Jerzy Kosinski

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“I Guess There’s Some Residual Regret On Everyone’s Part”

December 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In posting a piece of Norman Mailer’s 1956 letter to the Democrats, urging party members to draft Ernest Hemingway for their Presidential ticket, I made passing reference to Jack Henry Abbott, the longtime convict and fledgling writer Mailer helped spring in 1981 to disastrous results. Abbott later died in prison, a suicide, in 2002. From his Los Angeles Times obituary, penned by Myrna Oliver:

In 1977, when Abbott learned that Mailer was writing the book The Executioner’s Song about death row inmate Gary Gilmore, he wrote the author, offering to advise him on how imprisonment affects men.

Mailer, later calling Abbott’s letters “as good as any convict’s prose that I had read since Eldridge Cleaver,” maintained a prolific correspondence with the inmate from 1978 to 1981.

In 1980, he had excerpts printed in the New York Review of Books, prodding Random House to suggest the book, which was published in 1981.

Mailer further went to bat for Abbott with the parole board, and in June 1981 succeeded in getting him released to a halfway house in New York’s Bowery.

The author bought him a $500 suit and a pair of good shoes, hired him as his $150-a-week researcher and introduced him to other influential people, including the late author Jerzy Kosinski.

Abbott the jailhouse writer quickly became a celebrity, interviewed on Good Morning America and other programs and featured in People magazine.

Within six weeks of his release from prison, glowing in the attention from his just-published book, he went to New York’s Binibon 24-hour restaurant with a girl on each arm, and got into an argument with the actor-waiter Richard Adan over using an employees’ restroom. Taking the fight outside, Abbott stabbed the waiter to death and fled.

The Sunday New York Times had just hit the street with a review of In the Belly of the Beast, describing the book as “awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible, and as an articulation of penal nightmare it is completely compelling.”

The fugitive Abbott was captured two months after the stabbing, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years to life. He was next due for a parole hearing in June 2003.

His book was adapted into an edgy play of the same title first by Adrian Hall at Trinity Square Playhouse in Rhode Island and then re-adapted by director Robert Woodruff for the Taper Forum in 1984. The Los Angeles production was based not only on Abbott’s letters but on transcripts from his manslaughter trial.

One Times reviewer, when the play opened, wrote: ‘The dramatization is a gut-wrenching indictment of far more than our penal system….It gives us Abbott, unadorned, in his own words, which is enough. He’s a devilishly articulate analyst of the system that has him by the throat. His perceptions are both astonishing and on the mark.’

In 1990, after a bizarre civil trial in which Abbott represented himself, a jury awarded Adan’s widow more than $7.5 million in damages for the wrongful death.

“I’ve become a writer,” Abbott told jurors during the 1990 civil trial, inquiring of each if he had read his book. “As good as any other writer in this country, or even in Europe. This was something told to me, and I was encouraged to write. It was told to me by some of the top publishers and editors in this country.”

But those once-fawning supporters changed their minds after Abbott stabbed a man, abusing the freedom they had helped him win. Mailer’s friend Scott Meredith said, “Norman and I are stunned and distressed. I guess there’s some residual regret on everyone’s part.”

Kosinski was so remorseful that many said the episode contributed to his subsequent suicide. “Both Mailer and I believe in the purgatory power of art,” he mourned. “We pretended he [Abbott] had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the ’60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience.

“I blame myself again for becoming part of radical chic,” he said. “I went to welcome a writer, to celebrate his intellectual birth. But I should have been welcoming a just-freed prisoner, a man from another planet.”•

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5 American Novels David Foster Wallace Loved

September 24, 2012 in Books | Permalink

It still bothers me greatly that David Foster Wallace fabricated huge sections of his so-called non-fiction pieces. I don’t think his great talent made that okay. But it’s difficult to discuss such things sensitively considering the unhappiness of his life and the sadness of his death.

I just came across a 1999 article Wallace wrote for Salon about the five most unappreciated American novels since 1960. I’ve read the titles on his list, so I thought I would give my take on them.

•Omensetter’s Luck (William H. Gass, 1966): I’ve never really connected to Gass’ work, even his short fiction, but this one, his first novel, is his best. That said, I didn’t really enjoy this Faulkner-esque story, which concerns a preacher obsessed with the good fortune of a seemingly undeserving man, until the final third. What’s amusing is that my edition contains an essay by the author about how his OL manuscript was stolen by a colleague. It’s straightforward, filled with rich metaphor and emotion. After reading it, I though that perhaps Gass has been trying his whole career to write with someone else’s strengths instead of his own.

•Steps (Jerzy Kosinski, 1968): Not so much a novel as a collection of nightmarish stories linked by theme and tone. Like Kafka, but with the lurid eroticism and violence above the surface. Kosinski’s sexual politics could be gross, but this is a very brisk read and some of the stories will remain lodged in your brain, unforgettable for their paranoia and horror.

•Angels (Denis Johnson, 1983): Bruising, heartbreaking novel about a single mom toting her at-risk family through the underbelly of America. It does not have the lightness of tone that Jesus’ Son has. Not at all. But it’s the second-best fiction Johnson has written after JS.

•Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy, 1985): This insane, brilliant and unsentimental novel set in the Old West is one of my absolute favorites. A story about innocence devoured in the belly of the beast, it’s the book that Herman Melville tried and failed to create in Moby Dick. 

•Wittgenstein’s Mistress (David Markson, 1988): The best of the author’s typically avant-garde anti-novels, it follows the (repetitive) thought process of a woman who may be the last person on Earth. Philosophical and challenging, you will love it or quickly put it down.•

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“He Studies ‘How Man Refashions Nature’ By Watching Various Kinds Of Surgery”

August 16, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A deeply haunted soul capable of brilliance or dreck, novelist Jerzy Kosinski was a world literary figure who, like a lot of people who move to New York City to remake themselves, was a confusing blend of fact and fiction. He was such an inveterate observer–voyeur, really–that even he must have lost track of what was his own real experience and what was not. A 1979 People magazine piece by Andrea Chambers profiled the writer while he was still a formidable public figure, a dozen years before he committed suicide. An excerpt:

“His current novel, Passion Play, his seventh, is about a middle-aged loner who, like Kosinski, is a polo fanatic. ‘The character, Fabian, is at the mercy of his aging and his sexual obsession,’ he says. ‘It’s my calling card. I’m 46. I’m like Fabian.’

Fabian is not likely to win the hearts of critics. They routinely attack Kosinski’s work as dirty and violent, and Passion Play has scenes of suicide, sadism and transsexualism. ‘The violence is never gratuitous,’ he says. ‘I write about what I see in society.’

To enlarge that vision, Kosinski collects bizarre experiences as methodically as more timorous authors do library research. At night he prowls the streets of Manhattan. ‘I have always been fascinated by sexual experiences,’ he says. ‘I stop women on the street, introduce myself and say, ‘I like you. I want to photograph you.” Usually they assent. At other moments he studies ‘how man refashions nature’ by watching various kinds of surgery (though an operation turning a man into a woman frightened him: ‘There’s no return’). He also stops at hospitals to read to patients suffering from terminal illnesses. 

Sometimes Kosinski takes odd jobs like selling used cars or driving a limousine under the name José. ‘Short of murder, I have an intimate knowledge of everything I write about,’ he says. To know, he is quick to point out, does not necessarily mean to practice.’I have no chains under my bed,’ he smiles. ‘Only writing paper.’

It is actually a roll of adding machine paper he carries on his ramblings and uses for first drafts. A gypsy by nature, Kosinski shuttles between apartments in New York and Switzerland, with frequent detours to polo fields. Wherever he is, Kosinski has access to lethal chemicals. ‘I’m not a suicide freak, but I want to be free,’ he says. ‘If I ever have an accident or a terminal disease that would affect my mind or my body, I will end it.'”

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“You’re Gonna Be Exposed To Diachronic Time”

December 7, 2011 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Anthony Burgess, Jerzy Kosinski, and Barbara Howar turn the tables on Dick Cavett, 1974. Nice socks, Tony.

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Classic Film: Being There (1979)

April 22, 2011 in Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Not so long ago in America, when privacy was still an option and TV was the dominant medium, we feared that maybe this box could prove us idiots, that it could be used to dupe us at the highest levels, that Trilateral Commissions could fool us with Manchurian Candidates, that we could elect a President who was a propped-up simpleton or even an enemy among us. Now, of course, with the Internet’s constant flow of information and crowdsourcing vetting each candidate, all of those fears should be banished. But, of course, they’ve just been heightened. Hal Ashby’s picture-perfect realization of Jerzy Kosinski’s rich 1971 novella, Being There, written during the era when television was considered the problem with us, provides some clues to this phenomenon, though probably not the ones it intended.

Chance (Peter Sellers) is a mentally-challenged gardener who’s worked his entire life at the Washington D.C. home of man who has just passed away. Chance, who’s never left the grounds or learned to read or write, has learned all his life lessons from watching television. (“I like to watch,” he tells all he meets, often having has mantra to passivity misunderstood.) Since he’s not mentioned in the old man’s will, he’s evicted by lawyers. Forced into a spinning world he’s previously encountered only on the static tube, the bewildered man has unlikely good luck when he is hit by a limo carrying the wife of a political power broker. His injury is slight, but Eve (Shirley MacLaine) takes Chance in, and she and her sickly kingmaker husband (Melvyn Douglas) are enchanted by him, mistaking his opacity for wisdom, believing through a series of misunderstandings that he is a financial hotshot named “Chauncey Gardner.” Soon, Chance has met with the President (Jack Warden) and been quoted on TV by the beleaguered Commander in Chief. A lonely nation turns its eyes to Chance, and in addition to advising the President, he is soon being considered a potential candidate himself for the nation’s highest office.

George W. Bush was essentially the final TV candidate, so why have conspiracy theories been trumped up in an age when so little can be hidden? Perhaps if there is no unknown to fear we create it. Perhaps, like Chance, we like to watch, but what we really love is to see what we want to see.•

 

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“People Are Absorbed In The Most Common Denominator, The Visual”

January 20, 2011 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Like a lot of people who move to New York to reinvent themselves, Jerzy Kosinksi was a tangle of fact and fiction that couldn’t easily be unknotted. He was lauded and reviled, labeled as brilliant and a plagiarist, called fascinating and a fraud. The truth, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between. Kosinski was a regular on talk shows, at book parties and at Plato’s Retreat. He acted in Reds and posed for magazine covers. But he was too haunted to be a bon vivant, and in 1991, the author committed suicide.

Kosinski did an interview with The Paris Review in 1972. He opined about what he felt was the ever-dwindling importance of written and verbal language. He was very concerned by how much people liked to watch. Since his death, the Internet has supplanted TV as the premium medium, allowing people to write and publish more words than ever before, though that hasn’t really halted our drift deeper into pictures.

An excerpt:

Question:

Since you often teach English, what is your feeling about the future of the written word?

Jerzy Kosinski: 

I think its place has always been at the edge of popular culture. Indeed, it is the proper place for it. Reading novels–serious novels, anyhow–is an experience limited to a very small percentage of the so-called enlightened public. Increasingly, it’s going to be a pursuit for those who seek unusual experiences, moral fetishists perhaps, people of heightened imagination, the troubled pursuers of the enlightened self.

Question:

Why such a limited audience?

Jerzy Kosinski:

Today, people are absorbed in the most common denominator, the visual. It requires no education to watch TV. It knows no age limit. Your infant child can watch the same program you do. Witness its role in the homes of the old and incurably sick. Television is everywhere. It has the immediacy which the evocative medium of language doesn’t. Language requires some inner triggering; television doesn’t. The image is ultimately accessible, i.e., extremely attractive. And, I think, ultimately deadly, because it tuns the viewer into a bystander. 

Of course, that’s a situation we have always dreamt of . . . the ultimate hope of religion was that it would release us from trauma. Television actually does so. It “proves” that you can always be an observer of the tragedies of others. The fact that one day you will die in front of the live show is irrelevant—you are reminded about it no more than you are reminded about real weather existing outside the TV weather program. You’re not told to open your window and take a look; television will never say that. It says, instead, “The weather today is . . .” and so forth. The weatherman never says, “If you don’t believe me, go find out.”

From way back, our major development as a race of frightened beings has been toward how to avoid facing the discomfort of our existence, primarily the possibility of an accident, immediate death, ugliness, and the ultimate departure. In terms of all this, television is a very pleasing medium: one is always the observer. The life of discomfort is always accorded to others, and even this is disqualified, since one program immediately disqualifies the preceding one. Literature does not have this ability to soothe. You have to evoke, and by evoking, you yourself have to provide your own inner setting. When you read about a man who dies, part of you dies with him because you have to recreate his dying inside your head.

Question:

That doesn’t happen with the visual?

Jerzy Kosinski:

No, because he dies on the screen in front of you, and at any time you can turn it off or select another program. The evocative power is torpedoed by the fact that this is another man; your eye somehow perceives him as a visual object. Thus, of course, television is my ultimate enemy and it will push reading matter—including The Paris Review—to the extreme margin of human experience.•

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