Perhaps nobody but John could have exposed the bad faith of Ali Mazrui, who gave the Reith Lectures in 1980. The BBC sponsors these lectures with the evident intention that they should be one of the intellectual highlights of the year. When Ali Mazrui from Kenya delivered a diatribe against the West for the slave trade, John responded: “There is not a whisper, not a syllable, about the Arab slave trade, which had gone on for centuries before the first Portuguese navigator ever ventured south of the Equator and which has continued up to our day. It is all very strange, especially for a man who bears the same name as the Mazrui of Mombasa who were among the principal slave dealers on the African coast in the nineteenth century.”
The course of events in his view demonstrated that the more concessions were made to Arabs the more they would demand. He was the unrivaled authority on the history and politics of the Persian Gulf, with specialist knowledge of the treaties that local leaders had signed with nineteenth-century British governments. The Saudis had seized an oasis belonging by virtue of one of these treaties to neighboring Oman. The Foreign Office was charged to deliver a legally binding judgment about rightful ownership, and the Sultan of Oman had retained John to present what was a clear-cut case. Yet as he entered the room and before a word had been spoken, as John told the story, he knew the Omanis had lost. Defeatism was in the atmosphere. In the imperial past the Foreign Office had served the national interest, but in the present day they had come to the conclusion that the weak had to be sacrificed to the strong. The Saudi record was one of “bloodshed, terrorism and extortion,” but rather than confront as would once have been the case, the institutional decision now was to bow to it. The “strange love affair” that the United States conducted with Saudi Arabia was leading to “the slow paralysis of American foreign policy.” Western interests were being put at risk for no good reason. In Riyadh he had seen for himself a depot with hundreds of new-model American tanks but there were no fitters to enable them to take to the field. He also doubted the quality of Saudi Intelligence after finding in some official archive a file marked “Freemasonry” containing nothing but photocopies of the pages in Tolstoy’s War and Peace that describe Masonic ceremony. Years before such threats were realized he foresaw the use of oil as a weapon in Arab hands, Islamic militancy, and the attempt to ban free speech in non-Muslim countries. In a letter to me dated September 1980, he wrote, “If I see Arabian history in unflattering terms, at least I’m in good company. Wasn’t it Edmund Burke who categorized it as ‘a record of pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy and ungoverned zeal?”
When Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, some of her advisors recommended a Middle East policy free from pre-emptive cringe and offered to mark up passages in Arabia, the Gulf and the West for her to read. She duly asked the Foreign Office to send over a copy of the book, but instead received a note, “In the opinion of the Foreign Office, this man is not sound.”
Postscript. John and Valda retired to the Dordogne. Intending to write the definitive history of Saudi Arabia, John took with him a mass of notes and photocopied documents. I was in the habit of urging him to finish what should have been another magnum opus, but he didn’t. Saul Kelly, his son and a historian in the same field, has been editing and publishing much of the writing John left behind. Saul gave me a signed copy of The Hunt for Zerzura, his book about Count Ladislaus Almasy, a German agent in the Western Desert during World War II. Of all the signatories I have, theirs is the only father-and-son double act.
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The God That Failed
1971
A FEW YEARS AGO, I was in Budapest walking down a slightly dingy street when I caught sight of a tablet at first-floor level on the wall of one of the buildings. The young Arthur Koestler, born in 1905, had lived here in an apartment that he wrote up as a monument to a lost ideal of home, “stuffed with plush curtains, antimacassars, tassels, fringes, lace covers, bronze nymphs, cuspidors, and Meissen stags at bay.” From here he set out to go to university in Vienna, and on to Jerusalem, Berlin and Moscow, with interludes in prison and detention camps, condemned to death as a Communist by the Franco regime in Spain and then again by the Communist Party as a renegade.
The world had been bewildered by trials in the Soviet Union in which Stalin’s closest colleagues confessed to acts of treason they could never conceivably have committed, in other words consenting to their own judicial murder. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon offered the insight that these men were persuaded that their death was in the higher interest of the Party and it was doctrine that the Party could not be mistaken. In fact, the self-incriminations were far less cerebral, brought about by threats and beatings, but Koestler’s novel led the way to the intellectual discrediting of Communism before Solzhenitsyn began documenting the grim truth. Koestler further summed up his whole experience in The Invisible Writing, two volumes of autobiography destined to be read so long as anyone is still interested in right and wrong. That tablet in Budapest recognizes that Koestler singularly influenced the hopes and fears let loose in the contest to take control of the future known as the Cold War.
Once or twice in the early 1960s I wrote to Koestler suggesting that he contribute to the Spectator. It was a forlorn hope; he already had more commitments than he could manage. But on Sunday mornings his friends were in the habit of coming round for a drink, and politely he invited me too. He lived in a large house, a mansion really, in Kensington, and I was a short walk away in a street just around the corner. I was apprehensive. After saying that it was an honor to meet him, what small talk could possibly follow? Besides, I’d heard about a lady who was supposed to have approached him at some gathering and said, “Mr. Koestler, I’ve just been reading Darkness at Noon,” and was about to add that this was for the seventh time as the book had changed her views about everything, when he cut in, “And about time too.”
Koestler’s Sunday mornings had the atmosphere of a highbrow salon. Anti-Communism was the agreed ideology of those present. Mel Lasky, editor of Encounter, used to praise Koestler to his face. Others there included Iain Hamilton, his first biographer, George Mikes, Michael Polanyi, Denis Gabor, the broadcaster George Urban and perhaps Ed Shils (who coined gayim as the collective plural for homosexuals by analogy to goyim, the Jewish collective plural for Gentiles.) One Sunday, I believe in 1963, Goronwy Rees, one of the rare outspoken anti-Communist academics, took the floor to announce that Anthony Blunt had tried before the war to recruit him into the KGB. Next to me was John Mander, then literary editor of Encounter. I asked him if he’d just heard what I’d just heard. “Oh, didn’t you know, that’s Goronwy’s party piece.” Some fifteen more years had to pass before the country learned what was common knowledge in Koestler’s circle.
“We failed to see,” Koestler reproaches his generation, “that the age of Reason and Enlightenment was drawing to its close.” In one of his essays, ”On Disbelieving Atrocities,” all the more memorable because it was published in January 1944, Koestler describes himself as a screamer, a Cassandra; she screamed until she was hoarse and the Greeks still entered Troy. A character in one of his novels speaks for Koestler: “Europe is doomed, a chapter in history which is finished.” The sense that he’d got away with it so far but wouldn’t always be able to do so, infuses pretty well everything he wrote. I imagine that this vulnerability was always working away in him. “England is the best country to sleep in” was a favorite truism of his. “Old Struthians” is the label he attaches to the British after the Latin for ostrich, struthio for their similar habit of hiding their eyes from reality. Suicide of a Nation? is a collection of essays that he edited in 1971, by which time he thought that the question mark of the title was superfluous. January 14, 1971 happens to be the date he wrote below his signature in my copy of The God That Failed, a book that more than any other interpreted belief in Communism as a quasi-religious phenomenon, a superstition.
I could never quite make out why this quintessential central Europe
an intellectual tried to pass himself off as an English gentleman, dressing the part. It didn’t quite succeed because the handmade clothes were so perfect that they gave away the disguise. The Hungarian accent couldn’t be squared either. Cynthia Jefferies, formerly his secretary and then his wife, was some twelve years younger than him and temperamentally incapable of criticizing him. In an incident recorded by George Mikes, the Koestlers were playing Scrabble when Arthur put down “vince.” Surprised that Cynthia should question this, he explained to her that it meant flinching slightly with pain. He owned a house in Alpbach in Austria, and drove his car from there to Kensington. Parking, he rammed hard into the car ahead, and then in reverse hard into the pillar-box behind. Intending to be helpful, a policeman who happened to be on the pavement, pointed to the Austrian license plates and suggested that Koestler was not used to driving on the left. “You think I am a bluddy foreigner?” was Arthur’s response, and I have it on good authority, “Couldn’t you see zee vindscreen vipers voodn’t verk.”
The English edition of Darkness at Noon is a translation from its original German, and it was published shortly after Dunkirk. As if that wasn’t handicap enough, most of the edition was destroyed in the blitz. After the war, Calmann-Lévy, most venerable of firms, brought it out in French as Zéro et l’infini. François Mauriac wrote a review and by the end of 1946 half a million copies had been sold. Cassandra all over again, Koestler was in the position of an insider privy to secrets that the Party imagined would never be exposed but now gave him authority to go against fellow travelers and the current Left Bank attitudinizing about Stalin and Communism.
At the point in the mid-1960s when I was getting to know Koestler, Alain Oulman telephoned me. I had never heard of Alain – Pitou as he was known – but he contacted me because the Oulmans were on the family tree of my relations, the Fould-Springers. They lived in the Portugal of Antonio Salazar, the most glum of European dictators. Apparently the illicit Communist Party had held a conspiratorial meeting in the Oulman house not far from Lisbon. Pitou said he had known nothing about it but he nevertheless thought it prudent to settle in London and afterwards Paris. The Oulmans had shares in Calmann-Lévy. Two elderly uncles, both of them directors, were retiring and there was nobody but Pitou to run the business. About thirty years old, he had very little or no experience of publishing, but Koestler was obviously an invaluable property and my role was to help cultivate him, mostly by accepting invitations to one or another of the nearby Kensington restaurants. Pitou’s wife came from one of the English families in the Portuguese wine trade. Koestler kept on probing whether she, born a Christian, would try to give a Jewish education to the child she was expecting. Better not, in his opinion. When I asked why he did not write a sequel to Promise and Fulfilment exploring today’s Jewish identity, he answered, “A dog does not return to its vomit.”
On another occasion, Clarissa brought up the name of Jenny Trower, at one time her father’s social secretary in the Washington embassy and then Koestler’s mistress. He denied all knowledge of her. When Clarissa then told him that she’d just heard Jenny had taken her own life, he swung round, “Now you have spoiled my evening.”
Koestler happened to be ahead of me as I was boarding the flight to Iceland and so we took seats together. It was the first week of July 1972 and we were off to cover the Spassky-Fischer chess championship, he for The Sunday Times, I for The Sunday Telegraph. This was widely perceived as a test of strength between the two sides in the Cold War. The awe I had initially felt towards him had long since subsided. To think of him as impatient or intolerant was to fail to perceive that he was governed by deep and admirable rage against the infamy of the times. As soon as we were in the air, a voice on the intercom asked Mr. Arthur Koestler to make himself known. The airline was offering him a courtesy drink. A stewardess arrived with a bottle, a large home brew kind of bottle without a label, and poured a mug for him and one for me. He drained it straight down so the stewardess could pour another. I could not come to terms with a brew like this so early in the morning, so he drank mine too. Soon closing his eyes, he lay back. “But zis iss murder.”
Once in Reykjavik, we stepped straight into slapstick. Bobby Fischer had not arrived and might never leave the United States. The opening ceremony was held in a dark half-empty theater without him. According to the grapevine, Spassky was longing to give an interview to Westerners but could not escape the KGB agents escorting him. So we went to his hotel and found him and half a dozen KGB in one of the public rooms on the first floor. He made for the lift and so did we. On the landing, the KGB froze him out, and managed to crowd all non-Russians into the lift and then deposit them on the ground floor.
Could the restaurant where we took our meals really have been called Nausea? The place had its comic turn too. A man alleged to be the Icelandic national poet was lying at the foot of the bar. Every so often he would haul himself up, point a finger and bellow, “I know you! You are Hungarian, yes! But not Koestler – your name is Istvan Szabo!” and then relapse to his position on the floor. A reporter once more, Koestler was in his element. “He sniffs the air with animal awareness,” I wrote in my diary. “He makes me think of an otter, trim, the coat in tip-top condition.”
Psychologically Fischer had won before he had moved a single piece against Spassky. The attendant grandmasters agreed that Fischer was a genius, and Koestler had a characteristic phrase for it: “He has understood better than anyone else the midfield aura of the queen” (in his pronunciation “ze qveen”).
One of Koestler’s campaigns was to lift quarantine restrictions on animals brought into the country. In the end, the local butcher, Mr. Major, tied a huge bone to Koestler’s front door with the message, “With the Compliments of the dogs of Kensington.” To this day, I think of this if I’m ever in Montpelier Square.
At the beginning of 1983, I arranged to call round. It must have been about six in the evening when I got there. Koestler was alone in the sitting room. When he suggested that we have a drink, I stood up; the bottles and glasses were virtually within reach. But no, I was instructed to send for Cynthia in the kitchen downstairs. She would have to stop whatever she was doing, come up the staircase and pour our drinks. She hardly spoke and she did not give herself a drink. I was made to summon her to come up a second time to pour again.
Koestler meanwhile reminisced about his arrival in Britain in May 1940. The authorities informed him that he could take whatever time he needed to see Darkness at Noon through the press and enlist only when ready along with other refugee professors and artists in the Pioneer Corps. Very civilized, he said, a contrast to the way he’d been detained and threatened in France. “It wasn’t the Home
Office that naturalized me, it was Cyril Connolly.” Michael Scammell, Koestler’s sympathizing biographer, quotes a letter that Connolly wrote to Edmund Wilson at that time, conceding that Koestler was insupportable but “probably one of the most powerful forces for good in the country.”
1983 was also when Arthur and Cynthia Koestler ended their lives in a suicide pact carried out in the room where once friends and kindred spirits had gathered on a Sunday morning. In the manner of the ancient Roman falling on his sword, Koestler preferred the dignity of death to the humiliating suffering inflicted on him by incurable disease. Cynthia’s decision to die with him, in Scammell’s words, is “a mystery the bystander cannot penetrate.” But she was only 55, and that silent figure summoned to serve something to drink is disturbingly submissive, caught in the kind of sacrificial rite the Aztecs once practiced in Mexico.
WALTER LAQUEUR
The Missing Years
1980
LIKE MANY PEOPLE with first hand experience of Nazism or Communism, Walter Laqueur had an aura of expectant pessimism as though the repeat of brutality might be around the next corner. Born in Breslau in 1921, Walter retained a sentimental attachment to the Weimar Republic of his youth. On the eve of Kristallnacht, a medieval-style pogrom, he left Germany to go to B
ritish Palestine, soon to become Israel. He never saw his parents again; they were deported from Germany and murdered. Walter spent the Second World War in the unlikely collective setting known as a kibbutz, but I have not found in any of his writings anything about how he managed to combine pioneering and scholarship. A History of Zionism, published in 1972, is the standard work on the subject, and probably will never be superseded.
His many books form a running commentary on the great political events of the age. By the time I knew him, he had established himself in London as a leading authority on Nazism and Communism. Truth spoke for itself, he believed, and there was no need for adjectives that roused emotion. He and Leo Labedz were a formidable pair co-editing Survey, the magazine that described the reality of the Soviet bloc more informatively than any other. As the Germans were invading Poland, Leo had fled to the Soviet Union, from which he eventually escaped as a soldier in General Anders’s army. His judgment of Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers was fundamental. The issue of Survey devoted to analyzing the Trotskyite political vision spun by Isaac Deutscher in defiance of reality has claims to be the most effective polemic of the period.
And what might Jews like the Laqueur family have done in the face of tyranny? The Missing Years puts that question in the form of a novel, evidently based on the actual experience of people Walter must have known or known about. Reviewing the novel for Encounter, I pointed out that elements of choice were still possible. The elderly stayed put, conditioned by cast of mind and past experience. The young break out and try to run for their lives. One particularly memorable detail is that those escaping into Switzerland gave themselves away by falling on the suddenly obtainable luxury of chocolate and devouring it in public, whereupon the watchful Swiss police could identify them as illegal refugees and hand them back to the Gestapo. Survival, then, was a matter of luck. The Holocaust was also the end of common humanity.
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