He had watched and heard her play Chopin’s Seventh Etude in C-sharp Minor, one of Chopin’s greatest, most nostalgic works, but also the longest, most complex, perhaps most difficult cantabile for the left hand ever written. In her hands the etude’s two melodic themes, two voices—the impulsive male, the soulful female—had been brilliantly distinct, as reluctant to fuse as to separate, passionate in their remote keys, hushed in the quiet interludes, then culminating with classical precision in the immense breadth of the dominant theme. As he listened he recalled a time when she had played this etude for him and he had recited Chopin’s words of advice: “One’s aim is not to play everything with an even tone. The property of a developed technique is to combine a variety of shading.”
In Warsaw, Donna had not forgotten her lessons at the Old Glory. He had seen how composed she was when the computer tallied the votes of the jury and declared her the clear winner, how graceful and dignified she remained in accepting her prize. He had admired the tact and wisdom of her short speech and been profoundly touched by her brief mention of al; she had said it was a quality she felt she shared, through the music of Chopin, with all the people of Poland. He had seen and read about the reception given her at elazowa Wola, the composer’s birthplace, and about the open-air concert she had given in the shipyards of Gdansk, the birthplace of Solidarity, where she was surrounded by thousands of working men and women who cheered her as if she had come out of their own ranks to win the coveted prize.
Then he had met her at the airport, amid the incredible hullabaloo the media staged for her arrival, and had driven her, tired but excited, straight to the RCA Building to tape the talk show he was now watching.
The show’s host made a gesture of invitation; Donna rose, and the cameras followed her as she walked to the center of the stage and sat down at the grand piano. While she played, the camera angles alternated: there were images of her hands on the keyboard, close-ups of her face, long shots of her body, and close-ups of her feet on the pedals.
As he watched Donna play on the screen, watched her calm, studied movements and her perfect poise, he thought of the other side of her he knew. He remembered her as his lover, who after piano practice had run to him desperate in her need. He thought of her, her cheeks flushed, taking her clothes off with a moan on her lips, then helping him undress, throwing off the pillows and bed cover, pulling him down onto the bed, sinking to his groin, her hands and mouth on him, twisting and straining and stretching, until he would lay her down like a baby with a fever, and prompted by her clenched teeth, her thrashing legs, the shaking of her hands, her sudden cries, her rumpled hair, the look in her eyes, her flailing body, he would spear her with all his strength, his feelings flowing into her from the center of a persona that seemed no longer his own—from an archaic self, a self without a name, whose existence he knew of but could not identify. He remembered her in what seemed like a sensual trance, wrapping herself around him, clinging to his shoulders and thighs as though an inch of space between them would create an unleapable chasm. Then her lips and tongue would seek his mouth, and she would scream and cry at his every movement. After recoiling in an orgasm, she would rush back to him, pleading for more, drenched in sweat, weeping; she would hug him, only to disengage herself, almost brutally, and then, biting her tongue, her eyes cast down, her fists clenched, she would hit him again and again on his face and chest until, in order to defend himself, he would pin her down, his arms on hers, his knees over her shoulders. She would stop for an instant, and then, pleading, grabbing his hips, she would crawl under his legs and bury her head between his thighs. At her climax, screaming and crying, her orgasm ripping through her, she would strain under him, her breath ragged, her lips dry; she would not let him pull away from her but would cling to him, quaking, refusing to stop, urging him to move against and inside her, to restore the tension she felt slipping away, to prolong the release that was already fading.
On the television screen, Donna finished the short piece, bowed gracefully to the audience, and then went back to chat again with the host. She was his final guest, and at the end of the show the two of them got up and waved at the audience, their silent image quickly obliterated by a beer commercial. Domostroy finished his Cuba Libre, gave his place to a standing customer, and stepped away from the bar.
At the billiard table two pool sharks argued over a point of strategy. In a telephone booth, a drunken middleaged woman, screaming incoherently into the receiver, caught Domostroy’s curious glance and, furious at him, kicked the door shut. Next to the billiard table three youths apathetically fought star wars on the screen of an electronic computer game, and in a space adjacent to the bar an elderly black couple hesitantly tap-danced to the rock from the jukebox.
It was late, almost too late to do anything but go to sleep, and he wasn’t sleepy. By now, back at her Carnegie Hall studio, fatigued by her TV performance, Donna must know that he would not be coming to be with her, that she would sleep alone.
Once again, he thought of the note Donna had sent him from Warsaw: “If you haven’t guessed it yet, I love you. If I am reluctant to admit it even to myself, it is because I am unsure as to where I stand in your life.”
His decision not to see Donna weighed on him like a heavy cloak. The awful events at the Old Glory had stained his reputation; the gossip columns had brought back the past in allusions to his unsavory conduct. Even his music had come, once again, under attack, being described as derivative and unwholesome with a tendency toward disagreeable dissonance. It was obvious that his presence would not benefit Donna’s public image, and so he decided to leave her alone. She had to be alone, in order to go from one success to the next, as she undoubtedly would; just as he, a witness to failure—which might one day still befall her, as it might any artist—had to remain alone, in his own refuge.
He had nothing to do, nowhere to go. He could always take the car out. He’d heard about an artist’s loft in Soho where a group called A Better Way to Love held after-hours encounters—but it was raining, and he dreaded driving all the way downtown with his windshield wipers on, their measured sweeps reminding him of a metronome.
He turned to a pinball machine, a popular model called the Mata Hari, its ONE TO FOUR CAN PLAY and GAME OVER signs still flashing from the previous game. Hie Mata Hari’s lighted glass panel portrayed a scantily clad woman reclining voluptuously on a sofa and triumphantly handing a document to an elderly gentleman. The picture’s caption read, “The secret map, Baronl” Domostroy’s eyes lingered on the woman, young and slender, the curves of her body delectably smooth and sensuous.
He dropped a coin into the slot. Where GAME OVER had been a second before, BEGIN GAME now began to flash at him. He pressed the button, and the first ball popped up into the shaft, but for a moment Patrick Domostroy could not make up his mind whether to play it or not.
ON KOSINSKI
Jerzy Kosinski has lived through—and now makes
use of—some of the strongest direct experience
that this century has had to offer.
TIME
To appreciate the violent, ironic, suspenseful, morally demanding world of Jerzy Kosinski’s novels, one must first acknowledge the random succession of pain and joy, wealth and poverty, persecution and approbation that have made his own life often as eventful as those of his fictional creations.
He was born in Poland. The Holocaust of World War II claimed all but two members of his once numerous family. During the war, sent by his parents to the safety of a foster parent in a distant village, he eventually found himself fleeing alone from place to place, working as a farm hand, gaining his knowledge of nature, animal life—and survival.
At the age of nine, in a traumatic confrontation with a hostile crowd, he lost the power of speech. After the war, reunited with his ailing parents he regained his voice in a skiing accident.
During his studies at the state-controlled Stalinist college and university in Poland he was suspended twice and ofte
n threatened with expulsion for his rejection of the official Marxist doctrine. While a Ph.D. candidate in sociology, he became an aspirant (assistant professor) and grantee of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the state’s highest research institution, where he specialized in the study of individual versus collectivity and the sociology of American family life. Attempting to free himself from state-imposed collectivity, he would spend winters as a ski instructor in the Tatra Mountains, and summers as a social counselor at a Baltic sea resort.
Meanwhile, secretly, he plotted his escape. A confident master of bureaucratic judo, Kosinski pitted himself against the State, which had already refused to grant him and his parents permission to emigrate to the West. In need of official sponsors, and reluctant to implicate his family, his friends and the academy staff, he created four distinguished—but fictitious—members of the Academy of Sciences to act in that capacity. As a member of the Academy’s inner circle and a prize-winning photographer (with many exhibitions to his credit), Kosinski was able to furnish each academician with the appropriate official seals, rubber stamps and stationery. After two years of active correspondence between his fictitious sponsors and the various government agencies, Kosinski obtained an official passport allowing him to study in the United States under the auspices of an equally fictitious American bank “foundation” and to pay for his ticket to New York in local currency. While waiting for his U.S. visa, expecting to be arrested at any time, Kosinski carried a foil-wrapped egg of cyanide in his pocket. His punishment, had he been caught, would have been many years in prison. “One way or another,” he vowed, “they won’t be able to keep me here against my will.” But his plan worked. In December 1957, following what he still considers the singularly creative act of his life, Kosinski arrived in New York able to—as a result of his sociological studies—read and write in English without any difficulty, though only with a rudimentary knowledge of spoken American idiom. “I left behind being an inner emigré trapped in spiritual exile,” he says. “America was to give shelter to my real self and I wanted to become its writer-in-residence.” He was twenty-four years of age—his American story was about to begin.
He started his life in the United States as a part-time truck driver, moonlighting as a parking lot attendant, a cinema projectionist, a photographer, and a driver for a black nightclub entrepreneur. “By working in Harlem as a white, uniformed chauffeur I broke a color barrier of the profession,” he recalls. Studying English whenever he could, he perfected it well enough to enroll as a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and obtain a Ford Foundation fellowship. Two years later, as a student of social psychology, he wrote The Future Is Ours, Comrade, a collection of essays on collective behavior—the first of his two nonfiction studies. An instant bestseller, it was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post and condensed by Reader’s Digest He was firmly set on a writing career.
After his publishing debut he met Mary Weir, the widow of a steel magnate from Pittsburgh. They dated for two years and were married after the publication of No Third Path, Kosinski’s second nonfiction.
During the years with Mary Weir (which ended with her death) Kosinski moved with utmost familiarity in the world of heavy industry, big business and high society. He and Mary traveled a great deal—there were a private plane, a multi-crew boat, and homes and vacation retreats in Pittsburgh, New York, Hobe Sound, Southampton, Paris, London and Florence. He led a life most novelists only invent in the pages of their novels.
“During my marriage, I had often thought that it was Stendhal or F. Scott Fitzgerald, both preoccupied with wealth they themselves did not have, who deserved to have had my experience,” Kosinski once said. “At first, I considered writing a novel about my immediate American experience, the dimension of wealth, power and high society that surrounded me. But during my marriage I was too much a part of that world to extract from it the nucleus of what I felt. As a writer, I perceived fiction as the art of imaginative projection and so, instead, I decided to write my first novel about a homeless boy in war-torn Eastern Europe, an existence I’d once led and also one that was shared by millions of others like me, yet was still foreign to most Americans. This novel, The Painted Bird, was my gift to Mary, and to my new world’”
His following novels—Steps, Being There, The Devil Tree, Cockpit, Blind Date, Passion Play and Pinbcll, all links in an elaborate fictional cycle, were inspired by particular events of his life and written in Kosinski’s own unmistakable, highly individual style. He would often draw on the experience he had gained when, once a “Don Quixote of the turnpike’” he had become a “Captain Ahab of billionaire’s row.” “Few novelists have a personal background like his to draw on,” wrote the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Translated into many languages, his novels have earned Kosinski the status of an international underground culture hero, accompanied by official recognition: for The Painted Bird, the French Best Foreign Book Award; for Steps, the National Book Award. He was a Guggenheim fellow, received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as the Brith Sholom Humanitarian Freedom Award, the polonia media National Achievement Award, and many others.
While Kosinski was constantly on the move, living and writing in various parts of the United States, Europe and Latin America, tragedy persisted in his life. On his way from Paris to the Beverly Hills home of his friend, film director Roman Polanski, and his wife, Sharon Tate, Kosinski’s luggage was unloaded by mistake in New York. Unable to catch the connecting flight to Los Angeles, Kosinski reluctantly stayed overnight in New York. That very night in Polanski’s household the Charles Manson Helter-Skelter gang murdered five people—among them Kosinski’s closest friends, one of whom he financially assisted in leaving Europe and settling in the States.
For the next few years Kosinski taught English Prose and Criticism at Princeton and Yale. He left university life when he was elected president of American P.E.N., the international association of writers and editors. Reelected, after serving the maximum two terms, a special resolution of the Board of P.E.N. American Center stated that, “… he has shown an imaginative and protective sense of responsibility for writers all over the world. No single member of the American Center can possibly be aware of the full extent of his efforts, but it is clear that they have been extraordinary and that the fruits of what he has achieved will extend far into the future …” Since then, Kosinski has remained active in various American human rights organizations and was honored by the American Civil Liberties Union for his contribution to the First Amendment’s right of free expression. He is proud to have been responsible for freeing from prisons, helping financially, resettling or otherwise giving assistance to a great number of writers, political and religious dissidents and intellectuals all over the world, many of whom openly acknowledged his coming to their rescue.
Called by America “a spokesman for the human capacity to survive in a highly complex social system,” a politically engaged, socially visible and vocal Kosinski has had his share of public notoriety and headline-making controversies. He was often labeled and criticized by the media as an existential cowboy, a Horatio Alger of the nightmare, a penultimate gamesman, the utterly portable man and a mixture of adventurer and social reformer. In an interview for Psychology Today, Kosinski said: “As I have no habits that require maintaining—I don’t even have a favorite menu—the only way for me to live is to be as close to other people as life allows. Not much else stimulates me—and nothing interests me more.”
Traveling extensively, on an average Kosinski wakes up around 8 A.M. ready for the day. Four more hours of sleep in the afternoon allows him to remain mentally and physically active until the early dawn when he retires. This pattern, he claims, benefits his reading and writing, his photography, and practicing of the sports he has favored for years—downhill skiing and polo, which, as an avid all-around horseman, he plays on a team—or one-on-one.
As a screenplay writer, Kosinski adapted for the scre
en his novel, Being There (with Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas and Jack Warden) for which he won Best Screenplay of the Year Award from both the Writers Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); he was also seen on screen giving a highly praised idiosyncratic performance as Grigori Zinoviev in Warren Beatty’s Reds.
A critic once wrote of Kosinski that he “writes his novels so sparsely as though they cost a thousand dollars a word, and a misplaced or misused locution would cost him his life.” He was close to the truth: Kosinski takes almost three years to write a novel, and in manuscript rewrites it a dozen times; later, in subsequent sets of three or four galley and page proofs, he condenses the novel’s text often by one-third. As Kosinski’s publishers often attest, it is such high principled scrupulousness that leads to the remarkable consistency of voice of all his novels. Kosinski said that “writing fiction is the essence of my life—whatever else I do revolves around a constant thought: could I—can I—would I—should I—use it in my next novel? As I have no children, no family, no relatives, no business or estate to speak of, my books are my only spiritual accomplishment.”
“Learning from the best writing of every era”—wrote The Washington Port—“Kosinski develops his own style and technique … in harmony with his need to express new things about our life and the world we do live in, to express the inexpressible. Giving to himself as well as to the reader the same chance for interpretation, he traces the truth in the deepest corners of our outdoor and indoor lives, of our outer appearance and our inner reality. He moves the borderline of writing to more remote, still invisible and untouchable poles, in cold and in darkness. Doing so, he enlarges the borders of the bearable.”