Ivan Sanders
Going His Own Way
Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of
a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. New York: Random House, 2009,
689 pp., illustrated.
Michael Scammell's biography of Arthur Koestler is an extraordinarily
thorough, densely detailed, and still lucid and literate account of the man,
the writer and thinker. He is one biographer who almost knows more about his
subject than the subject himself ever did—and this despite the fact that
Koestler wrote two volumes of autobiography, a book of memoirs and dozens
of personal essays. Because of the prodigious amount of research he has done
and the vast material he unearthed over a long period of time, Scammell is in
a position not only to catch Koestler's factual errors but to reflect on the
curious omissions and lacunae in his versions of his life story.
The Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler is one of those literary figures who
over the years has been either overpraised or underrated. He is still often
referred to as one of the great minds of the twentieth century, a preeminent
public intellectual of the nineteen-forties, fifties and sixties, a formidable
debater and polemicist, and a worthy contemporary of Sartre, Camus, Orwell,
Huxley, Malraux, all of whom he knew well. But by a different estimate, his
fiction is too calculated and idea-driven, his books on scientific theory and
history are those of a gifted dilettante, and his forays, late in life, into the realm
of parapsychology, the work of an eccentric and a crank. After the shock of
Koestler and his wife Cynthia's double suicide wore off, troubling questions
began to be raised about his role in his wife's decision to end her life. (Unlike
Koestler who was seventy-seven and dying of leukemia when he chose ‘selfdeliverance'
in 1983, Cynthia was only fifty-five and in good health.) In the
years that followed, Koestler's reputation was further damaged by revelations,
in print, about his unruly private life, his heavy drinking, his temper tantrums,
and his appalling treatment of women. All this contributed to a turning away
from the man and his works. Koestler published more than thirty books, but
except for his masterpiece, Darkness at Noon, which has been continuously in
print since its publication in 1940, few of his books are available and read.
Michael Scammell notes that
the centenary of Koestler's birth in 2005 was virtually ignored in Britain and the
United States. The few articles that appeared in the press were short and apologetic,
and two small conferences held to discuss his work took place not in Britain, the
United States, France, or Germany where his influence and fame had been at their
greatest, but in tiny Hungary…
The unavoidable question: "Why read Koestler now?" is raised by Scammell
himself early in his book. We might add another question: Why publish a
monumental, close to 700-page biography of Koestler now? Scammell's
answers are many and they are compelling enough to reawaken interest in
both Koestler and his oeuvre.
[...]
Ivan Sanders
is Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's East Central European Center.
He is currently at work on a book on Central European Jewish writers and literature.
