Arthur Koestler raped novelist Jill Craigie. Now novelist Frederic Raphael says it was her own fault. Libby Brooks and Stephen Moss report
Jill Craigie wraps her red wool-covered arms around the modern plastic kettle as it boils, to muffle or draw heat from it one isn’t quite sure. She eyes her garden through the long, dusk-dulled kitchen windows. Her peachy skin is cross-hatched but she hasn’t yet surrendered that proud lift of the chin.
“Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?” she asks. It is received wisdom that every victim of violence questions how they might have acted differently and thus avoided assault. Most would have done the same thing as Craigie – Mrs Michael Foot – did in 1951, when she cooked an omelette for her husband’s friend and intellectual sparring partner Arthur Koestler. None would have predicted the brutal rape which followed this simple act of hospitality – revealed for the first time in David Cesarani’s biography of Koestler last year.
Well none, perhaps, except the novelist Frederic Raphael. In the political journal Prospect, he has written an essay attempting the seemingly impossible: to rescue Koestler’s reputation, and to drag the man from the pit into which Cesarani has cast him. He asserts that Craigie ought to have had “enough intelligence to read Koestler as a dangerous man”, and suggests she brought her fate upon herself by inviting him into her home.
“Both Jill Craigie and Jane Howard [the writer] … have a right to their grievances, but both were ambitious and experienced women who liked the company of the powerful and the famous,” he writes. “Is it any disparagement to suggest that they might, at the time, have been excited by the risks they were taking? They did not deserve what he did, or is said to have done, but they were not foolish virgins and they knew Koestler’s character. We are entitled to wonder … what they were doing with him.”
Is it any disparagement? Too damn right it is. Raphael, who hopes he is not being “ungallant” in raising these points, has taken a couple of paragraphs and a few literary circumlocutions to say what the bloke at the bar can manage in half a sentence after a couple of pints in the pub: they were asking for it. They knew his reputation – “a hell of a raper”, according to Labour politician Richard Crossman whose wife Zita had several run-ins with Koestler – so what did they expect?
Craigie remains surprisingly unruffled by Raphael’s onslaught. “I am completely unemotional about it,” she pronounces evenly. “I never expected to be believed, you see. It was bound to happen. There is always suspicion. They always think that the woman did something.”
She is circumspect about Raphael’s motivations for defending Koestler. “I suppose it is profitable to be controversial. He knew that he was bound to get publicity. I have never met him myself, but I did expect something like this to happen.”
Whatever his reasons Raphael has succeeded in re-igniting the row that blazed for months after Cesarani’s biography about Koestler’s proper place in the literary pantheon. The man who had exposed the terrifying story of communism from the inside, stood up for humanity in the face of totalitarianism and influenced an entire generation with his book Darkness at Noon, stood condemned as a serial rapist, no more, no less.
The book included an interview with Craigie, in which she publicly revealed the rape for the first time. “It was ethically right that the truth should come out. I knew then that it wasn’t only me, because Cesarani had other evidence of violence.”
Koestler’s reputation as a writer had long been in decline: when the Modern Library in the United States included Darkness at Noon, which was published in 1940, as one of the greatest books of the century, many demurred. But he was still treated respectfully, his masterpiece still read, and accorded an important place in histories of Stalinism and the Cold War. Then came Cesarani’s book, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, which is perhaps the most effective literary demolition job of recent years.
A newspaper serialisation concentrated, not surprisingly, on his treatment of women: the rape of Craigie; his appalling treatment of Howard, whom he impregnated and then forced to have an abortion; the pattern that Cesarani detailed of abusing young, vulnerable women; his use of prostitutes. In any public figure it would have been difficult to shake off such a charge sheet; any writer would have been damaged by the catalogue of crimes; but Koestler, the chronicler of barbarism and a seeker after the moral high ground, was uniquely damaged.
After the furore surrounding last year’s revelations, Craigie is understandably weary of the tale. “Michael was away for the weekend. Koestler rang up and said that he loved the British, and that he must see some British pubs. I wasn’t attracted to him. I didn’t really know what to talk about with him because I wasn’t on his intellectual level, but I felt that I ought to because he was a friend of Michael’s.
“I took him around Hampstead, and there was no sign of him flirting with me. As far I could tell he wasn’t getting drunk. It got late, so he said that I must give him something to eat. I said that my larder was empty, but he said that I must have eggs and that I should make him an omelette. So rather reluctantly I did.
“I genuinely think that the man was insane. There was such a sudden abrupt change in personality. I was talking to this civilised man, and then suddenly … I started on the washing up to bore him. I felt that I had been lumbered with him. If I’d been interested in the fellow I’d have sat down and offered him some brandy.”
She leans unsteadily on the kitchen sideboard, tiny and stranded across the vast, clean linoleum. “I wrestled myself free,” she announces suddenly. “I stayed outside, sitting on the steps, for what seemed like hours and hours. I thought that he must be a fool to fight with me, that he must have calmed down. I went inside eventually, and he pushed me over again.” She mimes a fist pulling hair. She will not continue.
“I never expected to be believed,” she repeats. Her petite frame shudders neatly, invaded by fuss, embarrassed. “But I did expect Arthur Koestler to be had up. I used to look through the Sunday papers, waiting for it. I thought that some woman was bound to report him to the police. I thought that he wouldn’t get away with it, but I was wrong.”
After the publication of Cesarani’s biography, a few feeble voices were raised on Koestler’s behalf, but no one much seemed to care about his eclipse. He had committed suicide, along with his wife Cynthia in 1983 (some saw the suicide pact as his final act of abuse against females), and seemed to belong to a vanished age. There seemed no contemporaries to speak up for him: the case was proven without consent and Koestler was condemned both to hell and to artistic oblivion. Until now.
Raphael’s is the most concerted – and ruthless – attempt to rescue his reputation. The author, critic and practised polemicist is no stranger to controversy, and if anyone can pull off this act of intellectual escapology it is him, but the task is formidable. Cesarani is no hack biographer with an axe to grind; his book is a work of scholarship and intellect; the sources impeccable; the facts not in dispute; and even Raphael, who only knew Koestler at the end of his life when he was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, cedes that the biography is “important and definitive”. So what form can his apologia possibly take?
Raphael attacks on two fronts. The first is the traditional one that writers and thinkers should not be judged by their behaviour but by the quality of their thought.
Had Raphael stopped there – with an attempt to rescue the thinker – his revisionism might have been welcome. But he attempts to redeem the man as well, and here he is on even shakier ground. “The abuse of women was (if it is not still) a certificate of virility in many great men, of whom Bertrand Russell is, in many respects, a more lurid and despicable example. If we are to dispraise famous men, who is to be spared?” he writes. Suddenly a moral failing has become the badge of intellectualism.
The slope on to which Raphael has gamely (or perhaps foolishly) stepped now becomes very slippery. Of the Craigie rape, he writes: “I was reminded of a judge who told me that the crucial questions in such cases were: `Did you bite him? Did you scratch him?’ I daresay that fear and embarrassment and even a sort of generosity led Michael Foot’s wife to file no loud contemporary complaint. But the limitations of biography, especially when one witness is alive and another dead, are obvious here.”
Craigie offers a simple explanation for not revealing the attack sooner. “No woman stood a chance in that situation. `So you let him into the house, so you had been on a pub crawl with him,'” she chants incredulously. “It would have been the end. I had just made a film and was the first woman film director, Michael was famous, imagine the headlines. No woman could have stood that. I couldn’t have done that to Michael.”
But her husband would surely have supported her? She bristles. “That,” she articulates cleanly, “is a terrible question.” Foot was keen for her to contribute to the biography, she says: “He thought that the truth should come out, a typical Michael Foot thing to say. I didn’t think that it would make headlines, naively I suppose.”
She told one person, her producer, the day after the attack. “He said, `Don’t tell Michael for God’s sake.’ We were newly married, and I only had eyes for him. I didn’t regard Koestler as a celebrity, just as a friend of my husband’s. Michael would have felt that he ought to sock him.”
Craigie finally told her husband about the attack at a dinner party many years later. “All my life I had listened to people going on about how marvellous Arthur Koestler was. I don’t get drunk, but I do become talkative after wine, and suddenly it all came out. It is very traumatic when you think that you are going to die.” He smashed her head against the floor again and again, she explains. “I was worried about my life, not my honour.”
It would have been more serious had she been a young virgin, she insists. “How awful if that had happened to a girl of 16.” There is a sharp gasp of pain. “It could have put her off sex for life!” She was not unaffected, she allows. “It kept recurring in my sleep,” she says. “I had nightmares. But I was anxious to bury it, to suppress it.”
Foot bowls into the room. He persuaded his wife to talk to us, and they both expect this interview will draw a final firm line beneath the whole affair. Foot is more rickety with age. His arms flail but, wherever he is in the room, one hand always manages to be touching his wife.
They sit together on the lounge sofa. Their intimacy is generous and fresh. We wait for my taxi to arrive. “Was she all right?” He grips his wife’s shoulder protectively. “A good witness,” he says fondly.