The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski, literary fraud

Roman Polanski and Jerzy Kosinski.

I see there's a movie version of The Painted Bird out based on the book by literary fraud Jerzy Kosinki. Kosinski was Polish and Jewish. He and his family spent the Nazi occupation living comfortably in a Polish village. If the Nazis found them, they would have burned the village with the villagers in it. There was nothing in it for the people there to hide a Jewish family among them. And to thank them, Kosinski wrote the book he claimed was autobiographical portraying them as essentially subhuman.

So I watched a documentary on You Tube called The Painted Boy, made years ago after Kosinski's suicide. They talked with writers and journalists who knew him or reported on him. Most of them seemed to take both sides at the same time. They knew he was a fraud but they still assumed that The Painted Bird was true.

The literary editor for The Nation magazine said that she had gotten a letter from him which was so crudely written that she realized that he couldn't possibly have written books in English.

She talked with others about it. There were already rumors about him and, in 1982, an article appeared in The Village Voice accusing him of plagiarism using ghost writers and translators to write his books for him. He had started out as a front for the CIA putting a pen name on anti-Communist tracts they had written.

When Being There became available in Poland, critics there pointed out similarities to a Polish novel written in the 1930's.

I don't know if he actually reformed after he was exposed. I heard that at a public event, someone asked him why the Poles didn't save the Jews from the Nazis. He asked why the Jews didn't save the Poles. The Nazis murdered millions of Polish Christians. They were in no position to be of any help to anyone.

The one time I heard Kosinski was on the old Larry King radio show. Someone asked about Poland and anti-Semitism and I suppose collaboration with the Nazis. He mentioned one fact, that Poland was the only country under Nazi occupation where the Germans would kill entire families if they were found to be harboring Jews.

I looked Kosinski up on Wikipedia several years ago. It had both versions of his history, both stated as fact. They briefly recounted the story of The Painted Bird as if it were true and, a couple of paragraphs later, gave his real history.

There are people who defended him doing this, using ghost writers and translators. In fact, the author of the article in the Village Voice thought that if Kosinski had just said how he did it, it would have been fine, or he had refused to discuss his writing process at all, there wouldn't have been a problem. But he didn't do that.

His work for the CIA may have been a good part of the problem. If he admitted he didn't write his books, he would have to admit that he didn't write the stuff the CIA had published. He'd have to admit that he had been a front for the U.S. government which would have destroyed his credibility.

I don't plan to see The Painted Bird. It may be like other frauds---like Sleepers or that Whitley Streiber flying saucer book---where things that seem plausible on paper look absurd under the merciless glare of the klieg lights. If you see the movie, you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it was fiction although worse things have happened.

It's what I hated about Good Will Hunting. There's something really repulsive about a fan fiction-like fantasy about having been a horribly abused child.