Arthur Koestler

Hungarian-born English novelist, essayist, critic, and memoirist

• Born: September 5, 1905
• Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
• Died: March 3, 1983
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

Arthur Koestler writes in his autobiographical Arrow in the Blue that his story is a “typical case-history of a central-European member of the educated middle classes, born in the first years of this century.” Koestler’s life is indeed representative of the life of a European who experienced the twentieth century crises brought about by the political presence of Communism. As a young man he was an active Communist intellectual. He was imprisoned in Spain by the Fascists and sentenced to be executed; he was imprisoned by the French and English. When he broke with the Communist Party he wrote one of the most effective novels of protest against it: Darkness at Noon. He tells the whole story of his shifts between an ethics of conscience and an ethics of action in his autobiographical works, his novels, and his essays—particularly The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays.

Arthur Koestler’s grandfather escaped from Russia during the Crimean War, when to hide his identity he adopted the name Kostler. Koestler’s father, Henrik Kostler, was an energetic, would-be inventor, a maker of radioactive products that included soap, brass polish, and cleaning powder; his mother came from an old Jewish family of Prague. After the outbreak of World War I ruined the father’s business, the family moved to Vienna; after that they never had a permanent home again.

Koestler’s interest in Zionism led him in 1926 to destroy the record of his studies at the University of Vienna. He went to Palestine to work for the Zionist movement, but after a probationary period, during which he worked in the fields, he was rejected. He suffered from poverty, failed as an architect, and worked as a lemonade vendor in Haifa, for a tourist agency, as a land surveyor’s assistant, and as an editor (for three issues) of a German-language paper in Cairo. He finally secured a job as correspondent for the Ullstein chain of newspapers and was sent to Jerusalem in September, 1927. During the next four years he worked for Ullstein in the Middle East, Paris, and Berlin. One of his assignments was as correspondent on the Graf Zeppelin when it made an expeditionary flight to the North Pole region.

Koestler was a member of the Communist Party from 1931 to the spring of 1938; he left the party after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism. Before that, however, he traveled in the Soviet Union and in 1936 went to Spain ostensibly as correspondent for the London News Chronicle. In February 1937 he was captured by the Fascists and for more than three months expected execution. He was released in response to protests from England. After being imprisoned as an alien by the French in the infamous camp Le Vernet, Koestler spent several months in 1940 trying to get to England. He spent six weeks in Pentonville Prison in England and then joined the British army. During the rest of the war he worked for the Ministry of Information in London.

After the war Koestler spent time in Israel in 1948, reporting on the First Arab-Israeli War, and then moved to France for a time before relocating to the United States, and then back to Britain in 1953. He wrote about a wide variety of subjects over the ensuing years, from anti-Communism to opposing capital punishment to the history of science to the drug culture of the 1960s. Koestler later developed Parkinson's disease and leukemia; in 1983, as his condition deteriorated, Koestler, a proponent of the right to die, committed suicide in London along with his third wife, Cynthia Jefferies.

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the two parts of Arrow in the Blue rank among the most revealing and influential anti-Communist documents of the twentieth century. His later books were well received, but many critics have judged them to be less significant than his early work.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Gladiators, 1939

Darkness at Noon, 1940

Arrival and Departure, 1943

Thieves in the Night: Chronicle of an Experiment, 1946

The Age of Longing, 1951

The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy with Prologue and Epilogue, 1972

Drama:

Twilight Bar: An Escapade in Four Acts, pb. 1945

Nonfiction:

Spanish Testament, 1937

Scum of the Earth, 1941

Dialogue with Death, 1942

The Yogi and the Commissar, and Other Essays, 1945

The Challenge of Our Time, 1948

Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917–1949, 1949

Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics, 1949

Arrow in the Blue: The First Volume of an Autobiography, 1905–1931, 1952

The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography, 1932–1940, 1954

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 Lotus and the Robot, 1960

Hanged by the Neck: An Exposure of Capital Punishment in England, 1961 (with C. H. Rolph)

The Act of Creation, 1964

The Ghost in the Machine, 1967

Drinkers of Infinity: Essays, 1955–1967, 1968 (with J. R. Smythies)

The Case of the Midwife Toad, 1971

The Roots of Coincidence, 1972

The Challenge of Chance: Experiments and Speculations, 1973 (with Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie)

The Lion and the Ostrich, 1973

The Heel of Achilles: Essays, 1968–1973, 1974

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, 1976

Life after Death, 1976 (with Arthur Toynbee et al.)

Janus: A Summing Up, 1978

Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings with Comments, 1981

Stranger in the Square, 1984 (with Cynthia Koestler)

Edited Texts:

Suicide of a Nation? An Enquiry into the State of Britain Today, 1963

Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, 1969 (with J. R. Smythies)

Bibliography

Cesarani, David. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. New York: Free Press, 1999. A good examination of the writer and his works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Day, Frank. Arthur Koestler: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1987. In addition to a listing of Koestler’s publications, there are 518 entries for writings about him, many of them from newspapers and journals. Includes some foreign-language items, and the latest materials are from 1985.

Goodman, Celia, ed. Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler’s Letters, 1945-1951. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. A vivid personal view of Koestler, documented by Koestler’s second wife, Mamaine Paget.

Hamilton, Iain. Koestler: A Biography. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1985. This lengthy biography, favorable to Koestler, is arranged year by year in the fashion of a chronicle and breaks off around 1970. Many events have been retold partly on the basis of interviews, Koestler’s papers, and firsthand accounts.

Harris, Harold, ed. Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at Seventy. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1975. This collection of essays by authors sympathetic to Koestler provides approximately equal coverage of the writer’s involvement in literary and in scientific concerns.

Levene, Mark. Arthur Koestler. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Koestler’s own life is discussed in the first chapter, and his major literary works are considered in detail, but relatively little attention is given to his scientific writings. The chronology and bibliography are useful.

Merrill, Reed, and Thomas Frazier, comps. Arthur Koestler: An International Bibliography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979. An indispensable work.

Pearson, Sidney A., Jr. Arthur Koestler. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Although a bit sketchy on matters of biography, this work deals with basic issues in Koestler’s writings and has some trenchant and interesting discussion of political themes. Also helpful are the chronology and a selected annotated bibliography.

Perez, Jane, and Wendell Aycock, eds. The Spanish Civil War in Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990. Contains Peter I. Barta’s essay “The Writing of History: Authors Meet on the Soviet-Spanish Border,” which provides an excellent grounding in the political history from which Koestler’s fiction evolved.

Sperber, Murray A., ed. Arthur Koestler: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Both positive and negative reactions appear in this fine sampling of critical work about Koestler’s literary and scientific writings. Among those commentators represented by excerpts here are George Orwell, Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, Stephen Spender, and A. J. Ayer. A chronology and bibliography have also been included.

Sterne, Richard Clark. Dark Mirror: The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Contains a substantial discussion of Darkness at Noon.