So, if the novelist is a tale-spinner, a fabricator, (a liar?), what limits should we place on him? What is "the integrity of the artist?"
When six-year-old Jerzy Kosinski became separated from his parents he was given up for dead; he spent the next three years roaming the Polish countryside, witnessing and suffering such atrocities that he was struck dumb, recovering his speech only years later when, now reclaimed by his parents from an orphanage and enrolled in a school for the handicapped, he was jolted back to speech by a skiing accident.
Or so the story went, until a 1982 Village Voice article challenged it and just about everything else about Kosinski. A 1996 biography by James Park Sloan maintains that the main accusations are indeed true. These include the revelation that The Painted Bird, which Kosinski either promoted as an autobiographical novel or allowed to be so interpreted, was the furthest thing from personal experience: the Kosinskis remained together throughout the war, safe and even comfortable.
Noting Kosinski's inability to express himself clearly in written English, Sloan says that he hired teams of editors to virtually ghostwrite his books, and that Being There, his 1971 hit, was not only polished by hirelings but Polish in origin, the plot stolen from a book published in the 30s back home.
Some Jewish critics say that, whether true of Kosinski's youth or not, The Painted Bird is still a powerful and representative book; some Polish critics say that Polish peasants could not have committed such atrocities upon him or anyone. Some praise the book as a simply-told parable.
In Being There, much of the above seems to reappear as theme -- the almost-mute Chauncey Gardiner, the parable truths concocted from nothing much, the rise to fame in a world of spin and re-spin.
Kosinski's literary reputation certainly went into a tailspin; when he committed suicide in 1991, some cited the allegations as cause.
(from Steve King)
When six-year-old Jerzy Kosinski became separated from his parents he was given up for dead; he spent the next three years roaming the Polish countryside, witnessing and suffering such atrocities that he was struck dumb, recovering his speech only years later when, now reclaimed by his parents from an orphanage and enrolled in a school for the handicapped, he was jolted back to speech by a skiing accident.
Or so the story went, until a 1982 Village Voice article challenged it and just about everything else about Kosinski. A 1996 biography by James Park Sloan maintains that the main accusations are indeed true. These include the revelation that The Painted Bird, which Kosinski either promoted as an autobiographical novel or allowed to be so interpreted, was the furthest thing from personal experience: the Kosinskis remained together throughout the war, safe and even comfortable.
Noting Kosinski's inability to express himself clearly in written English, Sloan says that he hired teams of editors to virtually ghostwrite his books, and that Being There, his 1971 hit, was not only polished by hirelings but Polish in origin, the plot stolen from a book published in the 30s back home.
Some Jewish critics say that, whether true of Kosinski's youth or not, The Painted Bird is still a powerful and representative book; some Polish critics say that Polish peasants could not have committed such atrocities upon him or anyone. Some praise the book as a simply-told parable.
In Being There, much of the above seems to reappear as theme -- the almost-mute Chauncey Gardiner, the parable truths concocted from nothing much, the rise to fame in a world of spin and re-spin.
Kosinski's literary reputation certainly went into a tailspin; when he committed suicide in 1991, some cited the allegations as cause.
(from Steve King)
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