ARTHUR KOESTLER: The Homeless Mind, by David Cesarani. Free Press, 646 pp. 

Almost two decades have passed since Ian Hamilton, a British journalist, tried to tell the story of Arthur Koestler's life and work. While Koestler: A Biography was not a very impressive effort, the precise quality of the book's sloppiness revealed a great deal about its subject's reputation. For Hamilton, Koestler was preeminently a political figure. This was the man who had started out as a Zionist cadre, then moved sharply to the left; he served as a Communist organizer during the Spanish Civil War, which landed him in a fascist prison. After becoming disillusioned with the Soviet experiment, he wrote one of the great political novels of the era, Darkness at Noon (1940), in which an old Bolshevik, put on trial by the state he helped build, makes one last sacrifice to the movement by confessing to crimes against the revolution.

Koestler became one of the most influential of intellectual Cold Warriors. Yet by the mid-1950s, he was losing interest in politics altogether. He studied the history of science. He published speculations on the psychology of human creativity and destructiveness. Now very dubious about political ideology, Koestler tried to patch together his own theory of the cosmos. His last few books concerned ESP, the mysteries of coincidence and other odd topics. This development earned Koestler a new reputation, as kook.

Ian Hamilton, his first biographer, examined Koestler's activist years with respectful attention. But he announced that Koestler's post-political work simply did not interest him; so he summed up these later developments in a few quick, awkward pages. The result was a strangely lopsided book. But it was a portrait of Koestler as an admirer would prefer to remember him: a writer who defined for the public mind one of the decisive questions of the 20th Century, namely totalitarianism. Given that, one should be discreet, and not pay undue attention to his later interest in the possibility of bodily levitation through mind-power.

David Cesarani's new and somewhat controversial biography is by far the most comprehensive book ever written on Koestler's life and work. Yet unlike Hamilton, he pays scant attention to the contrast between the politics and the paranormal. As for preserving Koestler's reputation, nothing could interest Cesarani less. The figure emerging from this book's pages is an utterly repulsive human being: an alcoholic egomaniac with a penchant for brutalizing the women in his life, up to and including rape. As a writer and an intellectual, Koestler fought tyranny. In his private life, he practiced it.

The evidence for all this is abundant, and Cesarani piles it up with the unrelenting thoroughness of a prosecuting attorney. The Homeless Mind is nothing if not well-documented. Among other windfalls, it benefits from the opening of the Soviet archives; the KGB had a special interest in Koestler, and collected a substantial body of material from his days as a Communist organizer. Cesarani also got access to the writer's private papers by informing the Edinburgh University Library (where they are held) that he was working on a study of Jewishness as a theme and influence in Koestler's work. As a condition, he promised not to write a biography -- then did so anyway.

The product of all this digging and scholarly interpretation is a book at once enormous and hollow -- in other words, a very typical example of literary biography as it is written nowadays. Aside from sordid revelations about Koestler's character, we have the standard reduction of work to "identity." Early on, Cesarani announces his theme: that Koestler was tormented by his Jewish origins. Born in Budapest to culturally assimilated and religiously indifferent parents, Koestler claimed to have grown up without any particular awareness of his own roots or of Hungarian anti-Semitism. Cesarani argues that, on the contrary, Koestler's various political commitments were responses to his deep uneasiness at being a Jew in European society.

This theory has the inestimable advantage of explaining everything, while also being impossible to disprove. Some of his books expressly concerned the fate of Jewry during and after the Second World War, and one supposes that Koestler had more than an academic interest in the subject. He also wrote on a nearly encyclopedic array of topics -- but that, you see, is the "homeless mind" of the wandering Jew.

There are whole stretches of Cesarani's biography in which the ethnic-identity thesis disappears. Instead, it becomes a monotonous chronicle of drinking binges, suicidal depressions, yelling matches and sex encounters of a rather compulsive nature. All of which is punctuated, at regular intervals, by automobile accidents (which were almost a hobby of Koestler's).

How the man ever got his books written, I can't imagine. And yet all this bad behavior serves only to confirm Cesarani's thesis. Koestler's Jewishness, "like that of other survivors of Central European Jewry, connoted self-abasement, deracination, exclusion, and trauma: it did much to explain, if not to condone, eccentric and even extreme behavior His lack of self-worth, his habitual duplicity and homelessness, which made him behave so terribly towards others, are thus rooted in his origins and his inability to resolve his identity."

As for the difference between psychobiography of this caliber and, say, the ranting of an anti-Semitic nut -- well, that is a subtle question. Cesarani is a professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University in England. He wants to situate every biographical detail within his area of scholarly expertise. The reality of motiveless malignancy (or what might be called "the creep gene") escapes him.

But that is not the worst problem with Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. I cannot recall that Cesarani makes a single insightful comment about Koestler's books. Cesarani wants to make a tight link between the public / political figure and the private man. As a writer, Koestler was preoccupied with ideas: some good, some bad, some just plain weird. What Koestler's ideas were, where they came from, the impact they made on other thinkers, and on the public -- surely all of this belongs in a biography, alongside the police reports.