by Tony Judt
If Koestler were alive, he would surely sue for libel, and he would surely win. Even on Cesarani’s own evidence, there is only one unambiguously attested charge of rape: In 1952 Koestler assaulted Jill Craigie, the wife of English politician and future Labour Party leader Michael Foot, in her own home during her husband’s absence. Much of the rest consists of circumstantial evidence and a strong dose of present-minded interpretation. Thus both Koestler and Simone de Beauvoir acknowledged that they had one night of bad sex, a mutual mistake. De Beauvoir attributed it to Koestler’s persistence—she finally gave in under the pressure of his importuning. Is this rape? A number of other women attest that Koestler pestered them for sex—some conceded, some didn’t. Whether they did or they didn’t, many women seem to have remained fond of Koestler after the experience. For Cesarani, this is inexplicable: “Perhaps he attracted a certain kind of masochistic personality for whom he fulfilled a particular need?” As for those who had sex with Arthur Koestler and went back for more, they presumably had a “compulsion to re-enact that wounding process.”
Maybe. Or maybe they just enjoyed themselves. Cesarani, like Koestler at his most polemical, sees everything in black or white. Either you are making consensual, mutually initiated, monogamous, nonaggressive, amorous love, or else something very dark and unpleasant is taking place: rape—or, more commonly, “date-rape,”—a term that occurs with disarming frequency in this book. As for the notion that someone might indeed be disposed to sexual domination, and even occasionally to force, and yet be appealing to women—well, this has apparently never occurred to Cesarani, even as a hypothesis. As a consequence, there is something tedious and “sexually correct” about his account of Koestler’s adventures. Cesarani doesn’t like the younger Koestler’s multitude of relationships, his “relentless pursuit of women.” Koestler himself explained reasonably enough that he habitually sought female companionship and comfort, but for Cesarani, “there comes a point when his rationalizations for sleeping around ring hollow.”
Worse for poor Koestler, he preferred women. If he had bisexual leanings, he suppressed them: “To him, heterosexuality was the norm, men were dominant partners and women were submissive.” Worse still, Koestler was not always faithful to one woman at a time: nor, indeed, were his women always faithful to him. Celia Paget briefly abandoned Koestler for a weeklong fling with Albert Camus, prompting an outburst from Cesarani, who finds it “extraordinary” that “people who constantly talked about friendship and loyalty” spent so much time in bed with their friends. Describing Koestler’s occasional taste for threesomes, Cesarani writes of “another gruesome triangular encounter.” The reader is constantly aware of the author’s presence, hovering pruriently and commenting sniffily upon the copulations of his protagonists. “Conventional morality seems to have had little purchase in these circles.” Quite.
Why should it? Even if we exclude as special pleading the claim (advanced by Koestler’s fellow Hungarian George Mikes) that if Koestler did not take no for an answer he was only practicing the sexual mores of his birthplace, the fact remains that sleeping around, “betraying” one’s lover or one’s spouse, treating women as submissive, and behaving in a generally “sexist” manner was hardly a trait peculiar to Arthur Koestler. Cesarani may not be old enough to remember the world before the sexual revolutions of the 1960s, and he may lack personal experience of the conventions and the morals of the European intelligentsia. But as a historian he should surely hesitate before chastising his subject for attitudes and assumptions that were widely shared in his cultural and social milieu. To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming majority of the Hungarian, Austrian, Russian, German, and French intellectuals who pass through the pages of Cesarani’s book shared most of Koestler’s views on such matters, even if they were not always so assiduous or so successful in practice. You have only to read their memoirs. Even the English were a lot less conventionally well behaved back then; but since their misdemeanors often involved partners of the same sex, Cesarani would probably find less to reprove.
The present-minded primness of Cesarani’s tone is often unintentionally funny and self-revealing. What sounds like a rather entertaining luncheon gathering of Koestler and some women friends becomes a “grisly assembly of ex-lovers.” When poor Cynthia Jeffries (Koestler’s last wife) takes up German and cooking, she earns Cesarani’s lasting disapproval for these “strikingly submissive gestures.” And Cesarani wholly deplores “Koestler’s assumption that a life of promiscuity and deception is normal and should be pleasurable, were it not for the inconvenience of a bad conscience.” If Koestler was ever made uncomfortable by his conscience—and there is not much evidence that he was—it was surely as nothing to the discomfort that he has caused his biographer by so obviously enjoying bodily pleasures and indulging them to the full. You can almost feel Cesarani’s relief when Koestler gets too old for extramarital sex and settles into respectable middle age.
Reviewers of the English edition of this book have been much taken with the issue of Koestler’s sideline in rape, and have asked how far this should alter posterity’s view of him. But Koestler’s attitude toward women has never been in doubt—you have only to read his memoirs or some of the novels, notably Arrival and Departure. We now know that he raped the wife of a friend and forced his attentions on some reluctant women. This is deeply unattractive behavior. But Koestler was no moralist. He did not preach about human goodness or pose himself as an exemplar of anything. If it turned out that he was a closet racist, or had remained all his life a secret member of the Communist Party, or had privately financed violent terrorist organizations, then some of his publications would indeed seem very odd, and we should have to ask how far he wrote in good faith. But nothing he wrote about sex is in contradictionwith his actions. And nothing he wrote about politics, or intellectuals, or the death penalty, depends for its credibility upon his sexual behavior. Koestler was a great journalist who exercised great influence; no more, no less. And neither of those claims is hostage to our views about his private life, after the fact.
THE SECOND ANACHRONISM in Cesarani’s book concerns Koestler’s Jewishness. On this score it is easier to sympathize with the biographer. Arthur Koestler was a Jew, born of Jewish parents into early-twentieth-century Budapest’s large and thriving Jewish community. He was drawn into Zionism while at university in Vienna: By 1924, at the age of nineteen, he was chairman of the Association of Jewish Nationalist Students in Austria. He spent much of the late twenties in Mandate Palestine, learning a passable café Hebrew, and he would return there in 1945. In addition to Promise and Fulfillment, his Palestine stints resulted in Thieves in the Night (1946), a novel about a Jewish settlement marked by the writer’s sympathy for the politics of Menachem Begin’s Irgun. Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was another novel shaped by Koestler’s interest in the fate of the Jews, this time in occupied wartime Europe. After the declaration of the State of Israel, Koestler left the Middle East, never to return; but he remained sufficiently involved with the Jewish dilemma to write The Thirteenth Tribe, which appeared in 1976. It is a bizarre, misguided attempt to demonstrate that the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are descended from Khazar tribesmen in the Caucasus—and thus need feel no special affinity for, nor obligation toward, Israel and the traditional Jewish heritage.
From all this, it would seem reasonable to infer that being Jewish was rather important to Arthur Koestler. Yet Koestler himself tended to downplay its significance. When he was not writing about Israel, Jews did not figure prominently in his work, and the autobiography goes to some lengths to understate the influence of his Jewish heritage upon his education or his opinions. Cesarani finds this a little odd, and his suspicions are probably justified, if only in part. Koestler’s efforts to be what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew” only serve to remind us just how very Jewish his story is, not least (for non-practicing Central Europeans of his generation) in the effort to deny that being Jewish did or should matter.
Koestler was too intelligent to claim that being Jewish was an elective affinity and that he could just choose not to be: History (that is, Hitler) had deprived him of that choice. In later years, though, he certainly behaved as though he wished it were otherwise.
Cesarani is right to note all this. But in his determination to show that Koestler was in denial, he inverts Koestler’s own emphasis and finds, or claims to find, a Jewish dimension in almost everything Koestler wrote or did. When Koestler joins the German Communist Party, he is seeking an alternative way to “resolve the Jewish Question”: His Communist activities, his political engagements in Popular Front Paris, and his adventures in Spain only make sense to Cesarani when seen through the prism of Jewishness. How else to account for Koestler’s decision to leave Palestine in 1929 and engage in European politics? “A passionate involvement of seven years’ duration in Jewish affairs could not be dropped instantly, even less when events thrust the fate of the Jews into prominence. On the contrary, Koestler’s ideological, political and geographical peregrinations make more sense if they are seen in the light of his complex Jewish identity.”
This is reductionist. it is perfectly possible to turn away from seven years of youthful involvement in a political or national movement, and to redirect one’s attentions to an entirely different set of causes. Many of us have made precisely such a change. In the last, turbulent years of Weimar Germany, a switch from Jabotinsky to Stalin might seem unusual, but it was readily explicable—and Koestler was still only twenty-six years old when he joined the party.
According to Cesarani, however, it just doesn’t make sense: “Although he explained his dive into the Communist Party in a variety of more or less convincing ways, it appears most logical when it is seen as having a significant Jewish dimension.” Does it really? And what does logic have to do with it? Political choices in that time and in that place were made out of optimism, pessimism, fear, longing, illusion, calculation. Even if it were somehow “logical” for a Jew to become a Communist, that would not explain why any one Jew in fact did so. There were many non-Jewish Communists, and even more Jewish non-Communists, in interwar Europe; the isomorphic relationship between Communism and non-Zionist,nonpracticing Jews may seem evident to Cesarani, but it was less obvious at the time.
In a similar vein, Cesarani is not well pleased with Koestler’s attitude to Israel after 1948. Koestler left Israel in that year and did not return; his memoirs, written shortly afterward, do indeed play down his earlier involvement in Jewish affairs, something that Cesarani calls “repression.” In later years, in keeping with his rather Manichaean intellectual style, Koestler claimed that the existence of a national state offered Jews a clear and unavoidable choice between aliyah and assimilation, between Zionism and the abandonment of a redundant tradition. His insistence on the impossibility of any middle path provoked a famous correspondence in 1952 with Isaiah Berlin, who suggested that there were many ways to be Jewish, and that a certain untidiness and incoherence in one’s way of life might be preferable to the uncompromising options proposed by Koestler.
Cesarani goes further. He finds fault with Koestler’s etiolated account of Jewishness (“His version of Judaism was nonsensical . . . Judaism does have a national dimension, but it also has a universal message”) and rather disapproves of Koestler’s “un-Jewish” admiration for the civilization of Christian Europe. He censures Koestler’s decision to live for a while in the Austrian Alps, and cannot fathom his envy for the village communities that he saw around him in Alpbach (“until quite recently those very same Tyroleans had been shooting and gassing his ilk wherever they found them”). When Koestler suggests that the existence of Israel will help Jews overcome those characteristics that were shaped by and encouraged anti-Semitism, Cesarani interprets him as “blaming the victims of Nazi persecution for their appalling fate.” There is much more in this vein.
But Cesarani has missed something in his haste to hold Koestler up to contemporary standards of Jewish consciousness and find him sorely lacking. Koestler was as much an outsider in Palestine and Israel as he was everywhere else. This may have made him an unsuccessful Zionist, but it sharpened his observer’s antennae. As he wrote to Celia Paget, “This country is only bearable for people who have very strong emotional ties with it—otherwise the climate is hell and the provincialism of life would bore you to death.” He deeply believed in the need for a Jewish “dwarf state” to exist, and he thought it both inevitable and on the whole a good thing that Israel would over time transform Jews into Israelis. He just didn’t particularly want to be there when it happened.
In other words, Koestler was reluctant to abandon precisely that sense of ambivalence and rootlessness which he so criticized in European Jewry—and which Cesarani correctly identifies as central to his personality and his writing. He was uncomfortable in Israel; he could hardly take refuge in religion or community; and the option of a Holocaust-driven sense of Jewish affirmation was simply not open to him. This is Cesarani’s biggest mistake, to suppose that the sensibilities and the concerns of Jews today should have been those of a Jew of Koestler’s generation.
Koestler thought and wrote about the Nazi destruction of the Jews of Europe, and his sense of the necessity of Israel was deeply informed by that experience. But—and in this respect he was representative of most Jewish intellectuals of his time—the Holocaust was not and could not be a consideration in his own identity. That would come later, much later. In the two decades following 1945, the years of Koestler’s greatest prominence and public engagement, Jews and non-Jews alike paid only occasional attention to Auschwitz and its implications.
It makes no sense to write of a twentieth-century Hungarian Jew— whose formative experiences were the secularized Jewish worlds of Budapest and Vienna; who passed through all the major political upheavals of the interwar years; whose overwhelming postwar preoccupation was the Communist threat and whose elective milieu was the urban intelligentsia of continental Western Europe—as though he should have shaped his life and works by the light of the Shoah, and to suggest that if he failed to do so he was engaging in a massive exercise in denial and repression. For it is surely not his Jewishness, nor even his failure to live up to other people’s expectations for a Jew, that makes Arthur Koestler interesting or significant.
WHAT DOES MATTER, of course, is Darkness at Noon, first published in 1940. This was Koestler’s most enduring book and his most influential contribution to the century. In France alone it sold 420,000 copies in the first decade after the war. It has never been out of print in half a dozen languages, and it is widely credited with having made a singular and unequaled contribution to exploding the Soviet myth. It made Koestler a rich and famous man, and if he had not written it we would not now be reading his biography. Any assessment of Arthur Koestler’s standing must rest on our reading of this book and its impact.
The story is well known. Koestler mixed his own experience of the death cell in Spain with his personal knowledge of Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin (both of whom he had met in Moscow) and produced the story of Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, an old Bolshevik who has fallen victim to the Stalinist purges. The book was written between 1938 and 1940, and Koestler could draw on wide public awareness of the recent Moscow trials, the setting for his study of the dilemma of Communist fealty and disillusion. Rubashov is an amalgam, but also a type: the Bolshevik activist who has suppressed his own opinions and judgment in favor of those of the Party and the Leader, only to find that he now stands accused of having “objectively” opposed the party line, and thus the Grand Narrative of History.
There is no plot as such—the outcome is inevitable. But before he is executed, Rubashov engages in introspective reflections upon his loyalties and his motives. More important, he takes part in a series of exchanges with his interrogators. In these conversations Koestler reproduces not just the official charges made against the accused at the show trials, but also the moral and political logic behind them. History a
nd Necessity, Means and Ends, intuitive reason and dialectical logic: These are all invoked and explicated in the great disputations in the novel, as first Ivanov and then Gletkin seeks to convince Rubashov that he should confess for the higher good of the party.
A part of the novel’s appeal was that it captured and confirmed a popular understanding of how Communism worked and what was wrong with it. Even a neo-Trotskyist critic such as Irving Howe, who thought the book paid insufficient attention to the social context of Stalinism, conceded that it was an unimpeachable and terrifying depiction of the workings of the Communist mind. Above all, Darkness at Noon functioned with extraordinary effectiveness at two quite distinct levels. For a mass audience, it presented Communism as a lie and a fraud, where facts, arguments, and trials were rigged to achieve the ends sought by a ruthless dictatorial regime. But for a more discriminating intellectual readership, the book portrayed Communism not just unforgivingly, but also with a curiously human face.
Despite its obvious debt to nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as to older accounts of witch trials and the Inquisition, Darkness at Noon is remarkably benign as a depiction of prison and interrogation. There are no scenes of torture. There is hardly any violence at all. The message is clear and explicitly stated: Unlike the Nazis and the Fascists, the Communists do not use physical torture to extract the curious confessions people make in court. Instead they convince their victims of their own guilt. The whole exercise operates at a rather rarefied level of dialectical conversation, especially between Ivanov and Rubashov. Even Gletkin, the “new” man, uses threats and force only out of necessity.
