by Gary Lachman
Yet not everyone was happy with this assessment, especially not David Cesarani. Cesarani’s motive in writing his book was initially to explore the question of Koestler’s Jewish roots – roots Cesarani, a professor of modern Jewish history, believed Koestler had vigorously and egregiously rejected. Cesarani gained access to the Koestler papers at Edinburgh on the strict condition that he was not writing a biography, a condition he agreed to and which the university believed he would honour. The task of writing Koestler’s biography was already given to Michael Scammell, whose authorized work is scheduled for publication in 2007, although it has already missed a few deadlines. Cesarani’s subsequent book, which, using Koestler’s jettisoning of his Jewishness as a peg, hangs on it a plethora of personal faults and flaws, has itself caused a literary storm. Scammell, Barnes and the novelist Frederick Raphael have accused Cesarani of lying, of selecting his facts to suit his argument, of making unsubstantiated claims, and of engaging in a malicious exercise in character assassination. That Cesarani depicts in tabloid detail the many sexual escapades Koestler engaged in – it was common knowledge even before Cesarani’s ‘expose’ that Koestler was an obsessive and aggressive womaniser – as well as incidences of violence, suggests that something more than academic interest fuelled his study. His most controversial assertion, however, is that, after a relationship and marriage built on domination and submission, Koestler bullied Cynthia into taking her life with him, in a form of ‘suttee’. “It is this negation of another human being,” Cesarani writes, “that casts a pall over the life, work and reputation of Arthur Koestler.”58
That life, work and reputation were considerable. Koestler had the kind of life most writers only write about. And, as is borne out by the titles of many of his books – Arrival and Departure, The Yogi and the Commissar, The Lotus and the Robot, and perhaps most succinctly in one of his last works, Janus: A Summing Up, Janus being the two-faced Roman god – it was characterized by the tension born of two opposing forces. In Koestler’s case, it was a clear, rigorous and supremely logical mind, linked to a fiery, impulsive and often violent emotional life.
Born in Budapest in 1905 to a prosperous father who had success with inventions like ‘radioactive soap’ and an envelope-opening machine, and a mother who visited Freud because of her persistent violent headaches, Koestler went on to have a life that exemplified “a typical case-history of a Central European member of the educated middle classes, born in the first years of our century.”59 Koestler could be seen as a kind of ideological impulse-buyer, were it not for the incisive intellect he brought to each of his infatuations. In a series of sudden shifts, starting with burning his matriculation book and abandoning university before receiving his degree, which he described as a “sudden enamouredness with un-reason itself,”60 and which would reappear consistently throughout his life, Koestler embraced and rejected Zionism, Communism, Marxism, politics, scientific materialism, and Darwinism. In his last years he engaged in an eloquent if highly criticized exploration of the possibilities of parapsychology and its links to quantum physics, which included having a weighing machine installed at Montpelier Square, so he could test the possibility of levitation.
Although in books like The Lotus and the Robot, a study of Indian philosophy and Zen, he is critical of mysticism, and although he was one of the first to experiment with and reject psychedelic drugs – calling their effect “confidence tricks played on one’s own nervous system”61 – Koestler himself claimed that “it was always the ‘oceanic’ type of experience that dictated the really important decisions of my life, and determined its abrupt zigzag course.”62 One incidence of the ‘oceanic’ came to him while he sat in a Franco prison, during the Spanish Civil War, waiting to be executed. Whiling away the time by working out the mathematical proof that there is no ultimate prime number, Koestler experienced a “wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue.” This serene detachment was interrupted by a vague nagging thought, which he recalled was the realization that he might be shot, and to which he replied, “So what? Have you nothing serious to worry about?”
It was experiences like these that led Koestler, at the height of his fame and influence in the 1950s as a passionate anti-Communist, to startle his critics by abandoning politics and plunging into detailed examinations of the flaws in Darwinian theory, the dangers of behavioural psychology and the roots of human creativity in a series of brilliant books like The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine, now classics of anti-reductionist thought. By the time of his death, Koestler was a best-selling author, a respected journalist, had received numerous honours, organized dozens of symposia (so many that his last novel, The Call Girls, satirized the conference life) had hobnobbed with intellectual celebrities like Bertrand Russell, and was courted by Margaret Thatcher.
Yet alongside his cultural achievements, Koestler had acquired a reputation as a hard-drinking, bullying male chauvinist, a dark side that Cesarani had no qualms about revealing, although, as many reviewers of his book pointed out, many of his revelations had been made in previous books about Koestler. Koestler’s marriages, to Dorothy Ascher, Mamaine Paget, and Cynthia, were characterized by his domineering personality, forced abortions, and appalling behaviour, mostly centred around his wives’ need to accept his philandering, as well as his heavy drinking and general abusive treatment. Most bullies suffer from an inferiority complex and Koestler, incorrigibly competitive, would not be outdone: he once said that his inferiority complex was “as big as a cathedral.”
His friend George Mikes broke off relations with Koestler when he tried to bully him into drinking more during their get-togethers. Koestler had a habit of smashing up his cars, and on one occasion, arrested for drink-driving in Paris, he took a swing at a policeman; something similar happened in the 1970s in London as well. During the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Koestler threw bricks through the window of the Hungarian legation. He was also prone to depression and attempting suicide and prior to his death, made several botched attempts. Once, on hearing that Walter Benjamin, who he had met in Marseilles, had killed himself, he swallowed the morphine Benjamin had given him, but his stomach refused it and he only vomited. An early attempt to gas himself, triggered by the Party’s rejection of an early novel, failed when a book fell off a shelf and hit him on the head, leading him to change his mind. On another occasion in another Spanish jail he again tried to poison himself, but his body again rejected it. He even wrote a book about a suicide. In The Case of The Mid-Wife Toad Koestler investigates the tragic story of the Viennese Paul Kammerer, a brilliant biologist and believer in the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics, who killed himself in 1926 when it was discovered that some of the test results supporting his work had been faked. Kammerer himself was not responsible for the forgery but his reputation was ruined and in despair he blew his brains out.
Cynthia, too, an attractive South African girl – shy, awkward and painfully self-conscious – was no stranger to suicide. Her father killed himself when she was thirteen and she herself considered it years later when she had been working for Koestler for some time. The two had become intimate, and she believed he was trying to get rid of her. “I knew he did not want me to be his ‘slavey’ for ever and that he thought I should find a husband and lead a life of my own. […] I was confronted by my empty self from whom there was no escape even for an instant. At last I found a solution to this intolerable existence. […] I would kill myself.”63 She thought of slipping into Kensington Gardens at night and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She was pulled out of this despair by getting involved with another man. But the affair didn’t last long and she was soon sending Koestler postcards, hoping he had lots of work for her.
That Cynthia was something of a cipher, and that she willingly gave herself over to Koestler, becomes clear from reading her sections of Stranger in the Square. That he took professional advantage of her devotion to him is also clear. Speaking of th
eir first meeting, Koestler wrote, “More important, from a professional point of view, was a quality in her of unobtrusiveness, almost of self-effacement …”64 Whether this is acceptable or not is debatable, but most writers as busy as Koestler would have been happy with the catch.
For Cynthia, working for Koestler was a dream come true. “It had long been my ambition to work for a writer. As a child I was happiest when reading and my favourite people were the imaginary heroes of books rather than those living around me.” She had even fantasized about being like Arlova, the doomed Rubashov’s secretary in Darkness at Noon. “I decided that she was the kind of secretary Arthur wanted. She never spoke, she never reacted in a distracting way.” She even wished she could wear “an embroidered Russian blouse like hers.”65 When Koestler had sent her away for a time she was inconsolable. “I was longing for the past – for the days when I had worked for him and for the thrilling moments when we happened to be alone. I could not face the fact that life would never be the same again.” That this devotion carried over into their emotional life and marriage, and that Koestler often, but not always, abused it – he did have a generous, affectionate side – is also difficult to ignore in the accounts of their life, both by Cesarani and by people sympathetic to Koestler.
But that he purposely browbeat her into killing herself, when by all accounts he could barely do the job himself, is a different question. In his pamphlet for the Euthanasia Society, Koestler spells out the many reasons why one shouldn’t commit suicide. One of these is the loss of a loved one. Koestler makes clear that it’s possible to survive this, providing one had strong outside interests. Yet it doesn’t take much to see that Cynthia lacked these, even though, in her suicide note, she wrote, “I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.” The fact that she says this has led many, not only Cesarani, to believe that Koestler’s grip on her lasted until she drank the honeyed Tuinal. Yet it was a grip she willingly endured, and even went out of her way to submit to.
The scenario of their last days raises some questions. If she didn’t really want to join him, wouldn’t it have been easy to fake taking the drug, especially in the company of a man dying in bits and pieces anyway? Cesarani indicts Koestler of not ensuring that she wouldn’t kill herself after his death, and of not taking his own life in some way without her being present. “It is an indictment of Koestler,” he writes, “that he lived with a woman who was a vacuum.”66 But if the “vacuum” loved him for some thirty-four years, was she really a vacuum? Yet even Cesarani doesn’t see her as such. “She was woman of intelligence and humour, who saw through Koestler and knew exactly what she was doing with her own life.”67 This doesn’t sound like a “vacuum.” Friends who knew them said that in his last years, Koestler was in Cynthia’s thrall, and was helpless without her. Perhaps Koestler did try to talk her out of it, and failed? Barely able to walk or to speak, how could he have stopped her?
As George Mikes said, no one will ever know what exactly happened between them, but when Michael Scammell’s biography appears, things may possibly become clearer. That his wife felt compelled to join him in death is surely tragic, yet it’s possible that Koestler’s bust, languishing in a closet in Scotland, may yet again see the light of day.
Thomas Chatterton
Even before Werther, the teenaged Thomas Chatterton was the original tragic Romantic genius. “The marvellous boy,” as Wordsworth called him, abandoned poetry at an even younger age than Rimbaud, and in a more dramatic manner, committing suicide at seventeen, defeated in his battle against an uncaring, philistine London, which he had hoped to conquer after leaving his provincial, mercantile Bristol.68 Ignored or rejected by those who should have recognised his gift – Horace Walpole in particular became the villain of this piece – Chatterton was left to starve in the archetypal garret, too proud to beg or even to accept help when it was offered. He struggled valiantly and defiantly, writing his poems, articles, and stories, sending them to editors, only for them to become lost in the wash of hackwork flooding Grub Street, or worse, printed without payment. Finally, his fate became unbearable and he decided to end it all, tearing his last poetry to bits in his death throes, succumbing to the arsenic he took that dreadful night of 23 August 1770 in Brooke Street, Holborn.
Unknown and practically unmourned when he died – he was buried in a pauper’s grave – Chatterton soon became the symbol of the rising Romantic new guard, and an early death the trademark of that generation. Keats, who would himself die young, would dedicate his Endymion to Chatterton. Rossetti would later dedicate sonnets to his memory. Coleridge wrote a monody on his death, Blake spoke of him with praise, and Henry Wallis’ painting of his corpse – with George Meredith as model – flame-haired and fallen in his attic room, still prompts sighs and muted appreciation from viewers at Tate Britain. Across the channel, Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton was a success and, to its author’s chagrin, triggered a spate of imitation suicides, causing Théophile Gautier to remark that in those days across Paris “you could hear the crack of solitary pistols in the night,”69 as starving poets agreed that killing oneself was “still the best way to prove one’s genius.”70 Vigny’s play was so successful in fact, that the French government held a debate to argue the best way to halt its deplorable effect. To give Vigny credit, he was appalled at the suicide craze and pointed out that he had written the play in order to plead the cause of young writers, not to encourage them to kill themselves.
As in the case of Goethe’s Werther, the dual themes of youth and neglected genius struck a chord in the public’s sentiments. There were Chatterton handkerchiefs and Chatterton engravings. Odes were written in his honour, concerts given, and even a Gothic ruin erected in his name. A decade after his death, a best-seller by Herbert Croft, Love and Madness (a title reminiscent of a Woody Allen film), combined a recent crime passionel with Chatterton’s story and more than anything else secured his place in the public consciousness as a doomed angel, a songbird too sensitive for this rough clime.71 A year earlier, an English translation of Goethe’s Werther included a note explaining to its readers that Werther’s feelings, “like that of our Chatterton, were too intense to support the load of accumulated distress; and like him his diapason ended in death.” Although the Chatterton craze ended with WWI, a trickle of it carried on into the new age, with works by Vita Sackville-West and a German writer, Ernst Penzoldt, carrying on the myth.
Chatterton’s ghost has even played a saving hand in the lives of other poets, dissuading at least two of them from following in his tragic footsteps. During the fin-de-siècle, the wretched Francis Thompson – penniless, starving, drug addled and sleeping rough beneath the Covent Garden arches – having spent his last pence on a fatal dose of laudanum, was stopped from killing himself by Chatterton’s spirit. Having swallowed half the dose, Thompson was about to down the rest when he felt a hand on his wrist. It was Chatterton, staying him, providentially, as the very next day, Thompson received news that the editor Wilfred Meynell had published one of his poems and wanted to contact him. The result was that Thompson spent his last years under Meynell’s care, writing the poetry he is known for today.
Chatterton’s biographer, the eccentric E.H.W. Meyerstein, a figure as fantastical as his subject, was plagued by depressions and thoughts of suicide throughout his life and, like Chatterton, was fated to be denied recognition in his lifetime; even today, although the author of many novels and books of poetry, he is known solely through his massive account of his hero’s short life, and this by only a few. Meyerstein, though, deserves to be better known, and not only for his eccentricities, although these do spark curiosity – among others he was said to wave his false teeth to make a point, and he had an obsession with crime scenes, and would walk for miles to view one. Meyerstein’s dedication to Chatterton brought him to live for a time beneath the poet’s beloved Saint Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, where, aside from his last four months in London, he spent all of his brief life. And in a small room in Ho
lborn, similar to the one in which Chatterton gave up his ghost, Meyerstein too faced the demon of self-destruction. Although in his journal he had written, “There is one ethical command: YOU MUST NOT KILL YOURSELF. However unbearable your environment is you must not do that,”72 the loneliness, doubt and stung pride that afflicted Chatterton visited him too. But the ghost of Chatterton appeared again and, as with Francis Thompson, moved Meyerstein to take heart and endure. Meyerstein was so affected he wrote a poem, “Chatterton in Holborn: A Vision.”
Not many yards from this your lonely bed
A lonelier than you broke life’s locked door,
And when the shades of fatal night were fled
They found his papers piecemeal on the floor,
The limbs and face distorted of the dead,
Who had no sense of what his days were for,
But now remembers and bids you live on,
Your guardian angel Thomas Chatterton.
Ironically it was Meyerstein’s A Life of Thomas Chatterton, published well past the prime of Chatterton’s posthumous fame, that dissolved the romantic myths about him and made him a more human and more interesting figure, making clear his less than attractive sides, his spite, his quarrelsomeness, and his ambitions.
Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752. It was not a propitious start. According to his horoscope, provided by Meyerstein, he had Mercury in the sixth house, which presented “an infallible argument of a wretched life and fatal end.”73 Whether Meyerstein worked back from the known facts to arrive at this assessment is unclear, but Chatterton’s life was certainly not happy. His father had died two months before Chatterton was born, and what we know of him suggests an interesting character. He was a school-master by trade but a musician by inclination who, among other works, composed an anthem for his own funeral; he was also a dabbler in the occult with an interest in the past, and, apparently, a drinker.