Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
pages 19-20 | 3466 words
All Antennae
John Banville
- Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind by David Cesarani
Heinemann, 646 pp, £25.00, November 1998, ISBN 0 434 11305 0
Arthur Koestler was a journalist with pretensions to grandeur. Certain of his works justified these pretensions – for example, his masterpiece, the novel Darkness at Noon, and the two autobiographical volumes, Arrow in thf Blue and The Invisible Writing – though not so triumphantly as he would have wished them to do or as, in his more confident moments, he believed they had. Throughout his career he suffered from the journalist’s fear of being merely clever, merely shrewd, merely in the know, incapable of the soaring inspiration, or, indeed, the inspired wrong-headedness, of the great artist or the great scientist. His was the classic 20th-century Mitteleuropean sensibility: deracinated, sophisticated, ambitious, self-doubting, hungry for experience, politically engaged, and racked by despair. Born into the comfortable if emotionally suffocating world of the Austro-Hungarian Jewish bourgeoisie, he saw the world of his childhood destroyed, and was never again able to find a place in which to belong. As David Cesarani puts it in the closing lines of this monumental (it is the only word) biography, for Koestler ‘home represented the secure bourgeois domesticity swept away by the Great War; home was a country that rejected him and connived in the slaughter of his family; home was a community united by a history, tradition, creed and culture that he despised.’ The biographer’s last word on the subject is a kind of syllogism: ‘Home finally was mind; home was homelessness; Koestler was the homeless mind.’
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
From David Cesarani
It has come to my notice that a serious error has crept into my recently published book about Arthur Koestler, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, reviewed in this issue of the LRB. Due to confusion at the editorial stage, on pages 379, 382, 386, 389 and 391 the names of Celia Kirwan and Cynthia Jeffries are transposed or muddled. I would like to put on record that the actions imputed to 'Kirwan' or 'Cynthia Kir wan' on these pages in fact refer to Cynthia Jeffries (later Cynthia Koestler) and not to Celia Kirwan (née Paget, later Goodman). I greatly regret the distress which this slip-up has caused to Celia Goodman. Along with the publishers, William Heinemann, I have taken the necessary steps to ensure that it is corrected in all future editions.
David Cesarani
University of Southampton
Vol. 21 No. 5 · 4 March 1999
From Conrad Dehn
At the end of his review of David Cesarani's Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (LRB, 18 February) John Banville describes Cesarani as 'diligent' and says 'he has read everything Koestler ever wrote … no detail is too trivial for him to hunt down.' This is not, however, wholly accurate. One of the important questions about Koestler, raised by Cesarani, is whether he tried to dissuade his wife from committing suicide with him. According to Cesarani, Koestler and his wife both left wills. The dates of those wills, what if any provisions were made in his will in favour of her, the bequests in her own, whether they had the same solicitors, and what instructions and advice on these matters each gave to and received from their solicitors might be of great importance in answering that question. For example, if Koestler made no provision for his wife it would be strong evidence that he expected and was content that she should die when he did, especially as his solicitors would have queried his instructions in view of her right in that event to apply to the court after his death for financial provision from the estate.
Yet despite the fact that wills are public documents it seems that Cesarani made no attempt to inspect them and that he did not ask to inspect the Koestlers' correspondence with their solicitors in connection with their wills. He confined himself to looking at such references to the Koestlers' wills and correspondence with their solicitor (about bequeathing their estates to a trust to set up a chair of parapsychology) as he found among the documentation in Edinburgh University Library, where he was working.
Conrad Dehn
London SW1
Vol. 21 No. 8 · 15 April 1999
From Jeremy Bernstein
John Banville's review of David Cesarani's biography of Arthur Koestler (LRB, 18 February) reminded me of something that has been nagging me since 1972, when I went to Reykjavik to cover the chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. Koestler was there covering it for some prestigious newspaper. George Steiner was covering it for the New Yorker. I blush to say that I was covering it for Playboy and that the article, brilliant as it was, was never published. But here is the point. Either in an article or in person, Koestler used a mildly obscene German phrase, in speaking of his own passion for chess, to describe what he would do to his opponent's Queen when he got hold of her. Alas the phrase has sunk down in my mental well where I have been unable to retrieve it. I think it involved some word like 'putzli'. Can anyone enlighten me?
Jeremy Bernstein
New York
Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999
From David Cesarani
I enjoyed Jeremy Bernstein's recollection of Arthur Koestler's banter in Reykjavik (Letters, 15 April). Putz is German/Yiddish slang for 'penis' – literally 'prick'. I am reliably informed that the diminutive ending '-li' is characteristically Viennese. However, since Putz is a noun and not a verb I'm not sure how much further this gets us in the quest to retrieve Koestler's meaning.
David Cesarani
University of Southampton
