The Most Considerate of Men

...that sleazy bureaucrats and Communist party hacks wanted to discredit a writer was unthinkable...

...Idid not see Jerzy often in the years after that, although I did hear things about him...

...He learned "every one of us stood alone...

...The next year he was re-elected, serving the maximum time allowed...

...The Times of London even put its account on page one...

...His real sin, though, was that he was still his own man in a world where everyone else was the same...

...That night, the Charles Manson gang invaded the household and butchered Miss Tate and her friends...

...It meant the villagers had finally caught him...

...Jerzy seemed to know everyone important...

...The next day, Kosinski called the airline to complain again about the luggage...

...In New York in 1958, he received a grant to do post-graduate work at Columbia...

...he was a celebrated anti-Communist Pole, and so he had to be discredited...

...Jerzy was just being slippery...

...Years later, when theleft got serious about discrediting him, it said the CIA had sponsored the publication of Jerzy's Novak books...

...Wiesel had read something that wasn't there...

...His heart condition had worsened and, as he said in the note to Kiki, he feared he might one day be a burden...

...Les Nouvelles Litdraires in Paris asked why Kosinski carried a gun, had dozens of false identities, and kept tear gas bombs in his car...

...He once described Poland, which he fled in 1957, as a cage of words that had been placed around him by the world's most malevolent author...

...prisoned in a large house of political fiction," he said, "persecuted by a mad bestselling novelist, Stalin, and a band of his vicious editors from the Kremlin, and, quite logically, I saw myself as a protagonist of his fiction...

...The boy discovered evil and learned the world was a dangerous place...

...Fine, they said, and I wrote a long article, carefully documented, tracing Warsaw's involvement...

...I saw myself imJohn Cony, formerly a media critic with the New York Times, teaches at the College of Communications of Boston University...

...Comrade, and two years later No Third Path, both under the pseudonym Joseph Novak...

...He was, in short, one of the best men I knew...

...Everything afterwards, I think, always came back to that...

...What a whole gallery of twentieth-century thugs had been unable to do to Jerzy, Jerzy had done to himself...

...Then he would fall silent and suddenly be out the door, taking his puns, epigrams, and dark humor with him...

...he worked for the CIA...

...In the aftermath, Kosinski spoke of "criminal chic," and said the writers who supported Abbott had been drawn by his ideas and not by his talent...

...I'm about to put myself to sleep," he said in a note to Kiki, his wife, and then lowered himself into a bathtub half-filled with water, tied a plastic shopping bag around his head, and died...

...but Jerzy, as I said, was his own master, and for him it worked wonderfully well...

...He led it in a campaign to free writers imprisoned by tyrants of both the left and right...

...He was a trickster, joker, and con man who was incapable of telling a lie...

...A few months later, the Nation magazine sponsored a conference of something called the American Writers Congress...

...His life and his art testified to that...

...It was a wholly anti-American gathering—financed by the usual foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts—and Jerzy said it reminded him of Eastern Europe...

...Other publications attacked the Times...

...Italian, French, and West German publications repeated the accusations, and an imaginative few made up some of their own...

...That, however, came later, and for years Jerzy thrived...

...W ho was this exotic, hawk-faced man who aroused so much speculation...

...Warren Beatty had cast him in the movie Reds...

...The Novak books had literary merit, and they presented a more telling picture of the moral bankruptcy of Soviet life than the clunky memoirs Langley then seemed to favor...

...He was an incongruous choice...

...There were many stories about Jerzy Kosinski...

...It was all fantastic, but in its way it worked quite well...

...Words meant more to Jerzy, perhaps, than to any other writer...

...he called Abbott a "misguided leftist...

...nothing he said could be trusted...

...The story in the cheesy little New York weekly was picked up all over the world...

...If we left him alone for thirty seconds and then came back, he said, we would not be able to find him...

...As it turned out, it was the Village Voice...

...Of course, Jerzy Kosinski was Jewish...

...The terrible thing was that it was successful...

...The Painted Bird, the propagandists said, slandered Poland...

...Indeed, Jerzy had not even identified the boy as Polish...

...Kosinski's life was unimaginable enough already...

...Even the headline in the Voice—'Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words"—had been a reminder...

...The Painted Bird was published in 1965...

...The Painted Bird will survive after most other books are forgotten...

...Abbott, an imprisoned murderer, had corresponded with prominent writers, passionately pressing them to adopt his Marxist-Leninist worldview...

...Once he and Kiki invited me and my wife to dinner at their apartment on West 57th Street...

...Late at night he would nurse a glass of wine at a literary bar on Second Avenue and talk, firing words in bursts and ricocheting sentences and whole paragraphs off the walls and floor...

...After dinner, he told us he had a secret hiding place...

...It was nasty, venomous, and sly, a paradigm of the distasteful, and had no purpose other than to discredit Jerzy and take his identity away...

...Jerzy put PEN to actually doing something useful...

...This, it said, was his "dirty little secret...

...Jerzy had not characterized the boy in The Painted Bird, other than saying the villagers thought he might be a Gypsy...

...He was not an ordinary anti-Communist 6migre Pole...

...He would badger friends about what he thought were matters of high importance, and keep badgering until he wore them out...

...A few years after Jerzy left office, world PEN, with its Americanchapter applauding, sanctimoniously expelled the Chilean chapter, while allowing chapters from all Communist and Third World countries to remain...

...he was part of a Zionist conspiracy...

...Indeed he did, and he saw himself as the protagonist of his own fiction, too, although he could never quite come out and say it...

...An eccentric technique, perhaps, and one not likely to be taught at, say, the University of Iowa's celebrated writing classes or the earnest poetry hutches of the New School...

...There was, for example, the incident with Jack Abbott...

...After the Voice published its story, I told my editors at the New York Times I wanted to investigate its charges against Jerzy...

...You believed some, dismissed others, and treated a few as sly jokes...

...Over time Warsaw's emissions spread like swamp gas and the Voice missed only the Zionist conspiracy...

...My wife and I stepped into the hallway, walked as far as the elevator, and then came back to the apartment...

...He mimicked his accent, ridiculed his physique, and laughed at his own eccentricities...

...we examined the furniture, windows, and doors...

...Steps came three years later...

...To begin with, he was witty andcharming, and utterly bereft of malice...

...Jerzy purposely had made his own outline obscure...

...His searches for just the right English word had been prodigious...

...Jerzy, I thought, how could you...

...At age six, he had been separated from his parents and sent to live in the countryside when Germany invaded Poland...

...How nasty that was...

...others would do that, too...

...No matter where he lived, he said, he always had a hiding place...

...The story was trash, full of evidence that purported to prove one thing, but which, read carefully, proved nothing at all...

...Whatever the fruits of his achievement at PEN, he was growing suspect in literary circles...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...

...in those days it was better to think of Jerzy as the subject of outrageous, appalling, but somehow amusing stories...

...He was a casualty, mishap, and survivor who always feared he might hurt someone himself...

...I had never met a Holocaust survivor before...

...The boy in the novel is brutalized by villagers, but that is not its point...

...The sketches showed a Communist society made up of oppressed and oppressor, and plainly Jerzy had made judgments...

...The villagers, wherever they might turn up, would not be able to find him...

...They are sketches...

...His life as a child on the run from the Nazis became the basis for The Painted Bird, his first and most enduring novel...

...It ran a long story that said Jerzy had hired editors and ghostwriters towrite his books, and that he was connected to the CIA...

...Kosinski declined to join the campaign...

...And in Poland, where each innuendo and outright fabrication about Jerzy had come from in the first place, the Communist press quoted European and American articles about the story in the Village Voice as proof of what the government had been saying all along: that Jerzy Kosinski was an inveterate liar...

...I asked them to make a little cross next to anything that didn't sound right...

...There were two running jokes in particular: Kosinski worked for the CIA and ghostwriters wrote his books.--sTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 17 That the jokes might have political 1 purpose never occurred to me...

...Eventually, it was only a matter of who would mug Jerzy first...

...I first met him in the late 1960s, just after he had won the National Book Award for Steps...

...The key word here is "both...

...He was concerned with language and the mystical property of words, and what words and language could do...

...When Jerzy published The Painted Bird years before, Warsaw had set out to hurt him...

...Mailer and his friends persisted, however, and Abbott won his freedom, a beneficence he repaid by immediately stabbing to death a young actor in the East Village...

...Later The Painted Bird went through nine full drafts...

...In fact, it did not, but since the novel was banned, who in Poland would know...

...He was fastidious, punctilious, and elegant...

...The story turned up in daily papers in Turkey and Japan and Malaysia...

...It was The Painted Bird...

...There were two running jokes in particular: Kosinski worked for the CIA and ghostwriters wrote his books...

...he said they were novels...

...When it was published, however, it had an unexpected effect...

...Everyone knew them...

...As I said, everything in Jerzy's life always came back to that...

...If enough people marked a sentence, I knew something was wrong with it...

...The campaign went on for years: Jerzy used ghostwriters...

...He was too raffish, too prominent, and too likely to turn up as a guest on David Letterman...

...for some reason I felt embarrassed...

...Kosinski had missed a connecting flight to Los Angeles, where he was to stay at the home of Sharon late and Roman Polanski, because the airline had misplaced his luggage...

...In 1973, he was elected president of the American chapter of PEN, the international association of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists, and novelists...

...I remember being uncomfortable...

...His inner landscape was no secret—you had only to read the books to know that—but the outside topography was mysterious...

...That would have been the same as death...

...It produced no evidence, of course, and in truth the spooks had had nothing to do with them, although it might have been nice if they had...

...Jerzy was his own master...

...if he could exist in the shadows, so to speak, it would be harder to track him down...

...I chose some people whose language was not English, and some who were Americans," he once explained...

...Surely, it was the making of Jerzy Kosinski, just as it was his undoing...

...Declare the works pure fiction, however, and he would insist everything in them was true...

...Wiesel was sensitive to that, but mistaken when he thought the narrator, the boy, was a Christian...

...He referred to Henry Kissinger as Henry, an indictable offense in itself...

...In Poland, Jerzy had taught sociology at the Academy of Sciences in Warsaw...

...When Elie Wiesel reviewed The Painted Bird in the New York Times, he noted the "terrifying elements" in the "metamorphosis of the boy's mind...

...No other novelist of his time so joined his life and art, and no other novelist had his life so confused with his art...

...The author of The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There, and eight other books, was dead at 57...

...The other drinkers wouldspeculate about where he had gone, though mostly, I suspect, he just went home to bed...

...The best the other publications could say about Jerzy was that the charges against him were not proved...

...That wasn't true...

...In 1970 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature...

...Critics said his works were autobiographical...

...Well, he could because he believed it was the correct thing to do...

...There was an artistic rationale for this—Jerzy once wrote a booklet explaining it—but a simpler one will do...

...W hen I heard that Jerzy Kosinski had killed himself, I was furious and then I cried, a not uncommon reaction, I suspect, among so many people who knew him...

...PEN was approximately as politically diverse as the Soviet Writers Union, an organization with which it eerily shared some positions...

...A man who escaped Hitler and Stalin had published four books in ten years in a language he had not grown up speaking...

...Jerzy made sixteen or seventeen copies of each draft and passed them on to friends...

...Finally, a cupboard door popped open and Jerzy unfolded from a shelf, where he had been lying behind some books...

...On the other hand, he made fun of himself...

...I could not imagine that commissars had set slanders adrift like noxious fumes in their own stale air and then waited for cultural winds to disperse them...

...That was the Kosinski conundrum...

...The Times of London compared him to Conrad, and certainly that was apt...

...He deserved better, but he was not really surprised because he knew how treacherous words could be...

...he plagiarized other novels...

...In 1960 he published The Future Is Ours...

...He was also a pain in the ass...

...They were nonfiction works about life in the Soviet Union—Jerzy had gone to school in Moscow in the early 1950s—but they suggested the novels later: the nearly anonymous Novak reported what he saw, expressing no viewpoint overtly...

...In the beginning, he would even call telephone operators late at night and try out words on them: Excuse me, miss, but I am a foreigner, and I do not know what this means...

...It was unpleasant, however, to think of that...

...Celine and Kafka stand behind this accomplished art," the Times review said then...

...The descriptions contained in this book do not propose moral codes and involve no judgments," Jerry wrote in an epilogue to No Third Path...

...And their victim was neither Jew nor Gypsy," he wrote, "but a forlorn Christian child of good Christian parents...

...When he left office, PEN's board of directors passed a resolution that said he had "shown an imaginative and protective sense of responsibility for writers all over the world," and that the "fruits of what he has achieved will extend far into the future...

...We looked under the bed and in the closets...

...Norman Mailer and others detected a rare literary talent in Abbott's letters and campaigned to have him released...

...It was extraordinary, really...

...Jerzy had bled over those words...

...Besides, his writing had not been going well, and if his health got worse he would be unable to write at all...

...Kosinski had vanished...

...Before Jerzy, PEN had recognized only one kind of tyrant...

...He was the most considerate of men, and the possibility of becoming pitiable must have appalled him...