While back in the middle of the last century, Arthur Koestler was considered one of the leading literary lights of the period — a journalist and novelist, an intellectual whose work not only captured the current zeitgeist but might well be the recognized voice of the era for ages to come, though today it would seem that light has somewhat dimmed. Koestler's work, other than Darkness at Noon, the novel that made him famous, is little read and gathers, as the author himself was wont to forecast, dust. Michael Scammell's new biography, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, will do much to rehabilitate the man and his work for this new century's readers.
Koestler's problem is that he doesn't fit nicely into any of the standard literary or political niches. Early on, he embraced a kind of utopian Communism which he found embodied in Russia, only to reject it as totalitarian dictatorship as a result of Stalin's pact with Hitler during WWII and the show trials of party members in various iron curtain countries after the war. He was unable to join with other European intellectuals, like Sartre, in supporting Russian actions as necessary means to a greater end, and turned with some reservation to American democracy instead. Indeed, Darkness at Noon is his impassioned attack on the degeneration of the Communist ideal under Stalin. Still even here, he was uncomfortable with the right wing passions of the McCarthyites as indeed they were with him. He found himself in the middle of two extreme political points of view, neither of which he could accept, nor they him.
As a young man he supported Zionism, even managing a permit to travel to Palestine to join a kibbutz, only once there to discover that pioneer life was a bit rough for him. Moreover, here too he was caught between two conflicting ideologies — those who looked for political solutions to get the British to stand behind the Balfour Declaration and those revisionists who espoused terrorist action as the only way to pressure the Brits. Unlike his attitude to Soviet expediency, Koestler saw in the revisionist ideas and actions a legitimate example of ends justifying means. His novel Thieves in the Night uses his experiences in Palestine to develop his political position, and again put him in the position of alienating not only the conventional Zionists, but the British as well. Later in life his ideas about race and assimilation placed him outside the mainstream of Israel and its supporters.
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