Like a Rolling Stone

Arthur Koestler had an interesting life. He was born in Hungary in 1904 but lived for most of 20 years in Austria and Germany and then for more than 40 years in England. There were many interruptions: years in Palestine, another year in Russia, yet another year in Spain, four in France and then long residences in the United States, in Austria and again in France. He was a 20th century Central European emigre intellectual, not atypical of a group of people now largely, though not entirely, extinct. Twentieth century: because his migrations, both physical and mental, were largely the consequences of the two world wars. Central European: because the cast of his intellectual inclinations was largely Austrian and German, while his character had a few Hungarian (more precisely Budapestian) traits--but then that was typical of many intellectuals in the Weimar-German period. Emigre: because, in midlife, he found refuge in England, which gave him both security and comfort during the second half of his life. Like other Central European emigre intellectuals, such as Marx and Freud, he died in London, where his ashes remain.

Unlike Marx and Freud, he was agile and restless. He needed many friends around him. He was prone to travel, at little notice and often. He had an instant appeal to women, many of whom he treated crudely, on many occasions which are related by his present biographer, David Cesarani. He had three wives, each of them quite different. Racked by illness (though not yet in the throes of unendurable suffering and not yet facing imminent death), he chose to kill himself by poisoning in 1983, having convinced (or, as some people say, suborned) his younger wife, Cynthia Jefferies, to die with him.

He left a legacy of more than 40 books, the last 30 of them written in English. Widely read and noticed, he had unusual successes in his literary career. The themes of his books are very different, which is why it is not easy to sum them up within a review. Many of them are period pieces--but then so was their author. Most of them deal with “-isms”: communism, Zionism, behaviorism, Darwinism, materialism. Koestler was Zionist and then anti-Zionist; materialist and then anti-materialist; communist and then anti-communist; liberal and then anti-liberal. His conversions were sincere. The flyleaf of “Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind” designates him as “this intellectual titan of the 20th century.” That he was not. He was a brilliant journalist and, like many brilliant journalists, a not inconsiderable thinker.

His novels will not endure. The most famous of these (originally written in German), “Darkness at Noon,” has proved thoroughly false since its publication in 1940. In this book, Rubashov, an idealistic communist condemned to death, confesses to nonexistent crimes in order to remain loyal to the party and to the cause of communism. It had a great impact, especially in the English-speaking world, where novels dealing with political ideas have been either rare or nonexistent. What we now know about the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s is that their hapless defendants, almost without exception, were forced into cowering submissions and confessions, including Mikhail Bukharin (after whom, to a large extent, Rubashov was modeled), without a trace of the Koestlerian fable. Cesarani writes: “The final rout of the Soviet imperium in 1989-90 began with the publication of ‘Darkness at Noon’ (50 years earlier).” This is complete nonsense. (It began with Khrushchev and Gorbachev, whose recognitions of the grave shortcomings of the Soviet system were the results of experience, of a reality that had nothing in common with the intellectual self-torturings of Rubashov.) “Koestler led the intellectual counter-attack,” Cesarani writes, “that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall.” That is a vast misreading of history. Koestler was but one among an estimable group of ex-communists who had explained their break with communism convincingly.

Better than Koestler’s novels are his autobiographies--though they too are journalistic rather than historically accurate. Perhaps his most valuable and enduring book is “The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe,” a well-researched and rather profound exegesis of the life and work of Johannes Kepler. This appeared in 1959, at the beginning of a period when Koestler devoted himself, more and more, to a questioning of the materialism of “natural” science. (In this case too he had brought within himself to England valuable intellectual baggage that was essentially Central European, indeed mostly German, in origin.) His related writings (and lectures) were more than excursions of an ever restless mind. What Koestler recognized was the presence (in his view, a presence rather than the increasing intrusion) of mind into matter. In this respect he was even more of an estimable pioneer than in his anti-communism: His understanding of the uneven “progress” of “science” well antedates Thomas Kuhn’s much celebrated but essentially flat-footed academic thesis “The Structure of Scientific Revolution” in 1962. But here too Koestler’s potentially great contribution was marred by some of his characteristic shortcomings. His scope and the range of his reading were broad; but they would not extend to people beyond his ideological ken. When it came to the primacy (chronological as well as perceptual) of mind over matter, Koestler seems to have entirely ignored the important books of his contemporary Owen Barfield in England (just as he largely ignored such contemporary English “right-wingers” as T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis). And sometimes he went too far, first into psychology and then into parapsychology. His biographer cites Koestler’s statement (in “Arrow in the Blue,” 1952): “[A]ll evidence tends to show that the political libido is basically as irrational as the sexual drive, and patterned, like the latter, by early, partly unconscious, experiences.” All evidence? Political libido? Basically? Patterned? “The heart has reason that reason knows not”: Pascal’s great maxim is shorter, better, wiser, deeper.

Cesarani’s book is a most detailed and, in many ways, useful account of Koestler’s life. There are only a few factual errors in it. In 1944, the British refused to enter into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann for obvious reasons and not because they “feared” that too many Hungarian Jews “would want to enter Palestine.” Henry and Clare Luce were not “pillars of the American liberal establishment.” Cesarani readily accepts Koestler’s own story about having urinated into the radiator when his car boiled over (Koestler was 5-feet, 7 inches tall). He overstates Koestler’s talents as a writer: “A world without Koestler would have been noticeably different; but there would have been little difference to a world without [Cyril] Connolly. [Koestler] was the better writer.” More successful, or more recognized, yes. But “better?” That is not within Cesarani’s province to state.

Yet the trouble is not with Cesarani’s details. It is with his argument, declared in the subtitle of this biography, “The Homeless Mind.” “His homelessness.” “He condemned himself to homelessness.” “He stigmatized the longing for home.” Not at all. Yes, Koestler wanted to belong: to this or to that cause, and eventually to England. But the desire to have a home and the desire to belong are not the same. You can belong and not have a home--like a nomad, or an American hippie; conversely, you can have a home and not belong--like an emigre. And this brings me to the central, and fundamental, thesis of Cesarani (who is professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University), stated throughout as well as in the beginning and at the end of this massive volume: “Koestler was a Jew who exemplified the Jewish [Cesarani’s italics] experience in Europe during the 20th century.” “It is clear that previous commentators and biographers have missed perhaps the most fundamental element of his story: that Koestler was a Jew.” He was Jewish, Hungarian, Austrian, German, English, in succession. (Koestler felt little or no allegiance to Hungary, and he just about never wrote in Hungarian, or for Hungarians.) Besides his speaking ability (never quite perfect) in these languages (he did not speak Yiddish or Hebrew), his association, his assimilation and his adaptation to these nations and to their customs was very impressive--though not exceptional. Perhaps it may be said that he was more non-English than English and more Jewish than non-Jewish, but these are only matters of proportion. To argue that his Jewishness was the most fundamental and essential fact of his person and of his work (in other words: that race predetermines mind) is a vast exaggeration, amounting to special pleading at best and to racism at its worst.