scientific utopia. In 1935 he married Dorothy Asher, although they separated after two years.
From 1936-1937 he reported on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle; for this General Franco rewarded him with imprisonment and a death penalty – Spanish Testament (1938) and Dialogue With Death (1942) – and he fled to France.
He resigned his membership of the Communist Party in 1938 – The God That Failed (1942) and The Invisible Writing (1954) – and became wholly disillusioned by the course of Soviet communism: Gladiators (1939), Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943).
Living in Paris, and in fear of the Gestapo, he published The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge. He tried but failed to commit suicide, eventually escaping via the French Foreign Legion. He was only freed from a French detention camp after the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noel Coward. Back in England he joined the Pioneer Corps – Scum of the Earth (1941) – but he’d achieved fame with the publication of one of the century’s masterpieces, Darkness at Noon, which details the failure of the Russian revolution. This novel, which brought him international fame, shows how the means of revolution – Bolshevism – becomes the ends, in the form of endless persecution and suppression.
He mixed in Bohemian and literary circles in London during the war, with men such as George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas and Michael Foot, and worked for the Ministry of Information where he wrote about Nazi atrocities. He met and married Mamaine Paget, although the marriage collapsed in 1952 and she died two years later. He fathered a daughter, Cristina, whom he never acknowledged, after an affair with Janine Graetz and in 1965 married Cynthia Jeffries.
In the mid-1950s he was campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment – Reflections on Hanging (1956) – and seems to have had his finger in every fashionable pie. He helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook, and, in the swinging ’60s, took LSD with Timothy Leary, exploring telepathy, extra sensory perception, serendipity and all the rest of it, as well as campaigning in support of euthanasia. In the 1970s he gave lectures on man’s predicament at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London that inspired, among others, a young Salman Rushdie with his remarks on language promoting conflict. (Rushdie, of course, as Allah knows, was eventually to learn that in his own way).
The Sunday Times sent him to Reykjavik to cover the match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. Chess fascinated him: “A paradigm of the working of the human mind, a battle of ideas… each piece embodies dynamic threat, as if it were alive and animated by the desire to inflict the maximum damage on the opponent’s men. When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, but a magnetic field of forces charged with energy.”
The loss of political faith was gradually replaced by an almost mystical scientific faith in the existence of a natural sequential order not clearly revealed as yet to human kind: Sleepwalkers (1959), The Ghost in the Machine (1967) and The Alphback Symposium (1968).
In 1976 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and, later, with leukemia. He committed suicide with his wife, Cynthia, in 1983. The last pages of this book are singularly moving, tellingly quoting Koestler’s words about “floating on my own back in a river a peace” – an image that had occurred to him as he lay in one of Franco’s jails in Seville. If still lacking answers, he now seems to have found some sort of peace. Rest, perturbed spirit.
