Reappraisals (5 page)

These are the challenges of the coming century. They were also the challenges that faced the last century, which is why they will sound at least a little familiar to some. They are a reminder that the simple nostrums of today’s ideologues of “freedom” are no more help to us in a complex world than were those of their predecessors on the other side of the twentieth-century ideological chasm; a reminder, too, that yesterday’s Left and today’s Right share among other things an overconfident propensity to deny the relevance of past experience to present problems. We think we have learned enough from the past to know that many of the old answers don’t work, and that may be true. But what the past can truly help us understand is the perennial complexity of the questions.

NOTES

Part One

THE HEART OF DARKNESS

CHAPTER 1

Arthur Koestler, the Exemplary Intellectual

Arthur Koestler was an exemplary twentieth-century intellectual. Born in Hungary in 1905—in his own words, “as the sun was setting on the Age of Reason”—he was educated in Vienna and would live variously in Berlin, Palestine, Paris, and London. Koestler joined the German Communist Party in 1931, traveled in the Soviet Union, and reported from the Spanish Civil War, where he was captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by Franco. Released as a result of British intervention, he wound up in France at the outbreak of World War II and was twice interned by the French. Escaping on the second occasion, he made his way to Britain, and there he spent the war years and much of the rest of his life. He was the moving spirit in the establishment in 1950 of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and was perhaps the best known anti-Communist intellectual of the postwar decade. In later years he devoted himself to a revisionist history of science, parapsychology, and a variety of more or less eccentric tastes and obsessions. In 1983, at the age of seventy-eight, he and his companion committed suicide.

Koestler came from Budapest and grew up in Vienna, in the center of Central Europe. Much about the man—his political affiliations, his cultural and intellectual curiosity and eclecticism, his ambivalent relation to his Jewish heritage, his voluntary and involuntary migrations—can be traced to his origins; indeed, they typify intellectuals from that place and time. To take just one illustrative instance: Koestler, like Manès Sperber (see Chapter III), was obsessed with psychosexual explanations for individual and collective human behavior. In his autobiographies and in his later “scientific” writings, he was consumed with the quest for all-embracing explanations derived from “complexes,” “repression,” “denial,” “neuroses,” hidden “drives,” and the like.

To English readers in the second half of the century, all this seemed a touch excessive, and Koestler’s diminished standing in recent decades owes something to our sense that he became a bit “silly.” Orwell once criticized him for reducing all revolutionary creeds and objectives to “rationalizations of neurotic impulses.” But to men who grew up in the supercharged intellectual ambiance of Freud’s or Adler’s Vienna, and who had discovered and abandoned communism before turning thirty-five, the turn to sexology or the paranormal made a kind of sense. Indeed, the leap of faith was less dramatic than it appears.

For Marxism, too, had been a leap of faith, a device for unraveling and decoding the skein of social experience. Its “science” consisted in interpreting all external political or social data according to a grid of suspicion: Things are not what they seem. They reveal their true meaning only when decoded in accordance with the knowledge of the initiated— at which point they make complete sense and everything falls into place in a universal scheme. Upon abandoning Marxism, Koestler simply sought out alternative ways with which to demystify appearances, to eliminate randomness, and to embrace deeper truths. To a Western audience, or to anyone who approached Marxism from a less holistically predisposed environment, his trajectory appeared curious; but seen from his birthplace it has a certain coherence. In the distinctive fin-de-siècle manner of his Central European contemporaries, Koestler was always a “modern.”

Insofar as Arthur Koestler had a profession, it was journalism. Indeed, the only regular job he ever held was as a reporter for the Weimar-era daily
Berliner Zeitung am Mittag
, whose foreign editor and assistant editor in chief he became at the age of twenty-six. Almost all of his interests and experiences were reproduced and transmuted into reportage, and at his best he was one of the greatest reporters of the century. His early enthusiasm for Vladimir Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism led him to an extended stay in Palestine in 1926-27, and he returned there for eight months in 1945. One product of these sojourns was
Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949
, still one of the best pieces of writing on its subject, despite its author’s prejudices and because of them.
Spanish Testament
(1937) ranks with the Civil War reporting of Orwell.
The Scum of the Earth
(1941) is not just a riveting description of Koestler’s experience in the French internment camps of Gurs and Le Vernet, it is also one of the most convincing and thoughtful accounts of the rotting, vengeful atmosphere in France as it entered the abyss. And Koestler’s autobiographies
Arrow in the Blue
and
The Invisible Writing
—together with his classic memoir of Communist faith and disillusion
The God That Failed
(1949)—afford an insight into the life and the opinions of a true child of the century. One day they will be required reading for every historian of our age.

The strengths of Koestler’s journalism derive from the same characteristics that marred his later forays into science and philosophy. Those books—notably
Insight & Outlook
,
The Sleepwalkers
,
The Act of Creation
,
The Ghost in the Machine
,
The Case of the Midwife Toad
, and
The Roots of Coincidence
, most of them published in the 1960s—were panned by specialists for their idiosyncratic speculation, their searching for coherence and meaning in every little coincidence and detail, their abuse of analogy, and the overconfident intrusion of their author into matters of which he was comparatively ignorant.

But those same Koestlerian traits give his essays and his reportage a bite and a freshness that time has not softened. In “The Yogi and the Commissar” and “The Trail of the Dinosaur,” Koestler’s engaged invective and his mordant and bitter commentaries on the illusions and the venality of his contemporaries are not just a pleasure to read. (His description of Simone de Beauvoir as “a planet shining with reflected light” has certainly stood the test of time.) They are also a sure guide to some of the opinions, the quarrels, and the beliefs that shaped the era. And they were hugely influential in shaping contemporary opinion.

In David Cesarani’s words, “By the force of his arguments and his personal example, Koestler emancipated thousands of people from thralldom to Marx, Lenin and Stalin.”
¹
For this reason alone, the author of
Darkness at Noon
(of which more later) would merit a major biography. It is a task much facilitated by the copious written record—in addition to the books already mentioned and a half dozen novels, Koestler kept detailed diaries and conducted a sustained correspondence with his many wives, lovers, friends, and enemies. Cesarani has put all this material to very good use; the result is a lively narrative of Koestler’s life, works, and opinions. Cesarani’s descriptions and summaries of the published works are conventional, but then it is not easy to do justice at second hand to writings whose virtue lies in their vivacity and their immediacy. About the later writings, certainly, it would take an inordinately sympathetic biographer to avoid remarking upon the likelihood that they will soon be justly forgotten; even so, Cesarani is kind enough to suggest that some of Koestler’s parascientific aperçus “may yet have the last laugh on the grey beards of Academe.” It is not clear why he thinks so. If it proves true, it will only be as a result of the sort of coincidence that Koestler set out so resolutely to deny.

About Koestler the man, Cesarani has rather more to say, and much of it is to the point. Arthur Koestler seems to have suffered from what Cesarani, following many of Koestler’s own friends, calls “a crippling deficit of self-regard.” He was a smallish man, an outsider for most of his life, who wanted very much to please and to be liked, but who succeeded in arguing, breaking with, and sometimes brawling with almost everyone he met. Like Sartre, he took Benzedrine to sustain him during his spells of writing, and he drank like a fish. His drinking led to bouts of quarrelsome violence and an extraordinary series of smashed cars; and when he wasn’t drinking, fighting, or writing he was often depressed and consumed with self-doubt. He was strikingly generous to strangers with the riches he earned from
Darkness at Noon
and his later writings, but he was selfish and narcissistic in his private life. According to his biographer, he was inordinately attracted to powerful men and weak women.

Of all these traits, it is Koestler’s status as an outsider that seems to me the most salient and interesting. Like many Central European intellectuals of his generation, Koestler had no fixed abode. He wandered from country to country, from language to language, from one commitment to the next. He knew and socialized with all the significant writers and thinkers of his age in Berlin, Paris, Jerusalem, London, and New York, but he was never “one of them.” It was perhaps a misfortune that he should have ended up in England: Of all his transitory homes, this was the place where belonging came hardest for the foreigner.

Koestler’s accent, his intensity, his experience, and his sense of the tragic all put him at odds with the distinctive English preference for understatement and irony. In New York, he was taken Very Seriously. In Paris, his friends quarreled with him over the Great Issues of the day. But in London, where he tried very hard to become English and strove for acceptance and membership, Koestler was sometimes an object of amusement and even ridicule. His English contemporaries admired him, certainly. They respected him and they acknowledged his influence. But on the whole they did not understand him.

David Cesarani is English—he is professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton—and it seems to me that he, too, does not always understand Arthur Koestler. He certainly finds him a bit annoying. His new book frequently second-guesses Koestler’s own memoirs and questions their credibility. It takes Koestler to task for his opinions and raps him over the knuckles for his shortcomings. This seems all a bit harsh. Koestler’s memoirs certainly retell his life story from his own distinctive perspective (how else would they tell it?), and the story itself occasionally changes from one version to the next, in keeping with his evolving interests. Still, Koestler is actually a rather good source of information about his own weaknesses. He admits to his false toughness, his insecurities, his constant unfulfilled search for the perfect Cause and the perfect woman, and his many personal failings. He faithfully recorded and castigated his “complexes”: his guilt, his dissipation, his womanizing, and his bad manners.

Cesarani acknowledges this, but then he admonishes Koestler for failing to pull his socks up and improve himself. Even when Koestler does correct a failing, Cesarani finds fault in his motives. In his Spanish jail, awaiting execution, Koestler came to the firm and abiding conviction that no abstract ideal can justify individual suffering. Cesarani disapproves: “It is perturbing and hard to accept in one who was so critical of others for their lack of imagination, that Koestler only realised that nothing, not even the most rationally compelling cause, was worth the sacrifice of a single life when it was his life that was at stake.” Once released, Koestler went on to devote his energies to dismantling the myth of dialectical materialism. But his rationalist critique of Marxism-Leninism’s fake science falls short of his biographer’s expectations, and Cesarani rebukes him for the “heuristic gaffe” of deploying a “materialist” criticism against a materialist illusion.

A biographer is entitled to censure his subject on occasion. More serious is Cesarani’s distance from Koestler’s European world. There are some minor but revealing errors: Otto Katz, another displaced Central European Jew, who was executed in Prague in December 1952 as a “fellow conspirator” in the trial of Rudolf Slánský, was not the cover name of André Simone (not “Simon”); it was the other way around. The Italian essayist and onetime colleague of Koestler’s was Nicolà Chiaromonte, not Nicholas Chiaromonte. Ernest Gellner was decidedly not a “Vienneseborn philosopher.”
France-Observateur
(not “Observateur”) was not a Communist sheet, but a neutralist journal of the non-Communist Parisian Left, which gives its attacks on Koestler in 1950 a significance quite different from the one suggested by Cesarani. And if André Gide was recording opinions about Koestler in his diary “in the 1960s,” then Cesarani has had access to some very privileged information: Gide died in 1951.