TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/83/83capmil.8

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Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age

March 14, 1983

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