Arthur Koestler: My Favorite Author

Darkness at Noon was famously blocked from becoming a Hollyweird movie by Clifford Odets, a Commie who deserved blacklisting and frankly, much harsher punishment than that, for keeping the literary masterpiece from the screen. Gramsci's philosophy still works overtime ln its corraling media, academicide and union thuggery into a Marxist killing floor. Koestler saw the evils of Communism when suddemly he found his Marxist comrades in Spain, after escaping Franco's firing squads, killing Trotskyites in their ranks. It was the light bulb going on in the brain of a brainwashed intellectual, a member of the "intelligentsia," always the easiest herd to drive over a cliff in a stampede of political correctness...!!! Kronstadt in 1921 proved Lenin & Trotskyite Bolshevism were a variant of fascism, Stalin was the logical end-product, an administrative genius with a ruthless brutality that made a lot of Nazis look like altar boys. The Communists opposed the Social Democrats in the 1933 German elections that brought a Nazi plurality to power and this act of perfidy made the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov a mere coda to an alliance very similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviets immediately began handing over to the Germans the fruits of their spy ring in DC and NY, including the Norden Bomb Site which increased the accuracy of high-level bombers immensely. This is all pointed out in Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, which didn't win a Pulitzer because Victor Navasky and his Hiss-loving skank-princess Katrina Van Den Heuvel, put down their cloven hooves in protest. Like any mad genius, Koestler had his moral pockmarks, mostly of a sexual nature that would make Woody Allen look like a Trappist Monk. Here's the end of Christopher Caldwell's summary of "Koestler - The Political and Literary Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, edited and run by none other than Sam Tanenhaus himself:

Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”

In the late 1990s, Jill Craigie, the wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot, told Cesarani that Koestler had raped her decades earlier. The scandal that resulted when Cesarani’s own Koestler biography was published embroiled Scammell, who had defended Koestler in 1995 against an allegation of attempted rape made by Foot. Scammell argues here that “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time” and that “Craigie’s story and Cesarani’s embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler’s reputation far larger than he deserves.”

He is wrong. Posterity has let Koestler off lightly. Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favor of crediting Craigie’s story. Bertrand Russell’s wife claimed Koestler tried to rape her, too. “Without an element of initial rape,” Koestler wrote the woman who would be his second wife, “there is no delight.” One girlfriend called him “an odd mixture of consideration, thoughtfulness and extraordinary brutality.” Certain aspects of Koestler’s sexism — in particular, his expectation that his girlfriends serve him as stenographers and maids — are indeed mitigated by the era in which he lived. His pattern of predation and violence, though, is a vice of a different order. It shocked those who encountered it.

Cyril Connolly was right to see Koestler as a journalist of genius. In this Koestler can be likened to the three contemporaries — Albert Camus, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell — who were his closest allies. If Koestler had a wider intellectual range than they, however, he had a narrower artistic one. It is a strange thing that this person known to the world primarily as a novelist can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body. The critic Leslie Fiedler once remarked that “Promise and Fulfillment,” Koestler’s 1949 book about Israel, should be filed “under K for Koestler, not I for Israel.” The point can be made more generally: In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself. And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West.