Michael Scammell discusses his new biography of Arthur Koestler

In the prologue to his new biography of Arthur Koestler, Michael Scammell describes a trend that followed Koestler throughout much of his life. He tended to get onboard with various political movements before they were popular and then turn against them when they became fashionable. Hence Koestler’s shift from Zionism to anti-Zionism, from communism to anticommunism.

Koestler explored numerous political ideologies and religions during his life and wrote more than 30 books, including novels, autobiographies, volumes of essays and nonfiction works. But in the end, he steered away from politics and organized religion altogether, observing that they seemed to carry an inherent perniciousness.

“He had the insight that a great deal of aggression comes from groups that band together in political parties and/or religions,” Scammell said in a recent interview with The Wire. “It was political fanatics and religious fanatics who were more prone to aggressiveness and violence than the average person.”

This insight came after Koestler had already established himself as one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century. He earned renown with his most famous novel, “Darkness at Noon,” which was published in 1941 and has never gone out of print. He was also a successful socialite who, despite his various defects of personality, palled around with everyone from George Orwell and Langston Hughes to Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. He even took psilocybin with Timothy Leary. And he had affairs with countless women—infidelities that plagued his three marriages.

Scammell’s biography, published by Random House in December, was two decades in the making. His previous biography of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released in 1985, and shortly after its publication Scammell was approached with the idea of writing about Koestler.

It was a natural fit for the English born Scammell, who speaks fluent Russian and has translated works by the likes of Nabokov, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he began working on “Koestler” in earnest. A professor at Columbia University, his work was mostly confined to summers, winter breaks and sabbaticals. By his count, his research took him to 14 different countries. But he did much of the writing here on the Seacoast, at his part-time home in Dover.

The 20-year effort never got dull for Scammell. Koestler, who committed suicide in 1983 at the age of 77 (along with his perfectly healthy 55-year-old wife), was an endlessly fascinating and mysterious intellectual. He serves as a particularly illuminating figure, reflective of the times he lived through.

“That was one of the huge attractions,” Scammell said. “I tried to use this, if you like, as a quick history of 20th century politics.”

Koestler was born Jewish in Budapest in 1905, at a time of growing anti-Semitism in Hungary. An only child, his affluent family moved to Vienna, Austria, when he was about 14. But his parents traveled often, leaving Arthur on his own for long stretches and instilling in him a lifelong sense of nomadic estrangement.
It was while he was still a student in Vienna that Koestler’s interest in politics began to flourish, and he showed an immediate aptitude for achieving a deep understanding of each movement he studied.

“He was incredibly intelligent and quick. He assimilated facts and ideas amazingly quickly at an early age,” Scammell said. “When he did get engaged with a particular set of beliefs and ideologies, he plunged in wholeheartedly and mastered the intellectual grounding of it very quickly.”

Koestler’s first ideological obsession was Zionism, the belief that Jews should settle in Palestine and establish their own country. He traveled to Palestine to pursue the cause, but was disillusioned by the hard physical labor on the collective settlement. He began working as a journalist in Palestine before moving to Germany, where his journalistic prominence rapidly swelled.

Hitler’s rise in Germany fueled Kestler’s opposition to fascism and his hard left turn toward communism. He fled to the Soviet Union and began working for the Communist Party, which sent him to Paris to conduct various forms of propaganda work.

As a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, Koestler went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he clandestinely tried to find evidence of collusion between Francisco Franco and Hitler. In 1937, he was arrested and, according to popular belief, sentenced to death (Scammell could not find evidence to support or refute Koestler’s death sentence).

Koestler’s three-month imprisonment in Spain, where he feared execution at any time, proved to be a turning point in his writing and his life. He would document his experiences in “Dialogue with Death,” and the ordeal planted the seed for his rejection of communism.

“‘Dialogue with Death’ was unlike anything he’d written before,” Scammell said. “It was a meditation on what it means to face death, it was a meditation on the Spanish prisoners who were there, and it was also a meditation on politics and how it affected men’s lives.”

Although he was imprisoned by fascists, Koestler connected the violence and executions he witnessed with the true nature of communism, as well. Not long after authorities in London negotiated his release, he broke from the Party.

“Darkness at Noon” was a fictional commentary on Stalin’s show trials in the Soviet Union. Koestler later co-edited “The God That Failed,” a collection of essays written by famous former Communists. He was a founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was funded by the CIA. He attacked communism with the same passion and fervor with which he had previously embraced it.

By the mid 1950s, however, Koestler felt he had exhausted his insights about anti-Communism. His writing veered sharply away from politics and toward scientific investigation, beginning with “The Sleepwalkers,” a book about astronomers.

Having studied at the Vienna Technological Institute, Koestler had a background in science. But he became increasingly interested in fringes of the field, exploring parapsychology, extrasensory perception, synchronicity and even levitation. Although he did not dispute traditional science, he was discouraged by its creative limitations.

“He disliked what he called the blindness of science, the mechanical objectivity,” Scammell said. “He began to look for ways in which science could have a more spiritual role.”

Suffering from both Parkinson’s disease and Leukemia, Koestler ended his own life by ingesting a mix of barbiturates and alcohol. More shocking was the fact that his 55-year-old wife Cynthia did the same thing by his side, despite being in perfect health.

Koestler’s seductive power over women was one of the most mystifying elements of his character. According to Scammell’s account, he was often verbally—and at times physically—abusive of his lovers. He was egotistical and temperamental. But he was also an emotionally translucent person, which many women found endearing.

“Women either loved him or hated him. They were either totally put off by his adolescent innocence or they fell for it hook, line and sinker,” said Scammell, who interviewed dozens of Koestler’s former mistresses. It’s almost as if, he continued, “(Koestler) had to sleep with a woman before he became friends with her. Some of those women remained friends with him for the rest of his life.”

In the 1990s, years after Koestler’s death, filmmaker Jill Craigie publicly accused him of raping her decades earlier. Scammell questions the truth of that accusation in his book, noting that Koestler never got to tell his side of the story.

“What I say is that Craigie spoke of it nearly 50 years after it happened, long after Koestler himself had died,” Scammell said. “I query whether she remembered the incident in her 80s as accurately as it actually happened.”

The book has already garnered considerable attention, including a six-page write-up in The New Yorker and a recent review in the New York Times. Both of those pieces accuse Scammell of being overly sympathetic to Koestler, especially in regard to the alleged rape. But Scammell said he took pains to remain objective.

If the reviewers judge Koestler to be morally repugnant, it’s precisely because of the incidents Scammell described in great detail in his book, he noted. 

“Part of my job was to present all these aspects,” Scammell said. “I removed myself quite consciously from a sort of editorial role.”

He added that Koestler often demonstrated tremendous generosity, especially toward fellow political refugees and Hungarians. But he seemed to be afflicted with some form of manic depression, and his quest for real happiness eluded him until his death. Scammell referred to that quest as a “quixotic and ultimately unsuccessful search for some type of utopia.”

“This kind of rootlessness that he had, he was constantly in search of some kind of home, but I think it was a spiritual home that he was in search of,” he said.

Michael Scammell will read from “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” at RiverRun Bookstore on Wednesday, Jan. 6 at 7 p.m. RiverRun is at 20 Congress St., Portsmouth, 603-431-2100.