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| The Afterlife of Arthur Koestler
JULIAN BARNES |
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In Murdoch's case, and Larkin's, and Koestler's, newspaper serialization has been a distorting factor in public discussion of the case. You cannot expect a biographer, or a publisher, to refuse the money and the free advertisement that comes from selling extracts; equally, you cannot expect even a high-minded broadsheet to do anything except fillet out the most salacious, discreditable, or controversial items and then run them as representative of the whole book. Sometimes the author may be dismayed by the version thus presented; sometimes he may be positively collusive. Bayley, for instance, preceded his memoir with a taster piece in the news pages of the London Sunday Times, describing how he had set Murdoch on the lavatory and wiped her bottom before taking her off to London for her last literary party. Not unarguably nice, perhaps. And then the broadsheet serialization will be followed up by other newspapers with a less central interest in the biography, except as a case for discussion.
At the time of Cesarani's publication, I was rung up by a French journalist checking that Ihad been a friend of Koestler's. Yes, in his very last years, I replied. So what do you think, he asked, of this new book which says he was a rapist? Wondering why I had picked up the phone, I replied, rather grimly, that I thought Koestler's analysis of Soviet communism was unaffected by the news. Yes, but do you feel differently about him, knowing that he raped someone? Well, he is dead, Ireplied, aware that I was hedging. Yes, but if he was alive, would you think differently of him? Yes, I probably would, I replied. Something of this shorthand exchange goes on when we read biography:
the texture of real acquaintance is often replaced by a series of questions
to answer, positions to assess, judgments to take. This isn't necessarily
wrong, but it is qualitatively different. Koestler himself was aware of
this process. In an essay about his friend Richard Hillary (the RAF pilot
whose return to air combat in 1942 can be read as a sort of romantic assisted
suicide), he addressed the Englishman thus:
Writing about a dead friend is writing against time, a chase after a receding image: catch him, hold him, before he becomes petrified into a myth. For the dead are arrogant; it is as hard to be at ease with them as it is with someone who has served with you in the ranks after he has received his commission. Their perverse silence has a numbing effect: you have lost the race before it started, you will never get hold of him as he was. Already the fatal, legend-forming mechanism is at work: these pleasant trifles are freezing into Biographical Anecdotes. |
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