Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age

By Patricia Blake

Arthur Koestler: 1905-1983

Moral indignation did and still does affect me in a direct physical manner," he once confessed. "I can feel, during an attack, the infusion of adrena line into the bloodstream, the craving of the muscles for violent action." For most of this century, Arthur Koestler lived by those words. Last week at his home in London, he died by them at the age of 77. The "rootless cosmopolitan," as he styled himself, had been an ardent supporter of "autoeuthanasia," and when the suffering of old age and disease grew in supportable, he reportedly took a lethal dose of drugs. His third wife, Cynthia, 56, joined him in the apparent double suicide. Koestler's act was in keeping with his principles. Throughout his long career, he had been attacked for taking a variety of political, moral and intellectual positions. But no one had ever accused him of being a hypocrite. If he backed an idea, it was with mind, muscles and blood.

Born in Budapest of middle-class Jewish parents, Koestler was a lonely, neurotic child brought up by a possessive and angry mother and strict, punishing household help. He was subject to suicidal depression, homicidal rage and "obsession with a cause." His first obsession was Zionism, a movement that seized his imagination when he at tended the Vienna Polytechnic in the early 1920s.

At 19, he briefly became the private secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant nationalist who also served as the mentor of another youthful Zionist, Menachem Begin. After spending several months in Palestine, Koestler returned to Europe, where he talked himself into a job with the giant Ullstein chain of newspapers. In 1931 he secretly joined the German Communist Party. "I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water," he later wrote. "I left it as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned." But it took several years to clamber.

While visiting Soviet Russia, he produced some romanticized articles about the achievements under the first Five-Year Plan, despite the fact that the country was being devastated by a famine that cost some 6 million lives. In 1936 he was dispatched to Spain by the party in order to expose German and Italian intervention for Franco in the civil war. He was arrested by the Falangists and subsequently spent three months in solitary confinement in the Central Prison of Seville. From that experience came a book, Spanish Testament, and the germ of an idea for his masterpiece, Darkness at Noon (1941).

On the long shelf of Koestler's work (six novels, 30 nonfiction books), no volume is as memorable or seems more likely to last. This searing tale of the Soviet Union's 1936-38 purge trials, and the gradual extraction of a false confession from an old revolutionary, proved profoundly persuasive to readers throughout the Western world. It was a bestseller in the U.S., and a 1951 dramatization by Sidney Kingsley, with Claude Rains in the central role, was a hit on Broadway. Following Darkness, Koestler wrote several powerfully antitotalitarian books, including Arrival and Departure (1943) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), and an eloquent contribution to The God That Failed (1950), a collection of essays by former members of the Communist Party.

But Koestler was never able to derive much joy from the past tense. He had seen his books vilified by Hitler's and Stalin's minions. Now he wished to hear no more about them. "The bitter passion has burned itself out," he decided. "Cassandra has gone hoarse and is due for a vocational change."

In the mid-'50s, after he had moved to England, Koestler turned his attention to anthropology, scientific phenomena and, ultimately, parapsychology. Recalling the "three out of every four friends" who had died or disappeared in the war, the Holocaust or the Gulag, he wrote, "Murder within the species is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man and a few varieties of ants and rats." He sought explanations for human behavior outside the field of established science and attempted to revise ancient history. But scientists and critics were not always receptive.

In The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), Koestler argued that many Eastern European Jews were descended not from the ancient Semites but from a Turkic national group in Eastern Europe that had converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. Isaac Bashevis Singer replied, "[He] tries so hard to show that the Jews are not even Jews, he fails also as a writer." Science Writer Martin Gardner, reviewing The Roots of Coincidence (1972), taxed the author with ignoring research that contradicts the claims of parapsychologists. Even Koestler's monumental and erudite The Act of Creation (1964) caused the eminent zoologist Sir Peter Medawar to grumble that Koestler had "no real grasp of how scientists go about their work." Malcolm Muggeridge dismissed the author as "all antennae and no head."

None of this slowed Koestler's production. He had been right so many times before; he had been attacked by so many who were now swept into the dustbin of history. Why should he care about the doubters? Indeed, as Koestler grew older, there was a marked change in the man. The fury and belligerence seemed to be ebbing. The bantam figure, who once seemed to be a walking history of modern European politics, appeared to be negotiating some new contract with the world.

In the late 1970s, Koestler postulated that death does not signify total extinction. "It means merging into the cosmic consciousness," he wrote in an essay on life after death, comparing the process of dying to "the flow of a river into the ocean." Summoning the rhetorical powers of his youth, the elderly writer foresaw the end. The river, he wrote, "has been freed of the mud-that clung to it, and regained its transparency. It has become identified with the sea, spread over it, omnipresent, every drop catching a spark of the sun. The curtain has not fallen; it has been raised." Ironically, after a lifetime of earthly visions, it was that glowing picture of an afterlife that gave Arthur Koestler the courage to face death by his own hand.

-- By Patricia Blake

HOSPITALIZED. David Niven, 73, debonair British actor, bestselling autobiographer (The Moon's a Balloon, Bring On the Empty Horses) and novelist (Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly); ostensibly for treatment of a digestive problem; in London. Niven suffers from a progressive neuromuscular disorder reported to be the incurable amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease, which has left him with a speech impairment and partial use of his left hand.

DIED. Olivier Chandon de Briailles, 27, race-car driver, boyfriend of Supermodel Christie Brinkley, and heir to the Moet & Chandon champagne fortune; by drowning, when his 1983 Ralt Formula Atlantic spun out of control at 100-plus m.p.h. during a practice run, careered off the track, exploded and sank in a nearby canal; in West Palm Beach, Fla.

DIED. Georges Remi (nom de plume: Herge), 75, Belgian artist-creator of the internationally known comic-strip chronicles of Tin tin, the perennially youthful and sparky reporter-adventurer who first appeared in a Brussels newspaper and went on to star in 23 books that have sold 80 million copies in 30 languages and enchanted three generations of children; in Brussels.

DIED. Valery Tarsis, 76, dissident Soviet novelist who was deprived of his U.S.S.R. citizenship in 1966 during a lecture tour of Britain, becoming the first in a modern line of enforced exiles; after a heart attack; in Bern, Switzerland. Once a writer and editor in good official standing, Tarsis grew disillusioned with Communism in the 1950s. The publication abroad of his scathing 1962 novel The Bluebottle earned him an eight-month stay in a Soviet mental hospital, an experience he described in his autobiographical novel Ward 7: "All around him were faces exposed by sleep or distorted by nightmares ... it is always hard to be the only one awake, and it is almost unbearable to stand the third watch of the world in a madhouse..."

DIED. Ulrich Middeldorf, 81, German-born Renaissance art expert who fled Hitler and from 1935 to 1953 taught at the University of Chicago, where he fostered a generation of art scholars now playing key roles in American museums and universities; in Florence.

DIED. Florence Gould, 87, longtime patron of the arts who gave moral support and millions to leading French literary figures, and in the post-World War II years surrounded herself with something of a Parisian Bloomsbury group that included Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali; in Cannes. Born in San Francisco of French parents, she married Frank Jay Gould, son of the railroad robber baron, in 1923; together they invested shrewdly in Riviera real estate and built the casino, and the cachet, that made their Juan-les-Pins resort famous. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.