Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (93 page)

In 1926 he took off for Palestine, to work on a kibbutz. After a few weeks the kibbutz decided Israel did not need him. Koestler, who took the rejection badly, found his true vocation as a journalist. It was at this period that he espoused the hardline Zionist theory of Vladimir Jabotinsky that Israel (as it was to be) could only establish and maintain itself by strength and, if necessary, violence. It was also Koestler’s stern view that Jews should either emigrate to their homeland or assimilate wholly to where they were. He left Palestine in 1929 to live by his pen in Paris and Berlin and then there occurred what he described as the ‘explosion’ in his brain. By 1931, he was a card-carrying member of the German Communist Party and, when required, a street-fighter. He married a fellow Party member in 1935, and separated from her in 1937. Koestler, as brave as he was reckless, exposed himself to huge personal risks in the Spanish Civil War, which led to his being imprisoned by the Francoists and sentenced to the firing squad. Only intervention at high level from Britain saved him. The experience – months’ long – in the death cell was formative.

In the next couple of years he supported himself by writing sex encyclopedias – a field in which he had also undertaken much risky fieldwork. He also wrote
Spanish Testament
(1937) about his experiences, published by Gollancz. In 1938 he finished writing his first novel,
The Gladiators
(in German) – on Spartacus (a favourite Marxist theme, see Howard Fast, page 523) and resigned the Communist Party, which he believed to be in a condition of ‘moral degeneration’ and no longer worthy of him. In the novel (first called
Slavenkrieg
– slave war), Spartacus is portrayed as a proto-socialist who failed in his revolution because he lacked the necessary Jabotinskyian ruthlessness.
The Gladiators
appeared a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War and made no impact.

Undiscouraged, he threw himself into his next novel,
Darkness at Noon
, in Paris. It was translated from German into English by his current consort, sculptress Daphne Hardy. Following the outbreak of war, Koestler had been interned in France and his papers confiscated, so the novel’s manuscript had to be smuggled across the Channel by Hardy. As Michael Scammell notes, ‘Rarely can a major novel have been written at such breakneck speed or under such conditions of chaos and fear, with arrest and persecution a palpable threat and whole chapters written inside a concentration camp’. Koestler escaped the camp, however, and joined the Foreign Legion. After a few months he deserted and made his way to England in 1941, as an illegal immigrant, intending to commit suicide if apprehended or turned back. Once arrived, he was again put behind bars and remained so when
Darkness at Noon
was published, in 1940.

The novel centres on Rubashov a former party leader in an unidentified state – clearly the USSR. It begins with him being brutally woken from his dreams by the
secret police and taken off for a months’ long interrogation. The novel was inspired by the 1930s Moscow show trials in which leader after leader appeared in court – apparently not coerced physically – to confess absurd capital crimes against the regime before being shot. Accepting their fate was one thing – but why had they accepted their guilt? In the novel, the interrogator Ivanov, a former friend, relentlessly brings Rubashov (who in point of fact was indomitably loyal to the Party) to a realisation that whatever his ‘subjective’ illusions, ‘objectively’ he is a traitor to the cause – specifically to ‘No. 1’ (i.e. Big Brother, Stalin, Hitler). Ivanov himself is liquidated, to be replaced by the more brutal Gletkin. Rubashov, his brain thoroughly washed, is duly shot. The novel had a powerful impact on thinking in the West – and, clearly, on his friend Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.

After a year in the ‘Alien Pioneer Corps’, and a mental health breakdown (which may have been confected), Koestler was transferred to the Ministry of Information. Not all his information – such as his early publicity about the fact of the Holocaust – went down well. In 1943, he found time to write a third novel,
Arrival and Departure
. A sequel to
Darkness at Noon
, it takes the form of a prolonged psychoanalysis of Peter Slavek (‘slave’ and ‘Slav’ are evoked), a former revolutionary in Neutralia. Gradually he comes to terms with his serial betrayals, political compromises and guilt.
Arrival and Departure
, the first novel Koestler wrote in English (the language he came to admire for its having ‘no fat, only muscles’), was relatively unsuccessful.

In late 1945 Koestler returned to Palestine – currently in turmoil. The result was his other major work of fiction, the
roman à thése, Thieves in the Night
(1946). The Koestlerian hero, Joseph, is rejected by a Gentile woman on seeing that he is circumcised. Joseph embarks on a voyage of discovery into his genetic origins in Palestine. He works on a kibbutz and, after this apprenticeship, throws himself into the Zionist struggle. The novel contains sharp satire of the British officials enforcing the Mandate and tendentious portrayals of the Arabs as – among other bad things – rapists and killers (centrally of Joseph’s lover, Dina). Joseph ends the novel a conscientious terrorist.

Koestler became a British citizen in 1948. By now he had a new partner, Mamaine Paget (English despite her name – stunningly beautiful, inevitably) who became his second wife in 1950. They moved to France. Koestler was now not merely a defector from communism, but its most formidable foe. He edited a CIA-sponsored collection by prominent intellectuals similarly disaffected,
The God That Failed
(1949). It seemed at this point he might emigrate to the US, where he was now welcome. Instead he took up semi-permanent residence in London, now a wealthy man. In 1965 (Mamaine having died) he married his long-time secretary, Cynthia Jefferies and published two further novels,
The Age of Longing
(1951) and
The Call
Girls
(1972), which are mere shavings from his workshop floor. The major works of his late period –
The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, The Ghost in the Machine
– are books which, each of them, would for lesser men have required a lifetime’s immersion in different disciplines.

A powerful force in British and world debate, he was the prime example of Sartre’s
auteur engagé
. He remained, to the end, astoundingly wide-ranging in the issues and ideas he engaged with. Among other things he was a campaigner against capital punishment, and for the right to suicide. Terminally ill – but writing to the end – he committed suicide, persuading his luckless wife (decades his junior and in good health) to go with him. On the web, the paranoid suggestion that he was murdered by Mossad is rampant. Looking at his extraordinary life it may well be true.

The thing that counts in writing is staying power. It’s that, more than anything, that gives you a reputation.

The first paragraph of
A Question of Upbringing
(1951), the first volume of Powell’s twelve-volume
Dance to the Music of Time
sequence, opens with a London road-mending in winter. Nothing is happening: ‘The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.’ The description meanders on for another 200 words, ending: ‘The grey, undecided flakes, continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.’

Where, the reader wonders, is all this going? Nowhere very quickly, it’s safe to assume, like the hole in the road. But the effect is instantly hypnotic. No writer in English is more the master of the slow tempos of life than Powell.
Afternoon Men
, his first published novel, is the chronicle of city fellows with huge expanses of postmeridian time, and nothing to fill it with – except, of course, cocktails, gossip and another cocktail. It captures, as in a sealed capsule, the feel of the dull leisure of the high inter-war period. What was unstoppably coming, of course – and one feels the
imminence gathering through the ‘Dance’ sequence – was another ‘Great War’, even more cataclysmic than the last. That
would
be a happening.

Anthony Powell was the only child of a distinguished soldier and a mother, some fifteen years older than her husband. He was officer class; she had her roots in the landowning classes of England. Somewhat perversely, he grew up prouder of his Welshness (his surname, he ordained, should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘Noel’ and not ‘towel’). At Eton he fell in with Henry Green and Cyril Connolly and at Balliol College, Oxford, with Evelyn Waugh, as one of what would later be called the ‘Brideshead Generation’. One of Powell’s critics wittily retitles his great work ‘A Dance to the Eton Boating Song’. Stylish ennui was the approved attitude and Powell, like Connolly, would be a connoisseur of the corrosive ‘enemies of promise’, his chosen terrain being the ‘acceptance world’. The term is derived from city jargon for ‘selling short’ – i.e. money for jam.

He left Oxford – though in one sense he never did – with the de rigueur ‘gentleman’s third’ in history and drifted to London, as if drawn by a magnet. ‘I am a metropolitan man,’ he once said of himself. He joined the publisher Duckworth where his father had ‘friends’. One of his early signings was Evelyn Waugh, whose
Decline and Fall
would influence his own work.
Afternoon Men
came out under the Duckworth imprint in 1931, to be followed in quick succession by
Venusberg
(1932) and
From a View to a Death
(1933). They are, all of them, wittily dispirited versions of ‘the way we live now’ – or, more precisely, how Powell’s class lived. In December 1934 (always his favourite month – he liked the gloom) Powell married Lady Violet Georgiana Pakenham, an offspring of the English Catholic aristocracy. The couple would have two sons. Was the marriage happy? ‘I should like to say more about Powell’s marriage, but I can’t,’ his biographer sighs.

In 1936 Powell left Duckworth for a short spell of scriptwriting in Los Angeles. It did not please, although it was remunerative. On the outbreak of war, he gave up writing for the duration. After a false start in the infantry – for which years of indolence had rather unsuited him – Powell found his niche in ‘intelligence’, working as a liaison officer with expatriate allies from occupied countries in Europe. He was demobilised in 1945 with the rank of major, a chestful of decorations, and a sense of vague remorse that he had had such a cushy war – and, as he said, a very ‘boring’ one. One of the allusions which comes up, time and again, in the wartime volumes of
Dance
is from Alfred de Vigny’s ironically titled
Servitude et grandeur militaires
. The French poet served in the army for fourteen years without seeing any action whatsoever. Powell’s father had seen real action in the earlier war.

In 1948, he fell, as he always did, into a comfortable berth as the
Times Literary Supplement
fiction review editor. In 1950 he inherited a fortune from an uncle he
barely knew. Money, too, always seemed to fall his way, and enabled him to move into a fine country house, The Chantry, in Somerset. Another bequest, when his father died, in 1959, insulated him against the inconveniences of post-war austerity. Financial security also enabled him to embark on his grand project,
A Dance to the Music of Time
, and to take his own time doing it. The sequence was launched in 1951 – the year of the ‘Festival of Britain’ which, in his prelude to his grand project,
The Sword of Honour
trilogy, Waugh portrays as the end of English civilisation. Under his series hero’s less jaundiced, but equally gloomy eye, Powell surveys fifty years of England. The viewpoint is conservative, like Waugh’s, but less irritably so. Powell rarely put people’s backs up. ‘Tony is the only Tory I have ever liked,’ said George Orwell – someone who elsewhere repudiated everything Powell’s class stood for. The design is loose-knit. Characters drift in and drift out with no more purpose than jellyfish in the ocean stream. Nothing is hurried – but time passes and things do happen. The reader is given the task of assembling, rather than being told, what is going on.
The Acceptance World
(1955) opens, typically, with a lavishly slow motion description of a seedily genteel hotel, some fortune-telling, and an uneventful tryst between the unsinkable Uncle Giles and his nephew Nicholas – neither of whom has what Othello calls ‘occupation’. This life-drift only makes sense in terms of Jenkins’s antagonist, Widmerpool, the ‘getter on’, a coming man who – inevitably – will die a lord. Should one strive, or let life happen and observe it, ironically, keeping afloat as best one can?

In later life, Powell’s closest friend was Malcolm Muggeridge, a former comrade in army intelligence and now the editor of
Punch
. Powell was recruited to the magazine in 1953, as literary editor, on the then huge salary of £1,500 p.a. Alongside
Dance
, which he completed in 1975, Powell kept private journals which, when published in 1982, revealed an increasingly bilious temperament. His last novel,
The Fisher King
, came out in 1986. He turned down a knighthood – even though it was offered by a Conservative administration. It would, probably, have looked paltry alongside his wife’s lineage – or perhaps too Widmerpoolian. He left over £1.5 million on his death and a fictional sequence to rival Balzac’s.