BIOGRAPHY: JOHN MONTAGUEreviews Koestler: The Indispensable IntellectualBy Michael Scammell Faber Faber, 689pp. £25
THIS IS A formidable book, well researched and, if not stylistically glittering, well marshalled. After the lion of Solzhenitsyn, to use Isaiah Berlin's metaphor for genius, Michael Scammell tries to track the footprints of that wily fox, Arthur Koestler, through many houses in many countries, many causes and, it seems, many women. It is as if the Cassandra-like voice of his most famous work, Darkness at Noon, cohabited with Casanova.
And then there is Koestler as cosmic reporter. In the mid-1960s, when I was teaching at Berkeley in California, he came to give a series of lectures. I found them fascinating, partly because they were not literary but an almost scientific attempt to analyse Inspiration. And the audience that came to hear them was very varied, including not only the usual English or arts faculty but also a fair sprinkling from the sciences, for which Berkeley was not unknown.
But it was Koestler's presence itself that was most arresting: the smallish, rather stocky figure; the almost solid dark hair; the harsh voice with its Hungarian accent. He was an Ost Juden, an eastern European or Ashkenazi Jew, from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Shuttling in his childhood between Magyar-speaking Budapest and German-speaking Vienna, he developed an early facility for languages. (Later he would master English and French but, while he had some Yiddish, he would never really learn Hebrew, despite periods in Palestine and Israel.) But surprisingly, he had gone to a Polytechnic instead of the Gymnasium, meaning he had had a partly scientific rather than a formal academic training, which may explain the scientific bent of those Berkeley lectures, but which would also get him into trouble later on.
Koestler went to Palestine as a young man. He hated the puritan atmosphere of his kibbutz, but he began to find his feet as an international journalist. “As an Austro-Hungarian Jew writing for a mainly German audience . . . Koestler showed sympathy for both militant Zionism and Arab nationalism . . .”, and he interviewed people such as King Faisal of Iraq. Later he developed a passion for Jerusalem, which he hoped to make the setting for a Zola-esque series of novels. “What a country for a writer,” he wrote to a woman friend. “I can’t understand that Hemingway and co haven’t discovered it yet.”
He also had a sneaking sympathy for the “hard men” of Jewish Palestine, the Irgun, and the Stern gang who had recently assassinated Britain’s colonial secretary, Lord Moyne. But in his later years he espoused the notion that the Ashkenazim were really descended from the Khazars, “a mysterious people from the north Caucasus who had converted to Judaism . . . ”
If Koestler believed that this theory would remove the racial basis for anti-Semitism, he underestimated its hydra-headed tenacity. The Thirteenth Tribewas Koestler's last book, and it stirred a hornet's nest. Anti-Semites who had denounced the Jews for a supposed racial inferiority could now seize on his views to argue that Ashkenazi Jews had no "right of return" to Israel, since they were not members of "the chosen race". And many fellow Jews were offended by his use of that term, which they believed "reflected the language not of the Bible but of anti-Semitism. The words in the Old Testament were 'the chosen people'. The Jews were a people chosen to receive the law . . . there was nothing racial or exclusive about the faith."
In any case, Koestler was something of an ideological weathervane. After a temporary disillusion with Zionism, he turned towards communism, even staying in the USSR – “the new Zion, the Soviet Union”. He adored the Moscow Underground and the Dnieper Dam, but his most pleasant Soviet interlude was his meeting with the black American writer Langston Hughes, who was working on an account of “Soviet Negroes”, the dark-skinned inhabitants of central Asia. The easygoing Hughes, with his jazz records, was amused by the stern and industrious Koestler.
KOESTLER'S SPANISH adventure was part of this communist period, and it led to jail: "Malaga was the first of at least a dozen cells that Koestler was to occupy over the next five years." And as his biographer further says, "Koestler was the only significant writer to stare death in the face in Spain and return to write about it". Still, his disillusionment was gradual, but the censorship of Red Daysand the show trials would lead to books such as The God that Failed, until he almost seemed an apologist for the West.
The chapters on post-war Paris are almost hilarious. I thought the Dublin of my youth was rollicking and rough, but alcohol and politics made for a much headier potion in the Latin Quarter. Sartre, and also Simone de Beauvoir, were pro-Soviet, a system Koestler was abandoning. The French translation of Darkness at Noonsold half a million copies, and may have swayed a referendum of 1946, according to François Mauriac. Yet Koestler was denounced by Joliot Curie and the communist press as a traitor and a Trotskyite.
But the Gide of Return from the USSRwas an admirer, as was Malraux. The writer as a philosophewas a category Koestler recognised, and the existentialists, especially, loved to dispute long into the night. After one hairy nightclub session fuelled by vodka andchampagne, with Russian music in the background, blows were struck. Legend has it that Koestler decked Sartre, but actually it was his pal, Camus, to whom he gave a black eye, because Camus was smooching with his girl.
Beauvoir would go to bed with Koestler (an unsatisfactory experience), and true to form, she would write about it in one of her autobiographies and in her roman à clef, Les Mandarins.
I met Koestler again during the time of The Thirteenth Tribe, not long before his death by suicide, at a brunch in the London house of Brian Inglis, who shared Koestler's views on parapsychology. I spoke to him of his Californian lectures, but he disparaged them, saying he had been only feeling his way. And we talked of Sartre, whom neither of us seemed to really like – no, trust – and he regretted he hadn't punched him, an unexpected line of argument in stylish company. I was impressed by his dark humour, his surprising modesty, but, above all, by his melancholy.
THE MAIN COMPLAINT of women was that he treated them rough before adopting the missionary position and embracing them with a regretful tenderness. Beauvoir maintained that he drank her tears. "Without an initial element of rape, there is no delight," he declared. He also preferred "open" relationships: "I take great liberties in my private life and concede the same liberties, by mutual agreement." While admitting that "this leads sometimes to somewhat painful conclusions" he also asserts that "it gives more basic stability to a relationship than things done on the sly". But he always talked and worked well with women, and his last wife paid him the ultimate compliment of not wishing to live without him, performing a kind of suttee. And an earlier wife told her lover, Camus, that she would kill herself if Koestler ever left her.
He found another home in England, where he formed friendships with writers as diverse as EM Forster and George Orwell. Orwell, like Koestler, had undergone the Spanish civil war and observed Stalin's purges. And Koestler's salute to Orwell on receiving the manuscript of Animal Farmis an extraordinarily perceptive homage: "Envious congratulations. This is a glorious and heart-breaking allegory; it has the poesy of a fairytale and the precision of a chess problem. Reviews will say that it ranks with Swift, and I shall agree with them."
But the person who understood Koestler best seems to have been the sybaritic Cyril Connolly: “ . . . as a writer he is perhaps only a journalist of genius, but I am afraid he is much more, a dynamo generating just the energy which the enlightened left had almost despaired of. Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long one could not trust him . . . with one’s wife, one’s best friend, one’s manuscripts or one’s wine merchant . . . yet I believe he is one of the most powerful forces for good in the country.”
A few years ago, finding ourselves in Budapest for literary reasons, we were advised to visit a museum like no other. Called "The House of Terror", it was a belle époquemansion in one of the most sumptuous quarters of that lordly city: 60 Andrassy Street, near where Koestler was born and where he would later meet poet pals such as Joseph and Tibor Déry.
We had already registered that the Hungarians in general seemed at once beautiful and sombre, terse to the point of surliness when confronted with strangers. And we could well imagine why this should be so, considering their long, sad history. Nevertheless we were shocked by 60 Andrassy Street. Inside, the rooms were plain, with the ground floor dedicated to the years of communist oppression, and a subterranean level to the Nazi occupation, complete with cells, torture chambers, an execution room, and ordinary-looking offices for those in charge.
But it was the photographs that disturbed us most, wall upon wall of them, thousands of victims. And then, at the end, the Wall of the Victimisers, photos of the betrayers, torturers and guards, many of whom would still be alive, perhaps walking down the elegant expanse of Andrassy Street itself. Who would not be melancholy, with a legacy like this?
John Montague is a poet. His memoir, The Pear is Ripe, and his collected stories, A Ball of Fire, were recently published by the Liberties Press
