History is a brutal sieve. Arthur Koestler is remembered now—if at all—for writing Darkness at Noon, a hand grenade of a novel tossed at Joseph Stalin’s Kremlin. Those 200 pages are all we retain off an intellectual nomad who stormed across the 20th century. He seems to have been everywhere, like an angry, book-spewing Zelig. Even a thumbnail summary makes me feel exhausted (deep breath): He grew up in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, witnessing revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was one of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine. He became a star in the Berlin of Sally Bowles’ cabarets and a rising Adolf Hitler. He was jailed and nearly shot by Gen. Franco. He fled the Nazis through Casablanca, Morocco. He gave Albert Camus a black eye, George Orwell a holiday home, and Soviet communism an enema. He had sex with supermodel twins, took magic mushrooms with Timothy Leary, and helped create Intelligent Design. Oh—and he was a rapist.
Michael Scammell’s terrific new biography—Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic—scrapes together a contradictory life that amounts to far more than the single novel that keeps him on our bookshelves. George Steiner said of him: “There are men and women who 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.”… Like the century he embodies, he skipped from one utopian fantasy to another, drinking the dream dry and then tossing it aside with disgust. Yes, he glimpsed darkness at noon—but he always saw another blinding light at 2 p.m. His life is a parable about the dangers of utopianism—and why it will always leave you with a vomit-flecked hangover.
Koestler was a 5-foot-6-inch cocktail of raw nerve endings and neat booze, prone to hurling restaurant tables across the room if you argued with him over dinner. He was born in 1905, and he nearly killed his mother there and then. She was 34—a seriously old age at that time to have your first child. The labor took two agonising days. Koestler liked later to claim his family had flared up from nothing into sudden wealth and then vanished into exile or the gas chambers. It wasn’t true: His mother was from one of the richest Jewish families in Austro-Hungary. But Koestler wanted to deny everything about her, always. She was ill and depressive, and even trips to Sigmund Freud couldn’t iron her out: She said he was “a pervert.” Her sniping rejections of her son—and her abandonment of him for years as she went off on “rest cures”—created in him a sense of guilt and inferiority that became his conjoined twin.
In his excellent biography, Scammell tells all this is plain and cool writing that makes Koestler seem all the more feverish. Yet he falters when it comes to dissecting Koestler’s greatest flaw: his abuse of women. Koestler’s first wife got him rescued from Franco’s prisons—but when the Nazis invaded France, he abandoned her and took another woman to safety. Koestler’s second wife was seriously ill—but he still punched her in the head. Koestler—s third wife was only 55 and entirely healthy when he committed suicide after contracting Parkinson’s—but he still let her kill herself with him. Koestler wrote: “Without an element of initial rape, there is no delight.” Jill Craigie—one of Britain’s best feminist writers—revealed after his death that one morning Koestler had pulled her hair, throttled her, and raped her. But Scammell says we need to keep it “in proportion,” and claims “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time.” But throttling a woman and forcing her into sex was regarded as a serious crime then. To excuse it is beneath a writer of Scammell’s caliber.
In a century of serial fanaticisms, Arthur Koestler embodied both the disease and the cure. He was a fanatic capable of sobering up, an ideologue who occasionally let reality in through the cracks. He never led us to the promised land—but he did show us why it is a mirage, dragging us away from the real and relentless work of reform.
Read more: http://www.slate.com/id/2238790/