A Kind of Greatness

Michael Scammell is to be congratulated for this magnificent biography. If you want to find out how brilliant, how selfish, how brave, how childishly promiscuous and how influential Arthur Koestler was, this is the book. If you want to know where Koestler was and when, and in the company of which woman or women, at various points during his turbulent career, you could not ask for a more serious, carefully researched and riveting text. The subtitle, stressing Koestler’s importance, is well judged too. He did more than anyone, except perhaps Solzhenitsyn later, to disenchant the world with the communist fantasy.

Scammell’s literary accountancy is excellent. All the important Koestler work receives highly competent, if intermittent, treatment. There is no certain way of balancing or blending the literary career with the rest of the subject’s biography, since they are neither the same story nor fully separable from each other. Scammell’s chosen technique is to scatter gobbets of analysis across the historical narrative. This achieves biographical coherence. It militates, however, against the book’s construction around central intellectual themes. It says much for Scammell’s writing that the reader does nevertheless emerge with a clear sense of Koestler’s main preoccupations. Where literature and history converge most crucially, in the resounding success of Darkness at Noon, the book is especially convincing.

Koestler was arguably a great man. He was, however, a disreputable man too, with a very dark side to his nature. Those with a taste for literary gossip will be strongly drawn to Scammell’s lively account of Koestler’s dealings with the French Marxist-existentialists, most crucially with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and with the philosopher of the absurd, Albert Camus. Second comes the cautious discussion of the posthumous furore sparked by Jill Craigie’s allegation that Koestler had raped her. Let us postpone the discussion of Koestler’s vast role in the defence of freedom, and reflect briefly on these two less salutary stories.

Scammell’s vivid pages on Koestler’s dealings with the existentialists did not allay the worries that have always attended my reading about them. The careless, prodigal boozing and feasting in the poverty-stricken France of 1946 seem especially vulgar in those austere circumstances. The rampant promiscuity among these educated Olympians is distasteful too. Of course, lots of people, educated or otherwise, drink too much and behave promiscuously. It is the intellectual company Koestler was prepared to keep which surprises one still.

Sartre and Beauvoir were communists. So was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book Humanism and Terror justified all communist atrocities as “historical necessity”. This ideology is what makes Koestler’s dalliance with them so jarring. Obviously the situation was nuanced. Beauvoir had enjoyed Darkness at Noon, Sartre had interpreted various other writings by Koestler as “existentialist”, and Koestler regarded Sartre’s short story “The Wall” as the best thing ever on the Spanish Civil War. Moreover, Camus was to prove a staunch anticommunist in time, in some ways the French Koestler, and personally a much nicer man. All this conceded, Koestler must have known precisely what kind of governance the Sartre–Beauvoir duet had in mind for the human race.

Scammell says Sartre was not a communist, and the Sartre–Beauvoir position was simply anti-Americanism. In fact Sartre later proclaimed Marxism the authentic philosophy of the twentieth century. If it is indeed conceivable that Darkness at Noon was crucial in saving France from communism, it is also true that Sartre’s “Marxism” plus “anti-Americanism” was invaluable to the Soviets. “Objectively”, he was a communist.

The “existentialist” dalliance thus rings not so much falsely as unpleasantly. It is possible to see Koestler during this particular excursion as a brilliant rotter who was right about communism, hobnobbing with another brilliant rotter who was wrong about it.

Fraternising with the enemy is not common in the Koestler story. The mature Koestler was usually staunch in defence of civilised governance. So was Camus, save for a brief youthful interlude in the French Communist Party. Koestler should not have given Sartre and Beauvoir the time of day. It is not enough that he later called them “The little flirts of Saint Germain des Pres” and “Peeping Toms, watching history’s debauches through a hole in the wall”.

Scammell also provides a balanced, sceptical and long-overdue account of the rape allegations which so tarnished Koestler’s reputation. Fifty years after the alleged offence, when Koestler was dead and gone, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife, claimed, at a dinner party, no less, that Koestler had raped her, an appalling allegation, even in relation to the promiscuous Koestler. The two had certainly been on a boozy pub crawl, and Koestler may well have made a pass at Craigie, as Scammell says. Indeed much of Scammell’s text groans under the weight of Koestler’s erotic antics.

In no sense, then, does Scammell play down Koestler’s voracious sexual appetite, nor his serial infidelities. Despite his charm and periodic sweetness, Koestler was often predatory and bullying in his relationships with women. This does not, however, in any way predict a disposition to rape, a point on which Scammell is emphatic. He obviously does not believe the allegations and cautiously but clearly finds for the defence, noting that the sound and fury of the case were largely a function of David Cesarani’s earlier, tendentious and very damaging biography, which Scammell dismisses: “Opinionated, thinly researched, and heavily slanted biography, masquerading as a study of Koestler’s Jewishness.”

I concur. Cesarani wanted to construe everything about Koestler in terms of his being a Jew, a subject in which Koestler seems to have lost interest in middle age. As I said in my (2000) review of Cesarani’s book, Koestler is defined by his anticommunism. From his forties onwards, Koestler seems to have been largely unconcerned as to whether his friends, colleagues, enemies or mistresses, were Gentile or Jewish. Furthermore, in his autobiographies Koestler gives the impression that as a child he was more worried about being small than anything else.

In his later years Koestler’s intellectual reputation was fading anyway. This was not a result of his writings in the philosophy of science. These were often ingenious and mostly well received, though never acclaimed like his earlier political commentary, which embraces also some magnificent biography. His scholarly status suffered badly in his declining years, deservedly, from his excursions into parapsychology, extrasensory perception and so on, subjects whose results are to date derisory. He had himself predicted the decay of his prestige, but he certainly helped it on its way. Perhaps the survival of the parapsychology work which Koestler funded at the University of Edinburgh is some kind of accolade.

The mystery, though, is why he engaged in such “research” when the game seems not worth the candle. The paradoxical answer is that it flowed from his sense of mystery. Like Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century, Koestler disliked the mechanistic entailments for humanity which seemed to flow from science. Burke’s Christianity allowed him to believe that we are divinely constituted as free beings. He did not try to reconcile his faith with science. He was content to leave science and religion to do different things.

Koestler wanted to transcend this separation. He says in The Invisible Writing, in some extraordinarily beautiful prose, that the universe is written in an invisible text, of which in rare moments of grace, we are vouchsafed a glimpse. Yet, one is led immediately to ask: who wrote the “text”? If it emerges solely from the universe itself, pantheism is implied. Pace Spinoza, pantheism seems like a dead end. If the authorship is outside the universe, the answer is God. In which case the Judaic religions have strong claims on our attention. Just why this intermittent revelation, if that is not too large a noun, is not reconcilable with Judaism or Christianity, Koestler does not say. My guess is that devout practitioners of these faiths probably get much further into the elusive “text” in question than Koestler ever could have. His parapsychology is the hopeless quest for a science which will show that human beings have a spiritual nature, that the gulf which Burke was prepared to leave un-bridged can be closed.

We may condemn alike, if we wish, Koestler’s moral frailty and the insubstantial obsessions of his later years. He certainly misconceived his comparative advantages, as economists call them, and it is hard not to conclude that Koestler would have been better off leaving parapsychology to the eccentrics and staying with the philosophy of science or better still extending his enormous contribution to the theory of despotism.

For Darkness at Noon, reinforced by The Yogi and the Commissar and The Trail of the Dinosaur, and for his enthralling autobiographical writing in Scum of the Earth, The Invisible Writing and others, as well as for his work with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, all those who live in free societies will be forever in Koestler’s debt. Sadly, he abandoned his study of human governance at the height of his powers (“Cassandra has grown hoarse and is due for a vocational change”) and the decline in reputation he predicted for himself was set in motion.

Koestler left the anticommunist work half-done and a quarter of a century after his death it is still far from complete, though Leszek Kolakowski’s magnificent three-volume Main Currents of Marxism delivered some further devastating blows. The central trouble is that though communism is materially dead with respect to governance in the free societies, its intellectual nerve centre, its ideological brain, still commands much of the conceptual terrain, a dire circumstance, fed in the free societies largely by public finance. Easy public money has served to keep alive, long after its sell-by date, Marxist theory itself, and has, since its demise, preserved its sour and carping residua—what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—in the shape of political correctness, neo-Marxist sociology of education, guilt-ridden accounts of Western history and of relations between the sexes and races and so on. The intellectual energy formerly wasted in these fields has now shifted its attention to modern pantheism and earth worship. These obsessions, too, call for a Koestler-style broadside.

His biographer too suffers, however, from some of the same mistakes which plagued Koestler. Scammell follows Koestler in calling German National Socialism “Fascism”. This usage, which should have long been repudiated among anticommunists, originated as a Soviet ploy for the confusion of understanding. The aim was to divert attention away from the socialist character of the Hitlerite system. The “Fascism” label also subsumed Fascism proper, as in Mussolini’s Italy. This too was a socialist phenomenon, though a much less sinister and menacing one than the Nazi or communist horrors. Linking Nazism and Fascism as both cognate and anti-socialist forms of governance was a device of genius, a verbal trap from which the intellectual opposition to communism has still not yet fully extricated itself.

Strangely enough, the truth is not hard to come by. Mussolini was a former Marxist and in many ways distinct from Hitler. He was a corrupt adventurer, but not an anti-Semite and he had no real taste for murder for its own sake. In this sense he was no blood-brother to the Nazis. He was, however, a former socialist. Hitler remained a socialist by habit and conviction. He spent the last few days before his suicide mouthing platitudes about the rottenness of capitalism. Antony Flew has often insisted to me that Hitler intended a much more intense socialisation of the economy in the event of a German victory.

I know no reference in Koestler to the thesis associated today with Richard Pipes and Paul Johnson, to the effect that Nazism and Fascism were Marxist heresies. It is also apparent that the whole intellectual pathology is kept alive by the deadening influence of the Left–Right taxonomy. This latter is the central conceptual apparatus blocking our advance to an understanding of the crucial homogeneity, in its central features, whatever the incidental variations, of the totalitarian phenomenon.

Twenty years after the fall of communism, which I celebrated in Warsaw, not only with rejoicing Polish friends, but also with Roger Scruton and Norman Stone, the West has still not overcome the crippling effects of the Soviet control of the terms of the debate.

The irony is that Koestler took the first steps himself in the clearing-up exercise we still so badly need. At the Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Berlin in 1950 he gave an electrifying speech which proposed that the old antinomies of socialism versus capitalism and of Left versus Right were outdated. The term “Left” in particular was a noxious anachronism which implied a continuous spectrum between liberals and tyranny. This had the effect of paralysing the resistance to wickedness.

Here Koestler was partly in error and partly breaking radically new ground. He was wrong that the opposition between socialism and capitalism was dead. Today it seems rather the case that once the totalitarian threat had been checked, there was no longer any room for socialism at the societal level. The tension now, for example, is between generally market economies, with large and often inefficient socialist sectors, and a hypothetical free enterprise on a societal basis, that is a free market economy with no socialist sectors. Even so, for me, the pertinacity of these remarks, made sixty years ago in front of some of the world’s most brilliant anticommunist intellectuals, is in strong contrast with the failure of the debate to move forward much since.

Koestler himself had undergone a certain evolution before this innovating speech. He had observed, initially, that Soviet Russia, by all the classical criteria, was a regime of the extreme Right.

It is also noticeable that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four there is not a hint of “Left” or “Right”. This suggests that in the late 1940s Orwell had come to much the same conclusions as Koestler. Of course the book is a lament for the death of capitalism, though Orwell probably did not notice this.

The problem in my view is that Koestler had not done the necessary homework on capitalism. Koestler’s writings on politics suffer from the same weakness as those of his friends Orwell and Camus. All three men rightly put personal freedom at the very centre of civilisation itself. They all detested communism and were reviled for this by the Marxists who still abounded in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet the weakness in their thinking reflects the fundamental inadequacy of their understanding of markets. It is noticeable that Hayek does not figure in Scammell’s text. The index carries not a single reference. There is some limp, superficial stuff on Hayek in Koestler’s The Invisible Writing, suggesting that Koestler had not really understood its huge import. Orwell’s response to The Road to Serfdom was even worse: “The trouble with competitions is that somebody loses them.” Camus’s brilliant, unanswerable attack on communism in The Rebel concentrates entirely on its monstrous cruelty, dogmatism and appetite for conquest. There is not a trace of real political economy.

Today, in terms of how often the words left, right and centre occur, the Left–Right spectrum is as entrenched as ever. A shift has nevertheless taken place. In the free societies there is now endless talk about “centre Right” and “centre Left”. The football metaphor suggested here, for my money establishes the right tone at just about the appropriate level. Let us close on that most dangerous of notes—let us say what our author might have said, if he had said it, which he did not. Or perhaps, more implausibly still, let us try to think what he might have said today, were he alive and well.

Koestler, we have admitted, was not fully equipped to speak on the political economy of totalitarian governance. As Scammell points out, however, one of the themes of Darkness at Noon is that Nazism and communism are converging. It is amazing, given his brilliant insight as to the essential homogeneity of the totalitarian zeitgeist, that someone with so extensive a knowledge of psychology as Koestler had not noticed its potential for the construction of a taxonomy of totalitarian variants.

Totalitarianism involves the takeover of a nation’s or empire’s governance by groups of people in the grip of fanatical and absurd ideas. The dogmas they entrench are adhered to with intransigent intolerance. The policies they pursue always generate resistance or apathy. There is always a degree of paranoia on the part of the government. In the last days of Nazism, for example, Hitler accused the German nation of lack of devotion to the cause. The underlying paranoia was starting to focus on the Germans themselves.

Communism and Nazism can be taxonomised in terms of variations in their management of paranoia. Communism, being based on a universalist creed, has a bigger initial problem than Nazism, because it promises a general utopia which is forever unrealisable. This renders the entire population suspect in the eyes of the totalitarian management. As the history of the Soviet Union and Communist China shows, no one is safe from the intractable suspiciousness of the state, neither the senior politicos nor the humblest of poor families. It is a murder state from the start, predicated on the persecution of the populace over which it presides.

Nazism, with its particularist ideology, its exaltation of Aryan man and so on, and its animus against non-Aryans, feeds its paranoia by its persecution of Jews, gypsies and Slavs. By celebrating and encouraging its native population, Nazism postpones the huge resistance that communism with its more general paranoia encounters from the start. The communists had to construct a murder machine from the beginning. The Nazi version did not get fully under way until Hitler had launched Germany into war, against those he despised on ideological grounds. It seems overwhelmingly likely that had the Nazis managed to build their empire in the East, it would have generated as much hatred or more than Soviet communism did, not only among persecuted foreigners, but also among Germans. The difference in the management of the underlying paranoia explains why Nazism was more popular, at least for the first ten years, than any communist society, anywhere, has ever been.

I still regard myself as greatly indebted to Koestler. As a teenager during the 1960s, I was on a scholarship to a minor public school, a boy from an unusually poor home, my mother having been widowed in 1942 and bringing up two sons on a wretchedly small pension. I do not recall the feelings of inferiority which Koestler speaks of. I most certainly do recall the envy I felt for the much more comfortable circumstances of all the other boys. I was already inclined to the Labour Party version of socialism.

One day when I was about fifteen, in the public library in Hanwell, in West London, I picked up Darkness at Noon from the shelf. I think I read half of it on the spot and came back and finished it the next day. I did not understand it all, but the one sure thing, from that day on, was that I would never be a communist. In those days the communists always had people posted in the universities to pick up hopefuls. Several tried to recruit me when I was at Durham, but they ran straight into my Koestler-created defences. Like Koestler, I think history is open and that lives can be changed by accidental circumstances—if they are accidental, I should also add.

I am hugely grateful to Michael Scammell for enlarging my knowledge of this extraordinary man.

Dennis O’Keeffe’s recent book Edmund Burke is reviewed in this issue of Quadrant.