Tied to Koestler’s star

Press, 7 December 1985, Page 20

Tied to Koestler’s star

Stranger in the Square. By Arthur and r Cynthia Koestler. Abacus, 1985. 236 pp. $14.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Ralf Unger)

Arthur Koestler, vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society at 77, had been suffering from leukaemia and Parkinson’s disease for the previous seven years. Therefore it was no surprise to anybody when he was found to have committed suicide in 1983, with a glass of brandy still in his hand. The shock came when his wife’s body was also discovered. Cynthia was 55 and in perfect health, and she too had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates. This book, found after the deaths, promises to clear up some _ of the mystery of Cynthia’s suicide by unravelling her complex personality. It achieves this only to a small degree. Cynthia was a South African, a shy, romantic late teenager who became Koestler’s occasional secretary in 1949. The book, which was planned originally to have been written in alternate chapters by Arthur and Cynthia, takes us up to 1956. The couple married eventually in 1965 and their life was mystically idyllic for Cynthia, until the suicides in 1983. Koestler’s persistent and well nigh pathological streak of promiscuity, which went on into his middle-age, is reminiscent of a Don Juanesque reflex itch for constant reassurance by conquering any appealing female he encountered, no matter what the damage. But Cynthia saw this as another lovable quality. She wept for the breakdown of his marriages and the pain that upset relationships caused him, while always worshipping him as her only god. She accepted without question his constant alcoholism, periods of depression, and complete loss of contact with his surroundings from

time to time. Two, abortions she mentions in passing as having to face alone were noted in his diary in code as “a touch ofyfood poisoning.” Great literary figures of the times met Koestler constantly and the book contains some fascinating thumb-nail sketches of such writers as Jean Paul Sartre who without his lifetime companion, Simone de Beauvoir, “behaved like a schoolboy on holiday keeping forbidden company.” Koestler’s constant and passionate involvement in causes such as world peace, the ending of capital punishment, and voluntary euthanasia kept him in touch with the leading intelligentsia of the times, and he was never at a loss for a scathing comment on them. Bertrand Russell, for example, was described as a cold, unrelating individual who simultaneously supported causes of the Brotherhood of Man. > At that time the artists and authors of Europe saw themselves as natural potential leaders. Arthur Koestler’s offerings in his novels and biographies made him wealthy, but arrogant in that he expected a worshipping audience for all his statements on the nature of man, the world, and all that. These became oracular as soon as he had uttered them to Cynthia. Although he was an influential author and his descriptions of the philosophy of communism and its rejection were, in their day, penetratingly definitive, now they seem to have only a scintillating coffee-house spontaneity, and are not considered statements that will endure long after his death. Poor Cynthia, thriving on thinly veiled pity and almost contempt, may have hitched her life to a star that was all to tinselly in its reflecting, dazzling light.