Koestler in the 1950s: cutting a “wide swath among his neighbours’ wives”
Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell (Faber and Faber, £25)
The final illustration of the photospread in Michael Scammell’s impressive biography of Arthur Koestler shows the bust of Koestler fashioned by Daphne Henrion. Its fate illustrates the so-called “Koestler problem” and touches wider questions about the biographer’s craft and the claims that genius has on posterity. After I published a study of Koestler in 1998 (Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind) that revealed he had raped the feminist filmmaker Jill Craigie, wife of Michael Foot, students at Edinburgh University demanded that the bust be removed from public sight. Although Koestler had endowed the university with funds (for research into the paranormal), the authorities conceded. Since then it has found a modest new home in the psychology department, but only time will tell if Scammell can succeed in restoring Koestler’s standing, if not his bust.
Arthur Koestler—who died in London in 1983, renowned, above all, for his anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon—was born into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in Budapest in 1905. He did not enjoy a happy childhood or youth, dropping out of engineering studies at Vienna university to emigrate to Palestine because he saw Zionism as the antidote to a despised diaspora identity. He was quickly disillusioned, and after various misadventures found his métier as a journalist and returned to Europe to embark on a stellar career working for the Ullstein newspapers in Berlin. His arrival coincided with the depression and the rise of the Nazis. What he saw convinced him that communism was the answer to his identity problem and the social crisis. When his employers found out he was a Communist party member, he was sacked.
Subsequently he travelled to the USSR to write a book in praise of the Soviet paradise. He completed it just as the Nazis established their dictatorship, so he relocated to Paris and threw himself into anti-fascist work. He conducted covert missions for the party in Spain during the civil war, but while he was working there as a journalist he was captured by the Nationalists and spent weeks in prison thinking he was about to be shot. The experience transformed him. Utopian projects to remake the world at the cost of a few lives suddenly seemed less attractive when it was his life at stake. Once released, he began a protracted disengagement from the party that culminated in 1940 with the publication of Darkness at Noon, a searing attack on Marxist revolutionary thought.
By this time, and several prisons later, he had arrived in England where he established himself as a journalist, novelist, and essayist. After the war he was one of the leading figures in the attack on Stalinism. Partly thanks to his pessimism over the future of a left-leaning Europe, he settled in the US. A few years later he lost patience with politics and America, and returned to London. Apart from campaigning against capital punishment, he now concentrated on writing popular science. His critique of rationalism, as represented by science, gradually led to a form of spiritualism. In old age he was garlanded with honours and held in high esteem, until, terminally ill, he committed joint suicide with his younger, healthy wife Cynthia in 1983. Even those who had stood by him during his intellectual somersaults were shocked by this denouement.
A spate of publications after his death exposed what friends and acquaintances had long known. He was fractious and, when drunk—which he often was—violently disputatious. He was prolifically unfaithful to each of his three wives, sired an illegitimate daughter whom he refused to acknowledge, and had a record of violence against women. In my book I attempted to fit together the public man and the private life, arguing that his flight from Jewishness left him homeless and insecure. Without a nurturing community or a positive sense of who he was, he was prone to exaggerated commitment to one cause after another. Unable to love himself, he was incapable of a stable, loving relationship with another.
To admirers of Koestler, though, I had simply trashed what remained of his reputation. Writing in Prospect, in March 1999, Frederic Raphael poured doubt on Jill Craigie’s accusation. He dismissed as crudely reductive my attempt to trace Koestler’s achievements and his tribulations to his Jewish origins. Raphael scorned my alleged preoccupation with Koestler’s sexual athletics and my inability to see him as a man of his time. In those days, Raphael argued, “The abuse of women was (if it is not still) a certificate of virility in many great men.” If Koestler frequently changed his mind and held some dotty beliefs, so did many other pioneers in the arts and sciences. “If we dispraise famous men,” Raphael cautioned, “who is to be spared?”
Michael Scammell, who was then working on the authorised biography, contributed to the obloquy. Now, after 20 years of hard pounding, his book has appeared. Unfortunately for Koestler’s defenders it contains yet more scandalous revelations and proves that even in his own day his conduct was regarded as unacceptable. We are barely out of the preface before Scammell informs us that Koestler was “never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility.” He had a vulnerable side and a candour that some women found endearing, although “his chronic promiscuity led other women to detest him.” His intellect and linguistic gifts won many admirers, but he was “distressingly competitive.” Koestler always wanted to be in control and when thwarted would lose his temper, viciously. His “tyrannical ways tended to drive away people of talent and discernment (his equals, in effect), leaving mostly those content to occupy more subservient roles.”
Scammell discovered that, in his earliest surviving fiction, the young Arthur described his hero using violence in the course of a “seduction.” He cautions that Arthur wasn’t the only youth in 1920s Vienna who “wondered if a little force wasn’t needed, or even expected, as part of the mysterious ritual of sex.” But this doesn’t explain why Koestler’s penchant for using physical force on women didn’t fade with age and experience. His first marriage “foundered on his proclivity to sleep with every woman who came his way” and he did not hesitate at bedding 16-year-old girls. After his “uneasy seduction” of Mamaine Paget, later his second wife, he wrote to her half-apologetically, “Without an element of initial rape there is no delight.” His English friends in the 1940s were “genuinely taken aback” by his “single-minded pursuit of women.” Several recalled his “crude advances and predatory belief that coercion added spice to sexual intercourse.” Cyril Connolly, himself no puritan, commented that “one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife.” When he lived in Pennsylvania between 1951 and 1952, Koestler “cut a particularly wide swath among his neighbours’ wives” and was “widely hated” for his “demented conduct.”
Despite his best efforts Scammell has not managed to salvage Koestler. And what efforts. Over a period of 20 years he crossed continents, mined archives and amassed interviews, taking so long that most of those he thanks for helping him are long since dead. Ironically, his success as a biographer is the cause of his failure as an advocate. Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, observes that “the Koestler he depicts is constantly repugnant—humourless, megalomaniac, violent” and “contemptuous of actual humans.” Caldwell concludes that “Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favour of crediting Craigie’s story.” He dismisses Koestler’s politics as being “driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself.” To Louis Menand, in the New Yorker, Koestler emerges as “a slightly mad dreidel [Yiddish for spinning top] that spun out of central Europe and across the history of a bloody century.” Anne Applebaum, writing in the New York Review of Books, praises Scammell for reminding us of Koestler’s heroic role in contesting Stalinism. Yet the demise of communism has cut the ground from under him. He looks ever more like “yesterday’s man, unfashionable and obsolete.”
So the verdict is in. Koestler’s character flaws so overshadow his political acumen, personal courage, and insight as a writer that he forfeits the free pass usually granted to genius. Yet there is another reason: Scammell gives ample evidence that Koestler was simply too inconsistent to warrant a pardon on the strength of any one achievement. Having argued that the ends cannot justify the means, he defended Zionist terrorism. He denounced communism, then flirted with the CIA and McCarthyites in America. He anatomised the totalitarian mind, but ruled his household like a despot and inflicted dodgy abortions on countless women because he didn’t want children. Though applauded as a journalist, autobiographer, and essayist he wanted acclaim as a scientific thinker, yet scorned the opinion of experts. He could be loyal, gracious and generous, while also bearing grudges, splitting hairs, and indulging a monumental selfishness. Genius may excuse almost anything, but Koestler fails the test. A truly balanced account of his life would not disparage his critics or blur his misdemeanours. It would acknowledge that sometimes even the genius is as irredeemable as the human.
Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell (Faber and Faber, £25)
The final illustration of the photospread in Michael Scammell’s impressive biography of Arthur Koestler shows the bust of Koestler fashioned by Daphne Henrion. Its fate illustrates the so-called “Koestler problem” and touches wider questions about the biographer’s craft and the claims that genius has on posterity. After I published a study of Koestler in 1998 (Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind) that revealed he had raped the feminist filmmaker Jill Craigie, wife of Michael Foot, students at Edinburgh University demanded that the bust be removed from public sight. Although Koestler had endowed the university with funds (for research into the paranormal), the authorities conceded. Since then it has found a modest new home in the psychology department, but only time will tell if Scammell can succeed in restoring Koestler’s standing, if not his bust.
Arthur Koestler—who died in London in 1983, renowned, above all, for his anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon—was born into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family in Budapest in 1905. He did not enjoy a happy childhood or youth, dropping out of engineering studies at Vienna university to emigrate to Palestine because he saw Zionism as the antidote to a despised diaspora identity. He was quickly disillusioned, and after various misadventures found his métier as a journalist and returned to Europe to embark on a stellar career working for the Ullstein newspapers in Berlin. His arrival coincided with the depression and the rise of the Nazis. What he saw convinced him that communism was the answer to his identity problem and the social crisis. When his employers found out he was a Communist party member, he was sacked.
Subsequently he travelled to the USSR to write a book in praise of the Soviet paradise. He completed it just as the Nazis established their dictatorship, so he relocated to Paris and threw himself into anti-fascist work. He conducted covert missions for the party in Spain during the civil war, but while he was working there as a journalist he was captured by the Nationalists and spent weeks in prison thinking he was about to be shot. The experience transformed him. Utopian projects to remake the world at the cost of a few lives suddenly seemed less attractive when it was his life at stake. Once released, he began a protracted disengagement from the party that culminated in 1940 with the publication of Darkness at Noon, a searing attack on Marxist revolutionary thought.
By this time, and several prisons later, he had arrived in England where he established himself as a journalist, novelist, and essayist. After the war he was one of the leading figures in the attack on Stalinism. Partly thanks to his pessimism over the future of a left-leaning Europe, he settled in the US. A few years later he lost patience with politics and America, and returned to London. Apart from campaigning against capital punishment, he now concentrated on writing popular science. His critique of rationalism, as represented by science, gradually led to a form of spiritualism. In old age he was garlanded with honours and held in high esteem, until, terminally ill, he committed joint suicide with his younger, healthy wife Cynthia in 1983. Even those who had stood by him during his intellectual somersaults were shocked by this denouement.
A spate of publications after his death exposed what friends and acquaintances had long known. He was fractious and, when drunk—which he often was—violently disputatious. He was prolifically unfaithful to each of his three wives, sired an illegitimate daughter whom he refused to acknowledge, and had a record of violence against women. In my book I attempted to fit together the public man and the private life, arguing that his flight from Jewishness left him homeless and insecure. Without a nurturing community or a positive sense of who he was, he was prone to exaggerated commitment to one cause after another. Unable to love himself, he was incapable of a stable, loving relationship with another.
To admirers of Koestler, though, I had simply trashed what remained of his reputation. Writing in Prospect, in March 1999, Frederic Raphael poured doubt on Jill Craigie’s accusation. He dismissed as crudely reductive my attempt to trace Koestler’s achievements and his tribulations to his Jewish origins. Raphael scorned my alleged preoccupation with Koestler’s sexual athletics and my inability to see him as a man of his time. In those days, Raphael argued, “The abuse of women was (if it is not still) a certificate of virility in many great men.” If Koestler frequently changed his mind and held some dotty beliefs, so did many other pioneers in the arts and sciences. “If we dispraise famous men,” Raphael cautioned, “who is to be spared?”
Michael Scammell, who was then working on the authorised biography, contributed to the obloquy. Now, after 20 years of hard pounding, his book has appeared. Unfortunately for Koestler’s defenders it contains yet more scandalous revelations and proves that even in his own day his conduct was regarded as unacceptable. We are barely out of the preface before Scammell informs us that Koestler was “never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility.” He had a vulnerable side and a candour that some women found endearing, although “his chronic promiscuity led other women to detest him.” His intellect and linguistic gifts won many admirers, but he was “distressingly competitive.” Koestler always wanted to be in control and when thwarted would lose his temper, viciously. His “tyrannical ways tended to drive away people of talent and discernment (his equals, in effect), leaving mostly those content to occupy more subservient roles.”
Scammell discovered that, in his earliest surviving fiction, the young Arthur described his hero using violence in the course of a “seduction.” He cautions that Arthur wasn’t the only youth in 1920s Vienna who “wondered if a little force wasn’t needed, or even expected, as part of the mysterious ritual of sex.” But this doesn’t explain why Koestler’s penchant for using physical force on women didn’t fade with age and experience. His first marriage “foundered on his proclivity to sleep with every woman who came his way” and he did not hesitate at bedding 16-year-old girls. After his “uneasy seduction” of Mamaine Paget, later his second wife, he wrote to her half-apologetically, “Without an element of initial rape there is no delight.” His English friends in the 1940s were “genuinely taken aback” by his “single-minded pursuit of women.” Several recalled his “crude advances and predatory belief that coercion added spice to sexual intercourse.” Cyril Connolly, himself no puritan, commented that “one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife.” When he lived in Pennsylvania between 1951 and 1952, Koestler “cut a particularly wide swath among his neighbours’ wives” and was “widely hated” for his “demented conduct.”
Despite his best efforts Scammell has not managed to salvage Koestler. And what efforts. Over a period of 20 years he crossed continents, mined archives and amassed interviews, taking so long that most of those he thanks for helping him are long since dead. Ironically, his success as a biographer is the cause of his failure as an advocate. Christopher Caldwell, in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, observes that “the Koestler he depicts is constantly repugnant—humourless, megalomaniac, violent” and “contemptuous of actual humans.” Caldwell concludes that “Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favour of crediting Craigie’s story.” He dismisses Koestler’s politics as being “driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself.” To Louis Menand, in the New Yorker, Koestler emerges as “a slightly mad dreidel [Yiddish for spinning top] that spun out of central Europe and across the history of a bloody century.” Anne Applebaum, writing in the New York Review of Books, praises Scammell for reminding us of Koestler’s heroic role in contesting Stalinism. Yet the demise of communism has cut the ground from under him. He looks ever more like “yesterday’s man, unfashionable and obsolete.”
So the verdict is in. Koestler’s character flaws so overshadow his political acumen, personal courage, and insight as a writer that he forfeits the free pass usually granted to genius. Yet there is another reason: Scammell gives ample evidence that Koestler was simply too inconsistent to warrant a pardon on the strength of any one achievement. Having argued that the ends cannot justify the means, he defended Zionist terrorism. He denounced communism, then flirted with the CIA and McCarthyites in America. He anatomised the totalitarian mind, but ruled his household like a despot and inflicted dodgy abortions on countless women because he didn’t want children. Though applauded as a journalist, autobiographer, and essayist he wanted acclaim as a scientific thinker, yet scorned the opinion of experts. He could be loyal, gracious and generous, while also bearing grudges, splitting hairs, and indulging a monumental selfishness. Genius may excuse almost anything, but Koestler fails the test. A truly balanced account of his life would not disparage his critics or blur his misdemeanours. It would acknowledge that sometimes even the genius is as irredeemable as the human.
