Chapter One BEGINNINGS A novelist is someone who hates his mother. --Georges Simenon when koestler came to write the first volume of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, he began by casting his "secular horoscope." He took a copy of the London Times published on September 6, 1905 (one day after his birthday) and studied its contents to discover what "influences" might have been at work on the global environment into which he was born. Skimming the advertisements and some minor news stories of the day, his eye came to rest on two weightier items: "Fierce Fighting in the Caucasus," about an anti-Jewish pogrom in Baku and the forcible suppression of a strike; and "Disturbances at Kishineff," describing an attack on Russian workmen and Jews attending the funeral of a murdered woman. The Russian workers' movement and the impending revolution of 1905 were both gathering steam at the time of Koestler's birth, and the situation of the Jews was implicated in both. Equally fascinating to Koestler was a Times editorial on the Treaty of Portsmouth between the Russian tsar and the emperor of Japan to end the Russo-Japanese War. The editorial extolled the virtues of the victorious Japanese, their "subordination of the individual to the tribe and the state," and their "monastic discipline," which it contrasted with the "excessive individualism" of the West. For Koestler, who had yet to make his own visit to Japan, the editorial had a sinister ring: "The clock that struck the hour of my birth also announced the end of the era of liberalism and individualism, of that harshly competitive and yet easy-going civilization which had succeeded in reconciling, thanks to a unique kindly-callous compromise, the slogan of 'survival of the fittest' with that of 'laissez faire, laissez aller.'?" After listing some luminaries active in science and culture (Einstein, Freud, Tolstoy, Kipling, Cézanne, and Matisse among others), he concluded pessimistically: "I was born at the moment when the sun was setting on the Age of Reason."1 The horoscope was a trick, of course. Looking back, Koestler picked out the events that suited him and arranged them to fit what he conceived to be the essential pattern of his life, yet for his biographer it has its uses. Strikes, pogroms, anti-Semitism, wars, the rise of the "first modern totalitarian state," and the decline of liberal humanism--as well as striking achievements in science and the arts--all were to spark his creativity in the course of his life, while the decline of the Age of Reason became an obsession of his later years. Just as important as the subjects was the nature of the selection he made. Everything Koestler found worthy of inclusion in his horoscope was external, public, social, political. There was nothing inward or intimate in that list, little to hint at the complex psychological life and excruciating personal struggles of the person writing it. It wasn't that Koestler considered such things irrelevant. Later he paused to consider the two main motives for writing autobiographies, "the Chronicler's urge" and the "Ecce homo [behold the man] motive," both intended to transcend the isolation of the self. The chronicler stressed external events, the contemplative stressed internal processes. A good autobiography needed both. Koestler admitted that though he had once vowed to write an intimate autobiography in the tradition of Rousseau and Cellini, he had shrunk from the "process of self-immolation" that their confessions had entailed. Acknowledging the tortured nature of his own psyche, he declined to investigate it closely, preferring not to look too deeply into the convoluted contours of his mind and motives. It was not uni Excerpted from Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.