Koestler and His Jewish Thesis.
Author | McInnes, Neil |
David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (New York: Free Press, 1999), 656 pp., $30.
When Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia jointly committed suicide in 1983, they left a bequest of about $1.67 million to finance psychic research and study of the paranormal. Universities in Oxford, Cambridge and London refused the money for fear of mockery; it was known that after staying at various Indian ashrams, Koestler had been investigating levitation and had installed a big weighing machine in his front hall because it would be easier to detect the loss of a few pounds than to measure the gap between stockinged feet and the carpet. People said Koestler had committed suicide twice, once by barbiturates, once by ridicule. No matter, Edinburgh University took the money; it had an academic psychologist who was willing to study these arcana. The web home page of the Koestler Foundation and its Koestler Parapsychology Unit explains how they labor on research into Psi (the conventional symbol for the unknown in an equation). Along with the money came the voluminous papers and a bronze bust of the benefactor.
This bust has just been withdrawn from public display because female undergraduates said they "felt uneasy under its gaze." Their unease began when British newspapers ran excerpts from David Cesarani's biography, notably passages denouncing Koestler as "a serial rapist." Actually, he adduces one indubitable victim of Koestler's brutal attentions, but thereafter his "series" consists of unsubstantiated gossip about other supposed cases, without names or evidence.
An authorized biography of Koestler (authorized by the estate, that is) is being written by Michael Scammel and will be published by Faber next year. Writing in the Independent, Bernard Crick, Orwell's biographer, said that for this reason Cesarani was required to sign an undertaking with the Edinburgh University Library that he was not writing a biography of Koestler but a study of how Koestler's Jewish identity affected his life and work. He has come to the conclusion that, although Koestler always denied it and all his critics have missed it, Judaism was the secret core and center of everything Koestler ever did or thought. This has enabled the author to write a full-length biography of over six hundred pages, ostensibly without going back on his undertaking to the Library. Most readers will care nothing about that, but many will marvel at the methods Cesarani uses to reclaim, for causes that Koestler repeatedly disowned, one of the most productive, ingenious, courageous, volcanic and influential personalities of the century.
It is not clear why one would want to reclaim for Judaism or any other respectable cause the scoundrel Cesarani portrays. Even Koestler's old regiment of 1940, the French Foreign Legion, would not wish to reclaim this satyr, serial rapist, wife-beater and drunken, brawling oaf. Cesarani says he was all of those things, habitually. Koestler long ago told us (either directly or in authorized books by his wives and biographers) that he was some of those things, occasionally. So Cesarani's air of revealing unknown scandals is one of the less pleasant features of his book. If one has read the letters of his wife Mamaine (published uncensored after her death as Living with Koestler in 1985), the joint memoirs written with his next wife Cynthia, published in the same year as The Stranger on the square, the authorized biography by Ian Hamilton, the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and her roman a clef, Les Mandarins, then one does not learn of a single new turpitude from Cesarani except the unsubstantiated allegation of serial rape.
Perhaps I should add the salacious detail taken from Koestler's diary that, at a time when he was running a "harem" of five girlfriends in London, he was eating three dozen oysters at a sitting and boasting he had got his "potency up to an average of two a day." Like two of his close friends, Bertrand Russell and Albert Camus, he had an extraordinary sexual appetite, plus the personal charm and magnetism required to indulge it. But Koestler was a Casanova, not a Don Juan. That is to say, he did not spurn the women he seduced but wanted to keep them as friends, and did for years, in some cases for decades. He even liked to have two or three past and present lovers at his table at once, a practice others found macabre. As Cesarani concedes, "If Koestler would not let go of ex-wives, mistresses and lovers, they were equally as reluctant to leave him."
Even the reader least sympathetic to this aspect of Koestler's character begins to suspect that Cesarani's paint is laid on with a trowel when, inevitably, he is reminded of achievements that would be quite incompatible with a life of drunken depravity. One such was the friendship of many of the greatest men and women of the age, literally dozens of famous people who sought Koestler's esteem. They were as different as Willi Munzenberg, the Comintern propagandist, and Margaret Thatcher, whose party Koestler eventually joined; they included men notoriously difficult to get on with but who always had time for him, like George Orwell and Andre Malraux; and other buddies who ended up enemies for reasons entirely to Koestler's credit, like Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Another such achievement, which Cesarani notices but devalues, is Koestler's extraordinary record of public service. He was...
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