“Very few care for beauty; but anyone can be interested in gossip.”
—C.S. Lewis

In 1982 The Village Voice published an article accusing the famous Polish emigre writer Jerzy Kosinski of being a fraud. The authors (Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith) argued that Kosinski’s novels had all received extensive and unacknowledged “help” from various editorial assistants; that Kosinski’s most famous novel, The Painted Bird (1965), had probably been published under false pretenses, at a time when Kosinski could not even write English; and that Kosinski’s earliest books, hostile nonfiction accounts of life in the Soviet Union, had perhaps been written for him by agents of the CIA. The thesis of Stokes and Fremont-Smith was that once The Painted Bird became a big literary success, Kosinski became permanently “trapped” in the public persona of a writer—and a writer in English, to boot—and that he was thereafter forced to publish more novels (with necessary professional help) in order to maintain the basically fraudulent image he had acquired. It is not clear why this story should ever have received any credence. Though the article was termed “meticulously researched” (if fundamentally misguided) by The Washington Post as late as this year, it was, in fact, based on the word of witnesses who suddenly reneged on crucial testimony, or later angrily claimed to have been misquoted or misinterpreted, and on rumors planted in the US by the Polish secret police (as The New York Times has shown) as far back as the 1960’s. Moreover, the very idea that someone would feel so “trapped” in the public persona of a writer as then to go on to write seven more novels was improbable on its face. This is especially true considering the severe risks of exposure Kosinski would have faced each and every time he published, if he were actually using the fraudulent method of composition (via “assistants”) which The Village Voice claimed.

The Village Voice scandal was just one of those bizarre occurrences that have marked Jerzy Kosinski’s life. Sometimes his luck has been good: he missed being murdered by the Manson Gang at Sharon Tate’s house in 1969 because his luggage got lost on the plane from Paris to New York; and as a child, of course, he missed being murdered by the Nazis. But sometimes his luck has been bad, as in the sudden death (by stroke) of his beloved first wife, Mary Weir—or here, with The Village Voice. No wonder that in Being There (1970) he named one of his heroes “Chance”! Nevertheless, The Village Voice scandal damaged Kosinski’s reputation, at least momentarily. No matter how unfair the original article, how flimsy its evidence, or how transparently political the motives of the authors (who clearly believed that only CIA stooges could want to write books attacking communism), it was impossible for Kosinski completely to defend himself.

The Hermit of 69th Street is, in more ways than one, Kosinski’s revenge. The new novel is massive, brilliant, often bitter. The last half centers on a fictionalized version of the scandal and its impact. The stand-ins for Stokes and Fremont-Smith are, naturally, treated in an entertainingly savage way: as smug Stalinoid-Nazi literary goons. And the notorious “editorial assistants” are transformed into representatives of a high-priced call-girl service—whose performances with Kosinski’s hero, the hapless and basically innocent writer “Kosky,” give him little satisfaction indeed. Conversely, Kosinski evolves a hilarious (but frighteningly self-punitive) fantasy in which Kosky, because of the scandal, fails to sell even a single copy of his new novel anywhere in the world—and loses his beautiful New York apartment as well.

But that is the book, only at one level, the level of the plot. Kosinski has taken on The Village Voice and its accusations about his inability to write English by filling every page of The Hermit of 69th Street with multiple puns, assonance, onomatopoeia—linguistic fireworks of all sorts. Kosinski was always a stylist: avant-garde, plain, baroque, romantic, depending on his mood. But here he reveals himself as a true—even arrogant—master of sophisticated and elegant English expression.

And there is yet another level on which Kosinski satirizes the charges concerning his authorial originality: he throws in every possible source for “Kosky’s” ideas in continuous running footnotes at the bottom of every page, combining these with boldface quotations (from every imaginable personage from Heinrich Himmler to Mae West) interspersed right in the main text. The result is, simply, a brand new novelistic form: utterly original, and often fascinating (but sometimes—as in the lengthy disquisitions on Tantric Yoga philosophy of which “Kosky” is fond—interminable and irritating). Kosinski calls this new novelistic form “autofiction.” It insistently interrupts the reader’s normal immersion in the narrative, i.e., the willing acceptance of the-novel-as-reality, and forces the reader constantly to be aware that.he is reading someone’s artificially designed text. Deconstructionists should love it.

Kosinski’s experiments with prose format, however, may in the long run not be as important as the new emotional openness which characterizes The Hermit. Since the grotesque and violent Steps (1968)—for which, given the mood of the times, he won a National Book Award—Kosinski’s novels have tended to become ever less surreal in tone, less bizarre, less totally nihilistic. Thus Pinball (1981)—his last major work before The Hermit—is the most approachable and optimistic of all Kosinski’s books. It even has a relatively happy ending. The comic pessimism of The Hermit therefore represents something of a return to an earlier Kosinski; and yet what is striking is that here, for the first time since The Painted Bird, Kosinski also tries once more to confront directly the major trauma of his life: the Holocaust. And in doing so, he establishes two new and direct claims to personal identity, in areas where he has previously been evasive. He is now willing to say openly and repeatedly that he is a Jew, and that he is a Pole.

It was only because Polish peasants hid him from the Nazis that the child Kosinski survived in 1939-1945 (his family did not). Not surprisingly, the theme of “concealment”—hiding, masks—has been a dominant one in his life: “Kosinski” itself is in fact only an assumed name. Moreover, after the publication of The Painted Bird, Kosinski sometimes emitted ambiguous signals concerning his own Jewishness; and though most of his fictional heroes over the past 20 years have been Eastern Europeans, none has been recognizably a Jew. The Hermit, however, has in “Kosky” a sympathetic Jewish protagonist who often meditates on the Holocaust; moreover, Kosinski writes at length and with compassion concerning Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish “ruler” of the Lodz Ghetto, who faced the terrible choice between immediate and complete annihilation of his people, or the slim possibility that some might survive via his (and their) cooperation with their Nazi oppressors. He retells once more some of his own adventures as a terrified child fleeing from the murderers. And the Nazi symbol “SS” appears on just about every page (although Kosinski gives “SS” kaleidoscopically-changing secondary meanings: for instance, “Safe Sex”!). But Kosinski would also agree with Jacob Neusner that the central meaning of the Jewish experience must be Mt. Sinai, not Auschwitz. And so we get (in the indispensable footnotes) a large dose of Talmud, and Hasidic religious philosophy as well, enriching the entire book. (None of this material has ever appeared in Kosinski’s novels before, and his ease with it comes as a shock.) It is no accident that just this winter Kosinski visited Israel for the first time.

But beyond this, Kosinski has also, in The Hermit, come to terms with being a specific part of the Polish community. The Communist government in Poland for 20 years savagely attacked The Painted Bird for being “anti-Polish,” because it depicted the crudity and brutality of Polish peasant life during the war. This charge was always unfair: peasants often are crude, and life in the countryside during a war is often brutal. But now in The Hermit, Kosinski goes out of his way to emphasize a fact probably little-known to most of his readers: the terrible suffering of the non-Jewish population of Poland under Nazi rule. It was not as terrible as the suffering of the Jews, but it was terrible enough. Kosinski emphasizes that literally millions of Poles were murdered by the Nazis, and further millions enslaved: perhaps a third of the entire people. Similarly, with this emphasis on a community of suffering, Kosinski emphasizes his impression that prewar Polish-Jewish relations were relatively good, and that Poles and Jews were in the process of creating together a great national literature. Finally, he emphasizes that he himself is alive only because dozens of Poles risked their lives to protect a Jewish child.

Here Kosinski makes an important contribution to the debate currently raging in Poland over national behavior before and during the Holocaust. This debate was initiated by the great Solidarity independent trade union (for which Kosinski was an important international spokesman), and was pushed further forward by the film Shoah. Kosinski’s position seems to be that one should be amazed and thankful that any moral behavior occurred in Poland in 1939-1945, given the situation created by the Nazis (with a little help, of course, from the USSR): as he is sympathetic toward Chaim Rumkowski’s predicament, so he is sympathetic toward the Poles. In fact, Kosinski is currently chairman of the American Foundation for Polish-Jewish Studies. And this spring, after 32 years of enforced exile, he was suddenly invited to make an official visit to Poland, to read (in English!) from his novels. Such, of course, is the momentary effect of glasnost.

Thus from being a man without a country in 1956, Jerzy Kosinski now seems on the verge of becoming a man with three of them (Israel, Poland, and the United States). The Hermit of 69th Street is therefore more than a novel of comic revenge against the Voice (though, to be sure, it is that as well). Massive and complex, the book is not for everyone; but it marks an important way-station along Kosinski’s road of development, and deals insightfully with the entire question of self-identity. Does this mean, however, that in The Hermit of 69th Street we are finally getting a glimpse of “the real Jerzy Kosinski”? Probably not. We can still be glad that we’ve been invited along for the ride. 

[The Hermit of 69th Street, by Jerzy Kosinski (New York: Seaver Books (Henry Holt & Co.)) $19.95]