Arthur Koestler (September 5, 1905 - March 3, 1983) was a novelist, political
activist, and social philosopher. He was the author of many popular books
including Arrow in the Blue, (Volume I of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (another book about
Communism), The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and The
Thirteenth Tribe. His most famous work is Darkness at
Noon, a novel about the Purges of the Soviet state during the Stalin era.
Life
Koestler was born in Budapest, Hungary as Artur Kösztler, to a German speaking
Hungarian Jewish family. His father, Henrik, was an industrialist and inventor whose
investments and ideas often showed a lack of financial good judgement; for example, he invested in a kind of radioactive
soap.
He later studied science and psychology at the University of
Vienna, where he became involved in Zionism. After college he worked as a news
correspondent. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the
British Mandate of Palestine. He joined the
Communist Party in 1931, but
left it after the Stalinist purges of 1938. He
spent this period travelling within the Soviet Union, reaching areas as far
flung as Mount Ararat, in the Caucasus and Turkmenistan where he met the black American
writer Langston Hughes.
While covering the Spanish Civil War, he was captured and held
for several months by the Falangists in Malaga, until the British Foreign Office managed to arrange
for his release. He recorded his experiences in Spanish Testament and used them as a part basis for his prison novel Darkness at Noon.
After spending time in a Vichy French detention camp, at Le Vernet, he
joined the French Foreign Legion. He then escaped to
England and joined the British
Army as a member of the British Pioneer Corps between 1941-42, employed by the BBC. He
became a British subject in 1945. He returned to France after the war, and there got to
know Jean-Paul Sartre, although it appears they never became good
friends.
During the post-war period, Koestler anticipated a number of trends by many years. He was amongst the first to experiment (in
a laboratory) with LSD, and also advocated nuclear disarmament. He also wrote about Japanese and Indian mysticism in The Lotus and the Robot in 1960.
However, just as the Cold War was beginning to accelerate at the end of the
1950s, and Darkness at Noon was gaining popularity, Koestler announced he would be
retiring from politics.
He then lived in London, where he made his living writing and lecturing. He was made
a CBE in the '70s.
Koestler, an advocate of euthanasia, and suffering from Parkinson's disease, took his own life along with his third wife,
Cynthia, in a joint suicide in England.
Koestler's multilingualism
Koestler was fluent in Hungarian, German, English, and French and knew a little Hebrew and Russian. There is some evidence (according to Cesarani) that he had also been exposed to Yiddish through his grandfather who was a speaker. This was partially due to his family life,
and constant uprooting, at first due to circumstances and later due to choice. During his life he lived in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Palestine
(pre-independence Israel), England,
Wales, France and the United States. He also spent a substantial time in the Soviet Union.
Throughout his life Koestler was to work in a variety of languages, though the bulk of his later work was in English. For
example Koestler wrote his best known novels in three different languages: the original of The Gladiators was in
Hungarian, Darkness at Noon in German (the original has been lost), and Arrival and Departure in English. As a
journalist he was to work in German, Hebrew, French and English. He claimed to have produced possibly the first crosswords in Hebrew.
Koestler and women
Always the connoisseur and lover, Koestler was married three times, to Dorothy Asher (1935-50), Mamaine Paget (1950-52), and
Cynthia Jefferies (1965-83). He also had a very short fling with notable French thinker Simone de Beauvoir, probably explaining the mutual animosity between Koestler and Jean-Paul Sartre. A 1998 biography
claimed that Koestler had beaten and raped several women, including film director Jill Craigie. After protests, a bust of Koestler was removed from display at the University of Edinburgh.
Further controversy has ensued over his suicide pact. Although he was terminally ill, his wife at the time was apparently
healthy, and some have claimed Koestler manipulated her into it.
Koestler's journalism
Koestler worked for a variety of newspapers, including Vossische Zeitung (science editor) and B.Z. am Mittag
(foreign editor) in the 1920s, as a French language freelancer in the early thirties, and edited Zukunft in the mid
thirties, an anti-Nazi, anti-Stalinist German language paper based in Paris.
After his release from captivity in Spain, Koestler worked for the News Chronicle. He would later produce work for
various English and American papers including The Sunday Telegraph on a number of his different interests.
Work
Much of Koestler's work was completely out of step with mainstream views. He did not merely arrive at different answers to
common questions. Instead, Koestler answered, or tried to answer, important questions that others were not even asking. Some
considered this a sign of his true creative genius.
The result of this originality is an uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Some of his, such as his work on creativity, can be
appreciated as brilliant. Some ideas challenge us to readjust our thinking in order to grasp their importance. Other ideas are
little more than nonsense. But taken as a whole, they are well worth serious consideration.
Koestler and Judaism
Although a lifelong atheist, Koestler's family background was Jewish. Notably, one of his biographers, David Cesarani has picked up on this, and has claimed he deliberately disowned
it.
Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe advanced the controversial conclusion that European, or Ashkenazi Jews, are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but from a group of
Khazars, a people in the Caucasus who
converted to Judaism in the 8th
century and were later forced to move westwards into current Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Koestler stated that part of
his intent in writing the book was to defuse anti-Semitism by undermining
the identification of European Jews with the Jews of the Bible, rendering anti-Semitic epithets such as "Christ killer"
inapplicable. Ironically, Koestler's thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not Semitic has become an important claim of many
anti-Semitic groups. Some Palestinian advocates have adopted this thesis
quite eagerly, since they believe identifying most Jews as non-Semitic would seriously undermine their historical claims to the
land of Israel. The main thesis of The Thirteenth Tribe has
since been debunked by genetic testing; while there has been mixing with various European populations by Ashkenazi Jews over the
centuries, there remains a clearly identifiable Middle Eastern genetic element in virtually all Ashkenazim.
Koestler's own view of Israel was that it would never be destroyed, short of a
second Holocaust. He supported the statehood of Israel, but opposed the idea of a
diaspora Jewish culture. In an interview in the London Jewish Chronicle, about the time of Israel's statehood, Koestler
asserted that all Jews should either migrate to Israel or else assimilate completely into their local cultures.
Koestler went to Palestine for a period, and lived on a kibbutz. His experiences
there were to form the basis of the unfinished Thieves in the Night. Always the controversialist, Koestler proposed
ditching the Hebrew alphabet for the Roman.
Koestler and science
Koestler wrote many books on science, and scientific practice. In the words of one cynic, "Koestler loved science, but science
didn't love him back". His critiques of science were often reminiscent of post-modernism's, and alienated much of the scientific community. Notably The Case of the Midwife
Toad (1971: about the biologist Paul Kammerer, who researched Lamarckian
inheritance)
The issue of mysticism, while implicit in his works, carried tremendous weight
in his personal life. This was confirmed when he left a substantial part of his own estate to establish the Koestler Institute in
the University of Edinburgh dedicated to the study of
parapsychological phenomena. His work The Roots of Coincidence
also discusses Paul Kammerer, this time in the context of a quantum theory of coincidence or synchronicity, along with the theories of Carl Jung. More controversially he also studied levitation and telepathy.
Koestler and politics
Koestler was involved in a number of political causes in his time, ranging from Zionism and Communism (later Anti-Communism), to campaigns against Capital
punishment (particularly hanging) and for voluntary Euthanasia. He was also an early advocate of Nuclear disarmament.
Koestler trivia
- In his younger days, the singer Sting was an avid reader of
Koestler. His band of the time, The Police were to name one of their albums
The Ghost in the Machine after one of Koestler's books. The title Synchonicity was also inspired by Koestler's
The Roots of Coincidence, which mentions Carl Jung's theory of the same
name. Koestler knew little about the burgeoning New Wave scene, and is alleged to
have said:
- "Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called
The Police - I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish
them from the punks - and they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it
until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record."
Biography
Autobiography in chronological order
The following books also contain some biographical details, The Lotus and the Robot, The God that failed, Von
Weissen Nächten und Roten Tagen (experiences in USSR, extremely difficult to get hold of), as do his collections of numerous
essays.
Other biographies
- J. Atkins, Arthur Koestler (1956)
- S.A. Pearson, Arthur Koestler (1978);
- Iain Hamilton, Koestler – A Biography (1982)
- George Mikes, Arthur Koestler – The Story of a Friendship (1983)
- M. Levene, Arthur Koestler (1984)
- Mamaine Koestler, Living with Koestler (1985);
- David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind,
(1998)
- Christian G. Buckard, Arthur Koestler – Ein extremes Leben 1905–1983 (2004, German language)
Langston Hughes's autobiography also documents their meeting in
Turkestan during Soviet times.
Koestler bibliography (excluding autobiography)
- Von Weissen Nächten und Roten Tagen (1933)
- L’Espagne ensanglantée (1937)
- Spanish Testament (1937)
- The Gladiators (1939)
- Darkness at Noon (1940)
- Dialogue with
Death (1942, abridgement of Spanish Testament)
- Arrival and Departure(1943)
- The
Yogi and the Commissar and other essays (1945)
- Twilight Bar (1945,
drama)
- Thieves in the Night (novel)
(1946)
- The Challenge of our Time (1949)
- Promise and
Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949 (1949)
- Insight and
Outlook (1949)
- The
Trail of the Dinosaur and other essays (1955)
- Reflections
on Hanging (1956)
- The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision
of the Universe (1959)
- The Watershed (1960, abridgement of The Sleepwalkers)
- Lotus and the
Robot (1960)
- Control of the Mind (1961)
- Hanged by the Neck (1961, reuses some material from Reflections on Hanging)
- Suicide of a
Nation (1963)
- The Act of
Creation (1964)
- The
Ghost in the Machine (1967)
- The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971: about the biologist Paul Kammerer, who researched Lamarckian
inheritance)
- Drinkers of
Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1968)
- The
Roots of Coincidence (1972)
- The Call
Girls: A Tragicomedy with a Prologue and Epilogue (play) (1972)
- The Lion and the Ostrich (1973)
- The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973 (1974)
- Janus: A Summing Up (collected extracts,
1978)
- Bricks to Babel
(collected extracts, 1980)
- Kaleidoscope (Essays from ’Drinkers of Infinity’, and ’The Heel of
Achilles’ and later pieces and stories, 1981)
Contributor
- Encyclopaedia of Sexual Knowledge (1935)
- Foreign Correspondent (1939),
- The Practice of Sex (1940)
- The God That Failed (1950) (collection of
testimonies by ex-Communists)
- Beyond Reductionism: The Alpbach Symposium. New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (co-editor, 1969)
- The
Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome (1973)
- Life After Death, (co-editor, 1976)
- Humour and Wit. I: Encyclopedia
Britannia. 15th ed. vol. 9.(1983)
External links
|
