Reappraisals (6 page)

Minor gaffes such as these help explain deeper misunderstandings. Cesarani has a soft spot for Simone de Beauvoir and cites her more than once as a guide to Koestler’s failings. Commenting on Koestler’s anti-Communism in February 1948 (at the time of the Prague coup), de Beauvoir opines: “He is remorseful not to be any longer a Communist, because now they are going to win and he wants to be on the winning side.” This tells us quite a lot about de Beauvoir, but not much about Koestler. In a similar vein we are informed approvingly that she thought Koestler had “a mediocre Marxist education.” That is true—though coming from this source it is a bit ripe. But it is irrelevant. Men and women did not become Communists in interwar Europe owing to the close study of Marxist texts. In Koestler’s own words (not cited by Cesarani), “What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.”

That is why people joined the Communist Party, and it is also why they were so reluctant to abandon it. Cesarani cannot fathom why Koestler did not make a clean and early break with the party—after all, his disillusion began with his firsthand observations of the Soviet Union just a year after he became a Communist. According to his biographer, Koestler’s claims of early disillusionment should therefore be treated with suspicion—it “took a long time to have much effect.” It was only (!) in 1938 that Koestler broke with the German Communists in Parisian exile, and even then he promised not to attack or “break fealty with” the Soviet Union. Cesarani finds this odd and describes it as a very “late” break with Communism. But it is absolutely at one with the experience of many ex-Communists of the time. It was not easy to leave the party, with all the fellowship and the security that it offered; and 1938 was hardly a time to hand hostages to Fascist fortune by embarrassing your former comrades and discounting their illusions and their suffering. It is easy for Cesarani now to castigate Koestler and his contemporaries for not seeing the light right away and behaving accordingly. At the time, in continental Europe, matters were a little more complicated.

The distance separating Cesarani from Koestler when it comes to understanding the mood of Europe before (and after) the war is chiefly one of space: the space that separates Britain from Europe. Obviously Cesarani understands the turbulent background to intellectual and emotional choices in the first half of the century: the Central European catastrophe of 1918-33 (revolution-inflation-dictatorship), the threat of Hitler, the promise of Communism, Spain, wartime collaboration, and the Soviet occupation of half the continent. But none of these calamities happened in Britain, to its eternal good fortune; and a historian of Britain may too readily underestimate their significance when accounting for attitudes and actions across the Channel.

Still, if there is a real difficulty with Cesarani’s approach, it results from an unbridgeable distance not in space but in time. For in two crucial respects, Cesarani’s book is deeply anachronistic. In the first place, he takes Koestler severely to task for his attitude to women. There is no doubt that the way Arthur Koestler treated women was, to say the least, disrespectful. It is not so much that he had serial affairs and wives—that might plausibly be interpreted as evidence that he rather liked women, even if he failed to like any one woman for very long. But there is a lot of evidence that Koestler did not so much seduce women as accost them and expect them to sleep with him; and when they demurred, he was pushy and demanding.

Most of the women whom Koestler tried to bed were younger than him, and were often impressed by his fame. However badly he treated them, they tended, in Sidney Hook’s words, to “make allowances” for him. He indulged his sexual whims with little regard for the feelings of others, and he could be as violent and reckless at home as he was in cafés or at the wheel. On at least one occasion (according to Cesarani) Koestler forced someone to have sex against her will. That is quite a rap sheet. It should be sufficient to introduce a degree of shadow into any portrait of the man. Yet Cesarani goes much, much further. Koestler, he writes, had a sustained record of “beating and raping” women. In Cesarani’s intemperate words, Koestler was nothing less than “a serial rapist.”

If Koestler were alive, he would surely sue for libel, and he would surely win. Even on Cesarani’s own evidence, there is only one unambiguously attested charge of rape: In 1952 Koestler assaulted Jill Craigie, the wife of English politician and future Labour Party leader Michael Foot, in her own home during her husband’s absence. Much of the rest consists of circumstantial evidence and a strong dose of present-minded interpretation. Thus both Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir acknowledged that they had one night of bad sex, a mutual mistake. De Beauvoir attributed it to Koestler’s persistence—she finally gave in under the pressure of his importuning. Is this rape? A number of other women attest that Koestler pestered them for sex—some conceded, some didn’t. Whether they did or they didn’t, many women seem to have remained fond of Koestler after the experience. For Cesarani, this is inexplicable: “Perhaps he attracted a certain kind of masochistic personality for whom he fulfilled a particular need?” As for those who had sex with Arthur Koestler and went back for more, they presumably had a “compulsion to re-enact that wounding process.”

Maybe. Or maybe they just enjoyed themselves. Cesarani, like Koestler at his most polemical, sees everything in black or white. Either you are making consensual, mutually initiated, monogamous, nonaggressive, amorous love, or else something very dark and unpleasant is taking place: rape—or, more commonly, “date-rape,”—a term that occurs with disarming frequency in this book. As for the notion that someone might indeed be disposed to sexual domination, and even occasionally to force, and yet be appealing to women—well, this has apparently never occurred to Cesarani, even as a hypothesis. As a consequence, there is something tedious and “sexually correct” about his account of Koestler’s adventures. Cesarani doesn’t like the younger Koestler’s multitude of relationships, his “relentless pursuit of women.” Koestler himself explained reasonably enough that he habitually sought female companionship and comfort, but for Cesarani, “there comes a point when his rationalizations for sleeping around ring hollow.”

Worse for poor Koestler, he preferred women. If he had bisexual leanings, he suppressed them: “To him, heterosexuality was the norm, men were dominant partners and women were submissive.” Worse still, Koestler was not always faithful to one woman at a time: nor, indeed, were his women always faithful to him. Celia Paget briefly abandoned Koestler for a weeklong fling with Albert Camus, prompting an outburst from Cesarani, who finds it “extraordinary” that “people who constantly talked about friendship and loyalty” spent so much time in bed with their friends. Describing Koestler’s occasional taste for threesomes, Cesarani writes of “another gruesome triangular encounter.” The reader is constantly aware of the author’s presence, hovering pruriently and commenting sniffily upon the copulations of his protagonists. “Conventional morality seems to have had little purchase in these circles.” Quite.

Why should it? Even if we exclude as special pleading the claim (advanced by Koestler’s fellow Hungarian George Mikes) that if Koestler did not take no for an answer he was only practicing the sexual mores of his birthplace, the fact remains that sleeping around, “betraying” one’s lover or one’s spouse, treating women as submissive, and behaving in a generally “sexist” manner was hardly a trait peculiar to Arthur Koestler. Cesarani may not be old enough to remember the world before the sexual revolutions of the 1960s, and he may lack personal experience of the conventions and the morals of the European intelligentsia. But as a historian he should surely hesitate before chastising his subject for attitudes and assumptions that were widely shared in his cultural and social milieu. To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian, Austrian, Russian, German, and French intellectuals who pass through the pages of Cesarani’s book shared most of Koestler’s views on such matters, even if they were not always so assiduous or so successful in practice. You have only to read their memoirs. Even the English were a lot less conventionally well behaved back then; but since
their
misdemeanors often involved partners of the same sex, Cesarani would probably find less to reprove.

The present-minded primness of Cesarani’s tone is often unintentionally funny and self-revealing. What sounds like a rather entertaining luncheon gathering of Koestler and some women friends becomes a “grisly assembly of ex-lovers.” When poor Cynthia Jeffries (Koestler’s last wife) takes up German and cooking, she earns Cesarani’s lasting disapproval for these “strikingly submissive gestures.” And Cesarani wholly deplores “Koestler’s assumption that a life of promiscuity and deception is normal and should be pleasurable, were it not for the inconvenience of a bad conscience.” If Koestler was ever made uncomfortable by his conscience—and there is not much evidence that he was—it was surely as nothing to the discomfort that he has caused his biographer by so obviously enjoying bodily pleasures and indulging them to the full. You can almost feel Cesarani’s relief when Koestler gets too old for extramarital sex and settles into respectable middle age.

Reviewers of the English edition of this book have been much taken with the issue of Koestler’s sideline in rape, and have asked how far this should alter posterity’s view of him. But Koestler’s attitude toward women has never been in doubt—you have only to read his memoirs or some of the novels, notably
Arrival and Departure
. We now know that he raped the wife of a friend and forced his attentions on some reluctant women. This is deeply unattractive behavior. But Koestler was no moralist. He did not preach about human goodness or pose himself as an exemplar of anything. If it turned out that he was a closet racist, or had remained all his life a secret member of the Communist Party, or had privately financed violent terrorist organizations, then some of his publications would indeed seem very odd, and we should have to ask how far he wrote in good faith. But nothing he wrote about sex is in contradictionwith his actions. And nothing he wrote about politics, or intellectuals, or the death penalty, depends for its credibility upon his sexual behavior. Koestler was a great journalist who exercised great influence; no more, no less. And neither of those claims is hostage to our views about his private life, after the fact.

THE SECOND ANACHRONISM in Cesarani’s book concerns Koestler’s Jewishness. On this score it is easier to sympathize with the biographer. Arthur Koestler was a Jew, born of Jewish parents into early-twentieth-century Budapest’s large and thriving Jewish community. He was drawn into Zionism while at university in Vienna: By 1924, at the age of nineteen, he was chairman of the Association of Jewish Nationalist Students in Austria. He spent much of the late twenties in Mandate Palestine, learning a passable café Hebrew, and he would return there in 1945. In addition to
Promise and Fulfillment
, his Palestine stints resulted in
Thieves in the Night
(1946), a novel about a Jewish settlement marked by the writer’s sympathy for the politics of Menachem Begin’s Irgun.
Arrival and Departure
, published in 1943, was another novel shaped by Koestler’s interest in the fate of the Jews, this time in occupied wartime Europe. After the declaration of the State of Israel, Koestler left the Middle East, never to return; but he remained sufficiently involved with the Jewish dilemma to write
The Thirteenth Tribe
, which appeared in 1976. It is a bizarre, misguided attempt to demonstrate that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are descended from Khazar tribesmen in the Caucasus—and thus need feel no special affinity for, nor obligation toward, Israel and the traditional Jewish heritage.

From all this, it would seem reasonable to infer that being Jewish was rather important to Arthur Koestler. Yet Koestler himself tended to downplay its significance. When he was not writing about Israel, Jews did not figure prominently in his work, and the autobiography goes to some lengths to understate the influence of his Jewish heritage upon his education or his opinions. Cesarani finds this a little odd, and his suspicions are probably justified, if only in part. Koestler’s efforts to be what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew” only serve to remind us just how very Jewish his story is, not least (for non-practicing Central Europeans of his generation) in the effort to deny that being Jewish did or should matter. Koestler was too intelligent to claim that being Jewish was an elective affinity and that he could just choose not to be: History (that is, Hitler) had deprived him of that choice. In later years, though, he certainly behaved as though he wished it were otherwise.

Cesarani is right to note all this. But in his determination to show that Koestler was in denial, he inverts Koestler’s own emphasis and finds, or claims to find, a Jewish dimension in almost everything Koestler wrote or did. When Koestler joins the German Communist Party, he is seeking an alternative way to “resolve the Jewish Question”: His Communist activities, his political engagements in Popular Front Paris, and his adventures in Spain only make sense to Cesarani when seen through the prism of Jewishness. How else to account for Koestler’s decision to leave Palestine in 1929 and engage in European politics? “A passionate involvement of seven years’ duration in Jewish affairs could not be dropped instantly, even less when events thrust the fate of the Jews into prominence. On the contrary, Koestler’s ideological, political and geographical peregrinations make more sense if they are seen in the light of his complex Jewish identity.”

This is reductionist. it is perfectly possible to turn away from seven years of youthful involvement in a political or national movement, and to redirect one’s attentions to an entirely different set of causes. Many of us have made precisely such a change. In the last, turbulent years of Weimar Germany, a switch from Jabotinsky to Stalin might seem unusual, but it was readily explicable—and Koestler was still only twenty-six years old when he joined the party.