TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0604> <title> 1983: Died:Arthur Koestler </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1983 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> March 14, 1983 Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age Arthur Koestler: 1905-1983 </hdr> <body> "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 late 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 </body> </article> </text>