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, who was 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. Far less cerebral in fact, the self-incriminations were brought about by threats and beatings, but Koestler's novel led the way to the intellectual discrediting of communism until Solzhenitsyn began publishing. 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 recognises that Koestler truly 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 honour 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.”
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