Pinball (42 page)

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 screen 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.”