Koestler's Legacy - I

Written for Vanity Fair, 1991

The maid found the bodies in the upstairs sitting-room when she got to work at the house in Montpelier Square, on the morning of March 3, 1983 -- the writer Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon and thirty other volumes of fiction, polemic, inquiry and reportage; and his wife, Cynthia, both of them slumped in comfortable chairs, both of them dead from massive doses of whiskey and Tuinol. "Please do not go upstairs," a note on the front door warned, but there were "no suspicious circumstances," according to police, and no sign of injuries on the day-old corpses: "It was a scene of calmness." The curtains had been drawn to screen the light of an early London spring. Two wine glasses sat on a coffee table next to a jar of honey and a note, dated the previous June and addressed "To Whom It May Concern."

"The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person," Koestler had written. "The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period." Why Koestler had waited eight months to put his plan into action was a matter of conjecture, but to anyone who knew him his death was no surprise. For years he had suffered from Parkinson's disease, and, more recently, from a particularly debilitating form of leukemia. He was "very ill," according to Pat Kavanagh, his agent at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop in London, "and I should think he found it intolerable." In the last interview of his life, at the age of 77, Koestler remarked that he meant to die "in harness."

"No one who knew him anticipated that he would quietly submit to the final removal of his physical and mental faculties," said Harold Harris, Koestler's literary executor and probably his closest friend in the months before his death. "Indeed, on the last occasion on which I saw him I felt that he might have left it too late. He was unable to stand, his speech was disjointed, and he clearly found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to him." At no time had Koestler made any secret of his feelings when it came to the right to die. In 1981, in his capacity as Vice-president of "EXIT," Britain's Voluntary Euthanasia Society, he penned a witty and characteristically provocative introduction to the Society's Guide to Self-Deliverance.

"We tend to be guided by first impressions," Koestler observed. "An unknown country" -- death -- "to which the only access leads through a torture chamber is frightening. And vice versa, the prospect of falling peacefully, blissfully asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame and become unborn again. For after all, reason tells us -- when not choked by panic -- that before we were born we were all dead, and that our post-mortem condition is no more frightening than the pre-natal twilight. Only the process of getting un-born makes cowards of us all."

It was typical of Koestler that his thoughts on the nature of death and dying were advanced as lectures in science. He had trained as a scientist in Vienna in the early 1920s, and science, to the end, remained his deep and truest passion.

"Animals in the wild," he went on, "unless killed by a predator, seem to die peacefully and without fuss, from old age -- I cannot remember a single description to the contrary by a naturalist, ethologist or explorer. The conclusion is inescapable: we need midwives to aid us to be unborn -- or at least the assurance that such aid is available. Euthanasia, like obstetrics, is the natural corrective to a biological handicap."

But what about Cynthia, Koestler's wife -- 55 years old when she died at his side, free of illness and unracked by pain, presumably, of any but the psychic variety. "It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life," Koestler had said in his suicide note, "and never before." They had been at work on a joint autobiography, a His-and-Hers account of Koestler's post-Darkness career, and in a typed addendum to her husband's farewell, Cynthia regretted that the book would not be completed.

"I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur," she wrote with a terseness and self-effacement that were typical of her character, "a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources." In the shock of discovery, word spread that Cynthia, too, had been mortally ill, but there is no evidence to support it. There was no reason at all to doubt her word: she couldn't live if Koestler died. On the Monday morning of their last week on earth she took their dog, David, a much-loved Lhasa Apso, to the vet's to have him put down. Her husband needed all of her care, she explained; she had no time for the dog. Harold Harris thinks Cynthia probably did not make up her mind to kill herself until "late in the day." He rejects the idea -- all their friends do -- that the Koestlers died in a suicide "pact."

"We were amazed," says Harris. "I'd always imagined Cynthia getting rid of the house in Montpelier Square and being happy in the country with the garden and the dogs." Pat Kavanagh, who, with her husband, the writer Julian Barnes, spent peaceful days with the Koestlers at Denston, their country place in Sussex, agrees that any pact they may have had was concluded at the last moment, "when it was just a question of exactly when, and exactly how."

"I am absolutely sure that Arthur didn't want her to die," says Kavanagh, "that he wanted her to stick around and look after his intellectual legacy, at least. But she wasn't having it. She'd been through it before, and she'd been left with a rather thin existence. She just wasn't having it." In 1937 Cynthia's father, an Irish surgeon who had emigrated to South Africa, where Cynthia was born, slashed his wrists "during a storm." His daughter was 10. She was quoted as saying once that her father's death was "like the end of the world," and indeed, after the Koestlers' suicide, much was made of the difference in their ages. All their friends were troubled by what Julian Barnes calls "the unmentionable, half-spoken question" of Koestler's responsibility for Cynthia's actions.

"Did he bully her into it?" asks Barnes. And "if he didn't bully her into it, why didn't he bully her out of it?" Because, with hindsight, the evidence that Cynthia's life had been ebbing with her husband's was all too apparent.

"She was very helpful to me as an aspirant gardener," Pat Kavanagh offers by way of example. "And people who are gardeners, I find, remain gardeners forever. It's in you. And I was sort of surprised, about six months before they died, when she said something that implied she'd lost interest in it. `Oh,' she said, `I don't care about it if Arthur's not going to be here to enjoy it.' And one wanted to kick oneself afterward. It was such an obvious sign of ... what? ... her letting go, I suppose."

Not that a disproportionate concern for Arthur on Cynthia's part would have struck her friends, in itself, as evidence of something amiss. Koestler called her "Slavey" (when he wasn't calling her "Angel"), and journalists who passed through London to interview the Great Man were bewildered, to say the least, when he sometimes stopped the conversation in mid-sentence and began to wail in a ludicrous, drawn-out falsetto: "Hoo-ooo-oo! Hoo-oo-ooooo!" This was Cynthia's summons to appear. Neither she nor her husband found anything peculiar, much less demeaning, about the paging system. The phone might even be ringing in Koestler's ear; rather than answer it, he would yodel for his wife, and she would materialize in the doorway. She seemed to spend her life permanently on tiptoe.

"Telephone, angel," Koestler would say.

She was "a shy, nervous, birdlike" woman, in Julian Barnes's recollection, "capable of seeming in the same day both twenty-five and fifty-five. She moved awkwardly, like an adolescent unhappy with her body, who expects at any moment to knock over a coffee table and be sent to her room for doing so." The Koestlers had met in Paris after the war, when Arthur was living with Mamaine Paget, the second of his three wives. Cynthia, at 22, had answered an ad in the Herald Tribune calling for secretarial help, and later explained the evaporation of her autonomous existence with the guileless remark that "it had long been my ambition to work for a writer." For sixteen years until he married her, before and after his divorce from Mamaine, in and out of her own love affairs and travels and jobs and disappointments, Cynthia served as Koestler's secretary, lover, procurer, cook and only hope of equilibrium.

"Cynthia," Koestler wrote in his diary one day, " -- toujours là." She took his name for social purposes before she won his hand in marriage, though to the end of her life, in a true indication of her view of herself, she signed official correspondence with her maiden name: "Cynthia Jefferies, Secretary to Arthur Koestler." She lived in terror of being "dropped from his lists" and considered suicide at least once, in 1952, when it looked as though Koestler might be tiring of her. She saw him through all the ups and downs of writing books; nursed him through illness; stood by him in feuds; and while it clearly pained her that her husband suffered from a "persistent and well-nigh pathological streak of promiscuity" -- these are Koestler's own words -- she tolerated his love affairs and his incessant cruising with a grace that passes comprehension. Cynthia was friendly, indeed, with most of Koestler's mistresses. She was the modern feminist's nightmare, though as with her suicide, so with her character: the surface was deceptive, the pop psychology is way too easy.

"She was absolutely vital to Arthur's life," says Ruth West, a protegee of the Koestlers who, for a while, lived in the basement flat of their house in Montpelier Square. "He adored her. And that was that. She had a sort of female thing that she'd worked out in the interest of her own fulfillment. It was a revealed dedication -- a way of finding and realizing herself. And without him, she had no purpose in living. They were vital to each other." West is still bothered by gossip about the Koestlers, and joins a large number of their friends in defending Cynthia's life as "a kind of a mission," a step up from secretarial work, surely, even a contribution to literature.

"I should say that her life was actually elevated by her association with Koestler," Jane Gunther observes with an almost forgotten social refinement, and notwithstanding the predictable shrieks of the "Hers"-column feminists (notably Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, who ranted in Mademoiselle after Cynthia's death that Koestler had made her his "creature" -- "I think it's fair to say he killed her"). Even imagining that the Koestlers' union was the ultimate co-dependent trip, we're stuck with the fact that Cynthia liked it that way, and that she was spared the "acute or chronic misère en deux" Koestler had long seen at work in the lives of his friends: "Their marriages were like parcels that had burst open in the mail van, and were precariously held together by bits of string." Cynthia might have been happy to know (inasmuch as her action furthered one of Koestler's causes) that her much-publicized decision to end her life resulted in a significant rise in the rate of inquiries and membership applications at EXIT, the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in London.

"In fact," wrote Mary Stott, the Society's chairman, in her 1983 annual report, "we have had almost twice as many new members this year as last." Mrs. Stott was one of the speakers at the Koestlers' memorial service at Burlington House in April 1983.

"It is not `requiescat in pace' that one wants to say to Arthur and Cynthia Koestler," she concluded, in a line that would have done the Koestlers proud, "but `Greetings, comrade voyagers among the stars.'" In his introduction to the Euthanasia Society's advisory pamphlet (it has since been withdrawn in England for legal reasons) Koestler made the distinction between the fear of death and the fear of dying; now, in his suicide note, read out to the crowd at Burlington House, he wanted his friends to know that he was leaving "in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a depersonalized 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."

*

If the suicides were a shock, if Cynthia's death had to be counted a grisly pre-feminist tragedy, the terms of her husband's will and testament left 'em laughing in the aisles, for Koestler (the genius of Darkness at Noon, scourge of Stalin, lion of anti-communism and self-appointed gadfly of Europe's postwar intellectual elite) left all of his money to "psychical research" -- "the scientific study of paranormal phenomena," as he carefully spelled it out, "in particular the capacity attributed to some individuals to interact with the external environment by means other than the recognized sensory or motor channels." In parapsychology this capacity, for lack of a better name, is called "psi" (after the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and the symbol for the unknown). Psi is the term the experts use when they want to speak generally, without imputation, about telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, ESP -- those "preposterous subjects" that occupied the final years of Koestler's working life and made him, finally, a "reluctant convert" to the reality of the paranormal.

"He was very, very good about taking up things and, when he'd got to the bottom of them, letting them go," Pat Kavanagh reflects. As Koestler's literary agent, Kavanagh had reason to keep up with her client's eclectic pursuits.

"People offered him huge sums of money to keep writing about things he'd done so well before -- books about biology, capital punishment, anti-communism, and so on. But when he was done, he was done. I mean, he retained an interest in everything generally. But his mind was always searching down a new path." Koestler was "a prince among journalists," in Bernard Crick's opinion, "a cosmic reporter ... one of the greatest intellectual popularizers of our time." Anthony Burgess credits him with having "virtually invented" the political novel through Darkness at Noon, his earth-shattering account of the Stalinist purges, probably the finest portrait ever painted of the Bolshevik mind.

"His gift to English literature was a horse's-mouth authenticity that no one would dream of looking into," Burgess has written. Koestler himself, for all that Darkness at Noon changed the intellectual outlook of a whole generation and simultaneously made him famous, very much resented being chained to the book. He would go to his grave, he complained, as a People item in the news magazines: "Arthur (`Darkness at Noon') Koestler."

He was born in Budapest in 1905, the only child of an ill-matched, stressed-out couple he described as "typical Central European Jewish middle middle." An unhappy childhood, Koestler observed -- "and mine was a very unhappy one" -- was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a life of creativity. Obsessive by nature, emphatic by temperament, hard-drinking and prone to fits of "depression rock-bottom," in 1931 he was propelled into the ranks of the German Communist Party by the rise of the Nazis and by a profound distrust (which he never abandoned) of "exacerbated capitalism," American-style: Koestler spent seven years, rough-and-tumble, in the service of Stalin.

"I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith," he wrote in The God That Failed, his splendid contribution to the history of the Pink Decade. "To say that one had `seen the light' is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. ... The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past -- a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don't know." But life, from the outset, had a way of throwing curves at Arthur: the cosmos failed to conform to the utopian dialectic.

He had his first experience with the psi-effect as a boy in Vienna, around 1915, when a can of beans blew up behind him for no apparent reason and knocked him unconscious to the floor. "The elaborately far-fetched nature" of this event earned Koestler a reputation for "awe-inspiring potentialities" among his parents' friends, and in the fading age of Spiritualism he was in great demand as a table-lifter and amateur clairvoyant. During the communist years, of course, his duty to the Party effectively put the kibosh on any curiosity he might have had about the metaphysical dimensions of the Other World, but he was already collecting and even soliciting "authentic reports on occult experiences -- telepathy, clairvoyance, levitation, etc.," in his capacity as science editor for the House of Ullstein in Berlin. An early attempt at suicide in 1934 -- Koestler was despondent about his writing career and unconsciously antipathetic to Stalin -- failed spectacularly when a book, a Soviet account of the Reichstag Trial, toppled from a shelf and crashed on his head just as he prepared to enter eternity. Was it coincidence? Koestler wondered, or just "a case of the Dialectic producing a miracle?" He was never able to write about his encounters with the paranormal without lapsing into a diffident, self-mocking tone. His good friend Brian Inglis, onetime editor of The Spectator and himself the author of numerous books on psychical research, thinks that Koestler was "embarrassed" by psychic phenomena and that he preferred to confine his studies, wherever possible, to the experience of other people.

"He wanted it to be scientific," Inglis explains. "His goal was simply to establish parapsychology as a scientific discipline." Despite spooky-silly stories at the time of his death, and more concerted efforts since then to downplay the importance of his work (Martin Gardner, the American science writer and professional skeptic, describes Koestler unscientifically as an "active promoter of the paranormal"), his interest in psychical research, like his interest in everything else, was sober-minded to a fault -- hard-headed, relentless, typically acute.

"I am still skeptical," Koestler declared in a television interview in 1966. "I know from personal experience, intuition, whatever you call it, I know that these phenomena do exist; at the same time my rational mind -- my scientific mind, if you want -- rejects them. ... I wouldn't accept ESP if my nose hadn't been pushed into it, you see what I mean?" During the Spanish Civil War, as a correspondent for leftist newspapers, Koestler had been captured by the forces of General Franco and sentenced to death as a spy. He sat in jail in Seville for nearly a hundred days, in total isolation, listening to the sobs and screams of his fellow prisoners as they were led away to be shot, not knowing from one minute to the next when his own time would come or what his reaction would be when it did.

"The lesson taught by this kind of experience, when put into words, always appears under the dowdy guise of perennial commonplaces," he wrote in The God That Failed: "That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic; ... that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty-bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit." To protect his own sanity, the imprisoned Koestler took to scribbling mathematical formulae on the walls of his cell, and shortly worked out for himself the Euclidean proof that the number of primes is infinite. Numbers were real, Koestler discovered (like Helen Keller at the water-well). They were pre-existing, "already there" -- they did not depend on anyone's ideas about them. It was "an absolute catharsis," proof, for Koestler, "that a higher order of reality existed and that it alone invested existence with meaning." He called it "the reality of the third order" (after the first, which was physical, and the second, conceptual), and believed it held the key to the riddle of the universe:

It contained `occult' phenomena which could not be apprehended or explained either on the sensory or on the conceptual level, and yet occasionally invaded them like spiritual meteors piercing the primitive's vaulted sky. ... It was a text written in invisible ink; and though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed was sufficient to alter the texture of one's existence, and make one's actions conform to the text.

Koestler resigned his membership in the Communist Party in 1938, at the height of the purges and the Moscow show trials. Rescued from Franco in a trade of prisoners, he went to Paris, and, later, to London, where Darkness at Noon was published in 1940 to a thundering success. As anti-communist man-of-the-minute, the cantankerous darling of the postwar Right, Koestler worked with George Orwell in the League for the Rights of Man, helped found the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Berlin, lectured at Carnegie Hall, and probably did more than anyone else to ensure the success, during the 1950s, of the campaign to abolish capital punishment in England. But in 1954, after the publication of the first two volumes of his autobiography, his divorce from Mamaine Paget and his settling down with Cynthia, he abruptly swore off political writing in favor of an ongoing critique of science and psychology and their joint relation to the "glory and predicament" of man.

"The errors are atoned for," Koestler proclaimed, "the bitter passion has burnt itself out; Cassandra has gone hoarse, and is due for a vocational change." What looked on the surface to be a complete and untenable switch of direction -- from "politics" to "science" -- was, in reality, only a shift of gears, a step upward, really, on the evolutionary scale of moral thinking.

"We have heard a whole chorus of Nobel laureates assert that matter is merely energy in disguise," Koestler protested, "that causality is dead, determinism is dead. If that is so, they should be given a public funeral in the olive groves of Academe, with a requiem of electronic music. ... Modern physics has destroyed materialism. Matter evaporates, it runs through the fingers like sand. We have holes in space into which matter vanishes. We have a particle, the tachyon, which appears to travel backwards in time for a brief moment. It's an Alice-in-Wonderland universe."

Insight and Outlook (1947) was Koestler's initial foray into the wilderness of psychology and the creative impulse, an adventure that led him, over the rest of his working life, through studies of the history of cosmology (in The Sleepwalkers), Eastern philosophy (The Lotus and the Robot), the interconnectedness of science and art (The Act of Creation), and the invigorating theory of the Holon (Beyond Reductionism, The Ghost in the Machine). Two of his last four books dealt directly with paranormal investigation, while in Janus: A Summing Up (1978) he put the finishing touches on a career-defining analysis of "the rationalist illusion" -- the idea that the human brain, on its own steam, assisted by nothing but technology of its own devising, could solve the riddle of its own existence and give meaning to human endeavor.

"You know," said Koestler, "if you keep telling man that he is nothing but an overgrown rat, he will start growing whiskers and bite your finger." Where once he had appeared as the unrelenting bête noire of totalitarian ideology, he now emerged as a sort of Humanist Avenger, the diehard champion of scientific method but implacable enemy of "scientism," behaviorism, "ratomorphism," "nothing-but-ism," "the crude reductionist maxim that what cannot be explained cannot exist." More and more as he grew older Koestler turned to radical formulations for his answers -- the philosopher Stephen Toulmin describes his contribution to the history of science as "the capacity (one might say) to put 2 and 1 together and get vingt-et-un" -- but when, in The Roots of Coincidence, he came out squarely in favor of the reality of ESP, he stepped into a critical hornet's nest more furiously hostile than any he had encountered before.

"Even close friends and admirers found the resulting brew of psychosomatic inference, mystic biology and murky parlor-tricks hard to swallow," said George Steiner in a tribute to Koestler after his death. "His public stance cut him off from all but an eccentric handful in the very community which he most prized: that of the working scientists, of the Fellows of the Royal Academy whose respect, if not agreement, he ached for." Koestler had dedicated The Roots of Coincidence to Rosalind Heywood, "catalyst-in-chief," one of Britain's psychic grandes dames, former president of the Society for Psychical Research and a particular friend of his own. Normally he had no use for professional or even affectional "psychics." Gossip was common at the S. P. R., and too much attention was paid there for Koestler's taste to the issue of "survival" -- life after death. He was, above all, never goofy about the afterworld. In 1976 Arnold Toynbee persuaded Koestler to give his thoughts on survival in a collection of afterlife essays, and he wrote rather torturously about "de-individualization" at the moment of death, a "merging into the cosmic consciousness -- the island vanishing below the surface to join the sunken continent -- or Athman joining Brahman -- whichever image you choose."

Had they known that Koestler was also conducting experiments in levitation in the basement of his house (he called it "Project Daedalus," and bought a second-hand weighing machine from a London railway station to see if his friends couldn't "think themselves, or abstract themselves," into shedding a few pounds), scientists in Britain might have proved even more recalcitrant than they did when he died and left his estate to psi research. Under the terms of his last will, and with Cynthia's income to bolster the fund, close to a million dollars was set aside to establish a Koestler Chair in Parapsychology, the first of its kind, at a university in Great Britain.