12/31/22
Newsletter #205
The Crack of Dawn
I’m an extremely author-centric reader, and have been since I was a kid. If I find an author I like, I read all of their books. I started off with James Michener, then Isaac Asimov. Since Asimov had already written at least 300 books, most of which were non-fiction, I revised my concept to all of Asimov’s sci-fi books.
I stumbled upon Jerzy Kosinski (born Józef Lewinkopf; Polish: [ˈjɛʐɨ kɔˈɕij̃skʲi]) when I was 18, starting right off with his most powerful book, The Painted Bird, written in 1965. It is the story of a young Jewish boy in Poland during WWII. The boy’s parents are taken away to a concentration camp and he is left to fend for himself for the rest of the war. It's a severely powerful story. It’s a short book, and I think I read it in about two hours. Although I’ve never read it again, I can remember a lot of it. Apparently, the story is similar to Roman Polanski’s early youth. Kosinski and Polanski became good friends in film school in Łódź, Poland – I have relatives from there. It’s pronounced, “Uh-dege.”
Jerzy Kosinski’s fame is based on another of his short novels, Being There, that he wrote in 1970. It was made into a beloved movie in 1979 (Kosinski co-wrote the script), but I never felt that the movie caught the flavor of the book. Also, I think you can read the short book faster than watching the overlong movie (130 minutes. Directed by Hal Ashby, who won the Oscar as Best Editor in 1967 for In the Heat of the Night, a snappy movie, and my biggest gripe with the movie, Being There, is that it’s cut too slow). As always, read the book.
Jerzy Kosinski was not only good friends with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, but he was also friends with Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger, and had introduced the couple to each other, who were also killed by the Manson family. Kosinski said that we was invited over that evening, but got caught in NY over a baggage mix-up.
But Jerzy Kosinski wrote a bunch of books besides those two novellas – Steps, Cockpit, Blind Date, The Devil Tree, Passion Play, Pinball – that are all interesting, weird, exciting, perverted, and all seem disconcertingly and strangely true. I repeatedly kept getting a sense that he really did this some of this shit; that maybe he was a CIA agent or something. His characters have multiple identities, keys to apartments hidden all over the world, many bank accounts, all kinds of stuff stashed all over the place, just in case. And none of these books were ever made into movies. I have not reread any of these books since I first read them in the late 1970s and 1980s, but many of them seemed like obvious movies to me. I’m surprised that so few films came out of Kosinski’s oeuvre. There’s still time.
As I wrote this I came across The Painted Bird (2019), a Polish, black & white feature with a surprisingly good cast, including: Stellan Skarsgård, Udo Kier, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, and Barry Pepper. The trailer looks severely and unrelentingly grim. I don’t remember the book being grim. It was continually shocking, and really did seem like a 9-year-old’s perspective and understanding of these events. Such as: the boy sees a train go past across the Polish countryside. It is on its way to Auschwitz. Something in bundles is keeps coming out the small high windows of the train cars, then bouncing along the ground. When the boy goes to see what the bundles are, they’re swathed babies, all dead. That’s a thing he sees one day. He sees many things.
Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide on May 3, 1991 at the age of 57. While taking a bath he ingested a lethal amount of alcohol and drugs, wrapped his head in a heavy- duty plastic trash bag, then duct-taped the living shit out of it, suffocating himself to death. His suicide note read: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity.”
Life was difficult for him. Shit, he saw way too much way too early. And beyond anything else, it’s difficult to write ten books. And he wrote good books. As an artist he was a great success.