ARTHUR KOESTLER: The Homeless Mind
By David Cesarani
The Free Press, 646 pages, $30
Seventeen years after his polemical suicide by barbiturates at his London home, Arthur Koestler confounds us still.
Koestler was the son of a prosaic Budapest textile merchant. He became a journalist in his formative years, corresponding in foreign trouble spots for Berlin and then London newspapers. Although he assumed British nationality as a flag of convenience in 1945, he posed as the very portrait of the brooding Central European intellectual.
For two decades and more after World War II, Koestler served as a genuine icon among the trans-Atlantic salon cognoscenti and the youth of Britain’s Oxbridge and the Left Bank in Paris. He provided the European left of “the Pink Generation” — his phrase — with a palatable democratic alternative to rank communism.
Koestler was a man of militant action, an ex-Zionist, an ex-communist, later author of the brilliant 1940 novel “Darkness at Noon,” which exposes totalitarianism by recounting how an old Bolshevik commissar is forced to confess political crimes he did not commit. Koestler was a vigorous autobiographer with weighted moral tales of early Palestine, Stalin’s Russia and the Spanish Civil War, tales that usually ended in disillusion. He was a shrewd anti-Soviet propagandist and inventive historian and philosopher of science, the author of an astonishing stream of some 30 books published over 51 years.
Koestler was also a right royal mess.
In a highly literate, superbly researched biography, David Cesarani, professor of modern Jewish history at England’s Southampton University, describes in knowing and respectful detail the sweep of Koestler’s remarkable oeuvre. He details Koestler’s significant impact on Western political thinking during the widening Cold War, decrying soft-headed neutrality in the face of Marxist-Leninist ideological challenge. He describes Koestler’s contemplative excursion in later life that took him from books on Copernicus and Kepler to studies of extrasensory perception and parapsychology.
As Cesarani observes: “At odds with his origins, uneasy with himself and unable to settle because with no clear identity it was not clear where he belonged, he was condemned to a nomadic lifestyle. Homelessness became his domicile.”
But Cesarani also casts an unsparing eye on the volcanic and destructive private side of the querulous Koestler. It’s enough to make the reader blink.
Koestler regularly delivered prose that glittered with reason and lucidity. Yet offstage he was tormented by a domineering — at times megalomaniacal — nature that, in turn, tormented three wives. There was also a succession of innocent, and not entirely innocent, female bystanders. “His life verged on a Feydeau farce as ex-wives, future wives, mistresses, ex-lovers and prostitutes whizzed in and out of his embrace with bewildering velocity, until the deceit and sexual athletics wearied him,” writes Cesarani of Koestler’s life in the early 1950s.
The wives were expected to act not only as cooks and bottle-washers but as adroit executive secretaries and typists of his handwritten manuscripts as well. Koestler paid short shrift to an illegitimate daughter, his only known offspring. Cutting a trim figure, always neatly combed and worldly, Koestler was evidently so appealing that the discards in the serial seductions mostly harbored only temporary, lady-like grievances.
When Cesarani’s biography of Koestler first appeared in Britain just over a year ago, the book raised eyebrows in London with its allegation that in 1952 he raped Jill Craigie, Britain’s pioneer female film director and the wife of his parliamentarian friend Michael Foot, later leader of the Labor Party. Craigie, who died last December at 85, told Cesarani she thought Koestler “had gone mad” after a pub crawl. Craigie tried to fight him off, but he was ” `very, very violent,’ ” she said. Reports Cesarani: “Koestler showed no contrition afterwards. As he left he merely gave her a side glance and said: `I thought you always had a bit of a yen for me.’ “
Beyond the chaotic relations with women, Koestler was beset with acute depressions when he found himself between books and international tours funded by his prolific journalism. There were spectacular bustups with a list of celebrated friends and acquaintances, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and British Laborite guru Richard Crossman. ” `We haven’t got anything to say to each other any more,’ ” Sartre told Koestler.
Modestly well-off from his book royalties and travel bursaries mostly funded by the British press, Koestler bought houses successively in Wales, France, Pennsylvania and the Austrian Tyrol, only to sour on them and the local ambience, sell and move on, blithely casting aside the servants and attempts to sink some roots.
Koestler’s mind was not the only thing that was homeless. So was his emotional state. Cesarani repeatedly cites the metaphor of Koestler’s frequent traffic accidents as an index of his instability. To be sure, Koestler was not an accomplished driver behind the wheel. Alcohol-induced mishaps were frequent, however.
In 1949 he punched out a suburban Paris police officer after he had been picked up drunk and asleep in his car. “(S)triking a policeman in France in 1949 was not a laughing matter,” Cesarani writes. But in a subsequent court appearance, Koestler and his lawyer came up with the ingenious explanation that he had realized he was a bit tipsy and pulled over to the side of the road in the interest of public safety. When he was taken to a police cell, he had “a flash-back to his imprisonment in Fascist Spain and lashed out in confusion.”
Nine years later, Koestler was arrested for drunken driving in Greenwich en route to central London. In a jury trial, he was acquitted with the imaginative assertion the incident ” `was apparently caused by the combined effects of an acute virus infection, of which I was unaware, and an ambitious young policeman.’ “
This diligent reporting may make Koestler seem, in retrospect, like some kind of gifted, generously tolerated nut, a genius who thought he could get away with almost anything because he was a genius. But any politically correct interpretation of his life also cannot ignore his simultaneous production of six novels, four volumes of autobiography (“Arrow in the Blue” and “The Invisible Writing” stand out) and his lead memoir of seven years as committed Communist Party activist in the 1949 collection “The God That Failed.” Plus all the rest.
More, Koestler was a seer. In 1951 he was notably prescient in “The Age of Longing” when he predicted the end of the Soviet cult of Stalin years before it came. And in 1969 he made a generalization eerily prophetic of our present era: ” `(T)he world is rapidly moving towards a mass-produced, uniform culture, and yet at the same time both the global confrontations and the venomous local conflicts of religion, language and race are getting not less but more acute.’ ” Belgrade, Belfast, Bilbao, please note.
Koestler, 77, and his wife, Cynthia, 55, both belonged to EXIT, a British right-to-die group. By 1983, he suffered from leukemia and Parkinson’s disease and faced anguishing new tests in the hospital. Cynthia was in excellent health but wrote in a suicide note, ” `I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.’ ” Police found both dead in their first-floor living room. On the coffee table were two wine glasses with a residue of powder-Tuinal, a powerful barbiturate. Koestler wrote, in his own farewell, that he was departing ” `with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond the confines of space, time, and matter, and beyond the limits of our comprehension.’ “
