KOESTLER: THE INDISPENSIBLE INTELLECTUAL

Michael Scammell (Faber, £25)

Arthur Koestler, British author and journalist, was born in Budapest in 1905. He witnessed and wrote about many of the pivotal events of the 20th century: he was a Zionist in 1920s Palestine; he joined the German Communist Party in the 1930s and travelled to the Soviet Union; he reported from Spain during Franco’s regime and was imprisoned and sentenced to death there; and he later escaped from occupied France by joining the French Foreign Legion.

He wrote novels, essays, scientific works, and pieces about the paranormal, most of which have not stood the test of time. He is perhaps best remembered for his political novel Darkness at Noon, although I can’t think that bookshops will be shifting many nowadays. An advocate of legal euthanasia, Koestler and his young wife committed suicide together in 1983 after he became terminally ill. The size and quality of this new biography reflect the breadth of Koestler’s output, his forceful personality, and his wide-ranging interests. It benefits enormously from the author’s extensive research through diverse sources, including archives of the CIA, MI5 and the German and Soviet Communist parties, as well as many interviews. One MI5 interrogator described Koestler as “one-third blackguard, one-third lunatic, and one-third genius”.

Scammell, a prize-winning biographer and academic, has taken on a challenging subject, for, while fascinating, Koestler could also be repulsive. His reputation was fatally tarnished when allegations emerged that he had raped Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife, after a pub crawl in 1952. In fact, Scammell gives us too much detail of Koestler’s marriages and love affairs and seems to excuse some of his behaviour, trying too hard to restore to Koestler some of the authority lost following the publication of David Cesarini’s 1998 biography, which portrayed Koestler as a rapist and sexual bully.

This is a more balanced account, attempting to show why Koestler was one of the most fascinating and controversial intellectuals of his day. He gives a full picture, measuring Koestler’s virtues as well as the sins, and reassessing Koestler’s brilliance as a writer and commentator. It could be argued that we don’t need another biography of Koestler, but although this is excessively detailed and revisionist, it is still a valuable addition to our understanding of this devilish character.