A Serial Offender

Some books carve themselves immediately and irrevocably into the minds of their readers. I must have been no more than 16 or 17 years old when I first read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Knowing little about the Russian Revolution, and the lies, torture and mass-murder that the leadership of Josef Stalin had brought in its train, I was instantly converted into a fierce disbeliever in every benign claim about life in the Soviet Union which was made in those days by the Communists and their innumerable dupes and fellow-travellers in the West.

Darkness at Noon is of course a novel, not a historical treatise, and it was precisely the sardonic intimacy of the book, together with the vein of outrage and despair running through it – a combination of effects that only a work of fiction could carry off – which rendered it so irresistible to me. At the time I did not know the book had enjoyed much more than a succès d’estime when it first appeared in English, about a year after the outbreak of the Second World War. Though supplies of paper were severely rationed then, it was reprinted over and over again during the war, at a time when the contribution made by the Russians to the destruction of Hitler’s empire in Europe was generating, in Britain and elsewhere, an unprecedented degree of sympathy for the Soviet Union. Yet here was a relatively little-known German-Hungarian writer – a refugee, a Jew and a former Communist – who had made his way to safety in England, after various desperate adventures and spells of imprisonment in both Franco’s Spain and a defeated France, and who then proceeded to celebrate his escape from the Nazis by writing a novel that portrayed Britain’s great eastern ally as a loathsome tyranny: as a region of darkness subject to the whims of a paranoiac leader, with a half-starved proletariat at his command and a ruling class kept in submission by his habit of constantly murdering swathes of his most zealous toadies and underlings. However there was something more deeply hidden within the book that helped it to make so immediate and long-lasting an impact on readers in Britain and the United States. (Not to speak of the world-wide audience it gathered after the war had ended.) Darkness at Noon may have been a passionate attack on Stalinism and all its works; but it was also an act of expiation by the author himself for having written dishonestly about what he had seen and felt, earlier in the decade, during an extended sojourn in the Soviet Union. Throughout that time, while ostensibly working as a journalist for various Western newspapers, he had suppressed the dismay and despair he had felt about almost everything he had seen in Russia; for reasons both of conviction and prudence he had remained faithful in public to the Communist Party line, and to its semi-secret ‘minders’. However, now that he had irrevocably broken with the party, and was living as a free man in Great Britain, he was determined to make amends for the lies and half-truths he had previously indulged in – and he did so with a vengeance. As with almost all he wrote, Darkness at Noon was produced at great speed. (Written initially in German, it was translated into English by Koestler’s then partner, Daphne Hardy; thereafter he would write almost exclusively in English.) Since the novel was avowedly political in intention, its characters occasionally appear to be representatives of attitudes the writer wishes to illustrate: they move and talk like specimens or exemplars rather than self-motivated individuals. But because the author was so seized by his theme, and because he knew from within the delusions and cruelties that sustained the Soviet system from top to bottom, he wrote of it with an authority and intimacy – and a degree of contempt – that was sufficient to convince all but the most hidebound of Communists and fellow-travellers that he knew exactly what he was talking about. All that said, it is a strange fact about the novel that it was not his direct experience within the Soviet Union itself that Koestler fell back on for his description of the prison to which all the characters of Darkness at Noon are confined, whether as victims or jailors. After returning from the Soviet Union to western Europe – and being temperamentally incapable, it seems, of staying away from trouble – he had gone almost immediately to Spain, a country then tearing itself apart in the civil war between local fascists, aided by Germany and Italy, and a ragbag collection of Communists, anarchists, loyalist republicans, and anti-fascist volunteers from all over the world. Hardly had the author arrived in Spain before he was arrested by Franco’s men and flung into prison, first in Malaga and then in Seville. In both these jails, hundreds of his fellow-prisoners were being taken and shot out of hand, week after week, while the remaining captives – Koestler among them, of course – waited in their cells for their number to come up. (During a relatively brief spell in the Malaga prison, for instance, some six hundred men were dispatched in this fashion.) In writing about the last weeks of the life of his hero, Rubashov, a former party leader, and now an imprisoned, disillusioned victim of Stalin’s random murder-machine, Koestler was therefore describing experiences that he himself had been through on terms as close to first-hand as anyone could ever get – and yet emerge alive. He knew from within what the routines of such a jail were like (fascist or Communist, the essentials were bound to be the same), and how the prisoners managed to communicate with one another, and how they cried out when being dragged to their death; he shared in their hysterical drumming on the doors of their cells whenever executions were about to take place; he also shared with them the stink, boredom, loneliness, dirt and mysterious spells of inactivity and silence that fell on the institution whenever the authorities imposed a pause in their own murderous activities. Darkness at Noon is built around three long, formal ‘hearings’ by two members of the political police in charge of the prison. One of the interrogators, Ivanov by name, is more humane than the other: he seeks to persuade Rubashov that if he confesses to the charges of sabotage and collusion with the West that the state has brought against him, and by which the interrogator himself sets little store, he may yet escape the death penalty. (The background to the novel is the great Stalinist purges of the 1930s, during which thousands of ‘old Bolsheviks’ were sent to their death on various preposterous charges.) Whether this officer’s way of treating his prisoner is a device to secure Rubashov’s surrender is something about which Rubashov himself (and the reader) is left in doubt. The other interrogator is a mere brute and bully, and in the triangular struggle between the prisoner and each of his inquisitors, it is the brute who finally emerges as the victor. In fact, just before the novel ends we learn that Ivanov himself has just been ‘unmasked’ by the authorities, and is now under arrest and awaiting trial, possibly in the same prison, on the same kind of contemptibly trumped-up charges – sabotage, spying for hostile powers and so on – that will bring Rubashov’s life to an end. To such charges Rubashov does eventually plead guilty, but neither of his two interrogators appears to realize that he is doing so not only because he has been worn down by their deliberate misinterpretations of his words and actions, or by the use against him of fatigue, sleep-deprivation and bright lights focused incessantly on his eyes, but also because he feels guilt at the crimes he himself has committed, not least in telling lies to himself and others about the revolution in which he has long since ceased to believe. Koestler died at the age of 78, some forty years after the publication of Darkness at Noon, which remains the book by which he is best remembered today. He wrote incessantly throughout his life, producing a further handful of novels (most of them of an unimpressive and argumentative kind); some outstanding volumes of autobiography (Spanish Testament, Scum of the Earth, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing); books on scientific and historical subjects; and polemics on items as various as extra-sensory perception, the life-cycle of the nematode worm, Zionism (both for and against), and the irredeemable cruelty of capital punishment. In the course of his career he changed his mind on many subjects, but neither in his public nor in his private life did he ever relent in pursuing his aims – whatever they might happen to be at any particular moment. Married three times, he remained a ruthless pursuer of married and unmarried women; though small in size he was pugnacious by temperament and was given to attacking physically people who offended him. He was also a dog-lover, a heavy drinker and a serial crasher of his cars into pavements, buildings and other cars. I met him just once, at a party in what used to be the offices of The Spectator, in Gower Street, London. Unfortunately, the room was so crowded and noisy that conversation of any connected kind was impossible. What I remember of him chiefly was the breadth of his forehead, and how deep were the lines furrowed across it; also the young, exquisitely dressed Japanese lady with whom he had proudly come in, and how ruthlessly he abandoned her once he discovered how little English she had.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 21 © Dan Jacobson 2009