TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.8

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                                                                                March 14, 1983

Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age

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 adrenaline 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, he had been an ardent
supporter of "autoeuthanasia," and when the suffering of old age
and disease grew insupportable, he reportedly took a lethal does
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 attended 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
the 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
Commisar (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 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
not 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 lat 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