Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell: review

By Dominic Sandbrook Published: 6:30AM GMT twenty-three February 2010

On the dusk of Mar 1 1983, Arthur Koestler sat down conflicting his mother Cynthia in their Knightsbridge sitting room, swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets cleared down with brandy and wine, and waited to die. It was the finish of an unusual tour that had taken him from the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to British-occupied Palestine, Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the French Foreign Legion, George Orwells London and California at the tallness of flowering plant power. To his admirers he was one of the biggest writers of the complicated age, a brave, waste man who had dared verbalise law to power. And yet, even in genocide a shade hung over him for, as Koestlers friends were frightened to discover, Cynthia, afterwards only 55 and in good health, had killed herself to one side him. As everybody knew, she was all underneath her husbands thumb, and their crony Julian Barnes was not alone in wondering: "Did he brag her in to it?"

At once melodramatic, relocating and disturbing, Koestlers flitting was standard of the man. Although he is majority appropriate remembered currently as the writer of one of the 20th centurys majority successful novels, Darkness at Noon, even he would certainly have certified that his own hold up story was as well improbable for fiction. Born in to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, he was a shy, shaken child who repelled his relatives by dropping out of university, converting to Zionism and disintegrating to Palestine, where he attempted (and failed) to hang on a organisation and in the future wangled a pursuit as Middle Eastern match for a German journal empire. By 1931, he was well regarded sufficient to be picked as the bondage match on house the Graf Zeppelins pioneering moody over the North Pole. And if his odyssey had finished there, it would have an entertainingly doubtful story.

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But it did not finish there, and one of the achievements of Michael Scammells perfectly abounding autobiography is to remind us what an outrageously charming hold up Koestler led. He assimilated and left the German Communist Party; he was arrested as a fight match (and part-time Comintern agent) by Francos men in Spain; he fled Paris, around North Africa, for well read London in the Forties; he helped to set up the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom; and, of course, he gave us a little of the majority satirical denunciations of autocracy ever written, not merely in Darkness at Noon, but in good oceans of essays and journalism, that sojourn as chilling and constrained as when they were primary written.

As Scammell observes, Koestler once called himself the "Casanova of causes", all of them espoused with blazing passion and most subsequently forsaken similar to prohibited bricks. He was a Zionist when couple of people had listened of Zionism and "an anti-Zionist when Zionism was in the prime"; he was a Communist, a Cold Warrior, an fan for euthanasia and a rather undiscriminating hold up of the paranormal. To British eyes he was the quintessential unfamiliar intellectual: short, passionate, controversial and unreliable. He befriended Orwell, Sartre, Camus and Timothy Leary; he slept with Simone de Beauvoir, who was reportedly unhappy that the experience was so brief.

Although Scammell is obviously an huge suitor of his subject, mostly pausing to pitch insults at Koestlers critics, he is as well good a memoirist not to admit that Koestler had a dim side. His defeat of de Beauvoir, for example, was one of many; indeed, one of his lovers claimed to have found a list of a little 200 others.

And nonetheless Scammell does his majority appropriate to hang up for Koestler, he was obviously a misogynistic brag on a pathological scale. "Without an component of primary rape there is no delight," he told his second wife, Mamaine. His victims enclosed Michael Foots wife, Jill Craigie, who after claimed that he had raped her in 1951. Scammell admits that Koestler "did handle intensely badly", but claims that this was merely standard masculine poise of the time a case, it seems to me, of stretching his biographical magnetism rather as well far.

Koestler might have been a deeply injured human being, Scammell concludes, but what mattered was that he was a good regretful romantic who done a "unique contribution" to the bargain of the complicated age. For me, however, this perfectly researched autobiography tells a opposite story. Behaviour that would be cowardly in a builder is no less intolerable in a writer; good moralists are not free from the standards that oversee the lives of others.

On the page, Koestler was a untiring censor of restraint who taught us most about the times. In person, however, he seems to have been a soaring egomaniac, receiving up and dispatch alternative people similar to so most contaminated tissues. Few writers of the last century improved diagnosed the monstrousness of others, but that did not stop Arthur Koestler from being a beast himself.

Koestler: the Indispensable Intellectual

by Michael Scammell

689PP, Faber & Faber, �25

Buy right away for �23 (PLUS �1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Books