Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: Born Today- Author Arthur Koestler- The New Yorker

Koestler was the prototype of the rootless cosmopolitan. The history of twentieth-century Europe made him that way.CREDITFLOC’H

Arthur Koestler was arrested by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the city of Málaga on February 9, 1937. Koestler had come to Spain, in the midst of the Civil War, as a correspondent for a British paper called the News Chronicle, and although Málaga had been abandoned by Republican troops and most of its inhabitants several days earlier, and although the reporters Koestler was travelling with had fled, he had stayed behind. Why is not clear. Michael Scammell, in his compendious new biography, “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House; $35), suggests a number of possibilities: Koestler felt loyal to the acting British consul, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who had a house in the city and with whom he had become friendly; he was disgusted by the cowardice of the deserters and wanted to show bravery himself; he couldn’t face the thought of leaving his typewriter behind; and he hoped to get a really big scoop. These motives—loyalty, courage, obsessiveness, and ambition—are all plausible, because they are all characteristic of the man.

He paid a price. The officer who arrested him, Captain Luis Bolin, had sworn, based on things that Koestler had already published about the Franco insurgency, “to shoot K. like a mad dog” if he ever got hold of him. Koestler was taken first to the Málaga jailhouse, which was crammed with prisoners picked up in the city and the surrounding villages during the Fascist advance. From his cell he could hear men being escorted outside to be shot, sometimes fifty at a time. In the week following the fall of the city, six hundred prisoners were executed. After a few days, he was transferred to Seville, to a prison that had been built by the Republican government and was now in the hands of the Nationalists.

He was placed in solitary confinement. For many weeks, he was not allowed out of his cell, a chamber six and a half paces long. He was verbally abused by the guards, ignored by the prison authorities, and led to believe that he had been sentenced to death. At night, he listened to men crying for their mothers as they were dragged out of their cells to be shot. Once, he heard a priest, accompanied by guards, going from cell to cell leading prisoners out to be executed. When they reached his door, the priest began to fumble at the bolt. “No, not this one,” a guard said, and they moved on.

He considered suicide, and starved himself for weeks in the hope of simulating a heart condition that might get him into the prison infirmary. He eventually managed to get books from the prison library—the first one handed to him was a Spanish translation of the autobiography of John Stuart Mill—and he was allowed into the yard, where he got to know some of the other political prisoners. But he was given no reason to believe that he would be freed or that his life would be spared.

Meanwhile, Chalmers Mitchell had made his way to Gibraltar, where he telegraphed the News Chronicle about Koestler’s imprisonment, and an international effort was begun to secure his release. William Randolph Hearst called Koestler’s arrest an “unacceptable infringement of the rights of journalists to carry out their profession.” The French government was urged to intervene, and Koestler’s wife, Dorothee, enlisted British notables in the cause. The National Union of Journalists, in Britain, passed a resolution demanding that the British government intercede, and fifty-six Members of Parliament signed a letter in Koestler’s support. Finally, following negotiations involving the League of Nations, the Red Cross, and the Vatican, a prisoner exchange was arranged. Koestler was taken to Gibraltar and remanded to the custody of British authorities on May 14th, after ninety-four days in captivity.

He returned to England to find himself famous. Three and a half years later, he published “Darkness at Noon,” his classic novel about a man confined, interrogated, and executed in a Communist prison. Though the book did not do well in England, it was an enormous best-seller in the United States and, after the end of the Second World War, in France, and then around the world. It made Koestler financially secure for the rest of his life, and it has never gone out of print.

Koestler went on to publish several volumes of autobiography: “Scum of the Earth” (1941), “Arrow in the Blue” (1952), and “The Invisible Writing” (1954)—all popular successes. He produced other novels, including “The Gladiators,” based on Spartacus’ slave revolt (1939); “Arrival and Departure” (1943), about a young revolutionary who escapes from a Fascist prison; and “Thieves in the Night” (1946), a story set in Palestine. These books had an uneven reception. Isaiah Berlin thought “Thieves in the Night” “a detestable and vulgar book”; Clement Greenberg, in Partisan Review, was more critical. He was intensively involved with anti-Communist organizations after the war, notably the Congress for Cultural Freedom; but in 1955 he more or less retired from politics and began writing popular books on science, among them “The Sleepwalkers” (1959), “The Ghost in the Machine” (1967), and “The Case of the Midwife Toad” (1971).

Koestler’s books explained science, but they also promoted his own views, and these inclined toward the heterodox. Among his enthusiasms were the Lamarckian theory of evolution (the belief that acquired characteristics can be inherited), extrasensory perception, levitation (he bought a sophisticated weighing machine for performing experiments), the cosmic significance of coincidences, and Eastern spiritual teachings, which he believed in theoretically but which he found, upon contact, somewhat alien to his temperament.

In 1976, he published “The Thirteenth Tribe,” a book purporting to prove that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of eighth-century converts, the Khazars, who immigrated to Europe from the Caucasus. The book was a best-seller in the United States. Koestler, who was Jewish, claimed that his argument refuted anti-Semitism by showing that European Jews were not related to the Jews whom some anti-Semites blame for the killing of Christ. But the book was popular with Arabs, since it implied that European Jews settling in Israel were returning to the wrong homeland, and with neo-Nazis, since it suggested that Diaspora Jews constituted a pseudo nation constructed on a racial myth, and that Jews should either immigrate to Israel or assimilate—which is, in fact, what Koestler himself believed.

In 1983, afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and chronic lymphatic leukemia, Koestler committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates with alcohol. His third wife, Cynthia, killed herself alongside him; she was fifty-five, and in good health. Koestler left virtually his entire estate, four hundred thousand pounds, to fund an academic chair in parapsychology, and there is today a Koestler Parapsychology Unit in the psychology department at the University of Edinburgh. Its Web site announces the recent award of a grant to study “alleged poltergeist experiences.”

Covering this multifarious body of work—more than thirty books and hundreds of articles, many highly fugitive, in all sorts of papers and journals—is actually the easier part of a biographer’s task. The hard part is keeping up with the subject himself. Koestler was the prototype of the rootless cosmopolitan. History made him that way. He was born in Budapest in 1905, but his family fled when the short-lived Communist government fell, in 1919. They moved to Vienna (Koestler’s mother was from a prominent Austrian Jewish family), where Koestler attended the Technische Hochschule. In 1925, after his father’s business collapsed, he was expelled for nonpayment of fees. He had been involved in Zionist organizations in Vienna, and he moved to Palestine, where he began his career as a journalist.

After several years spent travelling around the Middle East as a reporter, he worked for a year in Paris, then moved to Berlin. He arrived on September 14, 1930, the same day the National Socialist Party made its great gains in the Reichstag elections. He became the science editor at a major newspaper in Berlin. He was let go, for reasons that are unclear, in 1932, and he travelled through the Soviet Union, working on a book, and visited many of the republics, including Turkmenistan, in Central Asia. By the end of the trip, it was not safe to return to Germany, so he moved to Paris, which is where he met his first wife. He was living in Paris when he embarked on his Spanish adventure. Later on, he lived in France, Great Britain, and the United States, where he owned a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He travelled, in search of esoteric wisdom, to India and Japan. He even took a trip, as a reporter on the Graf Zeppelin, in 1931, to the North Pole.

Koestler wrote in German (the original language of “Darkness at Noon”) and English. He spoke Hungarian, Russian, Spanish, and French, too. (Hebrew gave him trouble; characteristically, he blamed the language.) He was, in his own phrase, the “Casanova of causes,” from Zionism to the campaign against capital punishment, and he donated generously to many of them. He maintained lifelong relationships (including the occasional feud) with the writers, scientists, and political activists he met in the various places he visited. And he was a social and sexual torpedo. Academics generally avoided him, but he socialized and debated—alcohol, generously administered, was a necessary lubricant and invariably made him obstreperous and sometimes violent—with nearly everyone else in midcentury intellectual circles, from George Orwell and Jean-Paul Sartre to Whittaker Chambers and Timothy Leary. He was married three times, and he had literally hundreds of affairs. He was the sort of person who records his liaisons in a notebook.

Scammell would therefore be entirely justified if he felt (a) proud and (b) exhausted after completing his biographical task, which has taken him, he says, to fourteen countries on three continents over a span of twenty years. (Scammell’s previous book, a prize-winning biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was published in 1984.) Just getting the file cards in order would have challenged Hercules, if Hercules had been literate. Other reviewers may second-guess Scammell’s take on, say, Zionist fraternities in interwar Vienna, but not this one. “Koestler” seems a prodigy of research, in many languages, and a scrupulous piece of fair-minded advocacy.

Still, there are challenges that even Hercules—even a learned and polyglot Hercules—might not have met with complete success. From 1914 until the Cold War froze the world temporarily into position, Europe was, politically, economically, and intellectually, a continent in extremis. It was not just a volatile and combustible place; it was an extremely dangerous place. For Koestler, violent political sectarianism was not a noisy backdrop to his books. It was the world in which he worked and risked his life.

He was a person who, in the course of his career, managed to attract the interest of the Gestapo, the Sûreté Nationale, M.I.5, and almost certainly the N.K.V.D. (He also had relations with the C.I.A., but these were mainly friendly.) He was imprisoned in three countries. He was living in France when the Second World War began, and in October, 1939, was arrested and placed in an internment camp, from which he was eventually released. When Hitler invaded France, in 1940, he was arrested again, only barely managing to escape to England. (In Marseilles, he encountered his friend Walter Benjamin, who gave him half of his morphine tablets, the pills that Benjamin used shortly afterward to kill himself.) When “Darkness at Noon” was published, that December, Koestler was in solitary confinement, as an undesirable alien, in a British jail. Arrogant as he could be about it, and annoying as it might be to people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, even during the Occupation, led fairly cautious and secure lives, Koestler truly possessed street cred.

To capture Koestler biographically, therefore, you need to capture all of this (plus what was going on in Moscow under Stalin and in Palestine under the British Mandate)—not only the multitude of personalities and the internecine details of organizational intrigue, which crowd the pages of this book, and with which Scammell is admirably methodical, but also the sense of history being made, the moral and ideological weather, the existential stakes. There are two difficulties. The first is simply the demands that the material places on narrative technique. Scammell is a clear writer, but he is not a dramatic one. Koestler was, preëminently, both—and that is the second difficulty. The best biographer of the first half, the adventurous half, of Koestler’s life is Koestler, which means that Scammell is often in the unhappy position of describing events that Koestler himself has already written about brilliantly and grippingly.

One of Koestler’s finest books, for example, is the account of his Spanish imprisonment, “Dialogue with Death,” published in England in 1942. The book is not really about politics. Koestler despised the Fascists, but he saw little to respect in the Republicans, either. The book is about what it is like to face one’s imminent execution—it was admired by Sartre, among others, as a lucid statement of the existentialist situation—and, in this respect, it is a stranger and stronger book than “Darkness at Noon.”

Koestler’s Spanish experiences obviously informed “Darkness at Noon,” but the novel has more to do with the fatal self-deceptions of Communist dialectics than it does with the sheer apprehension of death. And “Darkness at Noon” is a roman à thèse, in which every character is a type—the disillusioned old revolutionary, the soulless apparatchik, the doomed idealist. “Dialogue with Death” is just a report on a series of mostly horrible events, and the author is under no obligation to organize them, or even to make sense of them.

So a great deal of the accidental and absurd in life gets represented in the book—though, since it is life under immense pressure, the results are sometimes tragic or grotesque. One of the prison orderlies, Manuel, whom Koestler describes as “a little degenerate cripple,” rumored to have been sentenced to life for “some sexual offense that had had a fatal outcome,” is on duty with a particularly sadistic warder whom Koestler calls “Captain Bligh”:

At half-past ten I heard subdued whispering, tittering, and very odd snuffling and smacking noises in the corridor.

I looked through the spy-hole.

In the empty, lighted corridor a scene was being enacted, strange as a hallucination: little Manuel and Captain Bligh were playing at “horses.” Manuel was the horse, and had a string tied round him; Captain Bligh was holding the reins. They paraded like this up and down the whole length of the corridor; I could see them whenever they passed the line of vision of my spy-hole. The warder was holding a whip, he called out, “Gee up!” at every step and laid on with it. Manuel tittered, and whimpered with pain by turns. After having traversed the corridor three times, horse and driver went out into the empty patio. I could hear the crack of the whip and Manuel’s whimpers. Then they came back.

This was about eleven. Then I fell asleep. Next day I heard that three prisoners had been executed shortly after midnight.

And there is the night during Koestler’s stay in the Málaga slaughterhouse when he wakes up and hears a prisoner singing the “Internationale”:

I had read descriptions of German prisons and concentration camps. The singing of the “International” as a political protest or as a last demonstration was frequently mentioned in them; but despite my profound respect for the German martyrs, such passages had always struck me as a little melodramatic and implausible. Now I myself was hearing a man who knew that he was going to die singing the “International.” It was not melodramatic at all; the hoarse, unmelodious voice sounded wretched and pitiable. He repeated the refrain two or three times, dragging it out to make it last longer, to delay the moment when silence would return. I got up and posted myself by the door, and, my teeth chattering, raised my fist in the salute I had learned at meetings in Valencia and Madrid. And I felt that in the adjoining cells all the others were standing at their doors like myself and solemnly raising their fists in a farewell salute.

He sang. I could see him before me, with his unshaven, battered face and tortured eyes.

He sang. They would hear him outside and come and tear him to pieces.

He sang. It was unbearable. How we all loved him.

But none of us joined in the singing—fear was too strong.

There is no good way to retell these stories.

“We were never more free than during the German occupation,” Sartre wrote in 1944. The remark seems a little self-dramatizing, a little unearned. But one doesn’t feel that way about the words that Koestler published two years earlier: “Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house in Seville and, strangely enough, I feel that I have never been so free as I was then.” When he and the other prisoners knew that they were going to die, he says, and no longer feared dying, “at such moments we were free—men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.”

Still, there is some duplicity at work in “Dialogue with Death.” It peeks through in the passage about the singer, in the phrase “raised my fist in the salute I had learned at meetings in Valencia and Madrid.” Koestler didn’t learn the “Internationale” or the raised fist in Spain, and his sense of solidarity with the condemned man was not merely fraternal. Contrary to what William Randolph Hearst and the fifty-six M.P.s may have believed, Koestler was not really a journalist. He was exactly what Franco suspected him of being: a Communist agent.

Koestler became a Communist in Berlin, in 1931, but he remained undercover, in order not to compromise his position at the newspaper, where it was felt he could be of most use to the Party. Once more, his own account of this chapter in his life is inimitable: it appears in what is, after “Darkness at Noon,” probably the most widely known thing he wrote, the apologia for his Communist past in “The God That Failed” (1949)—a collection of essays by eminent former Communists, including Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone, which became a staple of Cold War literature.

Scammell does not even attempt to retell much of this episode. He has a cursory account of Koestler’s assignation in the Schneidemühl paper mill with the boss of the underground Apparat N, and of his reports to the mysterious Edgar, delivered under the nom de guerre Ivan Steinberg. He passes over the story of Koestler’s recruitment of von E., the son of a high-ranking diplomat, as an informant. Koestler always believed that he was fired from the newspaper because von E., panicked by his own role in passing information to a foreign power, turned him in. And one misses, too, touches such as Koestler’s delightful explanation of how, in Party meetings, the problem of “the sexual urge” was solved by the operation of the dialectic, which, correctly applied, reveals that the counterrevolutionary bourgeois institution of marriage is transformed into a progressive one in a healthy proletarian society. (“Have you understood, Comrade, or shall I repeat my answer in more concrete terms?”)

It was not because he was a Jew that Koestler did not return to Berlin at the end of 1933. It was because he was a Communist. The Reichstag fire, in February, 1933, for which Communist agents were blamed, led to a suspension of civil liberties (Hitler had come to power in January) and a crackdown on Communists. When he got to Paris, Koestler became an operative in the apparat of another German exile, the formidable Willi Münzenberg. It was Münzenberg’s idea to send Koestler to Spain, in order to find evidence, to be used by the Party, of German and Italian support for Franco’s insurgency. And it was Münzenberg who arranged, through an editor at the News Chronicle, also a Party member, for Koestler’s press credentials, to be used as a cover.

When Koestler’s wife campaigned for his release, she had both to conceal his Party affiliation and, at the same time, to fight against the Party’s own preference, which was that Koestler be kept in prison as long as possible, or even executed by Franco, as a martyr to the anti-Fascist cause. Thus the somewhat incredible consequence: a novel about a Communist prison that was inspired by an experience in a Fascist prison and written by a man being held, as a suspected Communist, in a French internment camp.

“Darkness at Noon” is based on the Moscow show trials of the late nineteen-thirties. Orwell was an ardent admirer of the novel; he reviewed it when it appeared, and it was undoubtedly on his mind when he started writing “1984.” Orwell’s Big Brother is prefigured in Koestler’s Stalin figure, called No. 1, whose picture hangs on every wall, and the interrogation scenes between Winston Smith and the Machiavellian O’Brien recall the two interrogations of Rubashov, the old Bolshevik, that structure “Darkness at Noon”: with the cynical Ivanov, and then, after Ivanov himself has been executed, with the doctrinaire Gletkin, who methodically finishes the job. Like Winston’s, Rubashov’s last mental image, at the moment he is shot, is the face of No. 1.

It is certain that many of Stalin’s victims in the show trials were physically tortured; Rubashov is not tortured. But many were broken in precisely the way Rubashov is broken in the novel, by the method known as “the conveyor”—hours of interrogation under bright lights in conditions of extreme sleep deprivation. After a week, most prisoners agreed to confess to whatever was put before them. Koestler was not interrogated in Spain, but he learned a great deal about the treatment of political prisoners in the Soviet Union from an old friend, Eva Striker.

Striker was, Scammell says, the chief cause of Koestler’s “lurch to the left” in Berlin in 1931. Not long after converting Koestler to Communism, she moved to Russia to take a position as the director of design in a porcelain factory near Moscow. In 1936, she was arrested and thrown into the Lubyanka, then transferred to a prison in Leningrad, where she was placed in solitary confinement and charged with plotting to assassinate Stalin. She was abruptly released after eighteen months, when her interrogator was himself arrested and imprisoned. She met up with Koestler again in Vienna, and, as Koestler acknowledges in “The God That Failed,” he used many details of her prison experience, including communication by rapping on cell walls, in “Darkness at Noon.”

Koestler resigned from the Party in 1938, but the real break came for him, as it did for many Western Communists and fellow-travellers, with the Non-Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin, in August, 1939, the treaty that made possible Hitler’s invasion of Poland. “Our feelings towards Russia were rather like those of a man who has divorced a much-beloved wife,” Koestler wrote in his autobiographical account of those years, “Scum of the Earth.” “He hates her and yet it is a sort of consolation for him to know that she is still there, on the same planet, still young and alive. But now she was dead.”

The friend of his enemy was his enemy. “Darkness at Noon” is anti-Communist because it is also anti-Fascist. Koestler devoted the next fifteen years of his life and work, starting with the essays on the Soviet Union in “The Yogi and the Commissar” (1944), to persuading fellow-travellers like Sartre that the Gulag was real, that Soviet Communism was an economic failure, and that Stalin was evil.

As Orwell astutely noticed, in an essay on Koestler written in 1944, Koestler’s rejection of Stalinism left him with no political party or platform of his own. He was anti-Communist, and he was (like Orwell) nominally a socialist, but there is a sense in which “Darkness at Noon” is a book that despairs not just of Communism but of politics. Like “1984,” “Darkness at Noon” is partly a meditation on power, a meditation conducted by Rubashov mostly in his own head. The conclusion that Rubashov continually reaches seems to be that any politics, any system of governance, requires the sacrifice of a few for the sake of the many, demands the primacy of ends over means. Rubashov doesn’t have an alternative political vision; he doesn’t argue for democratic socialism, or for a regime of human rights. His imagined alternative is represented by vaguely spiritual and sensual things—a painting of the Pietà, the memory of a woman’s body, what Koestler calls, borrowing from Freud, the “oceanic sense.”

This is what Orwell was referring to when he complained, in his essay, about “a well-marked hedonistic strain” in Koestler’s writings. Orwell suspected Koestler of believing that happiness is the object of life (not something that Orwell ever thought), and he concluded that this made him, despite his anti-totalitarianism, a utopian. Koestler admitted it. When he quit politics, he embarked on a quixotic crusade to rescue modern science from rationality and positivism, and to find, by deciphering what he called “the invisible writing” of the universe, a spiritual guide to conduct. This is what got him involved with characters like Chambers, whom he admired, and Leary, whom he came to distrust. Scammell’s subtitle is inexplicable: Koestler was not a skeptic. He was a romantic, a searcher after the absolute.

One of the American intellectuals who joined Koestler in anti-Communist events sponsored by the C.I.A.-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom was the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook admired Koestler for his views, his rhetorical skill, and his stamina. “There was, however, one aspect of his behavior,” Hook wrote in his autobiography, “that I found so painful that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him when he let himself go. This was his rude and cruel treatment of his wife, who though obviously hurt by his remarks seemed to dote on him all the more.”

Scammell does not cite Hook’s observation, but then he has plenty like it to choose from. The wife concerned was the former Mamaine Paget, a lovely Englishwoman whom many men found adorable. Edmund Wilson unsuccessfully proposed marriage to her (and Orwell unsuccessfully proposed marriage to her identically lovely twin sister, Celia). Though Koestler verbally and on a few occasions physically roughed up Mamaine, she was devoted to him, even after they separated, in 1952. (She died, following an asthma attack, in 1954.) Any number of women seem to have found Koestler irresistible, and many men had the same reaction that Hook did—they found the appeal mystifying.

Scammell is obliged to devote many pages to making sense of this aspect of his subject’s life. After his death, Koestler was accused by one woman of rape, and though Scammell manages to throw some reasonable doubt on the charge, he does concede that Koestler’s seduction methods, which he seems to have tried out on every attractive woman who crossed his path—“Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long,” Cyril Connolly told Edmund Wilson, “one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife”—were based on the belief that “coercion added spice to sexual intercourse.” In a letter to Mamaine after their first sexual encounter, Koestler refers, somewhat apologetically, to what he calls “an element of initial rape.”

“I always picked one type,” Koestler wrote in his diary after Mamaine died, “beautiful cinderellas, infantile and inhibited, prone to be subdued by bullying.” This certainly describes Cynthia, his last wife, who committed suicide alongside him, and whom one of their friends described as a dogged Shetland pony. Koestler was an utter traditionalist about gender: he used his wives and mistresses as secretaries, demanded that they keep his house and cook his dinner, and, in bed, insisted (according to one unusually spunky partner) on being on top. “I said to him once: ‘I want a change, I’m getting tired of being pinned down like a butterfly,’ ” this woman explained to Scammell. “ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but that’s what I like, pinning you down like a butterfly.’ ” We can get another intimate view of our subject from Beauvoir, who spent one drunken night with Koestler. She made him into a character called Scriassine in “The Mandarins,” her remarkable roman à clef about intellectuals in Paris after the Liberation. In his sexual encounter with the narrator in that novel, he is domineering, but also desperate. The woman gets no pleasure.

Scammell suggests that standards for sexual conduct have changed since the nineteen-forties and fifties, and it may be true that fewer men today regard physical coercion as a permissible, if inelegant, romantic technique. It might also be true, though, that opportunities for women of the kind who found themselves entangled with Koestler have changed, and that women like Mamaine Paget no longer feel that succumbing to the sexual demands of famous or interesting men is the only means of entry afforded them into a life of art and ideas.

Leaving aside the psychology of the women in Koestler’s life, what about the psychology of Koestler? Scammell thinks that Koestler suffered from manic depression, and he cites the symptoms listed by Kay Redfield Jamison in her book “Touched with Fire”: “an inflated self-esteem, as well as a certainty of conviction about the correctness and importance of their ideas . . . chaotic patterns of personal and professional relationships . . . spending excessive amounts of money, impulsive involvements in questionable endeavors, reckless driving, extreme impatience, intense and impulsive romantic or sexual relations, and volatility.” Those characterizations do fit Koestler, right down to the reckless driving, but evidence of depression, although there are plenty of self-reports, is thinner. He agonized, but every writer agonizes. If we are clinically inclined, a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder might better meet the case (I quote from the D.S.M.): “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

Why did Koestler renounce political activism (and, with a few exceptions, live up to that declaration) after 1955? As Scammell explains, Koestler had encountered difficulties when he came to the United States because he did not recognize the difference between left-wing anti-Communists like the editors of Partisan Review, to which he contributed; liberal anti-Communists like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with whom he consorted; and right-wingers like Joseph McCarthy, with whom he also met. In the beginning, he probably didn’t think American anti-Communist sectarianism was very significant. He had the view, not unreasonable, that an anti-Communist is an anti-Communist, whatever the color of his other views, and that anti-Communists ought to band together.

At some point, he must have realized that in a Cold War world the petty differences among European anti-Communists, a world he knew from the inside out, no longer mattered. The Americans were in charge. Events from now on would be dictated by American politics, not by the subtleties of French fellow-travelling apologetics. And so he set off after mind waves, alternative modes of consciousness, intelligent design—cosmic mysteries. He must, in the end, have been something of a mystery to himself. And, even after this exhaustive combing of the record, he remains something of a mystery to us—a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century. It’s a story that was worth writing and that is still worth hearing. ♦