The Passion and the Pity
WOODCOCK, GEORGE
The Passion and the Pity Stranger on the Square By Arthur and Cynthia Koestler Random House. 242 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by George Woodcock This book is, in the truest sense, pathetic. My first...
...The genesis of this book was Koestler's desire in 1982 to take up again the memoirs he had abandoned in the '50s, after the publication of two volumes— Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing—that had brought his life up to 1940...
...For pity and a kind of muted anger were the feelings I experienced as I read on...
...Cynthia Jeffries, an awkward, self-conscious, quietly pretty South African girl living in France, appeared on Koestler's doorstep in 1949—he was then residing in Fontainebleau—in response to an advertisement he had placed for a part-time secretary...
...Koestler, at 77, had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for seven years and from leukemia, then in its terminal stages, for four...
...He also makes it clear that at the time he thought she would survive him...
...Harold Harris, the Koestlers' friend and editor of their joint undertaking, cautiously remarks, "Perhaps it is the story of an obsession...
...I was longing for the past," she tells us, "for the days when I had worked for him and for the thrilling moments when we happened to be alone...
...Stranger on the Square gives one ample reason to believe that Cynthia's suicide was a compulsive act dictated by an overwhelming feeling of dependency— not the result of a decision in any common sense of the word...
...She killed herself because she could not cope with the thought of an existence on her own...
...I was conscious only of a pain in my heart which seemed to radiate in my lungs, stomach and liver...
...Still, Stranger on the Square is part of our record of one of the century's most important men of letters, a writer just short of great, and cannot be dismissed that way...
...The double suicide inevitably provoked much speculation...
...Shortly afterward his marriage to Mamaine Paget ended, and while Cynthia stood by he rather desperately revived the promiscuity of his youth in a series of frustrating love affairs...
...By all appearances the bondage she entered was self-created and not wittingly induced by him...
...Cynthia, 22 years younger, was in perfect health at the time of her death...
...On March 3 last year, the bodies of Arthur and Cynthia Koestler were found in the sitting room of their house on Montpelier Square in London...
...This seems to have prompted the couple's decision to make the third volume a joint autobiography starting from 1949, the year they met...
...It is true, I always picked one type: beautiful Cinderellas, infantile and inhibited, prone to be subdued by bullying...
...Contemporary readers are likely to see it as such...
...Probably because his energy gave out, the remainder of the work, or approximately half, is written by Cynthia, who had planned originally to deal with the rest of their life together...
...It is a pathetic and appalling story...
...Eventually Cynthia typed her own leave-taking message on the same sheet, concluding with the declaration, "I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources...
...In 1952, during one of their separations, she thought seriously of committing suicide (as her father had, although she was unaware of this at the time...
...The manuscript of Stranger on the Square lay unfinished on her desk...
...his wife was lying on a sofa with a glass of whisky on the table beside her...
...For Cynthia's part, she was devoted to him despite their frequent partings and her other lovers— she even married, unsuccessfully— from 1949 onward...
...They apparently had died two days earlier from massive doses of barbiturates...
...At the outset, in fact, he thought of her merely as" faithful Cynthia...
...But this does not appear to have assuaged her need...
...Could a heartache be experienced not only in a figurative sense but literally as well...
...I do not mean to suggest that Koestler was a kind of Svengali...
...The cursory, disjointed opening chapter here summarizes the events of Koestler's next decade...
...But this realization doesn't solve the problem.'" Ultimately, the secretary's steadfastness was rewarded: Once joined together, she and Koestler remained devoted to each other...
...Yet during the period that she was near him, observing his affairs, she was both jealous and fascinated by them, displaying a masochism that seemed part of her condition...
...After a while a boil appeared under my arm...
...But a close reading of these pages—in large measure her account of the early relationship from 1951-56— leaves little doubt that almost from their very first meeting Cynthia was dependent on Koestler to the point where she quite literally could not face life without him...
...I took the Metro to the American Hospital at Neuilly to have it lanced...
...its inadequacy suggests that he had left the task too long undone and now had neither the physical nor the mental stamina to carry the project to completion...
...not only the ideal secretary but also a passionate gardener and as good with a Hoover as with a lawnmower...
...And this spectacle of a human being so dominated by another, however unconsciously, turns pity into something near sorrowful anger by the book's end...
...Another age might have regarded her as a heroine in the high romantic vein John Dryden evoked when he called his play about Anthony and Cleopatra all for Love or the World Well Lost...
...She seems to have fallen under a spell...
...Since Koestler was a former vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, his decision to choose the moment and manner of his dying in the face of incurable illness came as no surprise...
...Nobody had expected, though, that Cynthia would join him...
...Three more chapters by him alternate with three by Cynthia...
...She continued to fill that role for him intermittently until 1955, when in response to his cable she quit a position she had taken in New York with Ely Culbertson, the authority on contract bridge, to become Koestler's full-time assistant...
...The tiny scar reminds me of my sickness of the heart...
...He was upright in an armchair, a snifter of brandy in his hand...
...indeed, the possibility was raised that her husband, who could be rather overbearing, had persuaded her to do so...
...My first impulse was to have done by repeating Shakespeare's phrase in another context, "But yet the pity of it...
...Koestler's farewell message, written in June 1982, nine months before their death, acknowledges his debt to Cynthia: "It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness I enjoyed in the last period of my life—and never before...
...On the contrary, they grew so close that parting became wholly unendurable for Cynthia...
...The reader is left to conjecture at exactly what stage he turned his affections to her before their marriage in 1965...
...As early as September 1950, when Koestler went to New York and she was left to find her own way in Paris, her reaction was dramatically psychosomatic, at least as she remembers it in 1982: "In the morning I got up...
...Cynthia's passion, nonetheless, was not directed principally to gardening, and it was intense...
...at night I went to bed and cared not whether I slept or did not sleep...
...Revealingly, too, three decades later while recounting their relationship she records Koestler's thoughts on women as if they were wholly unrelated to his attitude toward her when he set them down or subsequently: "He had written on' the crisis re women' in a notebook during the summer of soul-searching in the Dolomites ...: T can neither live alone, nor with somebody...
Vol. 67 • October 1984 • No. 19
