National Observer Home > No. 42 - Spring 1999 > Book Review

Arthur Koestler: the Homeless Mind

by David Cesarani

London, William Heineman, 1998, pp. 627 and index.

The author is professor of modern Jewish history at Southhampton University, and he has apparently written this biography of Koestler as an exercise in Jewish propaganda. It lacks proper objectivity.

Koestler was, of course, one of the great political figures of this century. He became a Communist Party member in 1932, but became entirely disillusioned with what he came to recognise as a ruthless and dangerous ideology. In 1940 his work Darkness at Noon appeared, a classic text that explained the workings of the Soviet authorities and the appalling nature of communist totalitarianism. This book was enormously influential, and caused many on the left who had previously been sympathetic to communism to recognise its true nature. Koestler went on to be one of the founders of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, which was influential amongst intellectuals and others in disclosing communist penetration and propaganda techniques.

Koestler was a complicated and unstable person, whose brilliance and determination were periodically undermined by over-consumption of alcohol and an obsessive desire for sexual relations with women. Nonetheless his importance is enormous. In a broad sense, he led the turn of the intelligentsia (which should never be underestimated) against communist doctrines and Soviet propaganda that had previously been remarkably successful.

As has been noted, Cesarani's biography is not objective. Koestler was a Jew, but after many vacillations he appeared to find many of his fellow Jews distasteful, and became disillusioned with Zionism. It may be thought that he recognised in himself some of the unpleasantness that he perceived in many other Jews.

The author states that in 1948, on a visit to Israel, Koestler and another person went to a cafe patronised by the Jewish Lehi, the Stern Gang: "The young gun-men averred that the only good non-Jew was a dead one". Experiences such as this render Koestler's withdrawal from Judaism understandable.

Cesarani has attempted to diminish these matters, first, by emphasising Koestler's personal weaknesses and secondly, by ascribing Koestler's personal dissatisfaction to the fact that he had rejected his own Jewishness, so that he became "homeless," and a kind of wandering Jew. But in fact Cesarani is showing in this the narrowness of his own attitudes: to him, Koestler must have been "homeless," because he had rejected his own Jewishness. Cesarani apparently does not accept that Koestler was, in this, making a permissible choice.

Doubtless Cesarani is attempting to make of Koestler's life a parable, by suggesting that generally unhappiness is the consequence of rejecting Jewishness, a proposition which is false.

From the above it may be seen that Cesarani's biography is not a satisfactory one. It is a sectarian book, and does not assist a proper evaluation of Koestler's importance as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century.

R. M. Pearce

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National Observer No. 42 - Spring 1999