Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind

Arthur Koestler's intellectual road was a long one indeed. Cesarani traces in detail the many stations of Koestler's life. He does this with a certain sympathy but even more with a critical awareness of the personal failings. Koestler who is remembered today more for 'Darkness at Noon' and the revelation of the true nature of the Soviet regime and mind is an extremely complicated and difficult figure. What is I guess most surprising in this work is the revelation of just how nasty a character Koestler could be. He was a conqueror in his own mind and his relations with the women in his life of which there were many did not ordinarily make or leave them happy. Cesarani writes a lot about the Jewish side of Koestler and the transformations he went from being a pioneering Zionist to a mythmaking re- inventor of Jewish historical identity. This book will tell its readers more than they may ever want to know about a human being whose life illustrates the truth that 'intelligence is not only everything it may not even be the most important thing'.

Koestler is the lost prophet of the 20th Century.In fact I only know much about him, thanks to my late father who was a fan (and curiously was born and died five years later than Koestler). He explored such areas as LSD, eastern religion, voluntary euthanasia and nuclear disarmament years before most people... He was caught up in many of the ideological causes of the age- Communism and later anti-Communism, Zionism, the movements against capital punishment and nuclear weaponry (although curiously he espoused abortion), as well as rubbing shoulders with a number of well-known people from different countries. No way do I agree with everything he said, but he has been written off because he alienated certain people. His writings about science for example, contain many controversies, but at the same time they contain many home truths.I would recommend Cesarani's biography, for the simple reason there is so little on Koestler now, and his books are mostly out of print. It is heavy going at times, and there is a slight self-righteous tone going through the book. Koestler did do and say some objectionable things (wife beating for example and bullying), but then again so have many "great people". Winston Churchill for example said and did far worse things. Cesarani is right to point out Koestler's tendency to neglect his Jewish roots, but he overplays this theme since he repeats it through the book (partially because Cesarani is a Jewish historian). Most interesting in this book is Koestler's life which touched on many important events, many places and ideologies and which is an incredible life by any standards. We need to re-examine Koestler, I think for many of the reasons above. Here are some books I recommend by him.Darkness at Noon (novel)- about Soviet show trials. A classic of its time.The Case of the Midwife Toad (out of print)- about the virtual character assassination of the scientist Kammerer and his startling experiments about evolution.The Ghost in the Machine - Like Synchronicity, this gave its name to an album by The Police, and talks about the uncomfortable idea that the human brain may have dangerous self-destructive flaws in it, and that modern psychology (of that time of course) may have to reassess itself.I would also recommend his essays such as Drinkers of Infinity, and The Heel of Achilles.

Just 40 years ago, he was considered one of Europe's great literary minds, and one of Zionism's most prominent intellectual stewards. Yet today, his reputation lies in such tatters that we need a new biography just to remind us that he wrote five novels aside from Darkness at Noon, as well as countless influential pieces of non-fiction. What makes Arthur Koestler's fall into obscurity doubly surprising is that his intellectual trajectory ran alongside that of George Orwell, an author who couldn't be farther from obscurity if he were alive and writing today. The similarities are startling: Both writers were leftists who awakened to the evils of jackboot ideology in war-torn Spain; both returned from the fight against Franco to denounce the propagandism of Europe's Russophilic intelligentsia; and both are remembered best by signature dystopic masterpieces in which they laid bare the frightening psychological engine at the heart of totalitarianism. And yet Orwell's reputation is still strong despite a career cut short by illness in 1950, while Koestler's star faded long before his death 33 years later. So, why? This is one of the many interesting questions that David Cesarani raises in his dry, but methodically rendered biography, Arthur Koestler, The Homeless Mind (Random House, $45). The pink decade of the '30s ended less than 60 years ago, but by post-Soviet lights, it seems more like centuries. Still, it is worth revisiting, if only to enjoy the highly charged political writing of the period. While modern authors and literary critics fight their culture wars over such issues as multiculturalism and feminism, mid-century antecedents such as George Orwell, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and Andre Gide wrote their great works in the shadow of real wars. Millions of lives actually were up for grabs in their struggle to disabuse Europe's Communists and fellow travellers of totalitarian sympathies. Between the publication of Darkness at Noon in 1940, and his abandonment of political writing in 1955, no author did more to further this effort than Arthur Koestler. But, as Cesarani illustrates in his rigidly chronological account of the writer's life, anti-communism was just one of the monomaniacal phases that filled Koestler's 78 years. As a young journalist, he moved from Zionism to Marxism to communism to anti-communism. He then picked up with anti-communism as a novelist, shifted into anti-revolutionism, and then adopted full-blown anti-rationalism. He flirted again with Zionism after the Second World War, then launched himself into chest-thumping Cold War jingoism, and finally retreated full time into his cranky obsession with science, psychology, and the mysticism that had suffused his life's work. From a literary point of view, however, Koestler's only works of enduring value came between Darkness at Noon and The God That Failed in 1950. Before this period, his writing consisted largely of straightforward rep