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Arthur Koestler: A Drinker of Infinity (Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal)
May 10, 2007 10:22 PM
Copyrigh City Journal
Arthur Koestler’s life and work embodied the existential dilemmas of our age.
Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word vince down on the board.
“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”
Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”
How many people could define a word in their first language with such elegant precision, let alone in their fourth, and moreover combine it with such irresistibly wicked humor? One can see in this trifling incident how being with anyone less brilliant than Arthur Koestler must have seemed intolerably dull to any woman who had been in love with him.
As it happens, Koestler’s relations with women now have more to do with his reputation than does anything that he ever wrote. Since the 1998 publication of David Cesarani’s biographical study, Koestler’s name has been synonymous with rape, possibly serial in nature, and the abuse of women. I tested this association on several friends with literary interests: though none had read Cesarani’s book, in each case, the first thought on hearing Koestler’s name was of rape. It is doubtful whether any biography has ever affected the reputation of an author more profoundly than did Cesarani’s; and its effect is proof, if we needed any, that books have an influence far beyond their actual readership.
Cesarani is a serious scholar, not a man to manufacture sensational claims for non-scholarly purposes; and, in fact, his widely publicized revelations, which came as a considerable shock, receive a kind of confirmation from a scene in Koestler’s novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943.
The book is at least partly autobiographical. Its protagonist (hero would be too positive a word) is Peter Slavek, a young refugee and former Communist militant from an unnamed Balkan country now under Nazi occupation. Slavek arrives in the capital of a neutral country—clearly Lisbon, Portugal—from which he hopes to reach England and enlist in the British forces, the only ones still fighting the Nazis at that time. Koestler himself reached England from Portugal with the same idea in mind, and his description of Lisbon’s wartime atmosphere clearly draws on firsthand experience.
While in Lisbon, Slavek falls in love with, or forms an infatuation for, Odette, a young French refugee awaiting a visa for America. Odette has taken no notice of Slavek, but one day she visits a friend’s apartment, where the Balkan refugee is temporarily staying. The friend is absent, so Slavek and Odette are alone. There follows a scene that suggests that Koestler was as personally acquainted with rape as he was with the fervid atmosphere of wartime Lisbon.
Slavek declares his love for Odette; she rejects him and prepares to leave. “He jerked himself to his feet, reached the door almost in one jump and got hold of her as she was passing into the hall,” Koestler writes. Then the author says of Slavek that he was doing what several rapists have told me that they sought to do—protect their victims: “As if the door were a death-trap and she were in danger of falling into it, [he] pressed her against him with a protecting gesture, while with his foot he kicked the door shut.” Odette struggles, but “her very struggling,” Koestler writes, makes Slavek’s grip “close tighter around her, like the noose of a trap”—not the activity of an agent but the operation of a mechanical contrivance.
The situation calms a little, and Slavek realizes that he should have let his arms drop with embarrassment, but then “she began struggling again in renewed fury, and this automatically made him tighten his grip.” Koestler describes Slavek as more terrified than Odette.
Then comes the actual rape:
She struggled breathlessly, hammering her fists against his breast … God, how unreasonable she was… . All he wanted was to make her understand that he didn’t want anything from her… . By her furious struggling she caused him to press her back, step by step, from the door. His lips babbled senseless words that were meant to calm; but now it was too late, the flames leapt up, enveloping him … . With blind eyes he fell as they stumbled against a couch … [and he] rammed his knee against her legs, felt them give way and a second later her whole body go limp.
After it is all over, Odette cries. Slavek takes her hand, and feels encouraged when she does not withdraw it to explain and justify his actions: “You know, I am not so sure that you will always regret it, although for the moment you are still angry with me.” Then he contrives to blur the distinction between voluntary and coerced sexual relations: “Nowadays things often start this way, the end at the beginning I mean. In the old days people had to wait years before they were allowed to go to bed and then found out that they didn’t really like each other, it had all been a mirage of their glands. If you start the other way round you won’t need to find out whether you really care.”
Odette’s reply absolves Slavek of any need to feel remorse: “The whole point is that if you knock a woman about for long enough and get on her nerves and wear her down, there comes a moment when she suddenly feels how silly all this struggling and kicking is, so much ado about nothing.” Sexual intercourse, then, has no more moral significance than urination or any other physiological function. “You probably think what an irresistible seducer you are, while in fact all you did was get her to this zero level where she says—after all, why not?” And to confirm the Slavek-Odette-Koestler theory, Slavek and Odette go on to have a short and intense love affair.
Koestler’s description of a rape seems to be from the inside; and if Cesarani is right, it gives us the very model of Koestler’s conduct and experience. He might even have suffered from (if “suffered from” is quite the right phrase) what psychiatrists call “coercive paraphilia”: sexual excitement brought on by the act of physical subjugation, a pompous name sometimes being the nearest that medical science can come to an explanation. Slavek’s argument, of course, is virtually a rapist’s charter. But the uncomfortable fact is that some of the women whom Koestler abused remained friends with him for the rest of their lives. It would take an entire book fully to explore all the evasions in the passage that I have quoted, as well as the social and psychological questions that it raises.
There is much more to Koestler, of course, than sexual perversity, even if it is difficult nowadays to read anything that he wrote without first donning rape-tinted spectacles. Arrival and Departure is not just about Slavek’s love life: it passionately engages with the most important political questions of the day.
For example, the book gave the most graphic description until then published of the gassing of the Jews in Eastern Europe, not as isolated massacres, but as part of a deliberate genocidal policy; and it drew an explicit comparison—now banal and commonplace, but then brave and arresting—between Hitler and Stalin, pointing out their similarities, despite their enmity. Meeting an intelligent Nazi agent called Bernard, Slavek asks him why the Nazis, so anti-Communist, nevertheless copied Soviet methods “to a considerable extent.” Bernard replies:
There is of course a certain affinity between your ex-fatherland and ours. Both are governed by authoritarian state bureaucracies on a collectivist basis; both are streamlined police states run by economic planning, the one-party system and scientific terror… . It is a phase of history as inevitable as was the spreading of the feudal, and later of the capitalist, system. Our two countries are merely the forerunners of the post-individualist, post-liberal era.
To have written this passage at a time when books praising our gallant Soviet allies poured forth from the press—when even conservatives, always very few among the intelligentsia, had replaced their visceral hatred of the Soviet Union with admiration—was an act of considerable courage.
Koestler’s reputation as a writer had declined well before Cesarani’s revelations. He had become an author of the kind one encounters during late adolescence or early adulthood, whom one catches like the literary equivalent of glandular fever, but to whom, once read, one develops a lifelong immunity. Once one of the world’s most famous authors, he became as dated as the youthful fashions of three decades ago.
There were several reasons for this. By 1980, if not before, the burning political issues of his early adulthood—Communism, the rise of fascism, and the establishment of a Zionist state—were of less concern to new generations of readers. Many regarded Koestler’s subsequent obsessions—Indian mysticism, Lamarckian biology, non-reductionist science, and parapsychology—as bizarre or even dotty, the symptoms of a mind that had lost its way. In his will, he endowed a chair in parapsychology at Edinburgh University. He regarded telepathy and precognition as established facts, largely because of the now-discredited experiments of J. B. Rhine at Duke University. He began to collect examples of startling coincidences, as if they could tell us something about noncausal relations between events. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before him, he seemed to the public to have traveled from serious authorship to spiritualist crankdom.
The penultimate nail in the coffin of his reputation, before Cesarani’s revelations, was his double suicide with his wife, who was 20 years younger, in 1983. While he had both severe Parkinson’s disease (causing a decline in his mental powers) and leukemia (from which he was soon to die, in any case), his wife, who swallowed a fatal dose of barbiturates with him, was in perfect health. Many believed—without adequate evidence—that Koestler had bullied his wife into ending her life with him.
This was the second double suicide of a great Central European writer of adopted British citizenship and his wife—the first being that of Stefan and Lotte Zweig. But whereas Zweig killed himself in despair at the state of the world, Koestler killed himself in despair at the state of his health—no doubt a commentary on the direction, not wholly bad, in which the world had moved in the intervening 40 years. But it suggested great egotism and cast doubt on the sincerity, or at least disinterestedness, of all Koestler’s previous commitments.
Koestler does not deserve such summary dismissal, for if any figure could claim to have encapsulated in his own life—and recorded—the political, intellectual, and emotional tribulations of the twentieth century, it is he.
He was born in Budapest in 1905 to assimilated Jewish parents. His father was a businessman who failed most of the time but who occasionally hit the jackpot: immediately before and during the first half of World War I, he made a fortune (soon lost) by manufacturing and selling soap that contained radium. Radioactivity was then a recently discovered phenomenon, and many believed the rays to be life-enhancing and disease-curing.
Koestler’s father spent the rest of his days dreaming of a new product that would restore his fortune at a stroke; and, in a sense, the young Arthur shared this kind of illusion but transposed it to the intellectual, political, philosophical, and spiritual spheres. As a young man, Koestler saw in radical Zionism the answer to his existential problems, though he had no religious belief or cultural or philosophical affinities with Judaism (much later, moreover, he wrote a book still cited by anti-Zionists, The Thirteenth Tribe, which claims that most Jews are not of Semitic origin but descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that converted to Judaism). Then Koestler converted to orthodox Marxist Communism, followed by a stage of crusading anti-Communism, itself replaced by a prolonged search for a spiritualism founded on evidence and rational inference. Koestler was not a man to do things by philosophical halves: he was a drinker of infinity, to quote the title of one of his books.
Young Arthur, gifted scientifically and mathematically, studied engineering in Vienna but did not graduate. Instead, the ardent Zionist went off to Palestine to live on a kibbutz. He did not last long; his personality ultimately would not allow absorption into a collective enterprise. On the verge of starvation, he was saved by a fortuitous appointment as the Palestine correspondent of the Ullstein Trust, the largest German newspaper group, which later assigned him to its Paris office. He then moved to Germany, where he served as the science editor of one newspaper and foreign editor of another, among other exploits flying in a zeppelin to the North Pole via Soviet Russia.
Koestler joined the Communist Party, later explaining that it seemed the only viable alternative to Hitler, but this led Ullstein to sack him. Returning to Paris after traveling in the Soviet Union, he wrote political propaganda under Comintern direction until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when a British liberal newspaper assigned him to visit Franco’s headquarters. Denounced as a Communist, he managed to escape, but Franco’s forces captured him during a subsequent trip to Spain and sentenced him to death. An international campaign secured his release. Koestler’s years as a Comintern agent—in which he, the most egotistical of men, willingly subjected himself to the Party’s discipline on the grounds that it represented the sole judge of transcendent truth—gave him unparalleled insight into the psychology of Party members suddenly accused of counterrevolu-tionary treason.
He then lived in France, breaking for good with the Communist Party over the show trials. When war broke out in 1939, the French government arrested him in Paris for being a potentially hostile alien and imprisoned him in a concentration camp; a second international campaign won his freedom. Fearing rearrest, he joined the French Foreign Legion and managed, by a very circuitous route, to reach Lisbon. From there, he flew—illegally—to London, where he again found himself imprisoned, this time for six weeks. In his prison cell, he corrected the proofs of Darkness at Noon, which would be his most famous book.
Released from prison, he at once joined the British army, which, he said, had a salutary effect upon his life. “I found myself transformed from a member of the grey, piteous crowd of refugees—the scum of earth—into a best-selling author,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous experience for any writer, but before it could turn my head I was also transformed into Private No. 13805661 in 251 Company Pioneer Corps, which was not given to lionizing intellectuals.” It says something of Koestler’s life until then that he called the three years he spent in blitzed London, where he survived a close bombing, “among the most uneventful (I almost said peaceful) of my life.”
By the age of 37, Koestler had traveled widely; spoke Hungarian, German, French, Russian, and English fluently, as well as some Hebrew (having invented the Hebrew crossword while in Palestine); had been imprisoned several times, including under sentence of death; had been a Zionist, a Communist, and an anti-Communist; and had written books in Hungarian, German, and English. Shortly after arriving in England, he knew and was friendly with its most prominent writers and intellectuals: George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Dylan Thomas, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Ayer, and many others.
Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in German while living in Paris, expecting at any moment to face arrest. It is the story of Rubashov, a Bolshevik intellectual modeled largely on Nikolai Bukharin, the economist and darling of the Party who wound up executed after a 1938 Moscow show trial.
At the time of the book’s publication in 1940, and for a long time afterward, the public confession of many old Bolsheviks to self-evidently absurd crimes that carried the death penalty—for example, that from the very beginning of their careers they had served foreign intelligence services—mystified many in the West. How had Communist officials obtained these confessions? Did the Russians have some extremely sophisticated and secret technique of interrogation, unknown in the West?
Of course, some in the West, Communists and ardent fellow travelers, believed that the trials were fair and that the confessions were unforced and entirely veridical. Among the most influential was a prominent British lawyer, D. N. Pritt, who actually wrote a book testifying to the Moscow trials’ fairness. As late as 1972, a fellow medical student, at the time a fierce Maoist, tried to convince me that the trials were genuine by lending me transcripts of the proceedings.
So Koestler’s imaginary reconstruction of how Rubashov was persuaded to confess, to which he brought his own intimate knowledge of how people thought and acted who had made the Party their whole life, was entirely new and original. Koestler’s solution to the puzzle was that Rubashov, and those like him, confessed not because of any physical torture (though Rubashov is deprived of sleep, a technique that interrogators did use in obtaining confessions) but because it was logical for them to do so. All their adult lives, they had believed that the end justified the means; moreover, and crucially, they had delegated to the Party the exclusive right to judge both end and means. Who were they, then, to object when the Party decided that it needed to sacrifice them, irrespective of whether they were guilty of anything?
Koestler is sufficiently sophisticated a novelist not to make Rubashov wholly admirable. Indeed, the Communist has failed to intervene on behalf of his own secretary, Arlova, with whom he has had a love affair, when she is accused of preposterous crimes. He reasons that his life is worth more to the cause than hers.
Koestler has the aristocratic Rubashov interrogated by a proletarian functionary named Gletkin. The climax comes when Gletkin argues that Rubashov’s private dissent from the Party line must, logically and objectively, lead to civil war and possibly to the destruction of the dictatorship of the proletariat and that, therefore, his confession “is the last service the Party will require of you.”
“Comrade Rubashov, I hope that you have understood the task which the Party has set you.”
It was the first time that Gletkin called Rubashov “Comrade.” Rubashov raised his head quickly. He felt a hot wave rising in him, against which he was helpless. His chin shook slightly while he was putting on his pince-nez.
“I understand.”
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