AN MI5 officer interrogated Arthur Koestler in 1941 when the writer sought refuge in Britain after a dramatic escape from a French concentration camp. The spook made an instant judgment: “He is a third genius, a third blackguard and a third lunatic,” he reported to his superiors.
In this magisterial and subtle biography, Michael Scammell alters the percentages — from this account Koestler emerges 60 per cent a genius, while the other two qualities are again divided equally.
Scammell makes no effort to hide his subject’s flaws or to shy away from controversies — Koestler’s frantic womanising and, possibly, a rape; his manic depression, alcoholism and pill-popping; the way he bullied the women in his life; the sinister suicide pact in 1983 with his (third) wife, a healthy woman nearly a quarter of a century younger than him; his eccentric beliefs, towards the end of his life, in a range of weird paranormal phenomena.
This is a skilfully structured work. Scammell enthusiastically recounts the titillating material and it is vastly entertaining. But at the end, one wonders, as the author intends us to do: does it matter that Koestler chased almost anything in a skirt? Here is the man who wrote one of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, Darkness at Noon, and created a fresh style of searingly honest autobiography with books such as Arrow in the Blue, in which he never portrayed himself as a saint.
Koestler could behave boorishly as he drank a river of booze and downed vast quantities of “uppers” such as Benzedrine. But not while he worked. From the Thirties to the Seventies he wrote the most powerful, coherently argued indictments against totalitarianism of both the Right and Left. His work inspired generations living under tyranny to struggle for freedom. It is interesting, but is it important that he could be an utter bastard, an Everest of selfishness?
Scammell recounts Koestler’s early life, from his birth in Budapest in 1905, as an adventure story. He was at the vanguard of almost every intellectual movement of the last century. Convinced that the “Jewish Question” would be a key future issue — how right he was — he went to Palestine in his twenties.
He abandoned Zionism, however, and the Communist Party became his life from the early Thirties. Doubts arose when he covered the war in Spain as a journalist. He was imprisoned by Franco’s fascists as a communist spy. Sentenced to death, for months before he was released he expected each day to be his last.
He turned against communism — at a time when fashion was in favour — largely because of the Stalinist show trials in 1938. After the Spanish Civil War he moved to Paris and began to write Darkness at Noon. But after the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940 he was arrested again because of his communist past.
Much of the book was written in a concentration camp, from which he was helped to escape by his then lover. He made his home uneasily in Britain, a country he never understood. He was always more popular abroad.
Here, we don’t think of intellectuals as a class. Throughout much of the world, Koestler was the greatest public intellectual of his era, at a time when such people existed. In France or the US he was treated like a celebrity as he fought the Cold War with all his might.
But there’s no way of getting away from Koestler and sex — though it is just as interesting to point out that he is perhaps the only author who changed the language he wrote in twice (first from Hungarian to German, then to English) while maintaining a high standard and making oodles of money. The sheer volume of his sexual conquests was breathtaking. Some women complained he was “rough” (Sonia Orwell). Simone de Beauvoir was disappointed by the brevity of the experience. But as Scammell points out Koestler retained a large number of women friends who cared for him deeply.
Scammell deals even-handedly with the charge that in the Forties Koestler raped Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife. It may have happened, though in his lifetime of pursuing women nobody else made such an allegation. On the other hand, Craigie and Koestler remained friends for decades, and she made the claims in her eighties when he was long dead and she was occasionally confused. In the Forties the difference between bad sex and rape was more blurred than it is now.
Most of Koestler’s earlier biographies have homed in on his lechery, for commercial reasons. This is a warts-and-all work, not with only warts. Koestler was a super-sophisticated man. At last, in Michael Scammell, he has a sophisticated biographer who can place his subject in context.