Reappraisals (7 page)

According to Cesarani, however, it just doesn’t make sense: “Although he explained his dive into the Communist Party in a variety of more or less convincing ways, it appears most logical when it is seen as having a significant Jewish dimension.” Does it really? And what does logic have to do with it? Political choices in that time and in that place were made out of optimism, pessimism, fear, longing, illusion, calculation. Even if it were somehow “logical” for a Jew to become a Communist, that would not explain why any one Jew in fact did so. There were many non-Jewish Communists, and even more Jewish non-Communists, in interwar Europe; the isomorphic relationship between Communism and non-Zionist,nonpracticing Jews may seem evident to Cesarani, but it was less obvious at the time.

In a similar vein, Cesarani is not well pleased with Koestler’s attitude to Israel after 1948. Koestler left Israel in that year and did not return; his memoirs, written shortly afterward, do indeed play down his earlier involvement in Jewish affairs, something that Cesarani calls “repression.” In later years, in keeping with his rather Manichaean intellectual style, Koestler claimed that the existence of a national state offered Jews a clear and unavoidable choice between aliyah and assimilation, between Zionism and the abandonment of a redundant tradition. His insistence on the impossibility of any middle path provoked a famous correspondence in 1952 with Isaiah Berlin, who suggested that there were many ways to be Jewish, and that a certain untidiness and incoherence in one’s way of life might be preferable to the uncompromising options proposed by Koestler.

Cesarani goes further. He finds fault with Koestler’s etiolated account of Jewishness (“His version of Judaism was nonsensical . . . Judaism does have a national dimension, but it also has a universal message”) and rather disapproves of Koestler’s “un-Jewish” admiration for the civilization of Christian Europe. He censures Koestler’s decision to live for a while in the Austrian Alps, and cannot fathom his envy for the village communities that he saw around him in Alpbach (“until quite recently those very same Tyroleans had been shooting and gassing his ilk wherever they found them”). When Koestler suggests that the existence of Israel will help Jews overcome those characteristics that were shaped by and encouraged anti-Semitism, Cesarani interprets him as “blaming the victims of Nazi persecution for their appalling fate.” There is much more in this vein.

But Cesarani has missed something in his haste to hold Koestler up to contemporary standards of Jewish consciousness and find him sorely lacking. Koestler was as much an outsider in Palestine and Israel as he was everywhere else. This may have made him an unsuccessful Zionist, but it sharpened his observer’s antennae. As he wrote to Celia Paget, “This country is only bearable for people who have very strong emotional ties with it—otherwise the climate is hell and the provincialism of life would bore you to death.” He deeply believed in the need for a Jewish “dwarf state” to exist, and he thought it both inevitable and on the whole a good thing that Israel would over time transform Jews into Israelis. He just didn’t particularly want to be there when it happened.

In other words, Koestler was reluctant to abandon precisely that sense of ambivalence and rootlessness which he so criticized in European Jewry—and which Cesarani correctly identifies as central to his personality and his writing. He was uncomfortable in Israel; he could hardly take refuge in religion or community; and the option of a Holocaust-driven sense of Jewish affirmation was simply not open to him. This is Cesarani’s biggest mistake, to suppose that the sensibilities and the concerns of Jews today should have been those of a Jew of Koestler’s generation.

Koestler thought and wrote about the Nazi destruction of the Jews of Europe, and his sense of the necessity of Israel was deeply informed by that experience. But—and in this respect he was representative of most Jewish intellectuals of his time—the Holocaust was not and could not be a consideration in his own identity. That would come later, much later. In the two decades following 1945, the years of Koestler’s greatest prominence and public engagement, Jews and non-Jews alike paid only occasional attention to Auschwitz and its implications.

It makes no sense to write of a twentieth-century Hungarian Jew— whose formative experiences were the secularized Jewish worlds of Budapest and Vienna; who passed through all the major political upheavals of the interwar years; whose overwhelming postwar preoccupation was the Communist threat and whose elective milieu was the urban intelligentsia of continental Western Europe—as though he should have shaped his life and works by the light of the Shoah, and to suggest that if he failed to do so he was engaging in a massive exercise in denial and repression. For it is surely not his Jewishness, nor even his failure to live up to other people’s expectations for a Jew, that makes Arthur Koestler interesting or significant.

WHAT DOES MATTER, of course, is
Darkness at Noon
, first published in 1940. This was Koestler’s most enduring book and his most influential contribution to the century. In France alone it sold 420,000 copies in the first decade after the war. It has never been out of print in half a dozen languages, and it is widely credited with having made a singular and unequaled contribution to exploding the Soviet myth. It made Koestler a rich and famous man, and if he had not written it we would not now be reading his biography. Any assessment of Arthur Koestler’s standing must rest on our reading of this book and its impact.

The story is well known. Koestler mixed his own experience of the death cell in Spain with his personal knowledge of Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin (both of whom he had met in Moscow) and produced the story of Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, an old Bolshevik who has fallen victim to the Stalinist purges. The book was written between 1938 and 1940, and Koestler could draw on wide public awareness of the recent Moscow trials, the setting for his study of the dilemma of Communist fealty and disillusion. Rubashov is an amalgam, but also a type: the Bolshevik activist who has suppressed his own opinions and judgment in favor of those of the Party and the Leader, only to find that he now stands accused of having “objectively” opposed the party line, and thus the Grand Narrative of History.

There is no plot as such—the outcome is inevitable. But before he is executed, Rubashov engages in introspective reflections upon his loyalties and his motives. More important, he takes part in a series of exchanges with his interrogators. In these conversations Koestler reproduces not just the official charges made against the accused at the show trials, but also the moral and political logic behind them. History and Necessity, Means and Ends, intuitive reason and dialectical logic: These are all invoked and explicated in the great disputations in the novel, as first Ivanov and then Gletkin seeks to convince Rubashov that he should confess for the higher good of the party.

A part of the novel’s appeal was that it captured and confirmed a popular understanding of how Communism worked and what was wrong with it. Even a neo-Trotskyist critic such as Irving Howe, who thought the book paid insufficient attention to the social context of Stalinism, conceded that it was an unimpeachable and terrifying depiction of the workings of the Communist mind. Above all,
Darkness at Noon
functioned with extraordinary effectiveness at two quite distinct levels. For a mass audience, it presented Communism as a lie and a fraud, where facts, arguments, and trials were rigged to achieve the ends sought by a ruthless dictatorial regime. But for a more discriminating intellectual readership, the book portrayed Communism not just unforgivingly, but also with a curiously human face.

Despite its obvious debt to nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as to older accounts of witch trials and the Inquisition,
Darkness at Noon
is remarkably benign as a depiction of prison and interrogation. There are no scenes of torture. There is hardly any violence at all. The message is clear and explicitly stated: Unlike the Nazis and the Fascists, the Communists do not use physical torture to extract the curious confessions people make in court. Instead they convince their victims of their own guilt. The whole exercise operates at a rather rarefied level of dialectical conversation, especially between Ivanov and Rubashov. Even Gletkin, the “new” man, uses threats and force only out of necessity.

Whether Koestler knew that this was utterly false is unclear. But there has long been copious evidence that Communist regimes—in the Soviet Union, in the satellite states of Eastern Europe, and elsewhere— were as brutal and bloodthirsty as other modern tyrannies. Communist dictators resorted to violence and torture no less than any other dictators. Koestler’s emphasis upon dialectics rather than nightsticks suggests an almost reassuring picture of the essential rationality of Communism, for all its crimes. Yet there is no doubt that he was not in the least interested in drawing a veil over Communism’s worst features. So what was going on?

The answer is that
Darkness at Noon
is not a book about the victims of Communism. It is a book about Communists. The victims— Rubashov and his fellow prisoners—are Communists. Koestler is all but silent on the famines, the expropriations, the wholesale deportations of peoples authorized by Stalin. As he would write a decade later in
The God That Failed
, “How our voices boomed with righteous indignation, denouncing flaws in the procedure of justice in our comfortable democracies; and how silent we were when our comrades, without trial or conviction, were liquidated in the Socialist sixth of the earth. Each of us carries a skeleton in the cupboard of his conscience; added together they would form galleries of bones more labyrinthine than the Paris catacombs.” But the skeletons are those of Communists, mostly of Communist intellectuals. And Koestler’s novel is a magnificent effort by an intellectual former Communist to explain to other intellectuals why Communism persecuted its own intellectuals and why they conspired in their own humiliation.

It is also, for related reasons, an indirect apologia for Koestler’s own passage through Communism. The crimes and errors of Communism are not denied. Quite the contrary. But they are presented as essentially intellectual deformations: logical derivations from legitimate starting points rendered fatal by the failure to take into account the individual and his capacity for independent judgment. In short, they are the sort of mistakes, however tragic and terrible, that intelligent and well-intentioned men can make when they are in thrall to great ideals. To adapt Shane’s reassuring words in Jack Schaeffer’s great eponymous novel, “No one need feel ashamed to be beaten by History.”

For this reason,
Darkness at Noon
seems curiously dated today. It operates entirely within its protagonists’ schema. Like Rubashov, Koestler believed that “for once History had taken a run, which at last promised a more dignified form of life for mankind; now it was over.” He also gives quite a lot of credit to the interrogators, who are presumed to be acting in good faith. In Gletkin’s parting words, “The Party promises only one thing: after the victory, one day when it can do no more harm, the material of the secret archives will be published. Then the world will learn what was in the background of this Punch & Judy show as you called it, which we had to act to them according to history’s textbook. . . . And then you, and some of your friends of the younger generation, will be given the sympathy and pity which we denied you today.” Koestler, of course, believes no such thing. But he believed that the Gletkins believe it. And that assumption renders the book, today, altogether less convincing as an insight into the Communist mind.

It follows from this—and this is not intended to diminish his significance—that Arthur Koestler has ceased to be a living source of ideas and has become a historical object. His greatest book is not the infallible account of its subject for which it was once taken; but it does offer a revealing insight into the limits of even the most devastating criticism of Communism at midcentury.
Darkness at Noon
may have undermined the plausibility of the Soviet state, but at the price of confirming the conventional intellectual assumption that Communism was nevertheless quite unlike other authoritarian regimes, and fundamentally better (or at least more interesting). This was not Koestler’s intention, but he might not have disagreed.

Koestler’s genius lay not in his analysis of Communism, but in his polemical brilliance when engaging with Communists (or Fascists) and their admirers. This, together with his journalism, is why he mattered then and matters now. He was witty—his essay on “The Little Flirts of St. Germain des Prés” and his vision of Parisian intellectual life under a Soviet occupation (“Les Temps héroïques,” published in Paris in 1948) are not just devastating and appropriately sexually inflected accounts of the Left Bank fellow-traveling milieu of Sartre and his friends; they are also very funny (or “scabrous” and “malicious,” in Cesarani’s words).

Koestler got a lot of things right and saw some things long before most other people. As early as 1969, reporting for the London
Sunday Times
on his travels through the postcolonial islands of the western Pacific, he foresaw both the unanticipated consequences of decolonization and the paradox of what we are now pleased to call “globalization”: “mass-produced uniform culture” and ever-more-acute “venomous local conflicts of religion, language and race.” Above all, Koestler was rather brave—he had no hesitation in facing down hostile audiences or speaking unpopular truths.

This did not endear him to many people. At the founding meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Berlin in 1950, many delegates—notably A. J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper—were quite put off by Koestler’s intensity and his uncompromising tactics. His obsession with the fight against Communism (like all his other obsessions) brooked no compromise and seemed to lack all proportion. But then Sidney Hook, a fellow organizer of the Congress, rightly observed that “Koestler was capable of reciting the truths of the multiplication table in a way to make some people indignant with him.”