Michael Scammell - Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

ALBERT CAMUS

ON TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1983, Arthur Koestler and his wife, Cynthia, entered their sitting room at 8 Montpelier Square, London, sat down facing each other, he in his favorite leather armchair, she on the couch, and poured themselves their usual drink before dinner. Arthurs was his favorite brandy, Cynthias was scotch. The only difference between this and a thousand similar evenings was the presence on a small table between them of a bottle of wine, a large bottle of Tuinal sleeping tablets, a jar of honey, and some extra wineglasses. Arthur and Cynthia swallowed about half the tablets each, washed them down with wine and honey, then sipped their brandy and scotch. Within half an hour or so they were unconscious, within an hour completely dead, and they remained there, fully clothed, for a day and a half, until their Brazilian maid came to clean the house on Thursday morning.

The suicide was meticulously planned and carried out without a hitch. Several months beforehand Koestler had prepared a handwritten letter. The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakeably [sic] clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period. The immediate reason for his decision was illness. He was suffering from both Parkinsons disease and what he called the slow-killing variety of leukemia. He had lived with Parkinsons for about seven years already, but leukemia was the last straw. I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become technically incapable of making the necessary arrangements.

Self-deliverance was an interesting term for Koestler to use. It echoed the Freitod (literally free death) of his native language, German, with quite different connotations than its grisly synonym Selbstmord (self-murder) or the more clinical Suizid (suicide). It was a form of death with which he was more than familiar, as a Central European Jew who had grown up in the shadow of anti-Semitism and the rise of fascism. Self-deliverance was also the term favored by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, of which Koestler was vice president, and he had long ago made it clear that he would kill himself rather than suffer a lingering death. In a preface to the societys controversial Guide to Self-Deliverance he had written: An unknown country to which the only access leads through a torture chamber is frightening. The prospect of falling asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame and become unborn again. Noting that animals enter the world and leave it again presumably without pain, he had added: The conclusion is inescapable. We need midwives to aid us to be bornor at least the assurance that such aid is available. Euthanasia, like obstetrics, is the natural corrective to a biological handicap.

He had not chosen self-deliverance lightly. The variety of leukemia he suffered from, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, was slow acting, and even in combination with Parkinsons was not necessarily lethal, and he had waited eight months after his diagnosis before deciding on the final step. He probably made up his mind for good on Sunday, February 27. Koestler hated Sundays. He was fond of quoting Dostoyevsky: Even if you are in the deepest dungeon, you always know when it is a Sunday. But the true decision had been made long before, of course.