82 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
children, who were effectively Stalin’s
hostages? Or did they feel that, in some
obscure way, they deserved punishment
for crimes they hadn’t committed? Here
was a problem for a psychologist—or,
better, for a novelist, one who understood
Communism from the inside and knew
what it was like to be a political prisoner.
That novelist was Arthur Koestler,
and the book that the Moscow Trials in-
spired him to write was “Darkness at
Noon,” which became one of the most
important political novels of the twenti-
eth century. Telling the story of a veteran
Bolshevik who is awaiting trial for trea-
son, the book originally appeared in De-
cember, 1940, just two years after the
events that it drew on, and became a
worldwide phenomenon. In America, it
was a best-seller and a Book-of-the-
Month Club selection, and was soon
adapted into a hit Broadway play. When
it appeared in France, in the spring of
1945, it sold half a million copies. Some
observers credited “Darkness at Noon”
with tipping the balance against the Com-
munists in the French elections of 1946.
N
ow Scribner has published a new
translation of the book, by Philip
Boehm, based on the original German
manuscript, which was discovered in a
Swiss archive in 2015 after being lost
for seventy-five years. The story of how
it disappeared in the first place gives a
vivid sense of the dislocated world from
which the novel emerged. Koestler began
writing “Darkness at Noon”—under its
original title, “The Vicious Circle”—
early in 1939, in France, where he had
lived as a stateless refugee ever since
Hitler came to power in Germany, six
years before. When the Second World
War broke out, that September, the
French government took the opportu-
nity to sweep up such immigrants—es-
pecially those who, like Koestler, had
Communist Party connections—and
put them in internment camps.
From October, 1939, to January, 1940,
Koestler had to abandon work on the
novel while he was a prisoner at a camp
in southwestern France. When he was
released, after string-pulling by some
highly placed literary and political
friends, he returned to Paris and quickly
finished the book. As Koestler worked,
his English girlfriend, Daphne Hardy,
sat in the same room producing an En-
glish translation, and, at the beginning
of May, both manuscripts were mailed
out—the English version to a publisher
in London, and the German version to
a publisher in neutral Switzerland.
Ten days later, the Germans invaded
France and swiftly conquered the coun-
try. Koestler, who was a Jew, a Com-
munist, and a refugee, knew that if he
fell into Nazi hands he would certainly
be killed, and he and Hardy embarked
on a headlong dash for the unoccupied
southern zone of the country, sepa-
rating along the way. Hardy, a Brit-
ish citizen, made it back to London
fairly easily, but Koestler underwent a
months-long odyssey, during which he
joined and then quit the French For-
eign Legion, twice attempted suicide
(once with morphine, once with cya-
nide—miraculously, neither worked),
and finally smuggled himself, via Mo-
rocco and Portugal, to England, where
he was promptly arrested once again.
While he was in transit, Hardy had
been corresponding with the London
publisher, which, despite some reserva-
tions, had accepted the novel for pub-
lication. When the publisher objected
to Koestler’s original title, it was Hardy
who, unable to contact Koestler, decided
on calling it “Darkness at Noon.” The
phrase was an allusion to Job 5:14: “They
meet with darkness in the daytime, and
grope in the noonday as in the night”—a
description of both the moral conun-
drums facing the novel’s protagonist and
the desperate plight of Koestler him-
self. The German manuscript, mean-
while, was presumed to have been lost
in the chaos of war, and so the English
translation of the novel became, in effect,
the original, from which all subsequent
translations were made, including one
back into German. The new edition is
the first to return to Koestler’s German
text, and aims to replace Hardy’s version,
which was the hasty work of an inex-
perienced translator—though, clearly,
it was good enough to have secured the
novel’s global reputation.
This new “Darkness at Noon” arrives
in a very different world from that which
greeted the original, and one important
difference has to do with Koestler’s rep-
utation. In 1940, he was thirty-five and
little known in the English-speaking
world. He had been a successful jour-
nalist in Berlin and a Communist Party
activist in Paris, but “Darkness at Noon”
was his first published novel. It trans-
formed him from a penniless refugee
into a wealthy and famous man, and was
also the best book he would ever write.
It was followed, in the forties, by an im-
portant book of essays, “The Yogi and
the Commissar,” and several thought-
provoking but less consequential novels
of politics and ideas, including “Arrival
and Departure,” which reckoned with
Freudianism, and “Thieves in the Night,”
about Jewish settlers in Palestine.
But after that Koestler’s reputation
took a fairly steep dive, as he turned
from fiction to pop-scientific works that
earned the scorn of actual scientists,
especially when he began to embrace
E.S.P. and other paranormal phenom-
ena. By the time Koestler died, in 1983—
in a double suicide with his wife, Cyn-
thia, after he was given a diagnosis of
terminal leukemia—he already seemed
to belong to history. And the dive turned
into an irrecoverable plummet after the
publication, in the past two decades, of
biographies by Michael Scammell and
David Cesarani, which exposed him as
an egotistical monster with a lifelong
pattern of abusing women emotionally
and physically. At least one woman ac-
cused Koestler of rape, but many oth-
ers described behavior that today would
certainly be classified as sexual abuse.
Simone de Beauvoir said that he kept
aggressively “pushing and pushing” her
to sleep with him until she gave in: “I
really detested him, that arrogant fool.”
If Koestler’s biography raises one bar-
rier to his reception, a changed political
climate raises another. Soviet Commu-
nism in its heyday served many people
around the world as a secular religion.
Today, although Marxist ideas and the
label “socialist” have been resurgent on
the left, the enormous influence once
exerted by Communism now seems a
distant phenomenon. To its adherents,
Communism was not just a party iden-
