Tracing Koestler's Career

...What analysis there is leans more toward adulation than insight...

...His organizational abilities he used to help form the Congress for Cultural Freedom as an umbrella group for writers and intellectuals opposed to Stalinism...

...In the decade after the War, he devoted his extraordinary energies to, and made his greatest contribution in, the fight against Communism...

...Compare that with George Steiner: "thoroughly standard...

...Yet for almost a generation, he carried history around in his suitcase...

...Koestler forswore politics to devote himself to his scientific interests...

...His summaries of the books are sketchy and his discussions limited in large part to what the reviewers had to say...

...One critic, the zoologist Sir Peter Medawar, is presumed to have resented an amateur trespassing onto his territory...

...He bewailed the collapse of all his heroes, and said how awful it was to have nobody to look up to...

...He was at home among the intellectual elites of England, France and the U.S...

...1955 came another transformation...

...Hamilton's acknowledgments page reads like a postwar Who's Who...

...His energies as a writer, propagandist and political organizer were prodigious: In one year during the '30s, he wrote half of a novel, translated someone else's novel into German, put together a guide to Paris, completed two film treatments, rewrote a play as a short story, contributed regular articles and reviews to a weekly paper, and dictated a quarter of a million words for a work entitled Sexual Anomalies and Perversions...

...His long, painful repudiation of Communism, which was to take up most of the decade, has become a permanent monument of our time...

...In the mid-'20s he attended the University of Vienna...

...With Zionism and Communism behind him, fascism never an option, organized religion an unattractive alternative, and nationalism an impossibility for a "Good European," where was Koestler to turn...

...Back in Berlin by 1930, he began studying Marx, and a year later decided to join the Communist Party...

...commonplace...

...in France after the Nazi invasion and again following the War, when Paris' Left Bank had become the mind of Europe...

...What is more, Hamilton has the nasty habit of impugning the motives of those who do not share his evaluation of Koestler's achievements...

...His was one of the clearest, most forceful voices warning the West, and particularly naively optimistic liberals, that they were in fact engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union...

...Initially, Koestler was a committed apparatchik, sacrificing his newspaper job for the Cause...

...a hoary chestnut...

...There are millions who could profitably learn from them????specifically, all those neutralists, pacifists and antinuke types filling the streets of Europe and America with their lost cause, indeed everyone who has ever made the argument that we would be better off building hospitals instead of bombs...

...When Koestler turned his back on politics in 1955, he left almost every hard question of our era unanswered...

...Fin desiecle emotions, anxiety, guilt, alienation, filled the household, exacerbated by the father's business failure during World War I. Young Arthur was an eager student, with an interest in science and a knack for languages...

...One thing led to another, and by 1927 he had become Middle East correspondent for the House of Ullstein, a German-Jewish newspaper chain...

...in the Soviet Union while Stalin was consolidating his hold...

...His estimations seem overwrought...

...Even the Nobel Prize for Literature Committee earns a suspicious glare for passing Koestler over: The Prize "was denied him, whether because of Sweden's delicate position as a tremulous 'bridge' between East and West, or for some other reason, I do not know...

...Active resistance against the National Socialists seemed only possible by throwing in one's lot either with the Socialists or the Communists, and Koestler despised the compromising, opportunistic, soft-centered Socialists who a decade before had stifled the German revolution and (as he saw it) made an unholy mess of their Republic...

...If this is a fair assessment, and I believe it is, then little of current value can be gleaned from a writer whose biographer sees no need to include in his index the Vietnam War, civil rights, China, the Third World, Kennedy (John, Bobby or Ted), the West Bank, Czechoslovakia, or rock music...

...K has not yet recovered his normal interest in life...

...Even a one-year journey through the Soviet Union, wherehecould seeCommunism's dismal economic failures for himself, did not undermine his faith...

...Such books as The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine followed, presenting Koestler's views on topics like the development of modern astronomy and the basis of original thought...

...It possesses neither depth nor thoroughness...

...Upon returning to Paris (Hitler having become Chancellor of Germany while Koestler was away), he found a position with the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, a Communist front organization under the notorious Willi Munzenberg...

...Except for Darkness at Noon and his most recent, most questionable volumes, bookstores do not carry his work...

...He was born in Budapest in 1905, into a family of assimilated Jews, just as the Hapsburg Empire was teetering on the brink...

...It is above all the quality of relevance in Arthur Koestler that makes for the lively interest in him," wrote Philip Rahv when Koestler was at the height of his fame and powers...

...I always have doubts about his ultimate sanity when he is like this...

...During a critical period of our century he seemed always to be at the center of things: in Germany when Hitler was rising to power...

...If Koestler could not find a cause to work for, he did have something to battle against...

...Today, Koestler's interests have become more esoteric, his ideas more eccentric (this study stops just before the time he began delving seriously into ESP...

...In prison, under threat of execution until a public outcry forced his release, Koestler experienced some sort of spiritual awakening...

...in Spain at the height of the Civil War...

...Never one to do things by halves, the ex-Communist settled in England and became a "fervent English-style 'Social Democrat.'" Social Democracy is no faith for anyone with the temperament of a true believer, though, especially not in its English variety, and Koestler, once the War was won, began complaining about the Labor Party's gray on gray...

...It was not enough to turn him away from Communism altogether, but it did initiate the process...

...The fact is that Koestler is little read today...

...Anyone looking for a reasoned consideration of the later efforts, or for an objective estimation of the writer's overall place in literature, will be disappointed by this biography...

...Whether posterity will look more kindly on his scientific output, condemning our neglect, I cannot say (although, pace Hamilton, theopin-ions of such knowledgeable skeptics as Stephen Jay Gould and Martin Gardner suggest it will not...

...in Palestine and then Israel at the birth of that nation...

...The Purge Trials, the dogmatism of his comrades and the Hitler-Stalin Pact completed it...

...As a result, his readers have rightly turned their backs on him...

...He wrote and lectured constantly about the danger...

...Embattled as ever, he was still making enemies, no longer of fascists and Communists but of behaviorists and Darwinists...

...The first step in Koestler's deconversion occurred a few years later, after he went to Spain to report on the Civil War and was arrested by Franco's Army in Malaga...

...The book is a rather pedestrian, generally uncritical account of the author-activist up to the end of the '60s...

...This period of Koestler's life is the toughest for the nonspecialist to grasp, and Hamilton is not of very much help...

...Koestler spent two years out in the field, enough time to disillusion him with Zionism, at least as a personal ideal...

...There he discovered Zionism, the first of his several causes, and in 1926, before receiving his degree, he left for Palestine to work on a kibbutz...

...The political writings are another matter...

...The Act of Creation, he declares, "is by any standard an astonishing work of erudition, brilliance, originality...

...These experiences inspired Koestler's finest writings, including, of course, Darkness at Noon...

...An important question, not only for him but for others as well, and Hamilton fails to give it its due...

...finally, in the United States when it was feeling its uncertain way as the foremost power in the world...

...Darkness at Noon, written a few years later, was composed literally on the run, between prisons...

...His wife's letters, to which Hamilton was granted special access, tell the story: "Poor K is in despair, his brain is simply not functioning at all....Arthur is still depressed and morose...

...He certainly seems to get little or no stimulation from people...

...The struggle to find an answer????or more accurately, to hold on to the different answers he chose????May be said to have shaped Koestler's life down to the present...

...of disarming banality...

...Koestler knew everybody...

...At this time, too, he flirted with the idea of moving to the United States, changing his mind apparently????hamilton does not spell this out????because the country had taken genuine anti-Communism to a hysterical and destructive extreme...

...But, oddly, those in agreement with Koestler have less need of his books...

...He made odd proposals????advising the government to hire the man who invented holiday camps for workers, urging the film industry to make movies about Karl Marx and Robert Owen????while growing increasingly depressed...

...Still, if Hamilton, a former editor-in-chief of the English Spectator, relies on a journalist's superficial this-happened-then-this-happened style to tell the tale, few individuals can better survive such surface handling than Arthur Koestler...

...After the communal settlement's members rejected him as "frivolous," he bummed around Haifauntilan acquaintance found him a job in Berlin...