Existential Cowboy Gone Astray
GILDER, JOSHUA
Existential Cowboy Gone Astray Passion Play By Jerzy Kosinski St. Martins. 27J pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Joshua Gilder Jerzy Kosinski's fictional persona easily made the transition from victim,...
...Nasty as this is, it doesn't amount to doodly-squat compared to the mutilations, murders, and general terrorizing carried out with such relish by Levanter, Tarden and the rest of Kosinski's cadre of secret agents and jet set adventurers...
...Yet our tired hero can hardly get it up for the usual Kosinski-style sadistic escapades, though he does make one half-hearted attempt toward the beginning of the novel...
...The ease with which Fabian parks this motorized gargantua in New York City is perhaps the greatest imaginative leap Kosinski has ever required of his readers...
...When not playing polo or pursuing sex, Fabian philosophizes...
...The WASPy Stanhopes live on an almost antebellum plantation somewhere in the South and are into horses in a big way...
...In retaliation he soaks a napkin with poodle urine and surreptitiously stains the students' jackets as they hang over the backs of their chairs...
...he saw her eyes wet with tears, her lips framing the words 'I love you,' soundless, perceptible only to him...
...This is not such a surprising evolution...
...Fall leaves cling "defiantly" to trees...
...The consuming aggression of past heros has been turned inward, modulated into a neurotic self-absorb-tion with the body and sickness...
...And a bit later: "Like a skiff bringing up the rear, a solitary leaf, its fretted veins a lair for the sun, would scud in his wake, gliding through the dappled air...
...The scent, of course, invites a responsive deluge from the resident dog population...
...A shrinking market for polo players, along with fairly severe character problems (when he is angry, he beans opposing players with the polo ball) keeps Fabian only marginally employed...
...Certainly he is far from being "One of the foremost psychological novelists in the world," as Gail Sheehy called him in a Psychology Today interview...
...Here is Tarden, of Cockpit, in an uncharacteristically reflective moment, pondering photographs of himself making love to various women: "These photos were taken by cameras equipped with a delayed action mechanism...
...Apart from its kinky sexuality, the story is merely the stuff of adolescent romance, those supermarket melodramas with the alliterative titles and stock characters...
...As she pins the ribbon to Captain Ahab's bridal, "She looked up to him [Fabian], and he took her hand...
...As an image, photography captures his peculiar mix of alienation, volation and aggressive voyeurism...
...both are a palsied caricature of life that never reaches down to stir up our truly buried fantasies...
...This makes for an episodic and often disjointed narrative, particularly in l'a\-sion Play, perhaps Kosinski's most plotted work...
...Kosinski's all-purpose euphemism for the genitals, "flesh," is particularly disagreeable, with its (probably unintended) cannibalistic connotations...
...They sponsor the Stanhope Cup riding competition...
...Overloaded with such imagery, it is surprising it doesn't drop like a brick...
...The father's concern is understandable, considering Vanessa is barely 18 and Fabian, from the evidence of the novel, is rapidly approaching senility...
...The brutality of his earlier novels and the melodrama of Passion Play differ only on the surface...
...They must all be minimalists...
...Unfortunately, it does not often remain unobtrusive...
...He doesn't have the crude power of Mickey Spillane, the finesse of Ross McDonald, or even the professionalism of any number of detective writers...
...In line with Hannah Arendt's argument about the banality of evil, it may be noted that Kosinski's maudlin sentimentality is the flip side of his sadomasochism...
...When I think about the energy expended during the last decades in picking up these women, and in taking, developing and enlarging these photographs, I am overcome by its pointlessness...
...Kosinski's new opus will force some critical reappraisal even from his fans...
...In the dramatic denouement, Fabian gallops abreast of his lover's private jet as it wheels down the runway, readying for take-off...
...He regretfully notes the sagging flesh of his face, assiduously squeezes the pus from his pores and worries over his greying pubic hairs, but fears that plucking them will metastasize a cancer...
...This could be Kosinski's epitaph, for it perfectly registers his level of seriousness...
...Vanessa, her forehead bent to the cool glass of the window, would catch sight of a man on a horse, streaming along the black strip of runway, the man's helmet, shirt and breeches all white, his horse black, the run of the horse unbroken, the rider tilting, as if charging with a lance, in combat with an enemy only he could see...
...And dappled air...
...Fabian is sitting at an outdoor cafe when a noisy group of students arrive and abusively ask him to vacate his seat for them...
...The erotic passages, for instance, are on a par with the mechanical thumpings the editors of Penthouse grind out every month in their letters column...
...Passion Play teems with this sort of cliched imagery and amateurish anthropomorphism...
...Now it is true that Kosinski has produced one great work...
...The dull glow of morning hovered over the spreading gray hills, and the raindrops, the children of the Ruh, shook themselves loose from the sky, scuttling fast...
...In his latest reincarnation, he is an aging polo player named Fabian...
...He refuses, and quickly becomes resentful...
...For what little plot there is in Kosinski's novels simply follows the peregrinations of the protagonists...
...Throughout the four subsequent novels, the cold blooded, impervious Kosinski hero changed little...
...Vanessa Stanhope is heiress to her family's immense fortune...
...Tight for money, he roams the country looking for work...
...Vanessa has entered her horse, Captain Ahab (this ties in, you see, with the quotation in the front of the book about a big, white whale . . .), but his rider suddenly falls ill...
...Along with his prose, Kosinski also has been lauded by one critic for "the pure genius" of his plotting...
...I would suspect that these fantasies, to the extent we really all do share them, are not so deeply buried: They are the effluvium of our mass-market fantasy machine, the fluff of adolescent thrillers and adventure stories...
...The ingenious perversity and remorseless violence of Kosinski's earlier novels inspired enthusiastic readers to talk of "deeply buried fantasies" and "devastating" commentaries "on contemporary Western life...
...In that first novel, he summoned through his vivid writing images of horror that no reader is likely to forget...
...It being her family's cup, Vanessa has the privilege of awarding the prizes...
...Passion Play, however, finds the persona somewhat mellowed...
...Nevertheless, in a touching avowal of selfless love, Fabian manages to reassure him: "Most of all I love the spirit that makes her as free as she is...
...There, in the mansion study, Vanessa's father and lover have a man to man talk under "the imperious mien of Commodore Ernest Tenet Stanhope, the family patriarch, whose massive portrait commanded the room...
...From Steps to Blind Date he appeared to have dispensed entirely with sentiment as a useless hindrance...
...Time has even compared him to Joseph Conrad, another Polish emigre who wrote in English...
...Since then, he has done only passably well with the spare action writing of the detective novel...
...One example: "In the odyssey of landlocked man, the horse had been the oldest craft of voyage, the most prophetic ship through space...
...In Passion Play, we are flooded with teenage romanticism...
...This is shortly followed by a trip to the Stanhope family estate...
...I hope I've done nothing to confine her-And I won't now...
...Kosinski's protagonists are always taking pictures...
...About halfway through Cockpit we come upon the following: ". . . theRuh.the wet wind from the warm lakes, swept through the region...
...An admiring critic once described Kosinski as an "Existential Cowboy...
...His forays into lyrical description are frankly embarassing, too...
...The Painted Bird...
...He travels together with his two polo ponies in a custom built Van Home, a vehicle that must be at least a mile long, since it has to accommodate a stable for the two horses and the multitude of rooms, closets and storage compartments that become the staging area for the author's fantasies of bondage and sexual humiliation-replete, of course, with leather bools, whips, spurs, and other riding paraphernalia...
...Understandably so...
...But his prose is functional as a vehicle for moving something from point A to point B, and is unobjectionable as long as it remains unobtrusive...
...Presumably because he is getting on in years, Fabian is obsessed by nubile young equestrians...
...Reviewed by Joshua Gilder Jerzy Kosinski's fictional persona easily made the transition from victim, in The Painted Bird, to victimizer, in Steps...
...Man astride his mount????even that first man, the horse at full run, its hoofs cleaving soil and space-had been the original passenger through air, the traveler borne by the winds...
...In the time it lakes to move from the genesis of an idea to its predictable conclusion one simply loses interest...
...He scours high society magazines, picks out a picture of some rich young debutante, usually about 16 years of age, who particularly excites him, and then finds some excuse to wheedle himself into her life and eventually into her pants...
...Unbeknownst to Vanessa, after whom he hankers, Fabian arrives at Madison Square Garden where the event is being held...
...other reviewers have been hardly less enthusiastic...
...Critics have praised Kosinski for such passages...
...CIA operative Tarden of Cockpit was as cruel as freelance secret agent Levanter of Blind Date...
...Well, is the leaf gliding or is it scudding...
...The Ruh punished them as they fled, forcing them aslant and hurling them against the ground...
...Fabian, though a polo player with little experience jumping horses, gallantly takes his place and comes through in the clinch (he must have the right stuff) while his target watches from the stands...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 22
