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>> this week on to win a, a look back at the life of a writer arthur koestler. >> michael scammell arthur of "koestler: the literary & political odyssey of a twentieth-century skeptic." why did you choose to open your prologue the way you did? >> partly for dramatic effect. partly to achieve my favorite form of literature which is a circle.

and partly because i did not see it as symbolic. that is to say, that he had tried in vain to exercise control over what he was doing. he constantly thought about where he was going, what he was thinking, what he was writing. there were three or four attempts at suicide earlier. it seemed to me to have great symbolic effect. >> let me read the first sentence. on tuesday, march 1, 1983, arthur koestler and his wife, cynthia entered their home and sat down facing each other. he in his favorite leather armchair and she on the couch and poured themselves their

usual drink before dinner. then what? >> that drink was laced with something else. obviously, it was a drink designed to kill them. they took their drinks with a great deal of morphine. that was the drug of choice. he had written a preface to their pamphlet on self delivery. he knew all about the various ways to bring about a death. the curious thing is that this was a man who, in his life, had led a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to abolish capital punishment in britain. he did not believe in the death

penalty, which he thought was barbaric, but he did believe in suicide. >> what was wrong with him at the time? >> that sort of dilutes the romantic image of suicide. he was suffering from leukemia at the time and also parkinson's disease. he had been deteriorating for a couple of years by that point. he made it clear who he was. >> how old was he? >> he was 78. >> how old was she and why did she commit suicide with him? >> she was 58. she was 20 years younger. she felt that she was extraordinarily dependent on him.

she lived entirely for him and lived through him, if you would like. she decided she could not face living on her own. she was the fitter of the two. >> i want to go where i think the american connection is for this on page 199. whitaker chambers, then an obscure journalist at "time magazine" called it the most exciting novel of the season, written by someone who knows russia and the places of the human mind and other critics echoed his high opinion. from then onwards, said arthur koestler later, my financial troubles never became pressing.

why was this important to this country? >> "darkness at noon" was important on a number of levels. it offered an explanation for something that had been baffling westerners in particular for many years. that was the stalin show trials. they happened in secret because authorities did not trust their apparatus and their methods. by 1937, they were holding these trials in open court.

leading soviet ministers and officials actually confessed in court to a series of crimes which struck people as fantastic. but what could they say to the confessions? many prominent people took these trials at face value. even those who were inclined to deep skepticism found the trials were orchestrated so beautifully that it was very hard to find where the scenes were. arthur koestler was still a communist at the time and was shaken by the thought that he could not believe they could have done this.

he set out to investigate not only the methods, but the psychology of the trials. he adopted a rather interesting approach. first of all, he was steeped in the crime and punishment and that was one of the influences on him. i think another influence was that he set up a show trial as a detective story. he set it up as a kind of psychological duel between the defendant and his interrogators. he based the behavior of the interrogators on the soviet

union. he offered a key to the way these things were conducted, but more important, he offered a key to the thinking of the defendants, the people that confessed. he did it by projecting some of his own feelings. he had been feeling guilt. it was one of his dominant emotions and one of his dominant driving forces. he had begun to move well away from the party at this time. he had one foot out of it. he had actually been attacked at a party caucus for one of the books he had written.

he drew on his own psychology. why would he feel sufficiently guilty? he pointed out that when he was a loyalist and had actually been responsible for the deaths of many people, he used the defendant's own conscience against him. >> i have the paperback. i found it easily. why did the author only sell 2500 copies? >> i don't think it was chambers alone.

i think the real answer to the monetary situation is more mundane. it was chosen for the book-of- the-month club. in those days, the book-of-the- month club books were extraordinarily popular and sold in the hundreds of thousands if not more. that combination of things, and i think the other thing is obvious, when he wrote it in 1939, it was just before the outbreak of world war ii. it disappeared in the events of the war. after the war, for a while, it was banned in germany by the americans and the british because of their cooperation with the soviet army. ñiit was seen as an extremely

heavy weapon during the cold war. i know that it was actually taught in schools right up until the fall of the wall. >> you know, on sunday, december 27, you lead the new york times book review section. it was written by christopher caldwell, who we had here on the program a while back. what is your sense that this is that important? >> i think that they bought my argument that we should talk about arthur koestler. i like to think that they bought my argument that he is an

extremely important figure, that his life was significant and that the books that he wrote remain important and interesting. one should remember, if one wants to be realistic about it, it was written as a biography. on the other hand, i do not want to suggest that he is venal in any way. i did not know this was going to happen until a week before it happened. >> what impact has it had so far? >> it has brought in a flood of emails. i would say that the review in "the new yorker" had just as much of an impact.

>> how do you pronounce his last name. in germany, is "kussler." in the united states it is "kessler." it is generally "kessler." in europe it is "kussler."

>> how many years have you spent with him in your life? >> we are talking 20 years. >> teaching where? >> i was teaching at cornell until 1994 and then i moved to columbia to teach nonfiction writing and translation which is my other hat that i wear. >> so, you are meeting with him. >> back in 1972, i founded a magazine called "index on censorship." it was about censorship in the arts and censorship of political books as well. i edited this for eight years until 1980 when i resigned to

write my first biography which was of another man. i was a dinner at david's one evening and he invited arthur koestler to meet me and talk about passing this information on to people who knew that were writing in soviet occupied eastern europe and hungary. >> you said that he spent time in 14 different countries. >> is it 14? i had forgotten the number. >> give us a broad view of where it was.

>> he grew up in hungary. his family was thrown out in 1919. they had reacted against a short lived communist occupation. he went to school and university in vienna. vienna was saturated with anti- semitism at the time. he became a zionist. he then moved to palestine. he was failing in his university studies. in his autobiography, he covered up the real reason. he actually left to get away from his parents, but one could leave without going all the way

to palestine. he had a very adventurous spirit. as a zionist, he wanted to see the promised land for himself. it was there that he became a journalist, writing for an obscure paper. >> who is that other fellow in the picture with him? >> this is an unknown fellow journalist. it was taken in jerusalem in 1928. at the time when he had just begun working for the press company. >> some of the photos we are showing are from your book. is this the first time people have seen them? >> in some cases, yes. in other cases, no. in the arthur koestler archive,

there are dozens and dozens of photographs. it was very difficult to make a selection. i would have liked to have printed more. >> go back to palestine. >> he was a very young journalist in palestine, but what he described about russia, britain and france and america and, he wrote about the saudi arabians that he called bolsheviks.

he'd trained himself as a journalist but he tired of the zionism. he moved to paris, briefly and then to berlin. he became a journalist with the main group of newspapers. because of his interest in science, he quickly got promoted to science editor. people forgot this when he turned to writing about science later in life that he had this

intense experience for two or three years in germany. >> by the way, he wrote how many books? >> 34, all total. >> how many are novels and how many are non-fiction? >> there are five novels, a couple of plays and the rest are nonfiction. >> of the nonfiction, which were the most successful? >> the most successful -- all of his nonfiction was pretty successful. i make the case in my book that one of the reasons that he has been more forgotten than he should have been was that people tend to think of him as a novelist because of "darkness of noon." ñiñiparticularly, in his autobiographal nonfiction.

>> did he go from berlin to spain? >> no, he joined the communist party. like many jews of the time, he joined the communist party and got himself to the soviet union on the pretext of writing a political travel book to be called "red days." he traveled around the soviet union with langston hughes. i had great fun writing about their views of one another. >> there is a picture of him with langston hughes. how did you find all that background information and what city were they in in russia? >> they met in a city that has a romantic name.

they also moved around in some rather small villages as well. actually, some of the material that is in there were published autobiographies. i also found the langston hughes papers at yale in the library and read them. >> how long did he stay in russia? >> just over 18 months. >> communist the whole time he was there? >> absolutely, yes.

part of arthur koestler's charm, -- what makes him impressive is the degree of every ideology that he pursued. when he was a zionist, he was an impeccable zionist. he dug down to the roots of zionism. when he became a communist, he did exactly the same thing. he became an absolute expert. he had an amazing way of assimilating books and ideas. i was rather amused to read one or two of the skeptical reviews when he was in the ukraine in the early 1930's when there was a famine and he ignored it and pretended it was not there. it was arthur koestler who pointed this out later in life.

he understood that he had been blinded with his enthusiasm. you can regard this as a defect or a virtue. once he entered into something, he was blind, in many ways, to its defects. >> we are in the middle 30's and he marries for the first time and i want to go through the three marriages that he had. >> ok. >> and show the pictures of the three women. the first one was 1935. dorothy? >> yes, he was back in france, working as a dutch journalist and propagandist.

he was very down on his luck. they were both working for the same man that was a leading propagandist. dorothy was a social worker who had grown up jewish in a quite well-to-do family in germany, which had lost all its money during the depression. she, herself, was a communist. >> how did you get the back story on this marriage? >> because of the difficult circumstances of their divorce and the bitterness that insued, he promised dorothy that he would not describe their marriage at any length. he was off in spain for months

and months and they parted soon after he was released from spain. >> what year? >> you know, dates are my nemesis. i think it was 1937. >> did she write about their life together? >> no, and i was extremely lucky that i was able to track her down in the very beginning of my research, shortly before she died. >> what year did you track her down? >> i found her in the london telephone book.

i wrote her a letter and then i telephoned her and she very grudgingly said that i could come and visit her. no notes, i was not allowed to take notes. immediately after our conversation, i rushed to the first cafe that i could find and wrote down everything that she had said and i had said. it is something that biographers and writers have to do sometimes. it is not uncommon to be told that you cannot take notes. any writer worth his salt, even by the person that said you cannot take notes, knows that you will make use of that conversation. i went back for a second visit and spent a little longer with her. >> what did she tell you about the marriage and about the man? >> she was very tight lipped.

she told about herself and her background. she told me how they met and how they went to switzerland. she spent quite a bit of time stonewalling my questions. it was very difficult to get information out of her. quite frequently, she would say that she did not want to talk about that. there was very little information on their relationship. she was much happier, which is characteristic of people that were communist, but she still loved to talk about politics. >> the next marriage was 1950. who was that too? >> i should add that we did spend a lot of time talking about her life after she and arthur koestler parted. she was stranded when he got out.

this was the beginning of the war. he helped her a lot, which he acknowledged. the germans were in full occupation of france. >> the second marriage, 1950. >> the strikingly beautiful identical twin of a debutante in england. they met through a common friend. that friend and a couple of friends of his were living in an apartment owned by someone with an unusual name.

>> you talked to her sister? >> i talked to her sister over a number of years. >> what value was that to you? >> she was shocked by the suicide. it was obvious that he was dying towards the end. despite the fact the turbulance of the marriage, she was devoted to arthur koestler. when she heard that i was writing the book, i instantly contacted her and she was

extremely friendly. not only did she speak at great length and freely about the relationship between arthur koestler and his second wife, but she had published a collection of his second wife's letters to arthur koestler. it emphasized how bad the relationship was. she gave me the unpublished portions of that correspondence. i was able to draw on her information, a great deal that was negative and a fair bit that showed him in a much better light. >> where did they live?

>> arthur koestler and dorothy could barely scrape two penny's together. she was better off than he because she had a regular job with an agency doing social work. they lived in one room for quite a long time and then they went off to switzerland because her brother had moved to the soviet union. he ended up being jailed. they were offered his apartment. although switzerland was extremely neutral, they were not supposed to practice their ideology.

i knew that he had met the italian novelist there. it was a communist circle. >> arthur koestler and his second wife were married how long and where did they live? >> they got married fairly soon after world war ii. they lived in wales in a pla i still cannot pronounce. while he was with dorothy, he had gone too hungary for a while and he was in spain.

with his second wife, he rushed off to palestine to write a novel about the struggle between the jews and arabs that was already beginning and they went together into the war. they lived in wales, for a brief while in london, and also lived in paris. they lived together for a year in the united states. >> how long did he live in the united states? >> he had intended to settle in the united states. he had decided that europe was finished. he came in 1951 and his second wife came afterwards.

they lived together for just over a year and he was here for just over two years. >> was there an announcement about communism or was that the "darkness at noon" book? >> in 1938, he wrote to the communist caucus to resign from the party. i discovered these in archives. i published it in "the new republic." he resigned and gave all the reasons why. but as a gesture to the soviet union and old loyalties, he agreed to keep the letters

secret. >> how did you find it? >> i found it by a rather roundabout route. i was in israel, and in one of the archives, and i forget which one it was, an archiist said that there are some of his papers in moscow. i asked how he knew that. he did not tell me at that time. i believe he already had some of them in his own archive at that point. arthur koestler was captured by the french police as a communist. he was jailed by the french for several months in a concentration camp.

the french confiscated his papers. in fact, they confiscated "darkness at noon." his english girlfriend helped translate it back into german. there was this stash of a large collection of papers that were taken back to berlin. they stayed there throughout the war. when the red army occupied berlin, they took the gestapo archives and took them back to moscow.

>> when you finally get that document, do you ever shake your head and say that you cannot believe you found this? >> yes. this was during the gorbachev perestroika. it was very hard work to get there. as someone who had worked with the dissidents, i had been banned from the soviet union for years. i was not sure i would get a visa. i found this archive with great difficulty. it was freezing cold, there. there were nine folders of material. >> do you speak russian? >> i do. >> where did that start? >> that started in the british army.

while i was in the british army, i had done rather well in languages at school. it is rather like the courses that were taught in monterey. the absurd thing is that i spent almost the entire time of my national service studying russian. i never used it in any practical way, but it changed my life. i then went to university and got my first degree in russian. >> where? >> at nottingham university. >> you were born in britain? >> yes.

after working in the former yugoslavia, i came to graduate school at columbia and studied russian at columbia. although i went back to the u.k. after four years, it planted a seed. i published papers on censorship and came here to get circulation and to raise money for foundations. after writing one of my books, it was such a huge success that i began to get job offers and so i moved. in fact, none of those original job offers materialized. i spent six months at the woodrow wilson institute and six months at harvard.

i was offered a job at cornell university. that pretty much sealed my fate, except that i very much wanted to stay here by then. >> let's go back to the third marriage. that was to cynthia jefferies, 1965. >> yes. >> what were the circumstances? >> cynthia became a secretary while he was living in paris. she was a stenographer, if you would like. she was also a rather beautiful young woman. she was also rather vulnerable. she had a record, according to her sister. as a young woman, her father had committed suicide when cynthia was just a child.

she had been rather attracted to strong, masterful and even bullying men. arthur koestler was certainly all of those things. they very soon started an affair. >> she is in the picture, the second from the right. >> yes, she is. >> isn't she in the dark in the back? >> yes. she was a secretary for a while and they separated. he called her back to work for him after his divorce from his

second wife and worked as his assistant and secretary and finally she made herself so indispensable and he was planning a trip to the united states. he wanted to bring her with him. he ran to the situation where it would not be acceptable to come with somebody who was not his wife and live with her openly. this was in 1965. they married in new york city at city hall. >> the women in his life, there is a quote that you use that he had "slept with many women." >> he suffered from satyriasis.

he was constantly running after women all his life. he seemed to have this insatiable need. sleeping with them would often be a prelude to a very long friendship. it is said that he had this mania. he had an enormous inferiority complex. >> how big was he? >> 5 foot 6 inches. >> how else would you describe him, personally? >> he had quite a magnetic personality. he never grew up. that is a plus and a minus. those that knew him very well in his middle years and early

years said that he had this schoolboyish air. he took ideas extremely seriously. he did not take convention seriously. >> what did he sound like? >> he had this very strong german accent. he spent three-quarters of his life in the english-speaking world and he had this very strong german accent that he was very ashamed of and hated but could never master phonetics. he spoke five languages pretty fluently at one time. i forget who it was that said that arthur koestler doesn't speak french, he massacres it.

the same was true about english. he constantly resisted radio and television. he hated people hearing the way that he spoke. >> his relationship with george orwell, whitaker chambers, important relationships? >> yes, i think so. i would like to get away from the personal and say why i think those relationships were important. the real reason to write about him is for what he wrote. the thing about arthur koestler, -- i do not put whitaker chambers anywhere near the same league as a writer.

in the english speaking tradition, people like steinbeck, hemingway, certainly, who believed that a writer should be not just a writer but a man of action as well. >> what does that mean? >> they should participate in the politics of the day. they should go to the hot spots and visit countries. there were revolutions in the soviet union. >> what do you think of that idea? >> now, it seems to be much the business of foreign correspondents.

it goes to central africa. but it was very much, for the 20th century, it was a very strong phenomenon. a distinct vein of literature grew out of this approach. it was an attraction to left- wing ideas. in arthur koestler's case, i link it to the idea of the search for utopia. he did not think palestine would do it.

ñiit did not do it for him. he later became a communist because he witnessed the consequences of the great depression and the poverty and deprivation of the working class. he felt that socialism had the answer. it was this that drew him to communism and the soviet union as it drew monroe and others. if you look at american examples, they are not quite that far to the left, but they were very far to that way of thinking. all of these men traveled. the great catalyst was the spanish civil war.

you could say that what kept this utopianism alive was the rise of fascism. >> why did franco of spain throw him in jail? >> because he was known to be a communist. i do not think franco's men were aware of the full depth of his involvement in communism, but they were aware that he had been visiting the republican forces in the battle for malaga. so, they accused him -- ironically, arthur koestler was a real interferer.

he tried to advise the spanish general about the things that he was doing wrong and why his troops were not up to the job. when he met einstein, he would explain the theory of relativity to him. that was the boyishness that was always with him. >> let me ask you about your work on this book. when did you get down to writing? what year? >> it was written over such a long period. i would have to look at my own diaries to tell. i think it must have been in about 1996 or something like that. >> when did you finish? >> not many months ago,

actually. i finished the main body of the book just over a year ago. >> you said you did 200 interviews. >> yes. >> did you capture all that on tape except for dorothy's interview? >> sometimes people explicitly do not like paper recorders. >> you say you were venturing into a new idea. >> yes, this book was not as big as one of my earlier books. a lot of my time, towards the end, was spent cutting.

i cut probably close to 80,000 to 100,000 words. i had a long correspondence arthur koestler enthusiasts. i know that there are people that are interested in the material, but they are a minority. i plan to put a lot of that on my website. i want to save other people having to go and dig up the same stuff. >> how big was his diary and where is it? >> his diary was kept intermittently. there are journals that start and stop.

there are detailed diaries that start and stop as well and then a diary that he kept his entire life. >> what got you the bulk of what you have in this book? >> diligence is obviously one of them. i speak a number of languages. i draw the line at hebrew. that was one element. the other thing is that i have always been a long distance runner. it when i was in school, i was hopeless at the sprint, but i could run long distance.

i enjoyed every minute of it. waysthis is my novel. it is a novel of research. it is an intricate jigsaw puzzle. >> where did you write it? >> i wrote it partly at cornell and partly in new york and a great deal of it at a summer house that we have in new hampshire, close to my wife's birth place. >> what will make this a success for you? >> this book is put together in

a rather sophisticated fashion. i would like some appreciation for the art that went into it. the construction of it, the pacing. secondly, the ideas in it. it is a kind of primer on 20th- century politics, particularly the politics of the left. i mentioned the idea of arthur koestler and the other novelists as utopiasts. most of these fellow novelist that i mentioned and many other people in the 20th century were religious but they lived in a century that was not religious. arthur koestler later sought those things in science.

>> you can get additional informational at your web site. thank you for joining us. >> you are welcome. >> for a dvd copy of this program call 1-877-662-7726. for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. episodes are also available as podcasts.

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> coming up "washington journal." public at a report on traffic safety laws after that.