LE MORTE D'ARTHUR

ARTHUR KOESTLER'S DARKNESS at Noon” is one of the classics of the century. It educated generations to their terrors. “The Spanish Testament” (also known as “Dialogue with Death”) comes close to being of this same stature. “The Sleepwalkers”—particularly the chapters on Kepler—is one of the rare feats of convincing imaginative re-creation of great science, of the poetic logic of discovery. I do not share the certitudes of Koestler’s “Reflections on Hanging,” but it endures as one of the great polemic tracts of our time and a pivotal moment in the debate on capital punishment. There are classic chapters in such autobiographical works as “Arrow in the Blue.” But there is a sense in which Arthur Koestler is more than the sum of his writings. There are in epochs and societies men and women who bear essential witness, in whose private sensibility and individual existence the larger meanings of the age are concentrated and made visible. In this black century, the Central European Jew has, more perhaps than any other tribe, borne the enormity of enforced vision and experience. Koestler, who was born in Budapest in 1905, stood on the exact terrain where the nerve ends of twentieth-century history, politics, language, and science touch. Their bitter and bracing currents passed through him. Catalogue the major presences in modernity—the politics of Marxism and of Fascist terror; psychoanalysis and the investigations of the anatomies of the mind; the forward surge of the biological sciences; the conflicts of ideology and the arts—and you will come upon not only Koestler’s many books but the man himself. He knew exile and prison, divorce and the bullying solace of alcohol, the ambiguous struggle for privacy in the world of the media. Koestler’s cards of identity, genuine and forged, the stamps and visas in his passports, his address books and desk diaries make up the map and itinerary of the hunted in our century.

This is why Arthur and Cynthia Koestler’s double suicide, on or immediately before March 3, 1983, reverberates still. This is why it took on so compelling a force of suggestion. Here again, the particular message was writ large. Austerely but poignantly recounted in George Mikes’ brief memoir, “Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship” (Andre Deutsch; $12.95), the suicide had immediate motives. A progressive, terminal illness would before too long have reduced Koestler to servile pain. But, as always in Koestler’s existence, the personal act was prepared for and underwritten by a deliberate and public reflection. Koestler had voiced strong sympathy with the views of a group seeking to clarify the legal and moral issues of freely chosen death. Having faced so much of death in its cruellest and most involuntary forms, having fought so hard against the cold-blooded infliction of judicial death on convicted men and women, Koestler attached enormous value to human freedom, to human dignity in respect of death. A sane man should be allowed the chance to make of his end an act consonant with the crucial worth of liberty of mind and conscience. The legal punishment of failed suicide, as it stands on so many statute books, seemed to Arthur Koestler a barbaric impertinence.

The actual suicide note was written as early as June, 1982. It includes the following passage:

I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a depersonalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This “oceanic feeling” has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.

In fact, and as is well known, Koestler’s hopes—or, rather, wishful speculations—were far from “timid.” His “oceanic feeling” (the phrase stems from Freud) focussed on the deepening conviction that there were, “out there,” psychic presences, ordering energies of a transcendent kind—inaccessible as yet in their occult force, but approachable, or in some ways discernible at the edges of our empirical notice and awareness. Hence Koestler’s urgent, often publicly defiant interest in parapsychology, in extrasensory perception, in phenomena extending from spoon-bending to poltergeists. Hence his ardent assembling of “inexplicable” cases of coincidence. Had not Lincoln’s secretary, called Kennedy, implored the President not to go to the theatre; had not Kennedy’s secretary, called Lincoln, begged the President not to go to Dallas; had Booth not shot Lincoln in a theatre and fled to a warehouse; had Oswald not shot Kennedy from a warehouse and then fled to a theatre? (When Koestler first put this concatenation to me, a wonderfully teasing, ironic, but also obsessed intensity seemed to vibrate in him. And as I hesitated, that smoldering, ironically insistent voice added, “And were they not both succeeded by Presidents named Johnson?”) Koestler left a substantial part of his estate for the underwriting of a university chair in parapsychological studies.

Friends, acquaintances who would not follow him along this murky road were more or less gently excluded from intimacy. Koestler knew full well that his belief in telekinesis and the extrasensory was making him an outlaw in the world of the exact and natural sciences. He would never be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Together with the Nobel Prize, for which he was indeed nominated, that fellowship was his supreme wish. Interestingly, these same two honors also eluded H. G. Wells, who is in some regards Koestler’s only true predecessor. Yet both writers had done far more than the great majority of professional scientists to make the stringent beauty and political importance of the sciences available to the literate community.

Another password in Koestler’s choice of his intimates was drink. Mikes is affectionately blunt on this matter. It soon became clear to both my wife and me that we could not keep up with the whiskeys before dinner, the wine at dinner, and the numerous brandies thereafter which paced Koestler’s evenings. This meant that an acquaintance, an exchange of views, a frequent round of mutual visits extended over the years could not ripen into unguarded closeness. A further obstacle, not alluded to by Mikes, was chess. Koestler played rapidly and sharply. But rather than lose to someone patently his inferior in intelligence, in talent, in knowledge of life, he would break off the game or refuse to play. This also came to be an undeclared cloud on our reciprocal trust, on the simple ease of being together. I ran up against exactly the same inhibition with Jacob Bronowski, that other master from Central Europe, whose death, together with Koestler’s, does seem to have reduced palpably the sum of general, of polymathic, intelligence in our affairs. And he was a brilliant player.

Koestler’s brandies, the spasms of irritation and of exasperated sarcasm which could chill and humiliate those nearest to him had their legitimate source. “A happy man.” remarks Mikes, “was a strange curiosity, almost a mystery for him.” How could a thinking, a feeling man or woman be happy amid the bestial follies, the waste, the suicidal blindness of contemporary history? To Arthur Koestler, official rationalism was complacency and an unacceptable pose. Was it really possible to found liberal politics on some fiction of reason, to pursue science on some unexamined basis of positivism, when the real world was so manifestly in the grip of inhuman, inexplicable impulses? If after the early nineteen-fifties Koestler ceased from intervening publicly in political debates (he abstained even at the moment of the Soviet invasion of Hungary), it was out of bleakness. Where they spoke out, the voices of reason were mocked.

Yet on good days Koestler radiated a rare passion for life, a deep merriment in the face of the unknown. He seemed to exemplify Nietzsche’s insight that there is in men and women a motivation stronger even than love or hatred or fear. It is that of being interested—in a body of knowledge, in a problem, in a hobby, in tomorrow’s newspaper. Koestler was supremely interested. I imagine that he arranged his appointment with death with that same watchful, challenging art of attention which he had lavished on literature and the sciences, on politics and psychology, on the lost tribes of Israel and French cooking.

George Mikes, himself a Hungarian exile, is too modest about his own many skills and achievements. He is the author of that classic tract “How to Be an Alien” and of a whole number of delightful books on the perils of modern times. This is a wise and a witty portrait of one to whom he meant much. Let me, just for the record, amend a story as Mikes tells it. Koestler had an eagle’s aerie of a house at Alpbach, in the Austrian mountains. During a summer colloquium there, he asked me to bring him into contact with a minor Hungarian official who was taking part in the proceedings. The three of us met at nightfall across a café table. Rather abruptly, Koestler asked if it would be possible for him to revisit Budapest and stand once more on native ground. After some thought, the Hungarian said that such a homecoming would be a veritable triumph for Koestler, and that the regime would give him discreet welcome. But he also said that Koestler’s name stood high on a very short list (it also included Silone) of those whom the Soviet authorities so loathed that they might come after them even in Budapest. His safety could not be absolutely guaranteed. The K.G.B. had a way of crossing borders. As Koestler and I walked back to his house, under a tumult of stars and in the clear mountain air, I said to him that to be on that list seemed to me a greater distinction than either a Nobel or a Fellowship of the Royal Society. He stopped short, gave me a characteristic side glance, and said nothing. But he seemed, momentarily, at peace.