Koestler wrote in German (the original language of “Darkness at Noon”) and English. He spoke Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and French, too. (Hebrew gave him trouble; characteristically, he blamed the language.) He was, in his own phrase, the “Casanova of causes,” from Zionism to the campaign against capital punishment, and he donated generously to many of them. He maintained lifelong relationships (including the occasional feud) with the writers, scientists, and political activists he met in the various places he visited. And he was a social and sexual torpedo. Academics generally avoided him, but he socialized and debated—alcohol, generously administered, was a necessary lubricant and invariably made him obstreperous and sometimes violent—with nearly everyone else in midcentury intellectual circles, from George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre to Whittaker Chambers and Timothy Leary. He was married three times, and he had literally hundreds of affairs. He was the sort of person who records his liaisons in a notebook.
Scammell would therefore be entirely justified if he felt (a) proud and (b) exhausted after completing his biographical task, which has taken him, he says, to fourteen countries on three continents over a span of twenty years. (Scammell’s previous book, a prize-winning biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was published in 1984.) Just getting the file cards in order would have challenged Hercules, if Hercules had been literate. Other reviewers may second-guess Scammell’s take on, say, Zionist fraternities in interwar Vienna, but not this one. “Koestler” seems a prodigy of research, in many languages, and a scrupulous piece of fair-minded advocacy.
Leaving aside the psychology of the women in Koestler’s life, what about the psychology of Koestler? Scammell thinks that Koestler suffered from manic depression, and he cites the symptoms listed by Kay Redfield Jamison in her book “Touched with Fire”: “an inflated self-esteem, as well as a certainty of conviction about the correctness and importance of their ideas . . . chaotic patterns of personal and professional relationships . . . spending excessive amounts of money, impulsive involvements in questionable endeavors, reckless driving, extreme impatience, intense and impulsive romantic or sexual relations, and volatility.” Those characterizations do fit Koestler, right down to the reckless driving, but evidence of depression, although there are plenty of self-reports, is thinner. He agonized, but every writer agonizes. If we are clinically inclined, a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder might better meet the case (I quote from the D.S.M.): “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”
Why did Koestler renounce political activism (and, with a few exceptions, live up to that declaration) after 1955? As Scammell explains, Koestler had encountered difficulties when he came to the United States because he did not recognize the difference between left-wing anti-Communists like the editors of Partisan Review, to which he contributed; liberal anti-Communists like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with whom he consorted; and right-wingers like Joseph McCarthy, with whom he also met. In the beginning, he probably didn’t think American anti-Communist sectarianism was very significant. He had the view, not unreasonable, that an anti-Communist is an anti-Communist, whatever the color of his other views, and that anti-Communists ought to band together.
At some point, he must have realized that in a Cold War world the petty differences among European anti-Communists, a world he knew from the inside out, no longer mattered. The Americans were in charge. Events from now on would be dictated by American politics, not by the subtleties of French fellow-travelling apologetics. And so he set off after mind waves, alternative modes of consciousness, intelligent design—cosmic mysteries. He must, in the end, have been something of a mystery to himself. And, even after this exhaustive combing of the record, he remains something of a mystery to us—a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century. It’s a story that was worth writing and that is still worth hearing.