Arthur Koestler
Edward Saunders
A man of parts, Arthur Koestler. Journalist, Zionist, anti-fascist, Communist, anti-Communist, novelist, historian of science – the list could fill this review. Little wonder David Cesarani and Michael Scammell took more than 600 pages apiece to accommodate him in biographical form. So it is to Edward Saunders’ credit that he has cornered Koestler in as tight a spot as one of Reaktion’s estimable “Critical Lives”. To be sure, the book can’t pretend to anything like its predecessors’ completeness. But large though Koestler’s life was, it might have been better if – like those earlier biographies – it had been cut a little shorter. Having spent the first half of his life as one of the twentieth century’s moral exemplars, he spent the latter part making an ass of himself.
Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905, to a well-assimilated Jewish family who fled for Vienna after the left- and then right-wing coups that followed the Great War. At 16, he left school to study engineering at the prestigious Higher School of Technology. Not, says Saunders, that he did much studying. What little work he did was spent in the library reading up on psychology. Most of the time he was running the college Zionist organisation. At 20 he took himself off to Palestine, there to find that although he loved the idea of the kibbutz, the reality wasn’t for him.