Reappraisals by Tony Judt Read Free Book Online

all this material to very good use; the result is a lively narrative of Koestler’s life, works, and opinions. Cesarani’s descriptions and summaries of the published works are conventional, but then it is not easy to do justice at second hand to writings whose virtue lies in their vivacity and their immediacy. About the later writings, certainly, it would take an inordinately sympathetic biographer to avoid remarking upon the likelihood that they will soon be justly forgotten; even so, Cesarani is kind enough to suggest that some of Koestler’s parascientific aperçus “may yet have the last laugh on the grey beards of Academe.” It is not clear why he thinks so. If it proves true, it will only be as a result of the sort of coincidence that Koestler set out so resolutely to deny.
    About Koestler the man, Cesarani has rather more to say, and much of it is to the point. Arthur Koestler seems to have suffered from what Cesarani, following many of Koestler’s own friends, calls “a crippling deficit of self-regard.” He was a smallish man, an outsider for most of his life, who wanted very much to please and to be liked, but who succeeded in arguing, breaking with, and sometimes brawling with almost everyone he met. Like Sartre, he took Benzedrine to sustain him during his spells of writing, and he drank like a fish. His drinking led to bouts of quarrelsome violence and an extraordinary series of smashed cars; and when he wasn’t drinking, fighting, or writing he was often depressed and consumed with self-doubt. He was strikingly generous to strangers with the riches he earned from Darkness at Noon and his later writings, but he was selfish and narcissistic in his private life. According to his biographer, he was inordinately attracted to powerful men and weak women.
    Of all these traits, it is Koestler’s status as an outsider that seems to me the most salient and interesting. Like many Central European intellectuals of his generation, Koestler had no fixed abode. He wandered from country to country, from language to language, from one commitment to the next. He knew and socialized with all the significant writers and thinkers of his age in Berlin, Paris, Jerusalem, London, and New York, but he was never “one of them.” It was perhaps a misfortune that he should have ended up in England: Of all his transitory homes, this was the place where belonging came hardest for the foreigner.
    Koestler’s accent, his intensity, his experience, and his sense of the tragic all put him at odds with the distinctive English preference for understatement and irony. In New York, he was taken Very Seriously. In Paris, his friends quarreled with him over the Great Issues of the day. But in London, where he tried very hard to become English and strove for acceptance and membership, Koestler was sometimes an object of amusement and even ridicule. His English contemporaries admired him, certainly. They respected him and they acknowledged his influence. But on the whole they did not understand him.
    David Cesarani is English—he is professor of modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton—and it seems to me that he, too, does not always understand Arthur Koestler. He certainly finds him a bit annoying. His new book frequently second-guesses Koestler’s own memoirs and questions their credibility. It takes Koestler to task for his opinions and raps him over the knuckles for his shortcomings. This seems all a bit harsh. Koestler’s memoirs certainly retell his life story from his own distinctive perspective (how else would they tell it?), and the story itself occasionally changes from one version to the next, in keeping with his evolving interests. Still, Koestler is actually a rather good source of information about his own weaknesses. He admits to his false toughness, his insecurities, his constant unfulfilled search for the perfect Cause and the perfect woman, and his many personal failings. He faithfully recorded and