Jerzy Kosiński

Jerzy Kosinski
File:Jerzykosinski.jpg Jerzy Kosinski at the Miami Book Fair International of 1985
Born	Josek Lewinkopf (1933-06-14)June 14, 1933 Łódź, Poland
Died	May 3, 1991(1991-05-03) (aged 57) Manhattan
Cause of death	Suicide
Occupation	Novelist

Jerzy Kosinski (June 14, 1933 – May 3, 1991) was a Polish-American novelist, best known for the novels The Painted Bird (1965) and Being There (1971), the latter of which was adapted into a film in 1979.

Early life, teaching, and marriage

Kosinski was born Josef Lewinkopf to Jewish parents in Łódź, Poland. As a child during World War II, he lived in central Poland under a false identity his father gave him to use, Jerzy Kosiński. A Roman Catholic priest issued him a forged baptismal certificate. Kosiński family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers, who offered assistance to Jewish Poles often at great personal risk (the penalty for assisting Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland was death). Kosiński's father received help not only from Polish town leaders and churchmen, but also from individuals such as Marianna Pasiowa, a member of the Polish underground network helping Jews to evade capture. The family lived openly in Dąbrowa Rzeczycka near Stalowa Wola, and attended church in nearby Wola Rzeczycka, obtaining support from villagers in Kępa Rzeczycka. They were sheltered temporarily by a Catholic family in Rzeczyca Okrągła. The young Jerzy even served as an altar boy in a local church.

After World War II, Kosiński remained with his parents in Poland, moved to Jelenia Góra, and earned degrees in history and political science at the University of Łódź. He worked as an assistant in Institute of History and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1957, he emigrated to the United States, creating a fake foundation which supposedly sponsored him; he later claimed that the letters from eminent Polish communist authorities guaranteeing his loyal return, which were needed for anyone leaving the communist country at that time, had all been forged by him.

After taking odd jobs to get by, such as driving a truck, Kosinski graduated from Columbia University. In 1965, he became an American citizen. He received grants from Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, Ford Foundation in 1968, and the American Academy in 1970, which allowed him to write a political non-fiction book, opening new doors of opportunity. In the States he became a lecturer at Yale, Princeton, Davenport University, and Wesleyan.

In 1962 Kosinski married Mary Hayward Weir who was 10 years his senior. They were divorced in 1966. Weir died in 1968 from brain cancer. Kosinski was left nothing in her will. He later fictionalized this marriage in his novel Blind Date speaking of Weir under pseudonym Mary-Jane Kirkland. Kosinski went on to marry Katherina "Kiki" von Fraunhofer, a marketing consultant and descendant of Bavarian aristocracy. They met in 1968.

Death

Kosinski suffered from multiple illnesses at the end of his life. By the time he reached his late 50s, Kosinski was suffering from an irregular heartbeat as well as severe physical and nervous exhaustion. Kosinski committed suicide on May 3, 1991 by taking a fatal dose of barbiturates. His parting suicide note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity".

Novels

Kosinski's novels have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list and according to Greenwood Press, have been translated into over 30 languages, with total sales estimated at 70 million in 1991.

The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird, Kosinski's controversial 1965 novel, is a fictional account (though not clearly stated as such), that depicts the personal experiences of a boy (of unknown religious and ethnic background) wandering around unidentified areas of Eastern Europe during World War II and taking refuge among a series of people, many of whom are brutally cruel and abusive, either to him or to others.

Soon after the book was published in the US, Kosinski was accused by the then-Communist Polish government of being "anti-Polish," especially following the regime's 1968 anti-Semitic campaign.. The book was banned in Poland from its initial publication until the fall of the Communist government in 1989. When it was finally printed, thousands of Poles in Warsaw lined up for as long as eight hours to purchase copies of the work autographed by Kosinski. Polish literary critic and University of Warsaw professor Paweł Dudziak remarked that "in spite of unclear role of its author [The Painted Bird] is an achievement in English literature." He stressed that since the book is a work of fiction and does not document real-world events, accusations of anti-Polish sentiment may result only from taking it too literally.

The book received recomendations from Elie Wiesel who wrote in The New York Times Book Review that it was: "One of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." Richard Kluger, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering ... one of the most powerful books I have ever read." John Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it."

However, reception of the book was not uniformly positive. After being translated into Polish, it was read by the people with whom the Lewinkopf family lived during the war. They recognized names of Jewish children sheltered by them (who also survived the war), depicted in the novel as victims of abuse by characters based on them. Also, according to Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, The Painted Bird was Kosinski's most successful attempt at profiteering from the Holocaust by maintaining an aura of a chronicle. In addition, several claims that Kosinski committed plagiarism in writing The Painted Bird were leveled against him. (See 'Criticism' section, below.)

Steps

Steps (1968), a novel comprising scores of loosely connected vignettes, won the National Book Award in 1969.

In 1975, Chuck Ross, a Los Angeles freelance writer, conducted an experiment with Steps by sending 21 pages of the book to four publishers under the pseudonym Erik Demos. The book was turned down by all of them, including Random House (which originally published Steps) and Houghton Mifflin (which published three of Kosinski’s other novels). Ross revealed his findings in New West magazine four years later. His article includes Kosinski's advice that next time he should offer the entire text. Ross repeated his experiment by submitting the entire text of Steps to literary agents in 1981, with equally dismal results. American novelist David Foster Wallace described Steps as a "collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that's like nothing else anywhere ever". Foster Wallace continued in praise: "Only Kafka's fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined." Samuel Coale, in a 1974 discussion of Kosinski's fiction, wrote that "the narrator of Steps for instance, seems to be nothing more than a disembodied voice howling in some surrealistic wilderness."

Being There

Being There was made into a 1979 movie directed by Hal Ashby, starring Peter Sellers. The screenplay was coauthored by the award winning screenwriter Robert C. Jones with Kosinski. The film won the 1981 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Film) Best Screenplay Award, as well as the 1980 Writers Guild of America Award (Screen) for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium. It was also nominated for the 1980 Golden Globes Best Screenplay Award (Motion Picture).

Criticism

According to Eliot Weinberger, an American writer, essayist, editor and translator, Kosinski was not the author of The Painted Bird. Weinberger alleged in his 2000 book Karmic Traces that Kosinski was not fluent in English at the time of its writing.

In a review of Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography by James Park Sloan, D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University wrote "For years Kosinski passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience 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. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosinski confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences. Upon accepting the book for publication Santillana said, "It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography." Although he backed away from this claim, Kosinski never wholly disavowed it."

M. A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger's assertion by saying: "Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake – possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them – as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right."

Kosinski himself addressed these claims in the introduction to the 1976 reissue of The Painted Bird, saying that "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."

Plagiarism allegations

In June 1982, a Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith accused Kosinski of plagiarism, claiming that much of his work was a derivative of successful prewar books unfamiliar to English readers, and that Being There was a plagiarism of Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy — The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma — a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz. They also alleged Kosinski wrote The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report explained that Kosinski's books had actually been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosinski's novels. Kosinski, according to them, had depended upon his free-lance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing." American biographer James Sloan notes that New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey, claimed to have written The Painted Bird for Kosinski.

The article found a more realistic picture of Kosinski's life during the Holocaust — a view which was supported by biographer, Joanna Siedlecka, and Sloan. The article asserted that The Painted Bird, assumed by some to be semi-autobiographical, was largely a work of fiction. The information found showed that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, Kosiński had actually spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family.

Terence Blacker, a profitable English publisher (who helped publish Kosinski's books ) and author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in his article published in The Independent in 2002:

"The significant point about Jerzy Kosinski was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy."

D.G. Myers responded to Blacker's assertions in his review of Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography by James Park Sloan:

"This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. 'There was a hollow space at the center of Kosinski that had resulted from denying his past,' Sloan writes, 'and his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star.' On this theory, Kosinski emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against… all-out psychosis.

Journalist John Corry, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in The New York Times in November 1982, responding and defending Kosinski, which appeared on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that "Kosinski was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign."

Kosinski himself responded that he had never maintained that the book was autobiographical, even though years earlier he confided to Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, that his manuscript "draws upon a childhood spent, by the casual chances of war, in the remotest villages of Eastern Europe." In 1988 he wrote The Hermit of 69th Street, in which he sought to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book. "Ironically," wrote theatre critic Lucy Komisar, "possibly his only true book... about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud." (ibid.)

TV, radio, film, and newspaper appearances

Kosinski appeared 12 times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson during 1971-73 and The Dick Cavett Show in 1974, was a guest on the talk radio show of Long John Nebel, posed half-naked for a cover photograph by Annie Leibovitz for the New York Times Magazine in 1982, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in 1982.

He also played the role of Bolshevik revolutionary and Politburo member Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty's film Reds. The Time magazine critic wrote: "As Reed's Soviet nemesis, novelist Jerzy Kosinski acquits himself nicely – a tundra of ice against Reed's all-American fire." Newsweek complimented Kosinski's "delightfully abrasive" performance.

Friendships

Kosinski was friends with Roman Polanski and claimed to have narrowly missed being at Polanski and Sharon Tate's mansion on the night Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's followers, due to lost luggage. His novel Blind Date discussed the Manson murders.

Interests

He practiced the photographic arts, with one-man exhibitions to his credit in Warsaw's Crooked Circle Gallery (1957), and in the Andre Zarre Gallery in New York (1988). He watched surgeries and read to terminally ill patients.

Kosinski was also very interested in polo and compared himself to a character from his novel Blind Date: "The character, Fabian, is at the mercy of his aging and his sexual obsession. It's my calling card. I'm 46. I'm like Fabian."

Bibliography

• The Future Is Ours, Comrade: Conversations with the Russians (1960), published under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak"
• No Third Path (1962), published under the pseudonym "Joseph Novak"
• The Painted Bird (1965)
• The Art of the Self: Essays à propos Steps (1968)
• Steps (1969)
• Being There (1971)
• The Devil Tree (1973, revised & expanded 1982)
• Cockpit (1975)
• Blind Date (1977)
• Passion Play (1979)
• Pinball (1982)
• The Hermit of 69th Street (1988)
• Passing By: Selected Essays, 1962-1991 (1992)

Awards & honors

• Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (award for best foreign work of fiction) for The Painted Bird (France)
• 1969 -- National Book Award for Steps.
• 1970 -- Award in Literature, National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• 1973-75 -- President of the American Chapter of P.E.N. Re-elected 1974, serving maximum 2 terms allowed.
• 1974 -- B'rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award.
• 1977 -- American Civil Liberties Union First Amendment Award.
• 1979 -- Writers Guild of America, East Best Screenplay Award for Being There with award winning screenwriter Robert C. Jones.
• 1980 -- Polonia Media Perspectives Achievement Award.
• 1981 -- British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Best Screenplay of the Year Award for Being There.
• International House Harry Edmonds Life Achievement Award.
• Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Hebrew Letters from Spertus College of Judaica.
• 1988 -- Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humane Letters from Albion College, Michigan.
• 1989 -- Received Ph.D. Honoris Causa in Humane Letters from State University of New York at Potsdam.

Further reading

Books

• Eliot Weinberger Genuine Fakes in his collection Karmic Traces; New Directions, 2000, ISBN 0811214567; ISBN 978-0811214568.
• Sepp L. Tiefenthaler, Jerzy Kosinski: Eine Einfuhrung in Sein Werk, 1980, ISBN 3416015568
• Norman Lavers, Jerzy Kosinski, 1982, ISBN 0805773525
• Byron L. Sherwin, Jerzy Kosinski: Literary Alarm Clock, 1982, ISBN 0941542009
• Barbara Ozieblo Rajkowska, Protagonista De Jerzy Kosinski: Personaje unico, 1986, ISBN 847496122X
• Paul R. Lilly, Jr., Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski, Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1988, ISBN 0873383664
• Welch D. Everman, Jerzy Kosinski: the Literature of Violation, Borgo Press, 1991, ISBN 0893702765.
• Tom Teicholz, ed. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, ISBN 0878056254
• Joanna Siedlecka, Czarny ptasior (The Black Bird), CIS, 1994, ISBN 8385458042.
• James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: a Biography, Diane Pub. Co., 1996, ISBN 0788153250.
• Agnieszka Salska, Marek Jedlinski, Jerzy Kosinski : Man and Work at the Crossroads of Cultures, 1997, ISBN 8371710879
• Barbara Tepa Lupack, ed. Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998, ISBN 0783800738

Articles

• Oleg Ivsky, Review of The Painted Bird in Library Journal, Vol. 90, October 1, 1965, p. 4109
• Irving Howe, Review of The Painted Bird in Harper's Magazine, October 1965
• Andrew Feld, Review in Book Week, October 17, 1965, p. 2
• Anne Halley, Review of The Painted Bird in Nation, Vol. 201, November 29, 1965, p. 424
• D.A.N. Jones, Review of Steps in The New York Review of Books, Volume 12, Number 4, February 27, 1969
• Irving Howe, Review of Being There in Harper's Magazine, July 1971, p. 89.
• David H. Richter, The Three Denouements of Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird", Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3, Summer 1974, pp. 370-85
• Gail Sheehy, "The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man", Psychology Today, December 11, 1977, pp. 126-30
• Margaret Kupcinskas Keshawarz, "Simas Kidirka: A Literary Symbol of Democratic Individualism in Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit", Lituanus (Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences), Vol. 25, No.4, Winter 1979
• Roger Copeland, "An Interview with Jerzy Kosinski", New York Art Journal, Vol. 21, pp. 10-12, 1980
• Robert E. Ziegler, "Identity and Anonymity in the Novels of Jerzy Kosinski", Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2, 1981, pp. 99-109
• Barbara Gelb, "Being Jerzy Kosinski", New York Times Magazine, February 21, 1982, pp. 42-46
• Stephen Schiff, "The Kosinski Conundrum", Vanity Fair, June 1988, pp 114-19
• Thomas S. Gladsky, "Jerzy Kosinski's East European Self", Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Winter 1988, pp. 121-32
• Michael Schumacher, "Jerzy Kosinski", Writer's Yearbook, 1990, Vol. 60, pp. 82-87.
• John Corry, "The Most Considerate of Men", American Spectator, Vol. 24, No. 7, July 1991, pp. 17-18

External links

• The Paris Review Interview with Kosinski
• Jerzy Kosiński at IMDb
• Yale University: Katherina von Fraunhofer-Kosinski Collection of Jerzy Kosinski