Koestler: A Biography

...Koestler was instructed to go to Franco's Spain as a Communist spy under the thin cover of a correspondent for the Budapest Pester Lloyd and the London News Chronicle, a newspaper supposedly Liberal but in fact no less Communist-dominated than the Liberal regime in Republican Spain...

...We could not bear to see Nazism as he unveiled it until Nazism was more or less eliminated...

...For no one has lived so fully and intensely a uniquely twentieth-century experience, and produced books which give the feel of what it has all been like...

...as much as Orwell tormented himself Koestler has indulged himself...

...Augustine of Hippo, owes greater virtue entirely to diminished temptation...

...But that did not happen immediately...

...He is strong on the political angle, and sensible and unsensa-tional on the private life...

...Evidently Koestler had difficulty in adapting himself to work as orie-<rf Muenzenberg's numerous puppets, and chose to earn much-needed money by writing books on "sex education" under the name of Dr...

...I myself believe that his study of scientific discovery called The Sleepwalkers is a masterpiece, from the perspective both of history and of philosophy...

...Hence, just as those readers who were disturbed by George Orwell's testimony to left-wing monstrosities could seize on certain aspects of Orwell's personality—his grim asceticism and almost masochistic endeavor to understand suffering—to find reasons to reassure themselves that the Orwellian vision of the totalitarian menace was, after all, "distorted," those same people will doubtless find in Mr...

...He received the special welcome reserved for men in strategic positions in society...

...He was told not to become an open member, but to work for the Party secretly...

...In the words of his biographer, "that most extraordinarily influential of novels, eventually to be called Darkness at Noon, began, as it were, to write itself, concentrating the author's half-conscious insights into a fearful revelation of the nightmarish realities of Communism in practice...

...Then the Spanish Civil War broke out and Willy Muenzen-berg needed his services urgently...

...A his last is what brought Koestler into conflict with many other intellectuals—in England, America, and particularly in that nation of intellectuals, France, where he went to live once more...

...Snow and others failed, in bridging the gap between the "two cultures" of the classical and the scientific...

...Hamilton's book evidence for considering Koestler an unreliable witness on analogous psychological grounds...

...was patronized by millionaire socialists such as George Strauss, encouraged by fashionable literary mandarins like Cyril Connolly, earned handsome royalties, and could easily have settled down, like H.G...

...Maurice Cranston is Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics...

...After producing a hack work in praise of the USSR, ostensibly a bourgeois visitor's discovery of its marvels, he was promoted to secret intelligence again, and installed in 1933 in Paris as an official of a Front organization called the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, a cover for the activities of Willy Muenzenberg, Comintern propaganda chief in Western Europe...

...JL/uckilv, by this time he had acquired- a devoted wife named Dorothy and although they were well and truly separated, Dorothy was tireless in her efforts in London to raise a public demand for her husband's release...

...But Darkness at Noon, in the English version, came out just then, and it was soon followed by Scum of the Earth, a novel based on Koestler's experience as Jewish refugee...

...But Koestler being Koestler was active as soon as he was released from war work in political campaigning, for the Zionist cause, for the abolition of capital punishment among other things, and then for the defense, on a worldwide scale, of freedom against totalitarianism...

...Wells, to a plush life as a novelist, womanizer, and armchair moralist...

...For it is a workmanlike narrative which sets out all the more interesting facts about Koestler's life...

...He did not like the materialistic ethos that prevailed in the scientific Realschule, and he was tormented with shyness because of his short stature...

...Indeed he became so zealous a Zionist that at the age of 21 he quit his university, studies altogether to go to Palestine, to work full time for the cause...

...He showed his gratitude by becoming British, and making himself the best foreign writer of literary English since Joseph Conrad...

...Courage being one of Koestler's most steadfast qualities, he accepted this dangerous mission and went...

...These duties, which he accepted without demur, led to his departure from the Ullstein press, when a colleague working undercover betrayed him to the boss...

...The British friends who had saved him from Seville had hardly less difficulty in securing his release from Pentonville Prison...

...These, inevitably, are controversial —but, as his biographer points out, Koestler really succeeded where C.P...

...Even so, his childhood was less than happy...

...and as Koestler is the last man to want anything suppressed in order to forestall embarrassment, the record is splendidly candid and fairly complete...

...He, in turn, being no longer useful to the Party in Berlin was shunted off to the Soviet Union, where the dismal reality of Communism slowly penetrated his consciousness, without as yet shaking his faith...

...The genuine liberals and the fellow travelers, the antifascists and the free-speech lobby, and even Sir Anthony Eden were whipped into action, and Koestler found himself released by Franco in exchange for a Nationalist prisoner, thanks to the intervention of Great Britain, a country he hardly knew...

...His criticisms of the empiricist ideology of modern science are on a level with those of Karl Popper...

...Eventually Koestler found a niche in Jerusalem as correspondent for the Ullstein press of Berlin...

...He married, as a second wife, a very English debutante named Ma-maine Paget without moderating his very Hungarian habits of philandering...

...It will hardly matter that Koestler's personality is as unlike Orwell's as any could be...

...But already the stirrings of a genuinely literary ambition were at work within him, and he embarked on his first serious political fiction, which he called The Gladiators, a historical novel set in ancient Rome but researched in libraries in Zurich and Budapest...

...He proved himself a born journalist, but not a man born to live in Jerusalem...

...he already had fairly extensive experience in that field to draw upon, and the technique of popular science journalism was just what was needed for such books in those innocent days: his Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge became an international best-seller...

...He was held in prison at Seville, awaiting execution...

...Thus, in wartime England, he became a celebrated author—and the Communists, a diminished band in England at that time, concentrating their wits on penetrating the secret services, hardly raised a murmur against him...

...stories of drink and adultery enliven (or darken, according to one's perspective) the pages of this book, and if Koestler is now settled down to a quiet life of temperance and domestic chastity, it will doubtless be said that it is because he is 77 years old, and, like St...

...There was too much hatred of Koestler in France for him to flourish there, and he soon left to divide his life between England and Austria...

...That was in 1930, when the rise of Hitler drove Koestler, and so many other intellectuals, into the arms of the Communists...

...Koestler has earned the right to be considered an original thinker as well as an artist, and if still an "intellectual," a very superior one indeed...

...but if readers want to have any grasp of Koestler's importance as a creative writer, and as a theorist of scientific knowledge, they will have to read Koestler's own books.ead Koestler's own books...

...He persuaded his employers to move him to Paris, and there, after writing a brilliant article on the work of Broglie in physics, he was invited to become science editor for Ullsteins in Berlin...

...But at the University of Vienna he seems to have found some contentment as a member of a Jewish fraternity, and relief from his personal problems by throwing himself into the cause of Zionism...

...Darkness at Noon sold more copies in France than anywhere else, and the French Communist daily L 'Hu-manite reacted by publishing a map showing Koestler's house outside Paris with the caption: "This is where the American Ambassador trains his para-military Fascist militia...

...Koestler found himself free to acknowledge the truth he had long tried to hide from himself about Stalin...

...he escaped by volunteering for the Foreign Legion, slipped off to Casablanca, and from there through Lisbon to London, where he was promptly put in jail again...

...Inevitably, the German journalists at Franco's headquarters recognized Koestler and remembered him as the man who had been exposed as a Communist agent at Ullsteins...

...Russia's share in the defeat of Hitler had left Stalin with great prestige, and a war-weary people's yearning for peace made them anxious not to provoke Soviet hostility...

...It seems that he was too much of an enthusiast and an extremist to be of any great use to the Zionist establishment...

...The Ullsteins, themselves Jews but hoping to improve their prospects under Nazism by dismissing as many Jews as they could, had good grounds for disembarrassing themselves of Arthur Koestler...

...f\rthur Koestler was born in Budapest in September 1905, into a middle-class Jewish family with scholarly traditions, but was nevertheless given a scientific, rather than a classical, education...

...Koestler went from Seville to Paris, and to work again for Muen-zenberg...

...He may even be better understood and more admired in the future than he is now, for Koestler's truth has always been too naked for many of his contemporaries to contemplate...

...Costler...

...The fall of France, accelerated by Communist opposition to "imperialist war" at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, found Koestler interned in France...

...Iain Hamilton's new biography of Koestler will perhaps give equal joy to those who admire him (as I do) and those who are against him...

...Koestler had a chance to escape from Malaga, but intrepid to the point of folly he waited there to watch Franco's troops take over the city...

...With time he mellowed, and settled down to a peaceful existence with his third wife, Cynthia, and returned to his earliest scholarly interest, producing instead of novels, books about science...

...Koestler upset all this by insisting that there was no freedom in Russia, and no peace to be bought by appeasing a tyrant...

...Hamilton does not do justice to the quality of Koestler's achievement...

...this enabled him to become at an early age a very successful scientific journalist, and then again, much later in life, to become a formidable methodologist of science...

...There was simply no denying his supreme literary distinction...

...The Moscow Trials had put the fear of hell into that cunning operator, and Muenzenberg was no longer the loyal servant of the Comintern...

...and since Communism, as he depicts it, is still with us and still flourishing, many readers avert their eyes from Koestler's truth, or repudiate it, or kick him for saying things they do not want to hear, and indignantly accuse him of "helping the CIA" to sabotage detente, de-Stalinization, and peace...