Katharine Whitehorn: FIRST PERSON
So Arthur Koestler, giant thinker, whose Darkness at Noon helped to turn a generation of intellectuals away from communism, whose Thieves in the Night can make one almost understand Israel, whose forays into science and mysticism teased and intrigued us for three decades, turns out to have been a compulsive womaniser, a rat and a rapist, promiscuous and disloyal.
What seems to have bewildered those who have read David Cesarini’s revelations is not that the great man behaved so badly, but that nobody seems to have minded all that much at the time – except, of course, the women, though even they put up with an astonishing amount.
He seems to have run his various affairs and three marriages in parallel, he forced Elizabeth Howard to have an abortion and he raped Jill Craigie, film-maker wife of Michael Foot. Why wasn’t all this an absolute scandal? Why didn’t Craigie report him to the police? How could any decent man tolerate him as a friend? I confess to a certain amusement at some of this.
“Sex,” Russell Baker once said, “is something most people think was invented the year they reached puberty.” (He then rubbished the idea that it had been invented in 1960, since it had actually been invented in 1958.) Those who reached puberty in 1960 or later aren’t exactly teenagers now, but an awful lot of people still seem to think that until about the time of the pill, the Beatles and the Lady Chatterley trial everyone was a virgin on their wedding night, mated for life like swallows and would be ordered out into the cold, cold snow by their fathers if they confessed to being pregnant.
Yet here was Koestler carrying on like a rattlesnake in the Forties and Fifties: surely people didn’t behave like that back then? Of course some of them did. Perhaps our image of the time is coloured by all those clean- cut noble images to be seen in films of wartime and before, when the only part of a man that was ever supposed to be stiff was his upper lip.
This, at any rate, could be one reason why generations that are perfectly at home with their own freedom, promiscuity and access to abortion are taken aback to discover that their elders didn’t behave so differently after all – it was just not referred to in polite company.
Polite company was not the kind kept by Koestler, the women he referred to as his harem or the intellectuals of the left. It was one of his cronies, Cyril Connolly, who wrote: “To the man in the street, who I’m sorry to say is a keen observer of life, the word `intellectual’ suggests straight away a man who’s untrue to his wife.”
If Koestler spent a night with Simone de Beauvoir, so did plenty of other people; if he got legless it would be with Dylan Thomas or Philip Toynbee; if Koestler’s women had recourse to an abortionist they weren’t alone: paying for your girlfriend’s abortion in those days was the act of a gentleman, not a cad. It was just, like so much else, something you didn’t talk about.
For what was really different was the amount that was openly discussed – and this perhaps is the explanation of why Craigie wouldn’t have reported the rape. She is quoted as saying: “I’d admitted him into my home – it did not look good.” She might well have been disbelieved. In those days the comforting conviction that only girls who had “asked for it” got raped was still amazingly widespread.
As late as the Seventies, when I was reading – indeed writing – stories from rape crisis centres that were enough to make you scared to go out without a long hatpin, I remember trying vainly to convince both a woman doctor and a man from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions that there was such a thing as a genuine rape. No wonder women kept quiet.
But that doesn’t explain why the men who knew about Koestler’s violence continued to be his friends – although maybe, alas, even that is not so astonishing. Aren’t too many men inclined to think that behaving badly about women doesn’t count? That if you let down a friend you’re a rat, but if you let down a woman you’re only a bit of a dog, something of a lad? Laddism may be a label of the Nineties, but the attitude’s as old as the stag night and the codpiece.
Actual rape, the men might concede, is going a bit far; but you only have to look at the popularity of former Tory MP Alan Clark, whose habits can’t even be excused by genius, to see that those who respected and liked Koestler for his work, his thinking and his excellent company wouldn’t necessarily shun him for what they probably saw as misdemeanours.
A more central puzzle remains: how could the man who spent his time slamming girls down behind sofas be the same one who posed, in Arrival and Departure, what is possibly the central question of the post-Freudian age – if you can trace in a man’s background and upbringing everything that makes him hold the ideals he has, does that remove their validity? To which, I suppose, one can only oppose another question: if you can trace, in his history, most of the elements that make a man violent and sexually rapacious, does that absolve him from blame? Well, Koestler didn’t think so; he was wracked by guilt, if never badly enough or for long enough to stop him doing it again.
There ought to be a correlation between being a genius and being a good man; but that’s wishful thinking. George Orwell, Koestler’s friend, wrote about Salvador Dali’s painting Dead Mannequin in a Taxi that the human mind ought to be able to understand that a painting can be good art and morally rotten; so it shouldn’t be beyond us to realise that you can be a great painter and a poisonous human being, or a great president and as rabid as a rabbit.
We have ideals, sure – starting with the ideal of courtly love, perhaps; and from whom do we get most of our information on that, via the court of King Arthur? Sir Thomas Malory – who was constantly up on charges of rape. Which gives, now I come to think of it, a whole new meaning to John F Kennedy’s Camelot.