As thin and narrow-chested as a sickly child, Jerzy Kosinski, with his deep-set eyes and rapid, lightly accented speech, inspired a protective impulse in those he met. Even his sharp wit and extravagantly comic stories, which made him a hit on television talk shows, seemed noble, a manifestation of bravery in the face of the horrors he had suffered.
It was easy to forget Kosinski’s jet-setting lifestyle, and the commercial and critical success of his books. It was easy to see him as exactly what he claimed to be in his autobiographical novel “The Painted Bird”–a Polish Jew who as a child was separated from his parents and hounded from village to village by peasants of nightmarish cruelty. A child who yet, miraculously, survived.
But in researching the just-published “Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography” (Dutton), James Park Sloan discovered that Kosinski,
whom he had known for many years before the novelist’s suicide in 1991, was not the man he’d thought.
“I met him 20 years ago,” says Sloan. “In 1971, I wrote a review of `Being There’ and he called up to thank me. Later, I learned he called everybody up.” The two men saw one another fairly often.
“But how well I knew him,” the biographer says, “is another question.”
Sloan, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is himself an award-winning author of novels and short fiction, whose work includes “War Games” and “The Last Cold War Cowboy.” Describing himself as “the sixth or seventh generation of ornery poor folks from South Carolina, people who got thinner as the soil got redder and the peanuts got smaller,” Sloan says of his own forebears that he “used to think they were dull,” but now considers making them the subject of a novel.
Certainly his heritage of unremarkable, patient stability is the polar opposite of the flamboyance, rootlessness and expedient lies that were Kosinski’s birthright. Precisely because of this distance from his subject, however, Sloan seems to see Kosinski with greater clarity than many of his rabid detractors or passionate defenders.
He was no Mr. Nice Guy
Sloan’s tone is, rather, ruefully amused. Going into the project, he says, “I had seen `The Painted Bird’ as a deeply authentic book that tells how the Holocaust felt to one child.” Unlike the many sophisticated critics who assumed the book to be literally true when it was published in 1965, hailing it as “an eyewitness account,” Sloan had supposed all along that the work was essentially fictional. But that didn’t make the book a lie. He assumed it reflected the psychological reality of a child’s suffering.
“I thought it was like Grimms’ fairy tales,” says Sloan. “Beneath the invention, the sense of menace is real.”
But in doing research in Poland and in the United States, where Kosinski lived after arriving in New York as a graduate exchange student in 1957, Sloan says, “I learned ways in which Kosinski was not authentic. I’d seen him as a kind man and discovered he had been gratuitously cruel.”
Kosinski was particularly vicious in his treatment of dogs, his biographer notes. He even tormented the pets of friends, on one occasion pinching one dog repeatedly around the eyes.
Kosinski had never concealed the fact that he was a seducer of women, rarely confining himself to a single relationship at a time, and making frequent visits to S & M clubs in New York.
“I was shocked by what people were willing to tell me,” says Sloan, but he was not disillusioned by their stories. “The women Kosinski knew were wonderful. The majority did not feel betrayed. He was exciting to be with–people felt exalted by his company. No subsequent revelations made that feeling go away.”
Sloan was disturbed, however, by the manipulative quality of Kosinski’s other relationships. His trip to America was financed by the parents of a Polish friend. When the family visited New York five years later, Kosinski claimed to be too busy to see them.
A whole new life
By that time, in 1962, he had married Mary Weir, the widow of an American millionaire. The earnest emigre intellectuals who had been his friends up until that time recalled the distance he rapidly established between himself and them, flaunting the Lincoln Continental he drove and making a grand entrance in his new wife’s apartment, “slowly descending the stairs in a red tuxedo.”
Kosinski’s manipulations were most unpleasant, Sloan thinks, in the case of Weir’s teenaged son, David, who found himself supplanted in his mother’s affections by her new husband. “Playing with another person’s sense of the coherence of life was shocking to me,” Sloan says.
David later discovered Kosinski had appropriated his life as the partial basis for the novel “Devil Tree.” As with “The Painted Bird,” Kosinski apparently felt no loyalty toward the people on whom he’d based his characters, and exaggerated or fabricated the negative qualities of those who had trusted him.
Stuck in the middle
Sloan struggled to maintain an objective distance between himself and what he discovered. “I kept reminding myself not to be upset,” he says. “To see Kosinski’s energy, to remember the remarkable text of `The Painted Bird,’ which I think will stand, informing us about a time and about the terrible truths of the human heart.”
And he stresses that even if Kosinski did not suffer what he claimed, he suffered greatly. “Remember, there was a major horrible event going on,” says Sloan, referring to the atrocities of war and the mass extermination of the Jews.
And despite the kindness of some villagers, there was an appalling level of unthinking, daily anti-Semitism in Sandomierz, where Kosinski’s family spent the war. “The war taught Kosinski to distrust human connection. People were a sea through which he swam,” says Sloan.
To arrive at a correct assessment of “The Painted Bird,” says the biographer, it is necessary to remember that it did reflect the horror of what others experienced. It also captured the emotional reality of what Kosinski endured.
“Some people say, `I feel bad, I feel scared,’ ” says Sloan. “But some people can’t say that, or when they say it, they don’t get a meaningful response.”
What Kosinski wrote, Sloan says, was a series of metaphors for his pain. The uncertainty of his life in hiding was so great, it was like being suspended above a savage dog: a moment’s forgetfulness, and you were lost. Referring to another central episode of Kosinski’s novel, in which the child is thrown into a manure pit, Sloan says, “It’s a way of telling us, `I felt soiled. I felt that what I was, a Jew, made me dirty to others.’ “
And yet there remains, both in the biography and in conversation with Sloan, a sense of deep unease about Kosinski’s duplicity. In 1982, critics writing in The Village Voice suggested that his work was largely done by uncredited “translators” and “editors.”
In Poland, numerous writings suggested that Kosinski’s novels were not “testaments” but falsehoods. Other articles implied that he was a CIA collaborator–a story Sloan says is almost certainly not true.
“When the FBI did a background check on Kosinski in relation to a job he applied for,” says Sloan, “he flunked,” unable to obtain even a minimum security clearance.
Baffling to the end
By 1991, despite the fact that a hit movie had been made out of his wonderful comic novel “Being There,” his position as former head of the international literary organization PEN and a social life that included dinners with everyone from Warren Beatty to Henry Kissinger, Kosinski saw that there was a pervasive shadow on his reputation. Worse, says Sloan, he had a feeling of fraudulence, as if his accomplishments weren’t real.
“He built his life around an empty core. There was a hollowness,” says Sloan. “He tried desperately to be more Polish, more Jewish, but the world caught up to him and he caught up to himself, and he couldn’t fill in the empty spaces fast enough.”
On May 2, 1992, Kosinski and his wife, Kiki, attended a cocktail party at the house of writer Gay Talese. Kiki went home afterward to pack for a planned trip to Florida. Kosinski went to a deli with his mistress, Ula Dudziak, then to a movie, and afterwards out for tea. He told Ula he would meet her the next day. Around 1 a.m., he returned to the apartment where Kiki was already asleep, put a plastic bag over his head and took a lethal dose of barbiturates.
“He gave no one any warning,” Sloan says. “The constraint on his feelings held to the end.” Having learned as a child to hide his vulnerability and his essential nature, Kosinski remained hidden to the last.
Reflecting on the life of a man he respected as a novelist, Sloan is hesitant to moralize. He does say, however, “I can’t tell you abstractly, platitudinously, why a person should behave well, but from his example I can tell it’s important.”
Slowly he adds, “His experiences when he was in hiding brutalized him. Most of us don’t hide in alleys and hit people with blackjacks. The reasons aren’t logical or rigorous, but we have them. Kosinski couldn’t think of any reason not to do another person harm.”
Ultimately, perhaps, the truest evidence of what Kosinski suffered as a child may be the lies he told as an adult.
———-
“A six-year-old boy was sent by his parents . . . to the shelter of a distant village. . . . The boy’s foster mother died within two months of his arrival and the child was left alone to wander from one village to another. . . .”
“Without saying a word Garbos used to beat me unexpectedly and for no reason. He would steal behind me and hit me on the legs with a whip. . . . (Garbos later suspends the boy from the ceiling and positions his fierce dog below.) “When freely hanging my feet were no more than six feet above the ground. . . . The pain in my body raced in two directions. . . .”
(While serving as an altar boy, the child accidentally drops a missal.) “I wanted to cry and beg for mercy but no sound came from my throat. . . . The peasants dragged me straight toward a large manure pit. . . . I was hurled into the very center. . . .”
–From “The Painted Bird”
When “The Painted Bird” was published in 1965, Kosinski claimed it was a true account of his childhood as a survivor of both the Holocaust and the brutality of Polish peasants.
In 1994, James Park Sloan visited the remote Polish village of Sandomierz, where he interviewed people who had provided the Kosinski family with food, shelter and concealment for the duration of World War II. One of those people was Edward Warchol, who wept and said, “We saved their lives, and he turned us into monsters.”
Sloan says so many witnesses’ stories agreed that he feels sure Kosinski was never separated from his parents as he claimed, never went mute from the horror of his experiences, never endured many of the hardships he claimed to suffer.
“The villagers want to tell you they treated him with kindness and were reviled for brutality that almost certainly didn’t take place,” he says. “The people who had saved his life came to his Polish book signing. He couldn’t acknowledge them. He had to protect his myth.”
