Arthur Koestler

I've been reading Michael Scammell's new biography Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. It's an excellent book, and Arthur Koestler was a complex and fascinating man. There is much to admire about him, but principally his honesty. Not that he always behaved well. In fact, he didn't, and frequently revealed an array of human weaknesses, including cowardice and fear, but also amazing strength of character under some of the most distressing circumstances.

Most of this is already available in Koestler's own work. He was a prolific and talented writer and storyteller. What Scammell provides is context. Koestler lived through one of those eras of political and social upheaval that leave the world permanently altered. Although he was a Hungarian and a Jew by birth, he was by experience a European, an urban cosmopolitan who saw the larger picture of European collapse and transformation and recorded it as it was happening. The biography is a book worth reading and thinking about.

It strikes me that there are many similarities to our own time. I sometimes fear we are similarly on the brink of chaos; perhaps not so precariously as in the 1920s and 1930s, but near to, politically, economically, and morally. Maybe that is just the nature of humans and our social failings. When Koestler actually confronted the men and women on the street, the famous proletariat of his Marxist fantasies, he was amazed by the disconnect between theory and practice. Eventually he was forced to rethink his views on Communism and Fascism. Revolutions fail because most people don't want revolutions, nor do they want instability. Koestler marveled that the great social, political, and economic upheavals that were destroying the lives of his friends and family were endured more successfully by many ordinary people who found ways to adapt and ignore unpleasant realities. With more limited expectations, they coped and made do with whatever was available to them.

Koestler was also interesting in that he was a joiner who never seemed to fit in with the groups he joined up with, always remaining an outsider and a critic. He was rather quick to find fault with the Zionists, the Communists, and most of his fellow intellectuals both on the right and the left. Scammell calls him a skeptic; and perhaps that's what he was, but he was also a dreamer, yet one who kept awaking from his dreams to find them disappointing. He sometimes tried to deny the evidence of his own eyes, as he did in Palestine and later in the Soviet Union, but eventually he had to admit the truth that was staring him in the face. The best thing about reading this excellent biography is that it has made me want to return to Koestler's own work. Might be just the thing for our uncertain times.