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“Arthur Koestler: The Zealot”

Hitchens’ review of Michael Scammell’s Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. Hitchens describes Koestler as a great writer (especially as demonstrated in his tour de force Darkness at Noon) but very troubled personally. Perhaps driven by his extreme insecurity, he describes Koestler as intellectually “promiscuous.” Hitchens writes that Koestler was very insecure about his writing. “ [He] once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels (The Age of Longing) in which he described its style as modeled on that of a certain ‘A. Koestler,’ whose writing, ‘lacking in ornament and distinction, is easy to imitate.’ ”

His shifts in position where not subtle: first, a staunch supporter of Communism (and active participant in the Spanish Civil War) but later writes one of the most influential ant-communist books ever; first, a supporter of  Begin’s ultra-nationalist Zionist group and later questioning whether there should be a Jewish state at all.

Later in life, sadly, his mental faculties started to fail him, “…in his last two decades Koestler abandoned every kind of scruple and objectivity and became successively bewitched by ‘theories’ of levitation, ESP, telepathy, and UFOs.”

Eventually, this led to his suicide (and his last wife’s along with him).

With Uri Geller:

New learning: During the Spanish Civil War, Koestler spent four days jailed by the Nationalist forces in Malaga.

New word: deracinated = “déraciné, uprooted or displaced from one’s geographical or social environment