The celebrated and reviled Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski
was a fantasist in a good cause-namely, art and himself. He’s a fascinating
subject for a play, which is, of course, another good cause and fantastic
illusion.
On the one hand, Kosinski’s award-winning 1965
autobiographical novel of the Holocaust, The
Painted Bird, made him a literary celebrity but was exposed as a lie. The Village Voice claimed that he had fabricated
his childhood role in the harrowing novel and that he didn’t even write
his own books, and there’s truth-it seems-to the allegations.
On the other hand, Kosinski-born Jerzy Lewinkopfin 1933-was
also his own creation. He re-invented himself in America like many an
immigrant, including his fellow Pole, Roman Polanski. And re-invention is,
after all, the tried and true American Way. He was a mystery who understood the
fame game. But if one of his works of art was himself, he knew the cracks and
flaws in his own creation. In 1991, as if destroying the pages of a soiled
manuscript in order to begin again, he killed himself.
A bright, engaging charmer who apparently seduced women with
ease, Kosinski was a talk-show gift and one of the last celebrity writers.
Those punch-drunk prizefighters, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, have faded along
with Tom Wolfe’s white suit. Yet it’s astonishing how many novelists and
playwrights were famous in the really, really famous sense-Dickens, Shaw and
Wilde before television, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward and poor old Truman
Capote, Messrs. Mailer and Vidal in the TV age. They’ve all been replaced by
celebrity chefs.
W.H. Auden claimed that Goethe of The Sorrows of Young Werther was the first writer or artist to
become a Public Celebrity. “There had always been poets, painters and composers
who were known to and revered by their fellow artists,” Auden wrote. “But the
general public, however much it may have admired their works, would not have
dreamed of wishing to make their personal acquaintance.” How quaint and
disapproving he sounds. But the need to make the acquaintance of the famous,
the need to know everything about them, is the spirit of our times and led to
Kosinski’s downfall.
Davey Holmes’ More
Lies About Jerzy goes in search of the truth about his murky, controversial
life, and the intriguing title promises big Kosinski-like whoppers. If only the
dramatist had liberated his fictionalized hero more! Alas, the drama at the
Vineyard Theatre, though it has its beguiling possibilities, proves too
virtuous to lie well. The play conscientiously covers the bases of Kosinski’s
downfall as if dutifully answering questions to a solemn term paper entitled “Fact
or Fiction: Say Which You Prefer and Why?”
We prefer fiction. We are for pretty and brutal lies in the
cause of poetic truth. So is Mr. Holmes, I assume, who’s telling his own lies
about Jerzy. He’s playing a double game. In its way, More Lies About Jerzy is as much a fabrication as Kosiniski’s The Painted Bird. It’s a fiction based
on fact, but Mr. Holmes’ game isn’t dangerous enough. Perhaps for legal
reasons, he’s coyly given all the real-life characters pseudonyms. Come out,
Jerzy Lesnewski-we know who you are! You’re Jerzy Kosinski!
Small wonder the
investigative journalist, an ambitious dope named Arthur Bausley who’s at the
center of the story, is given to prissy pronouncements about The Responsibility
of Creativity. “Creativity isn’t a gift,” he informs us like some official
censor. “It’s a privilege. There are conditions.” Oh yes? Who’s bestowing the
“privilege”? Who’s making the “conditions”? God-given talent is a gift; there
are no conditions. The second you impose conditions on creativity, it’s over.
But there’s the suspicion that Mr. Holmes has imposed a few
unnecessary restraints on himself. The action, set in 1972, is clogged with
almost 20 years of biography, and it plods. Evidence of Jerzy’s hidden past is
revealed when a childhood photo is conveniently discovered-in his own desk!
Messagesare telegraphed. Thefetching Gretchen Egolf, playing the starry-eyed,
gullible mistress Georgia, strips naked to prove some obvious point to our
goading hero about “naked feelings,” and rarely has an actress undressed
onstage with less interest in the outcome. Then again, the over-devoted
ex-lover of Jerzy, who’s a lady with her own dark secrets, concludes: “If you
say a thing is beautiful, has meaning and purpose, then it does.”
It’s a tad glib. The dramatist is saying that all truth is
personal, or relative. But the Kosinski or Lesnewski revealed onstage-played
expansively by Jared Harris in tight multi-colored shirts and leopard
underpants-is one wild and crazy guy. He’s showily neurotic rather than alluring;
obnoxious, not charming. It’s hard to see how Kosinski ever became a magnet for
such adoration and curiosity.
I must say that when I met him in the 1980’s I found him a
compelling, intellectually vivacious man, though I never got to know him. I
asked about the accusations calling him a liar. He said they were all lies! I
remember now that we talked about his 1979 script for Being There starring Peter Sellers and how much I had enjoyed it
(though it wasn’t a critical success). The film is a fable about a simpleton
named Chance who’s a gardener, and how he accidentally becomes known as Chauncy
Gardner, a revered statesman and adviser to Presidents. In truth he’s a moron,
an empty shell who loves television. In “reality,” he becomes a famous public
figure and the wisest man in America.
Jerzy Kosinski may have had his faults, but he was
prescient.
Getting Jumped
Boredom is the great danger of theater, as you know. But
don’t take my typically upbeat word for it. “The greatest guiding principle I
know of in my work, the one to which I always pay the most attention, is
boredom,” wrote Peter Brook (who often falls asleep at the theater, though
never during his own productions). “In the theatre, boredom, like the slyest of
devils, can appear at any moment. The slightest thing and he jumps on you, he’s
waiting and he’s voracious.”
I must admit regretfully that I haven’t felt jumped on so
voraciously as I did during Paradise
Island, staged by the admired New Group, which first produced Kenneth
Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth. The new
production is a mother-and-daughter play of such numbing, whining, neurotic
banality that it sinks you in blanket boredom and will not let you go. Let’s
not make matters worse by checking off the names.
“The spark is what matters,” Mr. Brook wrote, “and the spark
is rarely there …. One must never pretend that what one is doing is
automatically interesting, and never say to oneself that the audience is bad.
It is true there are sometimes very bad audiences, but one must rigorously
refuse to say so, for the simple reason that one can never expect an audience
to be good. There are only easy audiences and less easy ones, and our job is to
make every audience good.”
Amen to that.
