Arthur Koestler | |
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.jpg) Koestler in 1969 | |
| Born | Kösztler Artúr (1905-09-05)5 September 1905 |
| Died | 1 March 1983(1983-03-01) (aged 77) London, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, journalist |
| Education | University of Vienna |
| Period | 1934–1983 |
| Subject | Fiction, non-fiction, history, autobiography, politics, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, science |
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Arthur KoestlerCBE (UK:/ˈkɜːstlər/,US:/ˈkɛst-/;German:[ˈaʁtuːɐ̯ˈkœstlɐ];Hungarian:Kösztler Artúr[ˈkøstlɛrˈɒrtuːr]; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was anAustro-Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born inBudapest, and was educated in Austria, apart from his early school years. In 1931, Koestler joined theCommunist Party of Germany but resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned withStalinism.
Having moved to Britain in 1940, Koestler published his novelDarkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1949, Koestler began secretly working with a British Cold Waranti-communist propaganda department known as theInformation Research Department (IRD), which would republish and distribute many of his works, and also fund his activities.[2][3] In 1968, he was awarded theSonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture". In 1972, he was made aCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed withParkinson's disease and in 1979 with terminalleukaemia.[4][5] On 1 March 1983, Koestler and his wife Cynthiadied of suicide together at their London home by swallowing lethal quantities ofbarbiturate-basedTuinal capsules.
[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient ofSigmund Freud. Ininterwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary ofVladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of theZionist movement. Travelling inSoviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran intoLangston Hughes. While reporting on theSpanish Civil War, he metW. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia before winding up in one ofFranco's prisons. InWeimar Berlin he fell into the circle of theComintern agentWilli Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, includingJohannes Becher,Hanns Eisler andBertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by theGestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills fromWalter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along the way he had lunch withHeinrich Mann, got drunk withDylan Thomas, made friends withGeorge Orwell, flirted withMary McCarthy and lived inCyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention ofHarold Nicolson andNoël Coward. In the 1950s he helped to found theCongress for Cultural Freedom, together with Melvin Lasky andSidney Hook. In the 1960s he tookLSD withTimothy Leary. In the 1970s he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the youngSalman Rushdie.
Koestler was born inBudapest toJewish parents Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles).[7] Henrik's father, Lipót Koestler, was a soldier in theAustro-Hungarian Army.[8] In 1861, Lipót married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, and their son Henrik was born on 18 August 1869 in the town ofMiskolc in northeastern Hungary. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German, and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He later set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.[9]
Koestler's mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominentJewish family inPrague. Among her ancestors wasJonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose sonJudah Jeitteles became a well-known poet—Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Adele's father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family toVienna, where she grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, Jacob abandoned his wife and daughter and emigrated to the United States. Adele and her mother moved from Vienna to Budapest to stay with Adele's older married sister.
Henrik and Adele met in 1898 and married in 1900. Arthur, their only child, was born on 5 September 1905. The Koestlers lived in spacious, well-furnished, rented apartments in various predominantly Jewish districts of Budapest. During Arthur's early years, they employed a cook-housekeeper as well as a foreign governess. His primary school education started at an experimental private kindergarten founded by Laura Striker (née Polányi). Her daughterEva Striker later became Koestler's lover, and they remained friends all his life.[10]
The outbreak ofWorld War I in 1914 deprived Koestler's father of foreign suppliers, and his business collapsed. Facing destitution, the family moved temporarily to a boarding house in Vienna. When the war ended, the family returned to Budapest. As noted in Koestler's autobiography, he and his family were sympathetic to the short-livedHungarian Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. Although the small soap factory owned at the time by Koestler's father was nationalised, the elder Koestler was appointed its director by the revolutionary government and was well-paid. Even though the autobiography was published in 1953, after Koestler had become an outspoken anti-communist, he wrote favourably of theHungarian Communists and their leaderBéla Kun. He fondly recalled the hopes for a better future he had felt as a teenager in revolutionary Budapest.
The Koestlers later witnessed the temporaryoccupation of Budapest by theRomanian Army and then theWhite Terror under theright-wing regime ofAdmiral Horthy. In 1920, the family returned to Vienna, where Henrik set up a successful new import business.
In September 1922, Koestler enrolled in theUniversity of Vienna to study engineering,[11] and joined theZionist duelling student fraternity Unitas.[12] When Henrik's latest business failed, Koestler stopped attending lectures and was expelled for non-payment of fees. In March 1926, he wrote a letter to his parents telling them he was going toMandate Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer in a factory to gain experience and help him obtain a job in Austria. On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna forPalestine.[13]
For a few weeks, Koestler lived in akibbutz, but his application to join the collective (KvutzatHeftziba) was rejected by its members.[14] For the next twelve months, he supported himself with menial jobs inHaifa,Tel Aviv, andJerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he depended on friends and acquaintances for survival.[15] He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mainly in German. In early 1927, he left Palestine briefly forBerlin, where he ran the secretariat ofZe'ev Jabotinsky'srevisionist Zionist partyHatzohar.
Later that year, through a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-basedUllstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where he produced detailed political essays and some lighter reportage for his principal employer and other newspapers for the next two years. He was a resident at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im in Jerusalem.[16] He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents, and prime ministers,[17] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. As noted in his autobiography, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, theYishuv, and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career inHebrew.
In June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine.[18] In September 1929, he was sent toParis to fill a vacancy in the bureau of the Ullstein News Service. In 1931, he was called to Berlin and appointed science editor of theVossische Zeitung and science adviser to the Ullstein newspaper empire.[19] In July 1931, he was Ullstein's choice to represent the paper on board theGraf Zeppelin's week-long polar flight, which carried a team of scientists and the polar aviatorLincoln Ellsworth to 82 degrees North and back. Koestler was the only journalist on board: his live wireless broadcasts and subsequent articles and lecture tours throughout Europe brought him further attention.[20] Soon afterwards he was appointed foreign editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the mass-circulationBerliner Zeitung am Mittag.[21][22]
In 1931, Koestler, encouraged byEva Striker and impressed by the achievements of the Soviet Union, became a supporter ofMarxism–Leninism. On 31 December 1931, he applied for membership in theCommunist Party of Germany.[23] As noted in his biography, he was disappointed in the conduct of theVossische Zeitung, "The Flagship of German Liberalism", which adapted to changing times by firing Jewish journalists, hiring writers with marked German nationalist views, and dropping its longstanding campaign against capital punishment. Koestler concluded that Liberals and moderate Democrats could not stand up against the risingNazi tide and that the Communists were the only real counter-force.
In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to theSoviet Union. In 1932, Koestler travelled inTurkmenistan and Central Asia, where he met and traveled withLangston Hughes.[24][25] During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in theUkrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, alongside physicist and writerAlexander Weissberg. At the time, the Ukrainian SSR was in the middle of acatastrophic man-made famine. Much later, he would describe how in the train station ofKharkiv, "[Ukrainian peasant women] held up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, sticklike limbs, and swollen, pointed bellies" as a result of the widespread malnutrition. Nevertheless, at this time, he remained a convinced Soviet sympathiser, and echoing the official version of events by the Soviet government, he claimed that those starving were "enemies of the people who preferred begging to work."[26] Koestler wrote a book on theSoviet Five-Year Plan that did not meet with the approval of the Soviet authorities and was never published in Russian. Only the German version, extensively censored, was published in an edition for German-speaking Soviet citizens.
As a result ofAdolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, Koestler could no longer visit Germany. Koestler left the Soviet Union in 1933, and in September of that year, he returned to Paris and, for the next two years, was active inanti-fascist movements. He wrote propaganda under the direction ofWilli Münzenberg, theComintern's chief propaganda director in the West. In 1935, Koestler married Dorothy Ascher (1905−1992), a fellowcommunist activist. They separated amicably in 1937.[27]
In 1936, during theSpanish Civil War, Koestler undertook a visit to GeneralFrancisco Franco's headquarters inSeville on behalf of theComintern, pretending to be a Franco sympathiser and using credentials from the London dailyNews Chronicle as cover. He collected evidence of the direct involvement ofFascist Italy andNazi Germany on Franco's side, which at that time theNationalists rebels were still trying to conceal.[28] He had to escape after he was recognised and denounced as a communist by a former German colleague. Back in France, he wroteL'Espagne Ensanglantée, which was later incorporated into his bookSpanish Testament. WithinSpanish Testament, while in prison, Koestler described his belief in "the Socialist conception of the future of humanity"; in other words, "to given [sic] workers chance".[29]
In 1937, Koestler returned to Spain on the side of theRepublicans as a war correspondent for theNews Chronicle and was inMálaga when it fell toBenito Mussolini's troops, who were fighting on the side of the Nationalists. He took refuge in the house of retired zoologistSir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, and they were both arrested by Franco's chief propagandist,Luis Bolín, who had sworn that if he ever got his hands on Koestler, he would "shoot him like a dog".[30] From February until June, Koestler was imprisoned in Seville under sentence of death. He was eventually exchanged for a "high value" Nationalist prisoner held by the Republicans, the wife of one of Franco's ace fighter pilots. Koestler was one of the few authors to have been sentenced to death, an experience he wrote about inDialogue with Death. As he noted in his autobiography, his estranged wife Dorothy Ascher had greatly contributed to saving his life by intensive, months-long lobbying on his behalf in Britain. When he went to Britain after his release, the couple tried to resume their marriage, but Koestler's gratitude to her proved an insufficient foundation for a daily life together. Koestler returned to France, where he agreed to write a sex encyclopaedia to earn money to live on. It was published with great success under the titleThe Encyclopœdia of Sexual Knowledge, under the pseudonyms of "Drs A. Costler, A. Willy, and Others".[31]
In July 1938, Koestler finished work on his novelThe Gladiators. Later that year, he resigned from the Communist Party and started work on a new novel, which was published in London under the titleDarkness at Noon (1941). Also in 1938, he became editor ofDie Zukunft (The Future), a German-language weekly published in Paris.[32] Koestler's breaking with the Communist Party may have been influenced by the similar step taken by his fellow activistWilli Münzenberg. In 1939, Koestler met and formed an attachment to the British sculptorDaphne Hardy. They lived together in Paris, and she translated the manuscript ofDarkness at Noon from German into English in early 1940. She smuggled it out of France when they left ahead of the German occupation and arranged for its publication after reaching London that year.
After the outbreak ofWorld War II, Koestler returned from the South of France to Paris. He attempted to turn himself into the authorities as a foreign national several times and was finally arrested on 2 October 1939. The French government first detained Koestler atStade Roland Garros until he was moved toLe Vernet Internment Camp among other "undesirable aliens", most of them refugees.[33] He was released in early 1940 due to strong British pressure.Milicent Bagot, an intelligence officer atMI5, recommended his release from Camp Vernet but said that he should not be granted a British visa. (John le Carré used Bagot as a model forConnie Sachs in his spy novels featuring "George Smiley". Bagot was the first to warn thatKim Philby ofMI6 was probably spying for the USSR.)[34] Koestler describes the period 1939 to 1940 and his incarceration in Le Vernet in his memoirScum of the Earth.
Shortly before the German invasion of France, Koestler joined theFrench Foreign Legion to get out of the country. He deserted in North Africa and tried to return to England. He heard a false report that the ship Hardy was travelling upon had sunk and that she and his manuscript were lost. He attemptedsuicide but survived. Arriving in the UK without an entry permit, Koestler was imprisoned pending examination of his case. He was still in prison when Daphne Hardy's English translation of his bookDarkness at Noon was published in early 1941. Immediately after Koestler was released, he volunteered for Army service. While awaiting his call-up papers, between January and March 1941, he wrote his memoirScum of the Earth, the first book he wrote in English. He served in thePioneer Corps for the next twelve months.[35]
In March 1942, Koestler was assigned to theMinistry of Information, where he worked as a scriptwriter for propaganda broadcasts and films.[36] In his spare time, he wroteArrival and Departure, the third in his trilogy of novels that includedDarkness at Noon. He also wrote several essays, which were subsequently collected and published inThe Yogi and the Commissar. One of the essays, titled "On Disbelieving Atrocities" (originally published inThe New York Times),[37] was about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Daphne Hardy, who had been doing war work in Oxford, joined Koestler in London in 1943, but they parted company a few months later. They remained good friends until Koestler's death.[38]
In December 1944, Koestler traveled to Palestine with accreditation fromThe Times. There he had a clandestine meeting withMenachem Begin, the head of theIrgun paramilitary organisation, who was wanted by the British and had a 500-pound bounty on his head. Koestler tried to persuade him to abandon militant attacks and accept atwo-state solution for Palestine but failed. Many years later, Koestler wrote in his memoirs: "When the meeting was over, I realised how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence."[39]
Staying in Palestine until August 1945, Koestler collected material for his next novel,Thieves in the Night. When he returned to England, Mamaine Paget, whom he had started to see before going out to Palestine, was waiting for him.[40][41] In August 1945, the couple moved to the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, an isolated farmhouse owned byClough Williams-Ellis, in theVale of Ffestiniog. Over the next three years, Koestler became a close friend of writerGeorge Orwell. The region had its own intellectual circle, which would have been sympathetic to Koestler: Williams Ellis's wife,Amabel, a niece ofLytton Strachey, was also a former communist; other associates includedRupert Crawshay-Williams,Michael Polanyi,Storm Jameson and, most significantly,Bertrand Russell, who lived close by.[42]
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In 1948, whenwar broke out between the newly declared State ofIsrael and the neighbouring Arab states, Koestler was accredited by several newspapers, American, British, and French, and travelled to Israel.[43] Mamaine Paget went with him. They arrived in Israel on 4 June and stayed there until October.[44] Later that year, they left the UK for a while and moved to France. News that his long-pending application forBritish nationality had been granted reached him in France in late December; early in 1949, he returned to London to swear theoath of allegiance to theBritish Crown.[45]
In January 1949, Koestler and Paget moved to a house he had bought in France. There, he wrote a contribution toThe God That Failed and finished work onPromise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917−1949. The latter book received poor reviews in both the U.S. and the UK. In 1949, he also published the non-fiction bookInsight and Outlook. This, too, received lukewarm reviews. In July, Koestler began work onArrow in the Blue, the first volume of his autobiography. He hired a new part-time secretary, Cynthia Jefferies, who replacedDaphne Woodward.[46] Cynthia and Koestler eventually married. In the autumn, he started work onThe Age of Longing, which he continued to work until mid-1950. Koestler had reached an agreement with his first wife, Dorothy, on an amicable divorce, and their marriage was dissolved on 15 December 1949.[47] This cleared the way for his marriage to Mamaine Paget,[48] which took place on 15 April 1950 at the British Consulate in Paris.[49]
In June 1950, Koestler delivered a major anti-communist speech in Berlin under the auspices of theCongress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation funded (though he did not know this) by theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States. In the autumn, he went to the United States on a lecture tour, during which he lobbied for permanent resident status in the U.S. At the end of October, on impulse, he boughtIsland Farm, a small island with a house on it on theDelaware River nearNew Hope, Pennsylvania. He intended to live there at least for part of each year.[50]
In January 1951, a dramatised version ofDarkness at Noon bySidney Kingsley opened in New York. It won theNew York Drama Critics Award. Koestler donated all his royalties from the play to a fund he had set up to help struggling authors, the Fund for Intellectual Freedom (FIF).[51] In June a bill was introduced in theUnited States Senate to grant Koestler permanent residence in the U.S.[52] Koestler sent tickets for the play to hisHouse sponsorRichard Nixon and his Senate sponsorOwen Brewster, a close confidant ofJoseph McCarthy.[53] The bill became law on 23 August 1951 as Private Law 221 Chapter 343 "AN ACT For the relief of Arthur Koestler".[54]
In 1951, the last of Koestler's political works,The Age of Longing, was published. In it, he examined the political landscape of post-war Europe and the problems facing the continent. In August 1952, his marriage to Mamaine collapsed. They separated but remained close until her sudden and unexpected death in June 1954.[55][56] The bookLiving with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945–51, edited by Mamaine's twin sister Celia Goodman, gives insight into their lives together. Koestler decided to make his permanent home in Britain. In May 1953, he bought a three-storyGeorgian townhouse onMontpelier Square in London and sold his houses in France and the United States.
The first two volumes of his autobiography,Arrow in the Blue, which covers his life up to December 1931 when he joined the German Communist Party, andThe Invisible Writing, which covers the years 1932 to 1940, were published in 1952 and 1954, respectively. A collection of essays,The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays on the perils he saw facing Western civilization, was published in 1955. On 13 April 1955, Janine Graetz, with whom Koestler had an on-off relationship over a period of years, gave birth to his daughter Cristina.[57] Despite repeated attempts by Janine to persuade Koestler to show some interest in her, Koestler had almost no contact with Cristina throughout his life. Early in 1956, he arranged for Cynthia Jeffries to have an abortion when she became pregnant; it was then illegal.[58] Koestler's main political activity during 1955 was his campaign for the abolition ofcapital punishment (which in the UK was by hanging). In July, he started work onReflections on Hanging.
Although Koestler resumed work on a biography of Kepler in 1955, it was not published until 1959. In the interim, it was entitledThe Sleepwalkers. The book's emphasis had changed and broadened to "A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", which also became the book's subtitle.Copernicus andGalileo were added toKepler as the major subjects of the book. Later in 1956, as a consequence of theHungarian Uprising, Koestler became busy organising anti-Soviet meetings and protests. In June 1957, Koestler gave a lecture at a symposium inAlpbach, Austria, and fell in love with the village. He bought land there, built a house, and used it for the next twelve years as a place for summer vacations and organising symposia. In May 1958, he had ahernia operation.[59] In December, he left for India and Japan and was away until early 1959. He wrote the bookThe Lotus and the Robot on his travels.
In early 1960, on his way back from a conference in San Francisco, Koestler interrupted his journey at theUniversity of Michigan inAnn Arbor, Michigan, where some experimental research was going on withhallucinogens. He triedpsilocybin and had a "bad trip". Later, when he arrived atHarvard to seeTimothy Leary, he experimented with more drugs but was not enthusiastic about that experience either.[60] In November 1960, he was elected to a Fellowship ofThe Royal Society of Literature.
In 1962, along with his agent, A D Peters, and the editor ofThe Observer,David Astor, Koestler set up a scheme to encourage prison inmates to engage in arts activities and to reward their efforts. Twenty years later he left £10,000 in his will to the Koestler Trust. NowadaysKoestler Arts supports over 7,000 entrants from UK prisons annually and awards prizes in fifty art forms. In late Autumn each year, Koestler Arts runs an exhibition usually at London'sSouthbank Centre.
Koestler's bookThe Act of Creation was published in May 1964. In November, he undertook a lecture tour at various universities in California. In 1965, he married Cynthia in New York,[61] and they moved to California, where he participated in a series of seminars at theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences atStanford University. Koestler spent most of 1966 and early 1967 working onThe Ghost in the Machine. In his article "Return Trip to Nirvana", published in 1967 in theSunday Telegraph, Koestler wrote about thedrug culture and his own experiences with hallucinogens. The article also challenged the conclusion aboutmescaline experience inAldous Huxley'sThe Doors of Perception.
In April 1968, Koestler was awarded theSonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture".The Ghost in the Machine was published in August of the same year, and in the autumn, he received an honorary doctorate fromQueen's University, Kingston, Canada. In the later part of November, the Koestlers flew to Australia for a number of television appearances and press interviews. The first half of the 1970s saw the publication of four more books by Koestler:The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971),The Roots of Coincidence andThe Call-Girls (both 1972), andThe Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968–1973 (1974). In the1972 New Year Honours, he was appointed aCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).[62]
Early in 1976, Koestler was diagnosed withParkinson's disease. The trembling of his hand made writing progressively more difficult.[63] He cut back on overseas trips and spent the summer months at a farmhouse inDenston,Suffolk, which he had bought in 1971. That same year saw the publication ofThe Thirteenth Tribe, which presents hisKhazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry.[64][65][66][67][68][69][70] In 1978, Koestler publishedJanus: A Summing Up. In 1980 he was diagnosed withchronic lymphocytic leukaemia.[71] His bookBricks to Babel was published that year. His final book,Kaleidoscope, containing essays fromDrinkers of Infinity andThe Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968–1973, with some later pieces and stories, was published in 1981. During the final years of his life, Koestler,Brian Inglis, andTony Bloomfield established the KIB Society (named from the initials of their surnames) to sponsor research "outside the scientific orthodoxies." After his death, it was renamedthe Koestler Foundation. In his capacity as vice-president of theVoluntary Euthanasia Society, later renamed Exit, Koestler wrote a pamphlet on suicide, outlining the case both for and against, with a section dealing specifically with how best to do it.[72]
Koestler and Cynthia killed themselves on the evening of 1 March 1983 at their London home, 8 Montpelier Square, with overdoses of thebarbiturateTuinal taken with alcohol.[73] Their bodies were discovered on the morning of 3 March, by which time they had been dead for 36 hours.[74][75] Koestler had stated more than once that he was afraid, not of being dead, but of the process of dying.[76] His suicide was not unexpected among his close friends. Shortly before his suicide, his doctor had discovered a swelling in the groin, which indicated ametastasis of the cancer.[77][78][79] Koestler's suicide note read:[80]
To whom it may concern.
The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period.
Trying to commit suicide is a gamble the outcome of which will be known to the gambler only if the attempt fails, but not if it succeeds. Should this attempt fail and I survive it in a physically or mentally impaired state, in which I can no longer control what is done to me, or communicate my wishes, I hereby request that I be allowed to die in my own home and not be resuscitated or kept alive by artificial means. I further request that my wife, or a physician, or any friend present, should invokehabeas corpus against any attempt to remove me forcibly from my house to hospital.
My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements.
I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This "oceanic feeling" has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.
What makes it nevertheless hard to take this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my surviving friends, above all my wife Cynthia. It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life – and never before.
The note was dated June 1982. Below it appeared the following:
Since the above was written in June 1982, my wife decided that after thirty-four years of working together she could not face life after my death.
Further down the page appeared Cynthia's own farewell note:
I fear both death and the act of dying that lies ahead of us. 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.
Double suicide has never appealed to me, but now Arthur's incurable diseases have reached a stage where there is nothing else to do.
The funeral was held at theMortlake Crematorium in South London on 11 March 1983.[74] Controversy arose over why Koestler allowed, consented to, or (according to some critics) compelled his wife's simultaneous suicide. She was only 55 years old and believed to be healthy. In a typewritten addition to her husband's suicide note, Cynthia wrote that she could not live without her husband. Reportedly, few of the Koestlers' friends were surprised by this admission, apparently perceiving that Cynthia lived her life through her husband and that she had no "life of her own".[81] Her absolute devotion to Koestler can be seen clearly in her partially completed memoirs.[82] Despite this, according to a profile of Koestler by Peter Kurth:[83]
All their friends were troubled by whatJulian Barnes calls "the unmentionable, half-spoken question" of Koestler's responsibility for Cynthia's actions."Did he bully her into it?" asks Barnes. And "if he didn't bully her into it, why didn't he bully her out of it?" Because, with hindsight, the evidence that Cynthia's life had been ebbing with her husband's was all too apparent.
With the exception of some minor bequests, Koestler left the residue of his estate, about £1 million (worth about £3.59 million in 2021), to the promotion of research into the paranormal through the founding of a chair inparapsychology at a university in Britain. The estate's trustees had great difficulty finding a university to establish such a chair. Oxford, Cambridge,King's College London andUniversity College London were approached, and all refused. Eventually, the trustees reached an agreement with theUniversity of Edinburgh to set up a chair, theKoestler Parapsychology Unit, in accordance with Koestler's request.[84]
Koestler's relations with women have been a source of controversy.David Cesarani alleged in his biography of Koestler, published in 1998, that Koestler had been a serial rapist, citing the case of the British feminist writerJill Craigie who said that she had been his victim in 1951. Feminist protesters forced the removal of his bust fromEdinburgh University.[85] In his biography,Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (2009),Michael Scammell countered that Craigie was the only woman to go on record that she had been raped by Koestler, and had done so at a dinner party more than fifty years after the event. Claims that Koestler had been violent were added by Craigie later, although Scammell concedes that Koestler could be rough and sexually aggressive.
Some critics believed that Cesarani's claims of Koestler having been a serial rapist were unfounded; in his review of Cesarani's biography inThe New York Times, the historianMark Mazower observed: "Even those who applaud Cesarani for bringing the rape issue forward may wonder whether his approach is not too one-sided to make for a convincing portrait. Koestler was a domineering man. But he attracted women and many remained close friends with him after they had slept with him. It is implausible to write them all off as masochists, as Cesarani effectively does. Some broke with him; but then so did many other friends and acquaintances."[86] Similarly,John Banville, in theLondon Review of Books, wrote:[87]
Koestler himself, and at least one Hungarian friend, saw nothing odd in [Koestler's] bed-hopping. 'In Central Europe,' George Mikes wrote in defence of Koestler, 'every woman was regarded as fair game. She could always say "no" and ... her no would be taken for an answer, even if grudgingly.' Cesarani will have none of this political incorrectness, and stoutly declares: 'There is evidence that as well as his consistent violence against women Koestler was a serial rapist.' The evidence that Cesarani adduces in support of this accusation is an account of a particular encounter between Koestler and Jill Craigie, the wife ofMichael Foot.
Cesarani and others claim that Koestler hadmisogynistic tendencies. He engaged in numerous sexual affairs and generally treated the women in his life badly.[88][89][90] In his autobiography,The Invisible Writing, Koestler admits to having denounced Nadezhda Smirnova, with whom he was having a relationship, to the Soviet secret police.[91]
It is difficult to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. Fromprogressive education andFreudian psychoanalysis throughZionism,communism, andexistentialism topsychedelic drugs,parapsychology, andeuthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.
Koestler wrote several major novels, two volumes of autobiographical works, two volumes of reportage, a major work on the history of science, several volumes of essays, and a considerable body of other writing and articles on subjects as varied as genetics, euthanasia, Eastern mysticism, neurology, chess, evolution, psychology, the paranormal and more.[92]
Darkness at Noon was one of the most influential anti-Soviet books ever written.[93] Its influence in Europe on Communists and sympathisers and, indirectly, on the outcomes of elections in Europe, was substantial.[94]Geoffrey Wheatcroft believes that Koestler's most important books were the five completed before he was 40: his first memoirs and the trilogy of anti-totalitarian novels that includedDarkness at Noon.[88]
Koestler embraced a multitude of political, as well as non-political issues. Zionism, communism, anti-communism,voluntary euthanasia, abolition of capital punishment, particularlyhanging, and the abolition of quarantine for dogs being reimported into the United Kingdom are examples.[citation needed]
In his bookThe Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) Koestler defended the biologistPaul Kammerer, who claimed to have found experimental support forLamarckian inheritance. According to Koestler, Kammerer's experiments on the midwife toad may have been tampered with by aNazi sympathiser at the University of Vienna. Koestler came to the conclusion that a kind of modified "Mini-Lamarckism" may explain some rare evolutionary phenomena.
Koestler criticisedneo-Darwinism in a number of his books but was not opposed to thetheory of evolution in general terms.[95] Biology professor Harry Gershenowitz described Koestler as a "populariser" of science despite his views not being accepted by the "orthodox academic community".[96] According to an article in theSkeptical Inquirer, Koestler was an "advocate ofLamarckian evolution – and a critic of Darwiniannatural selection as well as a believer in psychic phenomena".[97]
In addition to his specific critiques of neo-Darwinism, Koestler was opposed to what he saw as dangerous scientific reductionism more generally, including thebehaviourism school of psychology, promoted in particular byB. F. Skinner during the 1930s.[98] Koestler assembled a group of high-profileantireductionist scientists, includingC. H. Waddington,W. H. Thorpe, andLudwig von Bertalanffy, for a meeting at his retreat inAlpbach in 1968. This was one of many attempts which Koestler made to gain acceptance within the mainstream of science, a strategy which brought him into conflict with individuals such asPeter Medawar who saw themselves as defending the integrity of science from outsiders.[98] Although he never gained significant credibility as a scientist, Koestler published a number of works at the border between science and philosophy, such asInsight and Outlook,The Act of Creation, andThe Ghost in the Machine.
Mysticism and a fascination with theparanormal imbued much of Koestler's later work and he discussed paranormal phenomena, such as extrasensory perception,psychokinesis, and telepathy. In his bookThe Roots of Coincidence (1972)[99] he claims that such phenomena can never be explained by theoretical physics.[100] According to Koestler, distinct types of coincidence could be classified, such as "the library angel", in which information (typically in libraries) becomes accessible through serendipity, chance orcoincidence, rather than through the use of a catalogue search.[101][102][103] The book mentions yet another line of unconventional research byPaul Kammerer, the theory of coincidence or seriality. He also presents critically the related concepts ofCarl Jung. More controversial were Koestler's studies and experiments onlevitation andtelepathy.[104]
Koestler was Jewish by birth but did not practise the religion. In an interview published in the British newspaperThe Jewish Chronicle in 1950, he argued that Jews should either emigrate to Israel orassimilate completely into the majority cultures they lived in.[105][106][107] InThe Thirteenth Tribe (1976), Koestler advanced a theory thatAshkenazi Jews are descended not from theIsraelites of antiquity but from theKhazars, aTurkic people in theCaucasus that converted to Judaism in the 8th century and was later forced westwards. Koestler argued that a proof that Ashkenazi Jews have no biological connection to biblical Jews would remove the racial basis of Europeananti-Semitism. In reference to theBalfour Declaration, Koestler stated that "one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third".[108]
Much of Arthur Koestler's work was funded and distributed secretly by a covert propaganda wing of the UK Foreign Office, known as theInformation Research Department (IRD). Koestler enjoyed strong personal relationships with IRD agents from 1949 onwards, and was supportive of the department's anti-communist goals. Koestler's relationship with the British government was so strong that he had become ade facto advisor to British propagandists, urging them to create a popular series of anti-communist left-wing literature to rival the success of theLeft Book Club.[2][3]
Koestler first learnedHungarian, but later his family spoke mostly German at home. From his early years he became fluent in both languages. It is likely that he picked up someYiddish too, through contact with his grandfather.[109] By his teens, he was fluent in Hungarian, German, French and English.[110] During his years inPalestine, Koestler became sufficiently fluent inHebrew to write stories in that language, as well as to create what is believed to have been the world's first Hebrewcrossword puzzle.[111] During his years in the Soviet Union (1932–1933), although he arrived with a vocabulary of only 1,000 words ofRussian, and nogrammar, he picked up enough colloquial Russian to speak the language.[112] Koestler wrote his books in German up to 1940 but then wrote only in English;L'Espagne ensanglantée was translated into French from German.[113] Koestler is said to have coined the wordmimophant, which he later used to describeBobby Fischer.[114][115]
In August 1945, Koestler was in Palestine where he read in thePalestine Post about the dropping of theatomic bomb on Hiroshima. He said to a friend: "That's the end of the world war, and it is also the beginning of the end of the world."[116]
NB The booksThe Lotus and the Robot,The God that Failed, andVon weissen Nächten und roten Tagen, as well as his numerous essays, all may contain further autobiographical information.
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