8. Arthur Koestler's the Invisible Writing Autobiography As Escape from the Self

8. Arthur Koestler’s The Invisible Writing Autobiography as Escape from the Self Koestler had few inner resources. It was as if he had no self on which to fall back when he was alone, or a self that he could face. David Cesarani: Arthur Koestler. The Homeless Mind David Cesarani, in his highly informative biography of Arthur Koestler, warns that Koestler’s autobiographical statements need “to be treated with great caution,” that “his memoirs certainly should not be taken at face value,”1 and that His memoirs are superb works of artifice, closely adhering to the conventions of autobiography as a genre. They are shot through with the ideas that fascinated him in mid-life, including psychology and the paranormal, and are arranged to illustrate them accordingly. Above all, they consistently play down his Jewish origins. He did not want his life story and its message to seem relevant to just one ethnic group so he toned down the Jewish element and universalized his experiences as much as he could. The overall result is a pre-structured life. Koestler knew what he wanted to record before he sat down to write out his life: autobiography was a political as much as a personal act. From the very moment of his birth, as reconstituted in the narrative of his life, Arthur Koestler was seeking to endow his existence with meaning, to place it, to make it belong somewhere.2 For example, as Cesarani points out, his perception of his childhood differed markedly from actual fact. Arthur Koestler (1905-83) did not have the miserable and lonely childhood he said he did: his relationship to his mother, for instance, was much more loving than he would admit, and his Jewishness meant much more to him than he would have us believe; and his schooldays were much happier than he suggests in his autobiographical writings, for, this “lonely boy” had many friends.3 Koestler was possessed by a profound need to belong. His obsessive and pathological sexual promiscuity which would last a lifetime, his involvement 1 David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler. The Homeless Mind (London et al.: Vintage, 1999), pp. vii, 13. 2 Ibid., pp. 7-8. 3 Ibid., pp. 7-32. 72 The Time before Death with Zionism and a failed attempt to settle in Palestine, as well as his joining the Communist Party in 1933, were all expressions of his passionate need to possess and to belong.4 His final break with Soviet communism in April 1938 was in part the result of the disparity that he witnessed in Soviet Russia between social reality and communist propaganda. But it was also due to the narrow- minded and prescriptive orthodoxy of the Party and the lack of creative freedom even when fighting Nazism and Fascism. After having been essentially a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a spy and informer for the Party, gathering useful political information as a “liberal” journalist in the West, and after his near-fatal involvement in the Spanish civil war, he began to question both the Party’s doctrine and its morality.5 His incarceration in Franco’s jail and his narrow escape with the help of close Party colleagues but also a number of important Western contacts, seems to have opened his eyes to real life, and pushed him away from ideological abstractions. Suicidal, prone to nervous breakdowns and depression, yet capable of enormous energy – a possible bipolar condition – Koestler finally managed to reach Britain in December 1940, after a highly adventurous escape from France which had begun in May of that year. Again, with the help of influential friends, he was able to settle down to writing and journalism, and doing propaganda work for British radio and film against Nazi Germany. The publication of his novel Darkness at Noon also in 1940, which was a fictionalized “autobiographical” account of his break with Communism, established his literary reputation.6 The next four years, from 1940 to 1944, saw him become increasingly and intensely involved in trying to save European Jews from the Holocaust. Koestler was one of a very few in England to believe the reports in the press and by word of mouth about Nazi atrocities. He heard of the “Final Solution” in the summer of 1942 and this pushed him to publish his second novel Arrival and Departure (in November 1943) which, apart from his fictionalizing his escape from France, drew attention to the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi gas chambers. He was personally involved with other Jewish organizations in a number of attempted plans to rescue the Jews in Europe, and all the more so when deportations began in Hungary in 1944 where his mother lived. All this was done in the face of official government disbelief in the Holocaust. In September 1943 he had 4 Cesarani, Arthur Koestler, pp. 35, 53, 74-76, 97, 100, 106, 145. 5 Ibid., pp. 114, 148. 6 Ibid., pp. 145-87. .

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