Koestler

There are certain famous people I have taken a dislike to without knowing much about them. One is C.S.Lewis. I have not read a single work of his but know of him through others' mentioning of him and through references to him on radio and TV. It's quite ridiculous but I can't help it. Another is Arthur Koestler about whom a new biography has just been published. At least a review of this work gives me some justification in my dislike (if not actual hate) of the man. "Scammell's biography is a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant - humourless, megalomaniac, violent."
Again, Christopher Caldwell writes in The New York Times review of Scammell's book: "In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself."
And further: "Like many people concerned about 'humanity', he was contemptuous of actual humans."
I have a certain admiration for the man who wrote "Darkness at Noon" though I have never read it; it had the effect of helping to eliminate from Western sentimentality about Stalin and his totalitarian state the ideas that the place was utopian to some degree or, at least, promised utopian solutions. And there are his scientific works such as "The Sleepwalkers" parts of which I have read (being myself interested greatly in the 17th and 18th Century thinkers and scientists this work appeals to me more than most of what he wrote).
So this dislike I have of these people - I dislike if not hate Mel Gibson, I can't bear to hear him speak, believe it or not - is probably more to do with me than with them; something has triggered some kind of mental mechanism that has brought about a totally illogical and possibly meaningless emotional reaction.
And yet.... and yet.... I can't help thinking lof Michael Foot's wife, Jill Craigie, and her assertion after Koestler's death that he had raped her when she was a young woman. Scammell is not sufficiciently critical of these happenings says Caldwell and seems to think that, to put it briefly, times have changed.
Not good enough surely.
Can we excuse him for his apparently abhorrent behaviour because he was so great a man? Caldwell recognises the difficulty when he writes: "And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West."