Jerzy Kosinski was standing at the gift counter in the lobby of the Playboy Club examining the bric-a-brac laid out for sale to tourists. One by one he picked articles off the counter–cigarette lighters, beer mugs, key chains–and held them up to the light. From time to time he asked the counter attendant to retrieve one of the more expensive objects, watches, for example, which were prudently kept in a glass case. The attendant hesitated, as though unsure whether he should call someone in authority, but Jerzy could be persuasive. An ordinary gold key chain seemed to capture Jerzy’s particular attention. He held it out in front of him at various distances, looking at it from different angles, like an anthropologist considering a newly discovered artifact of a lost civilization. Finally satisfied, he returned the key chain to the attendant and we moved upstairs for dinner.
The nameless protagonist of Steps, Kosinski’s second and National Book Award-winning novel, had a similar inclination to poke, prod, and examine minutely–people and objects alike, and sometimes people as though they were objects. In the opening episode he picks up a simple peasant girl by showing her his credit cards. These pieces of plastic, he tells her, need only be presented at the largest and most luxurious department stores in order to receive whatever goods one desires. Thoroughly seduced, the girl follows the protagonist to the nearest large city, where he allows her to use the credit cards for a day before abandoning her to her fate. The tone of the telling is perfectly neutral–so neutral as to approximate the dissociation of schizophrenia. Because of this value neutrality in the telling, it is hard to discover whether the butt of the story is the peasant girl, the department store, the protagonist, the reader, or the whole modern world–which is to say, life on this particular planet at this particular moment, where an alien can see men exchanging plastic cards for material goods, and material goods for peasant girls.
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By the end of dinner Kosinski’s green salad was hardly touched, if artfully rearranged. I joked with Kiki that he was a Polish vampire–that I had never seen him partake of the sustenance favored by ordinary mortals–but Kiki replied that it was no laughing matter. Jerzy had serious health problems, she informed me, and in her view many of them derived from simple malnutrition. It sometimes felt like her life’s work, she said, to get him to take in the nutrients necessary to sustain life.
During that same visit to New Haven, Kosinski informed me that he was using my first novel, which he greatly admired, in his classes at Yale. Naturally I was flattered, but as I thought about it I began to have a nagging doubt. How plausible was it that he would have chosen an obscure first novel by an unknown writer? The Story of the Fat Man and the Story of Using My Novel in His Classes were early entries in a category that I began to think of as Kosinski Apocrypha. Several others emerged during that first meeting. In one of them, he presented his Yale students with typed unattributed paragraphs from a number of writers, including himself, me, Thomas Mann, Proust, and Kafka, asking them to identify the author; the majority of Yale students, he said, thought it most likely that he had made up all the passages the night before. Then there was the Story of the Dining Room Scowl, in which Kosinski sat down in the dining room of a Yale college across from a randomly selected student, scowled, and said firmly, “I don’t like you.” The majority of Yale students, Kosinski contended, burst into tears and fled the scene. Why did he tell these stories?
It is tempting to see in Kosinski’s decline some final imprint of the Holocaust, but Jerzy would have none of it. He spoke ironically of his reputation as Holocaust author; he had once, he told me, spoken at the dedication of a Holocaust monument because the sponsors couldn’t afford Elie Wiesel. Wiesel charged $3,000, Kosinski $1,500. He was the discount version of Wiesel, Jerzy said. Yet the Holocaust was central to Kosinski’s emergence as an artist. When he used a credit card or examined a key chain, it was Kosinski the child victim who did the seeing–the man who as a child had been buried in shit by his fellow human beings, who had the sensitive nerve endings to really experience being buried in shit. On that first visit to Chicago, he revealed to me that he had voted for McGovern (a sadly pedestrian choice for an author who had outraged millions), that he drove a Buick. The interface of Kosinski and the world inevitably produced such incongruities: the Boy of The Painted Bird had grown up to drive a Buick.
By the time of the Scandal, we had drifted apart. I was in Italy on sabbatical, and had been out of touch with Jerzy for some time, when a series of increasingly desperate letters began to arrive. Accused of using excessive editorial assistance, accused of cribbing The Painted Bird from an obscure memoir, subject to insinuations that the CIA had had a role in his early works, Kosinski suddenly remembered old friends and summoned them to the cause. As a practical matter, there was little I could do except commiserate. Had the CIA actually played a role in the publication of Kosinski’s work? It is not impossible that the agency’s book-development program found his early works congenial. The thrust of the accusations, however–that Kosinski was not the author of his own works–struck me as absurd. How could a team of literary bureaucrats have possibly invented that alien vision?
