Reappraisals by Tony Judt Read Free Book Online Page A

castigated his “complexes”: his guilt, his dissipation, his womanizing, and his bad manners.
    Cesarani acknowledges this, but then he admonishes Koestler for failing to pull his socks up and improve himself. Even when Koestler does correct a failing, Cesarani finds fault in his motives. In his Spanish jail, awaiting execution, Koestler came to the firm and abiding conviction that no abstract ideal can justify individual suffering. Cesarani disapproves: “It is perturbing and hard to accept in one who was so critical of others for their lack of imagination, that Koestler only realised that nothing, not even the most rationally compelling cause, was worth the sacrifice of a single life when it was his life that was at stake.” Once released, Koestler went on to devote his energies to dismantling the myth of dialectical materialism. But his rationalist critique of Marxism-Leninism’s fake science falls short of his biographer’s expectations, and Cesarani rebukes him for the “heuristic gaffe” of deploying a “materialist” criticism against a materialist illusion.
    A biographer is entitled to censure his subject on occasion. More serious is Cesarani’s distance from Koestler’s European world. There are some minor but revealing errors: Otto Katz, another displaced Central European Jew, who was executed in Prague in December 1952 as a “fellow conspirator” in the trial of Rudolf Slánský, was not the cover name of André Simone (not “Simon”); it was the other way around. The Italian essayist and onetime colleague of Koestler’s was Nicolà Chiaromonte, not Nicholas Chiaromonte. Ernest Gellner was decidedly not a “Vienneseborn philosopher.” France-Observateur (not “Observateur”) was not a Communist sheet, but a neutralist journal of the non-Communist Parisian Left, which gives its attacks on Koestler in 1950 a significance quite different from the one suggested by Cesarani. And if André Gide was recording opinions about Koestler in his diary “in the 1960s,” then Cesarani has had access to some very privileged information: Gide died in 1951.
    Minor gaffes such as these help explain deeper misunderstandings. Cesarani has a soft spot for Simone de Beauvoir and cites her more than once as a guide to Koestler’s failings. Commenting on Koestler’s anti-Communism in February 1948 (at the time of the Prague coup), de Beauvoir opines: “He is remorseful not to be any longer a Communist, because now they are going to win and he wants to be on the winning side.” This tells us quite a lot about de Beauvoir, but not much about Koestler. In a similar vein we are informed approvingly that she thought Koestler had “a mediocre Marxist education.” That is true—though coming from this source it is a bit ripe. But it is irrelevant. Men and women did not become Communists in interwar Europe owing to the close study of Marxist texts. In Koestler’s own words (not cited by Cesarani), “What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.”
    That is why people joined the Communist Party, and it is also why they were so reluctant to abandon it. Cesarani cannot fathom why Koestler did not make a clean and early break with the party—after all, his disillusion began with his firsthand observations of the Soviet Union just a year after he became a Communist. According to his biographer, Koestler’s claims of early disillusionment should therefore be treated with suspicion—it “took a long time to have much effect.” It was only (!) in 1938 that Koestler broke with the German Communists in Parisian exile, and even then he promised not to attack or “break fealty with” the Soviet Union. Cesarani finds this odd and describes it as a very “late” break with Communism. But it is absolutely at one with the experience of many ex-Communists of the time. It was not easy to leave the party, with all the fellowship and