Arthur Koestler
From Philosopedia
Koestler, Arthur (5 September 1905 - 3 March 1983)
A Hungarian-born English writer and a Communist in the 1930s, Koestler left the party over the Stalin purge trials, becoming a spokesman of the non-Communist left.
His best-known novel, Darkness at Noon (1941), describes the purge of a Bolshevik “deviationist.” In "The Lotus and the Robot” (1960), Koestler wrote of his conversation with a professor of comparative religion, an expert on Buddhism. Is it possible, he inquired, “to have a system of ethics divorced from any transcendental belief?” The question showed his sincere questioning as to how human life can be thought to be absolute or sacred, for we live in a world of evolutionary accidents?
According to Paul Edwards in Immortality, Koestler was favorably impressed by Emerson’s view that after death we “lie in the lap of immense intelligence,” or Absolute Mind, a “great reservoir of consciences.”
Bernard Crick has written, “Like Koestler, I am ‘a pious atheist,’ ” presumably with first-hand knowledge of the Hungarian-born writer’s philosophic outlook.
In 1951, Koestler wrote about humanism to Warren Allen Smith:
- The term “supernaturalistic” begs the definition of nature. I believe this is not a problem of philosophy, but of semantics. If, however, your question refers to nineteenth-century materialism, that, of course, is dead as mutton. What will come after, I do not know. We live in an earthquake, and the new pattern of things has not crystallised.
His unusual personal affairs have been described in David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). In 1951, for example, when he wrote the above about the meaning of humanism, Koestler was married to Mamaine Paget. But he thought the wife of Michael Foot, a well-known socialist, “had a bit of a yen for me” and when she was alone with him, according to Mme. Paget, he “suddenly grasped my hair, he pulled me down and banged my head on the floor. A lot.” She managed to get away but was afraid to report the problem for fear it would lead to bad publicity. Daring to return after a time, she was again attacked and “I was overborne. I was terribly tired and weakened. There’s a limit to how much strength one has and he was a very strong man. And that was it.”
Cesarani wrote that “Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next few years it would be almost a hallmark of his conduct.” At another time he refused to wear a condom, and when Elizabeth Jane Howard became pregnant and considered an abortion, she was told that “the idea of having children was anathema to him.” After the abortion - in his The Lotus and the Robot, Koestler deplored “the slaughter of the unborn with its concomitant ill-effects on women” - and although she was having severe financial difficulties, he gave her little sympathy, adding “You’ll get over it.”
In their sitting room on Montpelier Square in London, Koestler and wife number three, Cynthia, swallowed honey laced with lethal quantities of barbiturates, dying during the night and were not found for two days. Koestler, who suffered with Parkinson’s disease and terminal leukemia, was found in an armchair, a glass of brandy in his hand. Cynthia, who had been in good health, typed a note added to his “farewell message” composed nine months prior. She wrote, apparently for Koestler’s editor, Harold Harris, “I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur - a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.” The family dog lay dead nearby.
(In a review by Christopher Caldwell of Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009), Koestler the author of more than 30 books is described as "consistently repugnant - humorless, megalomanic, violent" and
- Koestler’s enthusiasms included Lamarckian evolution, telepathy and ESP, a theory of creation that we would call intelligent design, levitation and the belief — laid out in his late book “The Thirteenth Tribe” — that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars of the North Caucasus.
- Not to mention euthanasia. At age 77, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, he resolved to commit suicide. His third wife, Cynthia, whose emotional dependence on him was extreme (“How I long to be bullied mercilessly!” she once wrote), killed herself alongside Koestler. She was still in her 50s and healthy. An earlier biographer, David Cesarani, blames Koestler for failing to dissuade her. Scammell is right to note, though, that Koestler was by then “too feeble and too far gone physically and mentally to have any further control over Cynthia.”
- Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”
- In the late 1990s, Jill Craigie, the wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot, told Cesarani that Koestler had raped her decades earlier. The scandal that resulted when Cesarani’s own Koestler biography was published embroiled Scammell, who had defended Koestler in 1995 against an allegation of attempted rape made by Foot. Scammell argues here that “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time” and that “Craigie’s story and Cesarani’s embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler’s reputation far larger than he deserves.”
- He is wrong. Posterity has let Koestler off lightly. Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favor of crediting Craigie’s story. Bertrand Russell’s wife claimed Koestler tried to rape her, too. “Without an element of initial rape,” Koestler wrote the woman who would be his second wife, “there is no delight.” One girlfriend called him “an odd mixture of consideration, thoughtfulness and extraordinary brutality.” Certain aspects of Koestler’s sexism — in particular, his expectation that his girlfriends serve him as stenographers and maids — are indeed mitigated by the era in which he lived. His pattern of predation and violence, though, is a vice of a different order. It shocked those who encountered it.
- Cyril Connolly was right to see Koestler as a journalist of genius. In this Koestler can be likened to the three contemporaries — Albert Camus, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell — who were his closest allies. If Koestler had a wider intellectual range than they, however, he had a narrower artistic one. It is a strange thing that this person known to the world primarily as a novelist can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body. The critic Leslie Fiedler once remarked that “Promise and Fulfillment,” Koestler’s 1949 book about Israel, should be filed “under K for Koestler, not I for Israel.” The point can be made more generally: In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself. 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.
(See "Arthur Koestler and His Century" in which Louis Menand describes Koestler and Sidney Hook, Koestler's reputation with women, and Koestler's possibly being a manic depressive.")
{Bernard Avishai, The New Yorker, 6 January 1997; Alexander Cockburn, “The Rapist and the Snitch,” The Nation, 23 November 1998}
