Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age

Arthur Koestler: 1905-1983

Moral indignation did and still does affect me in a direct physical manner," he once confessed. "I can feel, during an attack, the infusion of adrena line into the bloodstream, the craving of the muscles for violent action." For most of this century, Arthur Koestler lived by those words. Last week at his home in London, he died by them at the age of 77. The "rootless cosmopolitan," as he styled himself, had been an ardent supporter of "autoeuthanasia," and when the suffering of old age and disease grew in supportable, he reportedly took a lethal dose of drugs. His third wife, Cynthia, 56, joined him in the apparent double suicide. Koestler's act was in keeping with his principles. Throughout his long career, he had been attacked for taking a variety of political, moral and intellectual positions. But no one had ever accused him of being a hypocrite. If he backed an idea, it was with mind, muscles and blood.

Born in Budapest of middle-class Jewish parents, Koestler was a lonely, neurotic child brought up by a possessive and angry mother and strict, punishing household help. He was subject to suicidal depression, homicidal rage and "obsession with a cause." His first obsession was Zionism, a movement that seized his imagination when he at tended the Vienna Polytechnic in the early 1920s.

At 19, he briefly became the private secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the militant nationalist who also served as the mentor of another youthful Zionist, Menachem Begin. After spending several months in Palestine, Koestler returned to Europe, where he talked himself into a job with the giant Ullstein chain of newspapers. In 1931 he secretly joined the German Communist Party. "I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water," he later wrote. "I left it as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned." But it took several years to clamber.

While visiting Soviet Russia, he produced some romanticized articles about the achievements under the first Five-Year Plan, despite the fact that the country was being devastated by a famine that cost some 6 million lives. In 1936 he was dispatched to Spain by the party in order to expose German and Italian intervention for Franco in the civil war. He was arrested by the Falangists and subsequently spent three months in solitary confinement in the Central Prison of Seville. From that experience came a book, Spanish Testament, and the germ of an idea for his masterpiece, Darkness at Noon (1941).

On the long shelf of Koestler's work (six novels, 30 nonfiction books), no volume is as memorable or seems more likely to last. This searing tale of the Soviet Union's 1936-38 purge trials, and the gradual extraction of a false confession from an old revolutionary, proved profoundly persuasive to readers throughout the Western world. It was a bestseller in the U.S., and a 1951 dramatization by Sidney Kingsley, with Claude Rains in the central role, was a hit on Broadway. Following Darkness, Koestler wrote several powerfully antitotalitarian books, including Arrival and Departure (1943) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), and an eloquent contribution to The God That Failed (1950), a collection of essays by former members of the Communist Party.