Born in Hungary before
becoming a communist in Germany, then a French Foreign Legionnaire, then a
wartime propagandist for the British government – but, above all, a writer and
thinker – Arthur Koestler was one of the most intriguing intellectuals of
the twentieth century. Michael Scammell, the author of his official biography,
'Koestler, The Indispensable Intellectual', spoke to Eurozine partner journal
Letras Libres about Koestler’s life.
[Daniel Gascón:] You
have said that there was a yearning for utopia in Koestler and other writers.
What does he have in common with other twentieth-century writers, and what
makes him special?
[Michael Scammell:]
What Koestler had in common with so many writers of his era (and what
distinguishes him and them from our present generation) was hope. No matter how
disillusioned they became with the societies in which they lived, or
disappointed by their failures, both personal, social and political, they
retained what looks to us now like a naïve belief in human possibilities and a
conviction that the future would be better.
Much of this optimism was fuelled,
consciously or unconsciously, by the apocalyptic promise embodied in the
October Revolution in Russia and the hope that the utopian goals set by the
French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – might at last be realized
everywhere. We are only too familiar now with the catastrophic failures of the
Soviet experiment, but you have to remember that those ideals held powerful
sway throughout most of the last century (and are by no means dead even now).
Tony Judt called
Koestler ‘an exemplary intellectual’, Christopher Hitchens ‘a zealot’, and
Mario Vargas Llosa has said that he was more a journalist than an artist. Do
you agree with these descriptions?
I agree with Judt,
if by ‘intellectual’ we mean someone who devotes the better part of his life to
investigating ideas and if necessary sacrifices his comfort, his reputation,
and even his friends for them. I disagree with Hitchens, because despite the
element of zealotry in the way Koestler first embraced a variety of beliefs and
political movements, he never entirely lost his critical faculties and was
fearless in confronting his disillusionments when concluding he had been wrong.
As for Vargas Llosa’s criticism, it was commonplace in Koestler’s lifetime,
and, as Koestler pointed out, had also been levelled at a celebrated
predecessor with similarities to Koestler: H.G. Wells. There is some truth to
the charge, given the enormous size of Koestler’s output and his later turn to
scientific interests, but I believe it is based on too narrow a definition of
art. As someone who has written nonfiction all his life – and taught it at
college – I would say there is an art to writing nonfiction that transcends
journalism and expresses truths in ways that are perhaps not as sublime as the
best poetry and fiction, but are none the less valid and effective for that.
I
would also say that, apart from Darkness at Noon and certain passages in Arrival and
Departure and Thieves in the Night, Koestler’s best
work is to be found in his nonfictional auto-biographies, Dialogue with
Death, Scum of the Earth, Arrow in the Blue, and The Invisible
Writing, and in the best of his essays… read more:
http://www.eurozine.com/a-quintessentially-twentieth-century-life/
