There's a wonderful scene in Sam Mendes' recent nostalgia-fest Empire of Light where Olivia Colman's character watches a movie for what seems to be the first time in her life. It's at midnight, a private screening hastily set up by her friend, a cinephile projectionist played (inevitably) by Toby Jones. And what does he select to initiate her? Peter Sellers in Being There, of course.
It's an inspired choice. Peter Sellers' last great performance, as the hapless Chauncey Gardiner / Chance the Gardener, rhymes perfectly with Colman's character Hilary's struggles with mental health at the old Art Deco cinema she works at, in the coldly perfect seaside town of Margate in the early 1980s.
Sellers, too, was no stranger to such problems. Hhis former wife Britt Ekland recalled:
He obviously suffered from or was bipolar, severely bipolar. He was a very tormented soul who should have had more help. But instead he was unable [to] because he was such a valuable asset.Interestingly enough, very few of the people who praise the film and Sellers' performance in it make much mention of the screenplay writer, Jerzy Kosiński, who based it on his own 1971 novel.
And why is that, I wonder? Because he got cancelled, that's why: one of the first examples of this now nearly ubiquitous phenomenon. There can be little doubt that this drying up of attention and acclaim inspired his suicide in 1991. It's not a happy story.
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Let's start with a small parenthesis:
James Thurber: Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)The very proper gander
by James Thurber
Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, "There is a very proper gander." An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. "They said something about propaganda," she said. "I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. "They were up to no good," she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. "There he is!" everybody cried. "Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!" So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.
Before we get to The Painted Bird, by far the most famous of his novels, it's probably necessary to begin with some biographical data:
Kosiński was born in 1933 as Józef Nikodem Lewinkopf in Łódź, as the only child of Polish Jews Mieczysław (Mojżesz) Lewinkopf and Elżbieta Liniecka. As a child during World War II, he lived in occupied central Poland under a false identity, Jerzy Kosiński, which his father gave him. Eugeniusz Okoń, a Catholic priest, issued him a forged baptismal certificate, and the Lewinkopf family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who offered assistance to Polish Jews, at grave personal risk.Along the way he published, under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak", two non-fiction books containing analysis of Communist ideology and the Eastern Bloc in general.
... After the war, Kosiński's father aligned himself with Poland's communist regime, and the family was relatively well off ... By age 22 [Kosiński] had earned degrees in history and sociology at the University of Łódź ... [he] also studied in the Soviet Union, and served as a sharpshooter in the Polish Army. A biographer writes that Kosinski disliked conformity and therefore the communism that his father had sworn allegiance to, and because of this developed anti-communist views.
In order to emigrate to the United States in 1957, he created a fake foundation which ostensibly sponsored him, and forged letters from prominent communist authorities guaranteeing his return to Poland, which were then required for anyone leaving the country.
Kosiński first worked at odd jobs to get by, including driving a truck, and he managed to graduate from Columbia University. In 1965 he became an American citizen.Wikipedia: Jerzy Kosiński
The Painted Bird, however, written in the form of a childhood memoir, was a success on a far grander scale. It was marketed as a novel, but Kosiński let it be understood in conversation that it was based on his own childhood experiences in war-torn Poland. Certainly the huge attention and fame it eventually accrued was influenced by readers' belief that the events recorded in it were substantially true. Holocaust-survivor Elie Weisel, for instance, described it as "one of the best ... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity".
Kosiński used it as a springboard to launch his career as a major American novelist, and followed it up with a series of teasing metafictions such as the National Book Award-winning Steps (1968) and the bitingly satirical Being There (1971).
He was, in short, very much a writer of his time, exploring themes and techniques we might tend to associate with fellow magical realists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Milan Kundera.
In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith alleged Kosiński wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report said that Kosiński's books had been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosiński's novels. Kosiński, according to them, had depended upon his freelance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing."That was the first problem. The second was the question of the book's faithfulness to its author's own experience. Kosiński commented on this in his introduction to a 1976 reissue of the book:
Well-intentioned writers, critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me, survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book's authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read The Painted Bird. Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes.It was, in short, fiction - a novel by someone who had indeed survived the Holocaust years in Poland, but had not lived through the bizarre events reported by the small boy at the centre of his novel. An academic named D. G. Myers, in his review of a 1996 biography of Kosiński, claimed that the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry."
But do obscure English Professors from Texas often get invited to such parties? And how likely is it that Myers, a man born in 1952, was an habitué of the New York literary scene in the mid-1960s? So, despite the fact that his claim is pure hearsay, repeated without evidence or even a clear attribution, it's been quoted and requoted ever since.
It seems quite likely that Kosiński did say a lot of things which weren't strictly true whilst partying with the likes of Norman Mailer and Dorothy de Santillana (who happened to be a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin). So what? We should judge people on the claims they make in print, not on the random gossip surrounding them.
It didn't help that there was a concerted campaign to discredit him mounted by the Communist regime in Poland. Alleged "originals" for long passages in The Painted Bird were unearthed by assiduous, state-sponsored critics. It was also claimed that he'd been a C.I.A. plant all along.
In other words, he was either (in Poland) a plagiarist who'd ripped off more valid accounts by actual sufferers, or (in America) a fantasist who'd invented it all out of his own head. He'd either stolen it all from Polish writers and turned it in slick American prose, or written it all in Polish and had a series of shadowy "assistants" translate it for him.
The fact that these two scenarios directly contradicted each other didn't really seem to matter. There was something distinctly fishy about the man. He was just a bit too smug and successful for comfort.
So, from being a very proper gander - the darling of the newspapers and the literary set - Kosiński had become a lying fraud. Everything he wrote had (it seemed) been stolen from somebody else: private love letters (in The Devil Tree), the débâcle of his own unsuccessful marriage (in Blind Date).
When he eventually wrote a book, The Hermit of 69th Street, which satirised the impossibility of documenting every assertion in a work of fiction by "inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book", one sneering critic remarked of it: "Ironically, possibly his only true book is about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud."
By now everyone knew he was tainted, but nobody quite knew why. Doesn't a novelist have the right to make things up? Apparently not - if he's called Jerzy Kosiński. It reached such heights of absurdity that his casual remark that he'd just missed being a house guest of his good friend Roman Polanski on the night of the Sharon Tate murders was subjected to merciless ridicule: such a big liar that he even claims acquaintance with the dead! Shame on you, Jerzy! How tasteless to include details of the massacre in Blind Date!
But what are the facts of the matter? Kosiński certainly was friends with Roman Polanski; they met at the National Film School in Łódź:
In 1984, Polanski denied Kosiński's story in his autobiography. Journalist John Taylor of New York Magazine believes Polanski was mistaken. "Although it was a single sentence in a 461-page book, reviewers focused on it. But the accusation was untrue: Jerzy and Kiki had been invited to stay with Tate the night of the Manson murders, and they missed being killed as well only because they stopped in New York en route from Paris because their luggage had been misdirected." The reason why Taylor believes this is that "a friend of Kosiński [Clement Biddle Wood] wrote a letter to the Times, which was published in the Book Review, describing the detailed plans he and Jerzy had made to meet that weekend at Polanski's house on Cielo Drive."
Eliot Weinberger, in his 2000 book Karmic Traces, dismisses Kosiński as a "genuine fake" - whatever that's supposed to mean. In the era of Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality (retitled in the US Faith in Fakes), it seems astonishing that such clumsy categorisations can still be taken seriously. Kosiński's star remains in eclipse thanks to facile accusations which could be levelled at virtually any writer of the postmodern era.
The obvious - to a contemporary reader, at any rate - magical realist elements of The Painted Bird were not yet as commonplace as they would become after the appearance of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), along with the other great novels of the Latin American Boom. Kosiński was slightly ahead of the curve, as befits a Central European intellectual, and that failure to be ponderous enough for a public accustomed to the weighty tomes of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal proved, in the end, his downfall.
And yes, he did have a collaborator on the Being There screenplay: he was its co-writer, not its sole author. What a scandal! "A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb." Maybe he did get a bit of help from time to time. So did Alexandre Dumas. So did Truman Capote. Does it matter?
A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck.Requiescat in Pace, Jerzy Kosiński. And as for the rest of you Cold War morons who hounded him to his death, hang your heads in shame.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Fiction:
- The Painted Bird (1965
- The Painted Bird. 1952. 1965. London: W. H. Allen & Company, 1966.
- Steps (1968)
- Steps. 1968. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1969.
- Being There (1971)
- The Devil Tree (1973)
- The Devil Tree. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
- Cockpit (1975)
- Blind Date (1977)
- Passion Play (1979)
- Pinball (1982)
- The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)
- [as Joseph Novak] The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians (1960)
- [as Joseph Novak] No Third Path (1962)
- The Art of the Self: Essays à propos Steps (1968)
- "Packaged Passion". The American Scholar 42: 2 (Spring, 1973)
- Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962–1991 (1992)
- Being There, dir. Hal Ashby, writ. Jerzy Kosiński with Robert C. Jones [based on the former's 1971 novel] (USA, 1979)
- Nabarvené ptáče [The Painted Bird], dir. & writ. Václav Marhoul [based on Jerzy Kosiński's 1965 novel] (Czechia / Slovakia / Ukraine, 2019)
- Being There [cameo in gala scene] (1979)
- Reds [as Grigory Zinoviev] (1981)
- The Statue of Liberty [interview] (1985)
- Łódź Ghetto [voice of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski] (1989)
- Religion, Inc. [as beggar] (1989)
- Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski. Ed. Tom Teicholz (1993)
- Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller (2012)
- Sloan, James Park. Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography (1996)
Non-fiction:
Cinema
Adaptations:
Actor:
Interviews:
Secondary:
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