June 2022. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

1940, Vintage Publishing, 304 pages. Written in German, read in English.

Sometimes, the story of how a novel came to be published, is as fascinating as the novel itself. Darkness at Noon is that kind of novel — it was written by Arthur Koestler, inspired partially by his own incarceration in Spain during the civil war, and partially by reports of the trials of dissidents in Stalin’s Soviet Union, during the first years of the second world war.

At the time, Koestler was living in France with his girlfriend, the sculptor and then art student Daphne Hardy. He started to work on the novel just before the second world war has started, but was constantly harassed by local police due to his ties with the communist party (which he already retired from and denounced). Eventually he was arrested and imprisoned for a few months, marked as an enemy agent. He continued to work on the novel in prison, while Hardy had started translating passages from it from German to English, while she was waiting for him to be released. When he was finally released, he chanced to read some of her translated passages and liked them, and they set to continue to write and translate the book, simultaneously.

When the novel was completed, two copies were sent — the English translation to a British publisher, the German original to a Swiss publisher. Then the Germans invaded France, and the couple has fled — Koestler to join the French foreign legion, Hardy back to London. They have not heard anything from the Swiss publisher, and while the novel was being prepared to be published in London, their assumption was that the original copy in German was lost. The novel was published in 1940, under a different name than Koestler has originally intended it to have, to great acclaim, while Koestler may have heard the rave reviews from jail — again imprisoned, this time in Britain.

The problem with the novel, was that the published version, embraced by critics and hailed by fellow novelists like George Orwell, was not exactly the original novel. Hardy was a first time translator, without any real experience in translating texts from German to English, and a lot of the subtleties in the translation were based on her impressions of what was written in the original manuscript. Some of the subtleties have been lost in the original publication of the book, therefore, and the protagonist’s incarceration and series of interrogations, appear to be more civil and kind than they are supposed to be portrayed, due to the choice of words.

In 2015, a graduate student working on a thesis about Koestler’s German oeuvre stumbled upon the original manuscript in the archives of the owner of the Swiss publishing house to which the original copy was sent. It was mislabeled and attributed to A. Koestler, but the student knew immediately what this manuscript was. And thus, 75 years after it was first published, Darkness at Noon was published again, this time, the authoritative version.

The novel does not clarify where or when it takes place. Its protagonist has a slavic name — Rubashov, and even bears a forename and a patroneme — but there is no single indication in the novel that it occurs in Soviet Russia or that the “Number 1” referred to is actually Stalin, although the premise, the context and the details appear to be very closely related to the great purge in Stalin’s years of the Soviet Union. Rubashov is a well known party member of the old regime, who has gone out of favor with the new regime and therefore is imprisoned. Through a series of interrogations, he is persuaded to confess to a crime he did not commit — a plot to assassinate the leader, and eventually realizes he has no other choice but to die, following a mock trial. Throughout the novel a vivid picture is painted — of time spent in jail, the confined reality of the jail cell, communications by clicking on walls by cell mates, the psychological warfare of the interrogations and the constant fear. In the novel, Koestler paints a picture of horror and hope running in parallel, of a man haunted by his past and his future, at the same time.

The July 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess.