He did it on the night of May 3, 1991. In the bathtub. After swallowing a bottle of pills, the writer put a bag on his head, wrapped it around his neck, and waited for that irreversible numbness that he had so often fantasized about. He was tired, eternity awaited him, he wrote in a note. For decades, a question has accompanied its name: How much truth is there in Jerzy Kosinski?
He was born in 1933 in Łódź, Poland, as Józef Lewinkopfmember of a wealthy Jewish family. In 1957, at the age of twenty-four, he emigrated to the United States, where he would live his entire life. There he wrote eight novels and two non-fiction books, these first two under a pseudonym, a work rejected in his country of origin, where he was considered an enthusiastic anti-communist from his youth, when Poland was liberated from Nazism and a socialist system was established.
“For an exceptionally egocentric and individualistic adolescent, who had spent his childhood in an imaginary cage, Marxism must have seemed like a world going backwards,” writes the professor. James Park Sloan in his book Jerzy Kosinski: a biography.
He had thick black hair, a broad forehead, a prominent nose, and a dark look that was difficult to unravel. He was skinny and inconsistent, reminiscent of a clown. His hobbies included skiing and photography, an art that he developed with remarkable skill. They say that he wrote in his pajamas and slept during the day. The sunlight barely touched him.
His public life as a writer began in 1965. That year, almost at the same time that he obtained American nationality, he published The painted bird. The title is due to a scene that prophesies the rest of his work: a peasant dyes a bird with red ink and sends it flying so that other birds, believing it to be a different species, kill it.
In this foundational novel, the author narrates in first person the experiences of a dark Jewish boywhich during the Nazi occupation He hides in various huts in a village posing as a Catholic. A child who is alter ego by the same author, whom his parents hid at the age of six in the depths of the countryside until the war ended and they relocated the family to the new communist country.
Throughout the book, the little boy is mistreated and sexually assaulted by wild and superstitious men and women. He is hung from the ceiling rafters for days, witnesses a man’s penis being torn off in front of his wife, or a group of women tearing another woman to pieces. Incest, rape, zoophilia. As the story progresses, and despite the desire to give it a solid reflective background, it seems that Kosinski navigates the superficial layers of violence, leading the reader to a repetition of acts of primitive cruelty that limits the emotionality of the work. Its crudeness, in fact, sparked skepticism on the part of Western critics, with some of them accusing the author of exaggerating the calamities of war.
Just as happens to the boy in his story, Kosinski was mute for six years due to trauma. That’s what he told everyone willing to listen to him. Over the years, the version on this point, as will happen with so many other stories about his past, will vary depending on who his interlocutor is.
While in the United States the novel moved between devout praise and suspicion, in Poland It was prohibited, as it was considered to be an attack against the Polish people, especially because of the story it had given of the rural world before and after the German defeat. Kosinski himself, in the prologue to a 1976 edition, states that a group of men entered his house to kill him as a result of the unrest generated. He also claims that some Eastern European newspapers said that the book was commissioned by the North American Government.
“Conversely, the anti-Soviet newspapers highlighted the sympathy with which, they said, he had painted the Russian soldiers,” the writer adds as a counterpoint.
In her subsequent novels, she maintained her inclination toward the perverse, as well as her taste for fantasizing about rape and more subtle types of domination. while refining the psychological traits of his characters, many of whom harbor multiple identities. John Leonardjournalist New York Timeshe said about Blind Date: “When he learns to respect women in fiction, he will be a great novelist. (…) The women in his books are grateful victims.”
Not everyone, however, was so merciless in their judgment, and his book stepsa series of stories and micro-stories with simple and precise language, some of them particularly macabre, established him as a great writer who would win the National Book Award in 1969 and become a best-seller.
Outside its pages, Kosinski’s life was no less complex. He was unfaithful to his second wife, Kiki von Frauenhoferan aristocratic dancer who opened the doors to the artistic world of New York for her and served as her copier and secretary. Together with her he generated a magnetic effect wherever he went, and with her he ended his days, but today it is not clear that he loved her, at least not in a romantic sense. Kiki was someone he would end up marrying “to repay her for twenty-five years of unlimited devotion,” says Park Sloan. “He kept his life in order.”
had several parallel relationships of certain continuity. Of the affair with one of his lovers, Park Sloan writes something revealing: “Intimacy was his greatest fear, and if he had slipped into it with Jean like never before, he had to respond with an equal and opposite reaction,” so He stole her diary and letters, eliminating evidence of her revealed feelings. Later, you will have a affair that, this time, he will be close to ending their official relationship.
At that time, he used to slip through the underground city: he was attracted by the sordid sensuality of the slums, risking something unforeseen happening to him. Also visits to peep shows. He had a predilection for disguises and reckless pranks, and an intermittent tendency to seek sadomasochistic relationships.
“One listens to him with doubts when he describes his adventures. “There are more perverse things that he would like to do, murders that he would like to commit, but he limits these excesses to his novels,” the journalist wrote. Barbara Gelb in an article in The New York Timesshortly before recording these words from the writer: “At night I feel psychically safe because I know how to take care of myself.”
From rumor to article that sealed his career
At the same time that he was building his literary edifice, Kosinski gave classes and lectures in Princeton and Yalewas part of the PEN, and was even tested by the INC. He was known for his eloquence, his oratory skills and his taste for the salon, and he soon won the admiration of actors such as Warren Beattyfilmmakers Louis Malle and Roman Polanskiand political front rows like Kissinger. He even made a film with Peter Sellers, an adaptation of Being There which was nominated for the Golden Globes and the Oscars.
He had what he wanted most and that he didn’t bother to hide: the feeling of power, of being present in the lives of others, especially the elite. And yet, the more they looked at him, the more fragile his idea of himself seemed to become. He soon began to exhaust his audience with his jokes and anecdotes, so he often changed friends. “He took his role as jester to yet another court” says Park Sloan.
In the early eighties, after the publication of The Devil’s Tree, Criticism of his books became harsher, highlighting an “empty sadism” or the influence of mass journalistic language. In parallel, old questions emerged, until now discreet and inconsistent, about the honesty of his work.
“There was a rumor of rumors,” writes Park Sloan, but the point of no return came in June 1982, when two journalists published an article in Village Voice in which they outlined Kosinski as an imposter. Today, there are those who consider that his anti-communism, and his tendency to fantasize about the rich, fueled the suspicions of his colleagues in an intellectual ecosystem increasingly leaning to the left, if you can call it that. Kosinski himself attributed political reasons to the conflictand tried by all means to get his influential friends to defend him.
From the article they branch various accusations that intertwine with each other. On the one hand, they said that he had sold as his own experiences that were not his. “He always refused to deny that he was the protagonist of The painted bird“says Park Sloan. A fact that, today, with the growing popularity of autofiction, might not be much of a problem. Back then, however, there were those who felt cheated. They also accused him of having needed assistants to write in English and of not having recognized or cited them anywhere. And to top it off, it was suggested that he had copied some ideas from works in Polish that were not available to the American public.
The accusation of editorial assistance had more coverage than the others. “Not a single comma is not mine” was the phrase that sentenced Kosinski.
The truth is that The author had a desire for style, but needed extra hands to refine it. He began writing in English because it was a language in which he “could write dispassionately”, but it was soon revealed that he had difficulty making the work sound good. That was what some critics exploited among the rumors that eroded his reputation: It was hard to believe that he had written The painted bird. At best, the book would be a translation from Polish.
Editors like Wayne Lawsonof Vanity Fairhave recently tried to clarify this issue. In 1980, Lawson worked for a few months with Kosinski, and while he acknowledges that the writer needed help, his work never crossed the border of what was expected of him: an edition. Along these lines, Park Sloan points out: “Of the editors mentioned in the article Voice all but one came to Kosinski’s defense.” A dozen. It didn’t matter.
Since then, he always feared that the murmur would spread. In the last decade of his life, he dedicated himself to fleeing from that shadowwithout finding refuge within himself. The intimate isolation in which he had lived conditioned all the connections he established with reality. He became vigilant, paranoid. He was convinced that someone was entering his house and moving objects from their original location. “My memory, broken and uneven, was like an old cobblestone street,” he had written years ago in steps.
It was at that time when he wrote The Hermit of 69th Streeta novel full of footnotes, a kind of interrogation in which addresses the reconciliation between his Jewish identity and his Polish part. He also takes the opportunity to sneak in more or less explicit arguments in favor of his moral innocence. His aspiration was to be compared with Balzacwho used concealers to outline his work. But Balzac lied out of hobby, so it wasn’t the best reference either. The book received vague praise and great silences, something that must not have contributed to energizing its creator.
To the obsession he had with himself, Added to this was physical degradation, the result of age and nerves.in the form of arrhythmias and indefinite pain. Furthermore, he began to drink. Rum and Coca Colato be more precise. In cases like this, the temptation appears to launch some absolute psychologism that explains everything that is difficult to understand from the outside, that which vibrates in your writing. Several years before the great controversy, Jerzy Kosinski wrote: “Is it possible to keep the imagination more imprisoned than the child?”
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