The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
October 26, 2009
The protean Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) seemed to be at the periphery of great events and movements, from Zionism to the forked world of the cold war. Scammell, author of an award-winning biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, views Koestler with balanced patience in this somewhat overlong but definitive biography. A manic-depressive with a Napoleonic complex, Koestler relished feuds with fellow intellectuals such as B.F. Skinner and Isaiah Berlin. He rubbed elbows with Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir and Orwell. Gide, as Scammell points out, stung with his observation that Koestler was better off sticking to journalism. In fact, the last 20 years of Koestler's life were devoted to such flakiness as ESP and levitation. Koestler's dilettantish range of interests is so broad, it's difficult for the biographer to get his hands on his slippery subject. Even after his most successful novels, Darkness at Noon
and Thieves in the Night
, Koestler never let up. Yet his flip-flops on Zionism and his oddly passive reaction to the Soviet rule of his native Hungary might leave one pondering Koestler's legacy in our vastly different 21st century. 16 pages of photos.
Starred review from October 15, 2009
The first major biography in a quarter-century of Arthur Koestler (1905–83), today best known for the anti-Soviet novel Darkness at Noon (1940).
Scammell (Writing/Columbia Univ.; Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 1984), translator of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, among others, has a handful of a subject in Koestler, who roamed continents and disciplines and gave new dimensions to the term"intellectual outlaw." He was"Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his intellectual ambition…[and] never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility." Zelig-like, Koestler was everywhere at once, it seemed, throughout the most important episodes of the 20th century. He interviewed Sigmund Freud, carried documents that implicated the Nazis in the collapse of Republican Spain, hung out with Timothy Leary and Wernher von Braun, palled around with terrorists and Hollywood screenwriters and was known to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini. Amid all that, he found time to write a half-dozen novels, countless articles and other books, growing improbably more prolific as he grew older. Scammell is more admiring of Koestler than other biographers (such as Iain Hamilton), who have ranked him as a middling novelist and willfully ignorant pop scientist. Yet Scammell somewhat wearily writes, after recounting Koestler's championing of the Israeli magician/charlatan Uri Geller,"he pursued the grail of proving extrasensory perception to the end of his life, regardless of what the majority of his contemporaries (and his public) thought." In this elegant biography, Scammell shows a troubled and sometimes troubling soul with an almost stereotypically meddlesome mother—"Don't you have even a single nice memory of your childhood and youth?" she once demanded of him—and plenty of demons, susceptible to quack theories and big ideas. But he also generated big ideas for their own sake, led the life of the independent intellectual to the hilt and essentially lived as he wished.
A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler's work.
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Starred review from December 15, 2009
Who, Michael Foot wondered, will ever forget the first moment he read Darkness at Noon? Yet behind an unforgettable novel, Scammell finds a forgotten author. With this biography, Scammell forcefully reminds readers why Arthur Koestler still deserves attention. A Hungarian-born intellectual who traversed the globe during his peripatetic career, Koestler repeatedly found himself in the perilous middle of epoch-making history, narrowly avoiding an executioners bullet in civil war Spain. But it is Koestlers radical ideological shifts that make his work a fever chart for modern passions. In turn a Zionist, then an anti-Zionist; a Communist, then an anti-Communist; a pioneering existentialist, then a foe of existentialists; an exponent of empirical science, then a champion of parapsychologyKoestler offers an astounding diversity of perspectives. To be sure, DarknessKoesters harrowing expos' of the soul-crushing power of communismdeserves priority. But Scammell challenges the dismissal of Koestler as a one-book wonder, highlighting the enduring power of Dialogue with Death, Scum of the Earth, The Yogi and the Commissar, and other works. Attributing the recent neglect of Koestlers oeuvre to the controversy surrounding his and his wifes double suicide and to the malign influence of David Cesarinis hostile 1998 biography, Scammell has set the stage for the rediscovery of a great writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)