Tom and Daisy
          “Open wide, darling.”
          “I don’t want no more, Daisy.”
          “But, Tom — have you ever had grapes so juicy and sweet?”
          “I don’t like how the skin’s off ’em.”
          “Well, I deplore the skin. So I had Marie peel them.”
          “I dunno. . . . Seems there’d be a better way for a human bein’ to spend their time than peelin’ grapes. Plenty folks eatin’ grubs and roots to keep alive. But the rich, they gotta have their grapes peeled.”
          “Well, I think it’s marvelous that I have money. It got me you, didn’t it? My great big hairy caveman.”
          “I ain’t no caveman. I only slept in caves when I was runnin’ from the law. I stayed in a house with a roof and floor most all my days.”
          “Or in a jail cell. Don’t you prefer this suite at the Ritz over the cell I rescued you from? Isn’t this lovely soft bed better than a smelly old cot?”
          “I reckon so. But sometimes I get to thinkin’. Least in prison I wasn’t no dandied up French poodle. And these goddamn silk sheets — a man can’t get no traction on ’em.”
          “Oh, you do fabulously well, my darling. And you’re not a poodle. You’re the very opposite. God knows I’ve had my fill of foxtrotting dandies. . . . Tom, think of it! Two months ago I was driving up from Palm Springs and saw a road gang and then suddenly I laid eyes on YOU! Well, I told Ruttcliff to stop the limo that very instant. You were stripped to the waist, and I thought, ‘Now, there’s a man.’ You looked like that actor, Henry Fonda, except you were the real thing. A gorgeous brute. So I told Ruttcliff to ask that dreadful fat guard what county was holding you. It was money that freed you. Daddy’s lawyer fixed it all, and you went from leg chains to my arms. Which do you prefer, Tom?”
          “Aw, Daisy . . . Course, it’s your arms. I never know’d a woman like you for fancy positions.”
          “Yes. I’m . . . sophisticated. So very sophisticated. Tom . . . Is it only my sexual expertise? Do you care for me as a person, just a teensy bit?”
          “You know I do, Daisy. . . . I reckon I ain’t up to snuff this mornin’. Not after that shindig last night. Wine plumb gives me a headache. Then there was all them people. I ain’t got nuthin’ to say to that fancy bunch.”
          “It seemed that you had a lot to say to Lady Brett.”
          “That skinny ol’ crow? A lady? — with all the cussin’ she does? Hell, I didn’t talk hardly none. It was her talked — about some damn bullfighter. Fightin’ bulls! Killin’ ’em for nuthin’! When a prime bull can fetch fifty dollars!”
          “So you didn’t care for her? Most men find her devastatingly attractive. Tom? . . . I won’t find that you’ve vanished one day, run off with some woman to Monte Carlo or Saint Moritz?”
          “The only place I got a hankerin’ to run to is back to Oklahoma. But what about you? You was right snug with that fella with the crutch and the bandage on his head.”
          “Oh, Ernest. He had a dreadful accident skiing.”
          “Skiin’?”
          “Yes, it’s a sport where — oh, why explain, you’ll just disapprove.”
          “I thought he was in a regular knockdown fight.”
          “No. He had a sudden encounter with a tree. Actually, though, Ernest is an accomplished pugilist.”
          “A what?”
          “A boxer. He defeats just everybody in the ring.”
          “Oh, he does, does he? Well, I’d like to get him in a good ol’ eye-gougin’ tussle and we’ll see who — ”
          “Now, Tom . . . Lie back down, darling. Actually, Ernest is the one person at the party I thought you’d enjoy talking to. He’s an avid hunter and fisherman.”
          “For a livin’?”
          “Heavens no. He’s a writer. I tried to read a story of his, about a boy in the woods fishing and thinking a lot. It put me right to sleep. Reading’s such a bore, don’t you think? All those words lined up in tiny rows. Of course, I told him what a genius he was. If he doesn’t hear that he gets all grumpy. Now the book that I did nearly finish was This Side of Paradise. By Scott Fitzgerald. He was there last night. Poor Scott.”
          “Which one was he?”
          “Well, he was the one whose wife broke the Lalique vase over his head.”
          “Damn! That was some ruckus! That gal can fight like a vixen with cubs.”
          “Yes, Zelda does . . . lose control. Poor Scott. No wonder he drinks.”
          “Seems ever’body there put it away pretty good.”
          “Yes. They were writers, you see. That man with the eyepatch, the one who got soused and started roaring Irish ballads? They tell me that he’s been working for ten years on a huge novel that nobody can understand one single word of. Quite mad, he is. . . . Anyway, I wanted Ernest to talk to you, but he spotted Gertrude and Alice making their grand entrance, and he hobbled off as fast as he could. To further his career. Ernest is so ambitious.”
          “I spotted him from behind, sittin’ on a sofa next to this fella — ”
          “No. No, my innocent darling, that was no man. That was a woman.”
          “The hell you say!”
          “Yes. It’s true, Tom. That was Gertrude. You see, there are certain women who think they’re men. They take on a man’s ways, and they desire other women.”
          “Kind of like a sissy boy?”
          “Yes, exactly.”
          “I dunno, Daisy. . . . I just don’t cotton to this Paree crowd. Can’t we go back to Oklahoma?”
          “But it’s a Dust Bowl, Tom.”
          “The rain’ll come agin. Things’ll sprout up agin. We kin buy us a plot a land and build a home place and Ma and Pa and Rosasharn and the young uns — ”
          “And you and I will move in, and we’ll sleep on a mattress of corn shucks — where you’ll get good traction, I’m sure — and my complexion will be an absolute wreck in two days. Tom, I have to work hard to preserve my beauty. Don’t you see how absurd your idea is, for a woman like me? Anyway, Daddy’s lawyer has set your family up quite nicely in that apartment in San Francisco.”
          “But they ain’t happy there, not one bit. Ma still can’t cotton to them hills. Why put buildin’s up on hills? She won’t leave the apartment for them hills. Pa jist pines away to work his hands in the soil. It’s how it is with us Joads, we has to work the soil. And Rosasharn, she’s waitressin’, paintin’ her face and dressin’ herself like a tramp, and Ruthie and Winfred are runnin’ wild in the streets. Ma’s letter like to broke my heart. If we had a farm of our own. . . . Maybe in the Salinas Valley. That’d be better’n the way it’s goin’. The family’s dyin’ out.”
          “Tom . . . Sometimes I feel like I’m in another doomed affair. And Lord knows I’ve had enough of those. Of tragedy . . .”
          “Money don’t bring a body happiness.”
          “Does poverty?”
          “No! But it shouldn’t be that way, with one person poor as dirt while another has a heap more’n his share. It should be all evened up some way, so ever’body’s got enough.”
          “I shudder to think of the expression on Daddy’s face if he could hear you now. But I will mention the farm idea. I’m still his precious Daisy, despite all. But as for me returning to the states — no. For one thing, Pam is in a school in Switzerland, and I want to be on the same continent with her. And then . . . There are too many bitter memories for me in America.”
          “But it’s a mighty big place.”
          “Not really. There’s only New York, Palm Springs and Palm Beach. I’m always running into people I’d rather not see.”
          “Well, I still say that all your money ain’t bought you happiness. We was happy enuf, us Joads, when the land was producin’.”
          “Yes, Tom, maybe it is terrible to be so rich.”
          “It’s an idlin’ kind of life, like a truck idlin’ but not goin’ anywheres. A body needs to work. Otherwise there ain’t no purpose to things. Like the way I feel now, eatin’ grapes that somebody peeled. Me, Tom Joad! What would Preacher think, if he could see me? These here grapes recollect to me that song, the one about God stompin’ out the vintage where the grapes a wrath is stored.”
          “Tom, my gorgeous Tom. There are only two things wrong with you, and one can be fixed easily enough. But the other? — I wonder.”
          “What two things?”
          “Well, there’s the way you talk. Your grammar. That could be just a little bit better. And then there’s your tendency to think too deeply. The rich will always be on top, and I’d advise you to enjoy being one of them while you can. And as for these horrid old grapes of wrath — well, open wide. . . . Come on, darling. . . . There now! Isn’t it delicious?”
          “I reckon. But it ain’t right.”

Fahrenheit 451: The Future Is Now
          I recently watched the film version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I had resisted seeing it — or reading the novel, which was published in 1953 — because I thought I already knew the drill (and I was right): books are good (very, very good); book burning is bad (very, very bad). Reading makes you a better, more compassionate human being. The book burner is depicted as a uniformed fascist. People who don’t read are lacking in feeling; they are, as the main character calls them, “zombies.”
          In Bradbury’s world of the future books are a dire threat to a regimented society in which everyone should be an obedient, unthinking automaton. Thus there are firemen, whose job is to seek out hidden books and burn them. Reading is done in secret; in the case of one woman, her books are so precious to her that she chooses to burn with them.
          But the future is now, and it turns out that there was no need for flamethrowers. Indifference will do the job quite nicely. A book unwanted is as dead as one in ashes.
          True, there are books galore being published every year. But — and this is a vital distinction — how many of those books qualify as the type that Bradbury was holding up to be cherished? In this day of polls one should be conducted in which a million Americans, selected at random, are asked if they’ve read twelve books from the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century list (this list is restricted works written in English; I don’t agree with many of their choices, but I want to use an “official” source). The books selected for my poll should not be taught in high school or college (Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby), nor should they be difficult reading (Ulysses, Under the Volcano) or notorious (Lolita, Portnoy’s Complaint). Here are a dozen which would do quite nicely: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Henry Green's Loving, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.
          Based on my observations of the world around me, far from academia, I believe that less than 5% of those polled would have read even one of the books.
          But I have a fresh argument supporting the decline-of-reading theory. It has to do with a phenomenon that has almost disappeared: the novel serialized in a magazine or newspaper. I was already aware that crowds would gather awaiting the next installment of a Dickens’ novel, not only in London but in Paris, Moscow and New York. A little research produced the following list, a kind of sampler, of other novels first published serially: Far From the Madding Crowd, The Three Musketeers, Anna Karenina, Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair, Pere Goriot, Around the World in 80 Days, Middlemarch, Tender is the Night, The Way We Live Now, Treasure Island, The Magnificent Ambersons, Crime and Punishment, Germinal, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Madame Bovary, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Age of Innocence.
          Some are mainly entertainment (though on a high level). Others are serious literature. Yet people wanted to read the next installment. A magazine or newspaper would print these novels only if doing so was financially beneficial to them.
          I wrote that the serial novel has “almost” disappeared. For the right material an audience still exists. Rolling Stone published Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in biweekly installments and Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City ran for years in the San Francisco Chronicle. Both were topical, controversial, and extremely readable (with Wolfe’s novel on the literature side of the scale and Maupin’s on the entertainment end). But there are so few examples of such successes! Today only a handful of large circulation magazines are left that publish a single short story. Certainly none would serialize a National Book Award winner; that type of fiction has little appeal for the general public. As for what does make big bucks, the novels of the same dozen authors dominate the bestseller list, each providing their formulaic popcorn for the mind. The twelve books I selected from the Modern Library list are accessible to the reader; they have originality and substance. They are not outdated (there’s no expiration date on excellence). They will have emerged to the awareness of one who loves good books.
          In Bradbury’s futuristic world enough people loved good books to necessitate squads of fireman to ferret them out. Today we are free to read, and some do; but the vast majority, after their formal education ends, don’t.
          Which brings up another aspect of Fahrenheit 451 to consider: whether the death of the book (death by indifference) has had the dire results predicted by Bradbury. In the era when reading was most popular were people more compassionate? A quick study of 19th and early 20th century history gives us the answer. The same year that Londoners were weeping over the death of Little Nell, British military might was forcing China to allow opium to be unloaded in its port cities (the poppy was grown in India, another British colony, and the Chinese population presented a large market for addiction). Wars abounded in the 1800's, and the factors that led to World War I were inexorably moving into place. That catastrophe would never have happened if enough enlightened minds in England, France, Russia and Germany had prevailed. Yet two gunshots in Sarajevo set off a lockstep to a gruesome folly, while crowds cheered. And besides the warfare, these societies were dominated by greed, on both the personal and the national level. The poor were neglected and exploited in a brutish way.
          I only need to look at myself, a lifelong reader, and ask “Am I a better person for having read a lot of books?” I have to answer “No.” I have merely been entertaining myself. I look at my non-reading friends and I do not see unfeeling zombies. I’m no better than most (many are better human beings than I am). Has reading made me more intelligent (as some claim it does)? I do believe that reading quality work exercises the mind. But what of the restaurant owner, the real estate agent, the crane operator? Are they not, in their jobs, constantly working out difficult problems?
          An argument against the uplifting effects of great literature is found in the biographies of the men and women who produced it. Many led miserable lives, and a good number did much damage to others in their personal relationships. In today’s literary world, among both the successes and the failures, I observe much contention, jealousy, callousness — even maliciousness. Where’s the wisdom, the openness, the compassion?
          At the end of Fahrenheit 451 the Montag character, once a fireman but transformed by the power of the written word into a reader, finds refuge in a community of Book People. It is portrayed as a serene, pastoral, kindly world of the enlightened. Each person in this community memorizes a complete book; they become a living version of it. They pass on the words to a young person who also memorizes it and who will keep it alive. The actual book is destroyed; the idea behind this (I guess) is that books are living things and rightly exist in a flesh and blood form. In a commentary that accompanied the film, Bradbury says that he never sees the ending without tears coming to his eyes.
          I remained dry-eyed. Those enlightened souls smiling benevolently as they strolled past one another, each in their little world, seemed like inmates of an asylum. I couldn’t accept the destroying of books when the point (I thought) was that they shouldn’t be destroyed; besides, the existence of a work in print protects it from unexpected death or faulty memory. As for that whole memorization requirement, I shudder at the idea of my having to tackle Vanity Fair; it’s a great novel — but ye gads, man! Anyway, isn’t the idea of dedicating yourself to one book mighty restricting? I want to read new ones, enter new worlds. No, I wouldn’t be happy in Bradbury’s Utopia.
         Though, like him, my personal belief is that works of art, in whatever form they take, should survive. Survive for me and for others who care. If a time comes when no one cares, they should still survive, for who knows if a renaissance may follow us. I don’t hold much hope for that, but it’s of no great concern to me. I’m allowed to read whatever I please, and that will have to suffice. I’m sorry that literature is dying, but there’s nothing I (or Ray Bradbury) can do about it.


(Originally appeared, in a different form, in Monsters and Critics)

The Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski

Success
          Fifty years ago Jerzy Kosinski stepped off a plane at Idlewild Airport. Although the twenty-four-year-old from Poland arrived in New York with little money and few contacts — two of his early jobs were parking lot attendant and movie theater projectionist — he rose to a prominence that was comprised of both esteem and notoriety.
          Yet many today would ask, Who is Jerzy Kosinski?
          His first novel, The Painted Bird, published in 1965 (eight years after Kosinski’s arrival), was heralded as a classic by the likes of Elie Wiesel and Arthur Miller. Widely translated, it received France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger.
          Steps, his second novel, won the National Book Award in 1969.
          Being There (1971) was made into a film starring Peter Sellers. Kosinski’s screenplay was cited as best of the year by The Writers’ Guild of America and The British Academy.
          His next five novels were bestsellers.
          He served two terms as president of P.E.N., the international organization of writers and editors.
          There’s more — an award for achievement from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, teaching stints at Princeton and Yale — but Kosinski’s renown extended beyond the written word.
          He was on “The Tonight Show” twelve times, one of Johnny Carson’s coterie of offbeat and colorful guests.
          He played a small but significant role in the movie “Reds,” directed by his friend Warren Beatty. (He got billing over Jack Nicholson.)
          He would have been at the Beverly Hills home of another Hollywood friend, Roman Polanski, on the night that Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by members of Charles Manson’s “Helter Skelter” family; but on his flight from Paris to Los Angeles his luggage was unloaded by mistake in New York, which delayed him by a day.
          He appeared half-naked on the cover of The New York Times Magazine.
          Away from the public spotlight, at dinner and cocktail parties held in New York penthouses, Kosinski was on a first name basis with the famous — Henry Kissinger, fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, theater critic John Simon, Senator Jacob Javits — and also with those anonymous bankers and industrialists whose decisions drive the world’s economy. He was often the center of attention, for he had the gift of beguiling.
          In appearance Kosinski was an oddity. He could have posed for an illustration in a Grimm’s fairy tale — maybe a court jester, combining mischief and menace. His face was framed by a dense mass of tightly-curled black hair. His eyes, under wizard-like brows, were large, black and bright. His nose had the hook of a predatory bird’s beak. His mouth, unusually long and thin, seems, in photographs, to be clamped shut like an oyster shell.
          But that mouth opened, and out came exotic stories told in an exotic accent. Chilling tales of his childhood in Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe. Accounts of his adventures in the cryptic world of communist Poland and the Soviet Union. Stories about his prowls around New York at night — to sex clubs like Plato’s Retreat, with its orgy room; to sadomasochistic and transsexual hangouts; to brothels catering to every desire.
          Kosinski was a kind of emissary, one dressed in suit and tie, bringing dispatches from life’s underbelly. Yet he did it with a raconteur’s wit, and he always retained a sense of mystery. Did he participate in the sexual circus he described or was he just an observer? In all his stories, what was truth, what was made up? That he left ambiguous. His audience accepted his smiling evasiveness; it was an intriguing part of the game he played.
          Despite his free-wheeling lifestyle, Jerzy Kosinski had a wife. She did not accompany him on his nighttime prowls (various other women did), but it was entirely due to her that he was in a room entertaining the affluent and powerful.
          Before the marriage he had been an academic studying social psychology. He had written two books of anticommunist essays under the pseudonym of Joseph Novak. Mary Hayward Weir, the widow of an industrialist, had admired his writing, and this led to their first meeting. She employed the young man to catalogue the books in her library.
          When they married Kosinski was twenty-nine. Mary was forty-seven.
          He was suddenly part of a world that included a Park Avenue duplex, homes and vacation retreats in Southampton, London, Paris, Florence. There were servants, a private jet, a boat with a crew of seventeen. And, of course, those parties.
          The marriage ended after four years (two years later Mary died of brain cancer). Though his life of opulence was over, he had published The Painted Bird, and thereafter his writing provided him with a substantial income. He traveled extensively, he skied, he played polo.
          Shortly after Mary Weir’s death, Kosinski began a relationship with Katherina (“Kiki”) von Fraunhofer, a descendent of Bavarian aristocracy. After twenty years together they married; four years later, in 1991, Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide. He was fifty-seven.


The Fall
          Eight years before he got into a bathtub and put a plastic bag over his head, the writing career of Jerzy Kosinski had been fatally damaged. The first blow came in the form of a 1982 Village Voice articled entitled “Jerzy Kosinski’s Tainted Words.” Three major accusations were made.
          One was that Kosinski didn’t deserve credit as the author of his books. Someone came forward claiming that he had written The Painted Bird; others said that Kosinski wrote it in Polish and that the translator had not been acknowledged. As for the seven episodic novels which had followed, it was alleged that Kosinski provided the ideas but editors did the actual writing; the books were, in effect, ghostwritten.
          Another accusation was plagiarism — that Kosinski filched the concept and structure of Being There from a 1932 Polish novel entitled The Career of Nikodem Dyzma by Tadeusz Dolega Mostowicz.
          A third accusation was the most damning, for it undermined the whole raison d’etre of The Painted Bird. Kosinski declared — at parties, in interviews, in writing — that he was the boy in the novel (which, he said, was not strictly a novel but was “auto-fiction”). This nameless boy — who has black hair and black eyes and is thus suspected of being a Jew or a Gypsy (though his ethnicity is never stated in the book) — is six when World War II breaks out. He winds up wandering from village to village. Where? In the first printing the locale is central Poland, but in every subsequent edition it is Eastern Europe. For four years he is witness to and victim of horrific cruelty and barbarism — committed not by the Nazis but by peasant villagers, who are superstitious, ignorant and brutal. After being thrown into a pit of excrement, in which he nearly suffocates, the boy loses the power of speech. At the end of the novel he regains it.
          Poles were highly indignant about how their people were depicted (for twenty-three years the novel was banned in Poland). Then accusations from Polish researchers began to emerge. Kosinski’s story was a lie. He had not suffered atrocities at the hands of Polish peasants. Rather, he and his family had lived through the years of Nazi occupation not only in safety, but in comfort. And their protectors? — Poles.
          Documents, personal accounts and even photographs were produced. In the Polish version, the Jewish Lewinkokopf family, to escape the Nazis, moved from Lodz (where the Lodz ghetto and the nearby Chelmno Extermination Camp would claim hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives) and changed their name to Kosinski, a common Polish one. They lived in the homes of Poles and their true identity was concealed by Poles. They carried on their lives as Catholics. Jerzy was baptized and received Holy Communion; he served as an altar boy. The Lewinkokopf/Kosinski family was in fearful hiding, but not in a potato cellar or barn. They even employed a maid.
          The Poles branded Jerzy Kosinski a Holocaust profiteer. It is true that The Painted Bird was immediately granted the status of a chronicle of the Holocaust, and as a Holocaust text it was placed on college and even high school required reading lists. Reviewers constantly used the words “realistic” and “brutal truth” when praising it. Some drew parallels with The Diary of Anne Frank.
          But Anne Frank was in that attic. If you take away the authenticity of The Painted Bird, what is left?


Truth
          A truth reinforced for me during my research is that truth can be a slippery thing. The information about Kosinski’s rise and his years of success should be fairly accurate, since those are matters of public record or come, undisputed, from multiple sources. But the accusations which precipitated his fall present problems. I encountered so many contradictory and questionable “facts” that everything I read became suspect. I began to believe nothing.
          Kosinski — the man who, according to both friends and foes, liked to operate from behind smoke and mirrors — was no help in clearing up matters. One example: When he writes about his relationship with Mary Weir, what emerges is a picture of a devoted couple separated only by her tragic death. Why does he omit the fact that they divorced? Could it be that he did not want his marriage to a wealthy socialite eighteen years his senior to be perceived as a career move? Reading Kosinski on his personal life, I constantly sensed I was being steered in a direction that suited his purposes.
          The end to my research came in the reference section of my library. I consulted two highly-respected texts. Contemporary Authors, published by Gale Research, relates the story of how Kosinski, as a boy, lived through the experiences depicted in The Painted Bird. Next I opened American Writers, edited by Jay Parini. Their essay on Kosinski bluntly states that he lied about his wartime experiences; he was safe with his parents. The two texts, working with the same available information, present opposing conclusions.
          Since “experts” armed with evidence disagree, I’m using a different approach in this essay — a personal one. Though my emotions will come into play, I suspect that many have let their enmity or admiration for Kosinski determine which version of the truth they choose to believe. I harbor neither of these feelings toward the man; my responses arise solely from his work. For my method I’ll rely on simple logic, and for my texts I’ll use the novels he wrote (or didn’t write). You may find my conclusions faulty, but at least you’ll be able to follow my reasoning and see where it leads me.
          The easiest accusation to tackle is the one about plagiarism. A Polish novel entitled The Career of Nikodem Dyzma exists, but there’s no indication that it has been translated into English. So I cannot compare it to Being There. Still, how could a novel written in Poland in 1932 correspond closely to the adventures of Chauncey Gardiner in New York in the 1960’s? Television had not been invented in 1932; Chauncey is a product of television. He moves into the lofty realms of corporate wealth. Being There is relevant to the media-driven America of today. Kosinski may have borrowed the premise of the idiot whose simpleminded utterances are interpreted as profundities, but he had to shape this premise greatly to fit his purposes.
          Next — did Kosinski write his novels? I came across no solid, unassailable proof that he didn’t. It all comes down to words by people making this claim, and refutations of those words, some by editors stating that they did nothing more than normal editorial work on his books. We do have Kosinski’s admission that he was not only very receptive to editorial advice but that he actively solicited help. He would send copies of a novel-in-progress to friends, asking them to mark places that “didn’t sound right” (he lacked confidence in his command of the English idiom). He was a compulsive reviser. In his 1972 Paris Review interview there is a facsimile of a galley proof page of Passion Play with Kosinski’s handwritten changes. A note states that, between the first and third set of galley proofs, he shortened the novel by a third, cutting over a hundred pages. This can be seen as a sign of insecurity. But it can also indicate an willingness to change.
          I find Kosinski’s novels to be stylistically very similar, and in a unique way (The Painted Bird deviates the most, but it differs in point of view from the others). The prose is detached, flat, terse; it has an emotional remoteness. The voice of the novels comes across distinctly as that of one person.
          The copy of The Painted Bird that I have — a 1978 paperback — ends with a five page biographical essay entitled “On Kosinski.” It begins with an italicized quote from Time magazine: Jerzy Kosinski lived through — and now makes use of — some of the strongest direct experience that this century has to offer. What follows is an account of his life and a tribute to his writing. Kosinski is referred to in the third person, and the words used to describe the man are laudatory in the extreme: “extraordinary,” “brilliant,” “great.”
          And the biography is without attribution! This is quite unusual. Could the author of “On Kosinski” be Jerzy Kosinski? If it was done by him, it would exhibit another feature of his personality that friends and foes agree on: his vanity. But, whoever wrote it, Kosinski must have approved its inclusion. Besides the “direct experience” reference, the second paragraph of “On Kosinski” contains the following information: “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.”
          And so we move to the thorniest accusation. Even though documents, personal testimonials and even photographs have been produced by Polish researchers which “prove” that Jerzy Kosinski spent his boyhood in safety, I had my doubts. Documents can be forged, personal accounts can be fabricated, old photos of a black-haired boy do not constitute solid evidence. Could resentment about how Kosinski depicted the Polish peasantry have led to a concerted effort to discredit his book?
          On the other hand, those who see The Painted Bird as a realistic portrayal (the “brutal truth”) may have a predisposition to accept that which is not true. We expect monsters when we look at Europe in the throes of World War II, and Kosinski provides them in abundance. That these monsters are not jack-booted Nazis would seem to undermine the Holocaust connection. The explanation given is that Kosinski’s broad theme was the victimization of the powerless; if the evildoers in this firsthand account were peasants in Poland, let the blame fall where it must. Kosinski’s comments on the novel’s title support this argument. He states that he witnessed, as a child, a favorite entertainment of villagers. They would trap a bird, paint its feathers vivid colors, and then release it. When the painted bird returned to its flock the other birds tore at and killed the outcast.
          Decades ago, when I began reading The Painted Bird, I was unaware of these complexities. I believed that the book was what it was purported to be: a fictionalized account of harrowing events which the author had experienced. But as I moved from one gruesome scene to another I lost that belief. A gut feeling grew, and a strong one. These things never happened.
          In chapter four a miller gouges a plowboy’s eyes out with a spoon. In chapter five a mob of women attack a character named Stupid Ludmila; one of them pushes a bottle filled with excrement up her vagina and breaks it with a kick; then they beat her to death. In chapter six a carpenter is devoured by a swarm of rats.
          Any one of these horrors might be accepted as the truth. But the stringing together of one after another (and many more follow) — happening to or before the eyes of one boy — is highly suspect. I came to believe that I was reading the fantasies of a sick mind.
          All this is done artfully. Kosinski establishes a pervasive sense of dread; he builds up to each event with deliberation; he describes it with an imagery that penetrates deep into the reader’s consciousness. I’m not questioning the power of the writing. I am questioning its morality. Detractors have called the novel pornographic, contending that its horrors excite a form of lust. Some humans act out those lusts, in basements with bloodstained concrete floors. Marauding armies seem to be infected with it. Leaders of countries have conducted reigns of terror based on it. It is a deplorable part of the history of man. And, as a confirmation of its existence in the here and now, there are writers and filmmakers who rake in millions by providing grisly fare to a public that wants to vicariously enjoy it. Kosinski recognized that his novel had an appeal to the baser instincts. In an interview conducted seven years after the novel was published, he talks of readers who pursue “the unusual, masochists probably, who want sensations. They will all read The Painted Bird, I hope.”
          But, as befits the man, Kosinski’s literary ambitions were extravagant. If the book was to be considered a serious work of art, he knew that its sensationalistic aspect must be overshadowed. What redeeming element could raise it above its parade of repellent scenes? Not only for critics and readers. How could he get a reputable publisher to consider the novel? The solution was something an expert dissembler like Kosinski was well-equipped to carry off. What greater significance, what greater validation could he bestow upon the novel than to claim it to be the truth?
          At parties held in Mary Weir’s penthouse, Kosinski told stories of his childhood during the war. Since the Weir parties were well-represented with the artistic set, people in publishing were present. It is easy to imagine Kosinski taking a senior editor aside, suddenly serious, his penetrating black eyes intense. Those stories — they aren’t made up. No, those things actually happened to me. And more, much worse than anything I’ve spoken about. But I’ve written about them. It was something I needed to do. To speak. To tell it all.
          The book was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was promoted as an account of what the author had endured, and critics and readers accepted it as such. Its credential of authenticity carried Kosinski to his pinnacle.
          Stripped of its authenticity, The Painted Bird is still a Holocaust novel. It’s not about the acts of peasants but about the damaged psyche of Jerzy Kosinski. I believe that as a boy he hid in comfort, but he was still hiding from monsters. Hiding from trains that took Jews to extermination camps, where they would be herded into ovens. Of these things he surely knew, and they haunted his thoughts.
          The cover of my Bantam edition of The Painted Bird shows a “Monster with a Basket” by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is a detail from the Hell panel of “The Last Judgment.” The painting is crowded with grotesque tortures that fascinate and repel.
          But was Bosch ever in hell? Did he witness what he depicted? We are seeing the same type of sickness that afflicted Kosinski, though Bosch’s was religiously motivated. There is no indication that Kosinski had any religious beliefs. He may have worshiped power. It would have been one of the childhood lessons he absorbed into his blood and bones, along with lessons about the need to lie, the need to hide. But power was most important. Steps, his second novel, is composed of brief, disconnected episodes that portray variations on the relationship between predators and their prey, with dominance being the objective. Brutality is present, though not nearly to the intensity as in The Painted Bird. In Steps the means of subjugation are mainly psychological, and they often take the form of seduction.
          In my first reading of The Painted Bird I stopped at the Ludmila scene. Why? Emotional responses are complex. It’s not that I am too pure for the book’s ornate cruelties; I must admit that I skimmed through the next chapters, like a carrion-feeding bird. Then I had quite enough of Kosinski — and of myself. When I recently started reading the book again I tried to see its merits, but once more I abandoned it, overwhelmed by feelings of disgust and disbelief. Does it contain material of a redemptive nature? I’m sure it does — Kosinski was too skilled a manipulator not to include that. Is the exploration of the evil uses of power a worthy theme? Yes, but there is a difference between portraying it and indulging in it. The Painted Bird can be seen as an exercise in power and seduction, carried out with calculation. Kosinski draws the reader into complicity with his dark inner world. When the miller twists the spoon in the plowboy’s eyes we are both the victim and the victimizer.


“Eternity”
          The Village Voice article and the swirl of controversy that followed marked the end of the literary career of Jerzy Kosinski. The string of novels that he was producing every two or three years came to a halt. One more book, The Hermit of 69th Street, was published six years after the article appeared. It rambled on for over 500 pages about an author besieged by false accusations. It hardly rose to the surface of the literary and public consciousness before sinking into obscurity.
          Whatever Kosinski felt inwardly, he did not live the life of a hermit. He devoted much time and energy to social and humanitarian causes. He worked for the creation of the Jewish Presence Foundation (the man who did not once use the word “Jew” in his twenty-seven page Paris Review interview was, in his last years, active in working for the “empowerment” of Jews). He also was involved with the establishment of AmerBank, the first Western bank chartered in post-communist Poland. He became what he is now cited as being: a Polish Jew.
          He still had money; he still traveled; he still had friends. It is fitting that his last night was spent at a crowded party in an Upper East Side townhouse. Fitting because, in a sense, his life of fame and fortune began at Upper East Side parties, with Kosinski working the room.
          The party was given by the author Gay Talese. According to the New York Times, Talese detected no signs of depression. “Last night, he was moving in and out of the crowd as I’ve seen him on so many occasions.”
          Kiki said she had last seen her husband at nine p.m. (meaning that they had not attended the party together). The next morning she found him in his bathroom (they had separate bedrooms and bathrooms). He was naked in a tub half-filled with water, a plastic shopping bag twisted around his head. She said that he had been depressed about a heart condition. He had left a note in his office. In it he wrote these words: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity.”
          In researching his death, I again came across conflicting stories, unanswerable questions. The seriousness of his heart condition is definitely in doubt. Some accounts of his suicide include barbiturates washed down with alcohol.
          The separate bedrooms cause me to wonder how intimate his relationship with Kiki was. In many ways they carried on separate lives. Though he was married twice, the word “marriage,” in the case of Kosinski, doesn’t seem to apply in a conventional sense. If I again turn to the texts — his novels — I find, despite all the sex, a conspicuous lack of emotional commitment. There is no love. Was Kosinski capable of it? Love makes one vulnerable, so would he risk it? Yet his twenty-four year relationship with Kiki indicates a bond of sorts.
          In the end, I don’t understand Jerzy Kosinski. He must have seen his life as a success, at some level. He came so far, if you consider the boy growing up under the most menacing of shadows. And he did it by using his talent, wits, determination and boldness. Was he happy? There is so much darkness in his novels, I wonder how much brightness there was in his life (inside him, in the place he kept hidden). I am left with a sense of pity, which I’m sure he would not want me to feel. Though he was adroit at playing on people’s sympathies, this was a form of manipulation — he saw it as a strength. No, he wouldn’t want pity, not at the end. He would prefer respect. And I can grant him that.
          In the last moments of his life he again displayed an indomitable will. For Jerzy Kosinski, old age, with its weakness and dependence, was something he chose not to deal with. He chose. He acted. He would not be a victim, even of Time.


(Originally appeared, in a much-altered version, in Arts and Opinion)

Dead Letters Office

After early success with his tales of the South Seas, Melville met negative critical and popular reaction to both Moby Dick and Pierre. These huge works were tremendously ambitious. What amount of toil and hope went into them? Both sank quickly.

For the remainder of his life — almost forty years — Melville’s literary output was minuscule. It had become clear that he could not make a living from his writing. He got employment as a customs inspector in New York and worked at that job for nineteen years; so, in a sense, he carried on with life. But what was the state of his creative spirit? I think he addresses the intimate issue of failure in “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story he wrote shortly after Pierre’s devastating reception.

It’s significant that Bartleby is a copier, a man who writes words that have no feeling behind them. They’re devoid of creativity. If one writes without readers or appreciation, he may as well be copying out a list. Was Melville, in this character, expressing his personal sense of aimlessness and futility?

Bartleby is a man beyond depression. He is deep into apathy; his response to any demand (such as to do work) or kindly offering (to go to a warm place to sleep) is “I prefer not to.” For him life is hardly discernable from death — indeed, at the end Bartleby prefers not to eat, and he slips into death with hardly a ripple.  

The unnamed narrator, the “I” of the story, is Bartleby’s employer, an elderly lawyer who carries on with the daily routine of getting up, going to work, making a living. Toward Bartleby he feels an empathy which goes unusually deep. So deep, considering the troubles the clerk causes him, that Bartleby can be seen as an aspect of the elder man’s own self — or that of a customs inspector.

In the first paragraph of the story Melville’s narrator alludes to something that he knows about Bartleby’s past, though he doesn’t reveal what it is until the end. By setting up matters in this way, Melville is stressing the importance of the revelation. 

It is this: Bartleby had previously been employed in a postal Dead Letters Office. The narrator’s reaction is extreme: “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?” He thinks how these letters — of love, of hope, of pardon — are burned by the cartload. “On errands of life, these letters sped to death.”

As a writer, Melville experienced this; he saw his work as going to a Dead Letters Office —  his words falling into the abyss of indifference. Sinking, burning — use what analogy you will, it is still death.

“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” the narrator writes at the close.

Humanity indeed: The great parade of those whose dreams are unfulfilled. With the story’s last word Melville moved from the narrow failure of a writer to the universal.

The Sea Gull
          The two words I heard most often in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were “devastation” and “God.”
          On the night of the storm, listening to people call in to the one local radio station that remained broadcasting — some on cell phones in attics that were filling with water — I heard constant pleas to God. “Please, God, help us.” And in the aftermath of the storm God’s name was invoked for strength, guidance, blessing. God dead? Hardly. A natural disaster turned people’s thoughts heavenward. They spoke His name.
          I came back to my apartment three days after the hurricane. When I got out of the car, eyeing the roof shingles that littered the grounds, a furtive motion caught my attention. There was a large bird on the walking path that wound around the manmade lake in the middle of the complex. When it saw me it strutted rapidly out of my line of sight. Why didn’t it fly off, I thought. Something about the bird being there struck me as odd, even unsettling (I had just driven through an ominous landscape, altered by destruction). But I hadn’t time to investigate. I hurried upstairs to check out the damage to my apartment.
          There was none. My place had survived intact. Others in the complex were not so fortunate. In the next weeks carpeting, sheetrock, refrigerators, mattresses, couches, tables — all manner of furniture — accumulated near the overflowing dumpster. Yet I didn’t even have a water stain on my ceiling. Some claimed that the storm was punishment meted out on the sinful by God (another way His name was used); does it follow that those spared devastation are the virtuous?
          The next afternoon I sat on my patio — I live on the third and top floor. I was reading the collected stories of William Carlos Williams. For forty-two years the author had been a practicing physician in a city in New Jersey. Mostly he treated poor immigrants, and his stories were often about his patients. I mention this because perhaps my reading that particular book has meaning.
          I looked up from its pages and saw the bird, again walking on the path around our scenic lake. I recognized it this time as a sea gull.
          A sea gull, five miles from the sea? — in this case Lake Pontchartrain, which separates the small city I live in from New Orleans. I studied the bird intently. It darted about, pecking at the grassy verge of the walkway. Searching for food — that basic necessity for its survival. I waited for it to turn, so that I could view it from the other side. When it finally did I saw that the right wing jutted out at an angle, clearly broken.
          It was all there for the imagination to recreate. Snatched up by the wind, the gull was swept aloft, carried inland at a speed well over a hundred miles an hour; then, on a sudden downdraft, slammed onto the ground or into the wall of one of these apartments. It could have struggled to this little lake, for it could still fly — though only for short distances; I witnessed one floundering flight from the walkway to the water.
          I watched the bird carry on its strutting search. It looked okay, active and alert — except for that wing. Its plucky vigor brought to mind something a vet had told me years ago, in regard to my newly-stitched up cat. Injured animals will try to carry on as they normally would; thus my cat, if she felt herself observed, would likely continue to jump up on things. In this world of claw and fang, instinct tells animals to appear fit and able, so that they are not spotted by the eye of the predator as the one to pursue. I thought of how we humans are so coddled by kindness. We complain, seek help and sympathy even from strangers. Dumb animals suffer dumbly, alone.
          There was nothing I could do for the bird. I knew that if I approached it on the walkway it would make its pitiable flight to the water. Anyway, there was no veterinary office open. The city was largely abandoned. I shrugged inwardly — such is life — and looked down at my book: Dr. Williams treating with tough compassion the sick and the dying and those giving birth.
          After that day I would never see the bird again.
          The next morning the phone rang — a surprise in itself, for service was rare; the man on the line knew my name. He informed me that he had just taken my mother to the emergency room. She had fallen and broken her arm. “It’s pretty bad,” he said.
          She had called out to the stranger as she stood in the doorway of her apartment. She held her right arm against her chest; it was the least painful position she could find. He had immediately driven her to the hospital. She spoke of him later as her “guardian angel.”
          The young doctor and nurses were kind. Their most generous act may have been to give her a morphine drip. I watched her tense face relax; this smoothing out of her features happened in seconds, right before my eyes; the shoulders sagged in relief, a serenity took over her being. She sighed.
          Morphine, I thought, for future reference.
          But this is not a medical narrative, nor an examination of the personal dynamics between a mostly-helpless eight-seven-year-old woman and her aging son. This, rather, is an inquiry into the supernatural.
          Was the sea gull, with its broken wing, an omen, a prophetic sign?
          A surprising number of people I’ve known have had experiences with the supernatural. One person, kneeling at Dostoevski’s grave, felt herself infused with a message from the Master. Others can summon up memories of previous lives. Many have felt guidance from an invisible source. Stories about premonitions abound, often involving animals. A friend’s dog was found curled atop Granny’s quilt in the linen closet, a place he almost never went; the next morning a phone call gave them the news that Granny had passed away in the night.
          When I observe the world around me I see it teeming with belief in, or at least fascination with, the supernatural. It's even a common subject of television shows. We humans want, perhaps need, the existence of another dimension.
          I have remained unremittingly earthbound; when I jump into the air I always return immediately to the ground. In my life nothing has occurred of a supernatural nature. So how do I react to the stories friends tell me? Silently; but disbelief and, increasingly, anger lurk behind my nodding smile. It’s their complacency that bothers me — why should they be granted the security of a universe that cares about them?
          Of course, skepticism is a common response to the type of tale I’ve related. And it’s socially acceptable to scoff at levitating swamis, tilting Ouija boards and pin-studded Voodoo dolls — to the whole world of the occult. But there is one point to consider: The smallest belief you hold that is outside the rules of the natural world is a supernatural one. You have passed over a line to the Other Side.
          You are in a realm that is dominated by religion. The domain of both God and spirits.
           I read parts of the New Testament recently and was struck by how many miracles Jesus performed. If I lived back then and I was in one of those dusty, sun-baked villages and I witnessed Him — as it is written by His disciples — cure the sick, restore sight to the blind, raise the dead, walk on water, I would have followed Him. I will follow Him now, tonight, if He will give me a sign — maybe a luminous cross on my bedroom wall. I only ask that I witness the miracle with my eyes, with my senses.
          Or grant me any transgression of the natural laws; a passing, however small, over to the Other Side. At least I will know it exists.
          Which caused me to contemplate the sea gull.
          Was the bird’s plight meant to be an omen of my mother’s? Broken wing, broken arm? Was there supernatural meaning for me encoded in the events I’ve described?
          I actually toyed with the idea. But — no. The story I’ve related, unembellished, has no meaning beyond the natural events themselves. An odd coincidence occurred. A sea gull was injured in a storm; days later my mother tripped and fell. Her arm healed. And the gull, with its broken wing? As I said, I never saw it after that day on my patio. But there are feral cats in a wooded area not far from these apartments, and fish over three feet long have been caught in the lake — predators, capable of dragging down the vulnerable.
          In me only a passive pity prevails. Life — the natural world that holds sway over us — is cruel. I give an inward shrug and return to my book.
          Where does this lack of belief leave me? No place good. I understand that fact more forcefully as I grow older. I am left with the bitter quotidian, which offers no answers, no solace. And which presents me, ultimately, with a handful of dust.
          About a week after I returned to my apartment I drove the five miles to Lake Pontchartrain. The lake had been the source of the huge surge of water that had done most of the damage. As I got within three miles of its shore I began to truly understand the word “devastation.” I was driving through a landscape of unrelenting wreckage.
          At the end of the road, on the rocky bank of the lake, I got out of my car. Around me, like bones picked clean, were posts and studs, all that was left standing of waterfront homes. Perched on them were sea gulls. When I walked toward a cluster of the birds they lifted off on strong wings.


(Originally appeared, in a different form, in Arts and Opinion)

To Have and Have Not
          It was pure coincidence that I read Yonnondio immediately after I read The Late George Apley. I knew beforehand what to expect of Apley — the story of a man born into Boston Brahmin society — but the subject matter of Yonnondio: From the Thirties (in an old hardcover edition, missing its dust jacket) was a mystery to me. All I knew was that the author, Tillie Olsen, wrote the story “I Stand Here Ironing.” I could have explored the novel’s pages, but sometimes I like to be surprised. After I finished the Marquand, Yonnondio was next in the queue.
          So it was that I left George Apley writing his final letter in the library of his brownstone on Beacon Street and found myself in a primitive Wyoming coal-mining town, where Jim Holbrook wakes, cursing, to the whistle calling him to make his daily descent into the earth.
          Both men live in the same country, in the same period, but they could live in different worlds. Reading these two books consecutively was fortuitous. The authors wrote in isolation of each other. They were interested only in presenting their characters and the lives they are caught up in. Environment plays its vital role. We experience the stultifying obligations of wealth and the brutalizing effects of poverty.
          Each author wrote what they knew. Like their books, they existed worlds apart.
                                                                                               *
          John Phillips Marquand was born in 1893 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His ancestors were shippers and merchants in the Revolutionary period. Though he was born into wealth, financial reversals in his family changed his life. He did not go to an exclusive boys’ school; instead he went to Newburyport High School. He attended Harvard, but on a scholarship. He was not invited to join any of the exclusive clubs, was ignored by the blue bloods.
          He married Christina Sedgwick when he was twenty-nine. Her family was a prominent and well-connected one (Christina was the niece of the editor of The Atlantic Monthly). This marriage ended in divorce. His second marriage would link him to the Rockefeller family; it too would end in divorce. The marriages produced five children.
          He wrote prolifically, and with an eye to making money. His first financial success came with a series of Mr. Moto spy novels. His many stories for magazines like the Saturday Evening Post brought in a substantial income. It wasn’t until he was forty-four, with The Late George Apley, that he set out to write a serious novel. The book was a commercial and critical success, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Following Apley came a string of ambitious novels. From 1937 until 1960 (the year of his death) he was one of the most popular authors in the country. Many of his books, including Apley, were made into movies.
          Marquand’s prose carries the reader along effortlessly. His characters and plots are engrossing. He became wealthy off his talent. He also became (partly due to his marriages) part of society’s elite. He was a member of all the “right” Boston and New York clubs. He had luxurious homes in Newburyport and the Caribbean. As he grew older he admired more and more the old values and disapproved of many of the new.
          Yet the scholarship student who was snubbed by members of Harvard’s “Gold Coast” would always feel ambivalence toward the society he was a part of. In his novels he observed the upper class through the eyes of an outsider, and often his gaze is sardonic. He said that The Late George Apley was written largely “out of defiance”; his wife warned that they would have to move out of Boston if the book was published. Yet Marquand’s satiric barbs are blunted by admiration. The overall tone of the novel is gentle, humorous. Rather than disapprove of his creation, I believe that much of the author is contained in the character of George Apley.
          Marquand was a man for whom writing was a job; most of his days were occupied with the solitary work of putting words on paper. Some statements he made in his later years show that he felt disappointment and regret as regards his personal life. Also, it deeply rankled him that the literary world scorned and dismissed his work. He partly attributed it to the fact that he was simply too popular. Many of his harshest detractors were critically-acclaimed authors whose books sold poorly. Left-leaning academics had no sympathy for his focus on the upper classes. Marquand also believed he was not taken seriously because of the so-called hack work he had done (the Mr. Moto novels, his stories in the “slicks”). He saw a future in which he would not be remembered. That fear turned out to come true. Who reads Marquand today? Back Bay Press (a Boston-based publishing firm) has reissued The Late George Apley (though the lugubrious man with the enormous mustache on the cover is, to me, completely wrong; Ronald Colman, who played him in the film adaptation, is much closer to how I visualize George Apley).
          Another problem for Marquand’s reputation was that The Late George Apley was the high point of his career. The novels that followed, although some of the early ones are excellent, are not of the same caliber. (Marquand always disliked being told that Apley was his best work.) Also, the world he wrote about belongs to another age; the values of the new have taken over. Both Apley and Marquand are obsolete. Which is a shame. To reveal human character, and to do it with such artistry, with such subtle and disciplined intelligence, should be an enduring achievement.
          John P. Marquand died in 1960, in the town where he was born.
          What follows is the opening paragraph of The Late George Apley:

George William Apley was born in the house of his maternal grandfather, William Leeds Hancock, on the steeper part of Mount Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, on January 25, 1866. He died in his own house, which overlooks the Charles River Basin and the Esplanade, on the water side of Beacon Street, on December 13, 1933. This was the frame in which his life moved, and the frame which will surround his portrait as a man. He once said of himself: “I am the sort of man I am, because environment prevented my being anything else.”

          These are the words of a Mr. Willing. Why is he setting off on this biographical undertaking? Following the opening paragraph is a letter Mr. Willing had received from George’s son, in which John Apley first thanks Mr. Willing for the appreciation he read of his father at the Berkley Club. Then the young man offers a challenge. “I seemed to hear the lives of all our fellow members read out with the usual comments, and these comments were always similar. You made Father seem like all the others, Mr. Willing. You shaded over the affair of Attorney O’Reilly and some other things we know.” Later he writes, “You mentioned not a word about how Eleanor and I disappointed him and Mother.” The son wants Mr. Willing to write an account of his father that is a true one. “To do a last piece of justice to Father.” He offers Mr. Willing access to all his father’s letters and papers. He closes with these words: “My main preoccupation is that the thing should be real. You know, and I know, that Father had guts.”
          So we have a biography written by Apley's elderly friend, a man ruled by a sense of propriety. Mr. Willing uses, primarily, George Apley’s own letters to tell most of the story. Yet Apley is also ruled by propriety. As he writes his son when John is at Harvard, “There are some things which one does not speak about and you will learn to follow this same reticence. I am glad to tell you before I leave this subject that there are very few skeletons in our family closet.” It is interesting how skillfully Marquand utilizes his faulty — or, rather, withholding — narrators. Despite their editing of emotions, we read between the lines, we draw conclusions from what is omitted; when Apley does give a look into his innermost thoughts — regrets, disappointments, doubts — it carries special weight, given his high regard for reticence. At the end of the book the portrait of George Apley is there, but he seems to stand a bit to the side, in shadows. Actually, this is entirely appropriate to the nature of the man.
          As for the events of his life, the closest George Apley came to sordidness was the O’Reilly affair. He tangled with that unscrupulous politician (the new breed of Irish who were rising to political power and who Apley deplored). He steps into a trap O’Reilly sets for him. He enters a hotel room and finds a woman in a negligee. Two police officers immediately burst in. O’Reilly soon arrives, proposing that he and Apley settle their differences. To O’Reilly’s surprise, Apley demands to be taken to the station house and arrested. He wants to fight the charges of immoral behavior in court (to the consternation of his family and friends). But something causes him to back out. It involves a Mary Monahan. She is related by marriage to O’Reilly; she asks George to let the matter drop. He complies to her request.
          Who is Mary Monahan? In his time at Harvard George had a brief fling at rebellion, which included his love for this Irish girl. The end of their relationship is described by Mr. Willing as hidden behind a “blank wall of silence.” But it is obvious that his parents and his extended family and the society he lived in banded together to deter him from his inappropriate choice. When Mary returns to his life, Apley, now an elderly man, refers to her, in a letter to his friend Walker, as the ghost of an Annabelle Lee. “We had our own kingdom by the sea once.” He and Mary sit together in his library and “She was much more real to me and the time we spent is a much more real space of time than anything in the dull years that have elapsed. In those two hours I could feel that I was alive again. . . .”
          But the young Harvard student, after being whisked away on a summer tour of Europe with his aunt and uncle, buckled down to the responsibilities of his name and position, which allowed only the “right” conduct: the right school, the right clubs, the right friends, the right wife. He becomes a strong advocate of these values. Inherited money makes him a man of independent means. He never participates in the rough and tumble of the commercial world (his father had little faith in his being able to survive there). Apley’s occupation — he’s a lawyer for a venerable Boston firm — involves the handling of the money of the wealthy with caution, and George Apley is most definitely a cautious man. He fills his ample free time with club life, worrying about the grey squirrels in the attic of their summer home, outings to Pequod Island (a male preserve until invaded by the women), his collection of Chinese bronze bowls, writing letters to family, friends and the Boston Evening Transcript, reading, working with the Save Boston Society. He lives quietly, without extravagance or ostentation. Very little is said of his marriage, and that absence is significant; the reader knows that it is loveless. Late in life he develops a platonic relationship with a lady his age. Although the doctors are against it, due to his heart condition, he insists on making his Saturday bird walk with Clara.
          George Apley’s greatest concern is his son, the person who will carry on the Apley name. The boy grows into a man not willing to abide by the constrictions that his father did. It is the same with his daughter; she will not be ruled by what she considers outdated standards of conduct. In the span of George Apley’s life the world changed radically. In the 20's and 30's new ideas and the spirit of rebellion were in the air; and, in John’s case, the experiences he had in France in World War I made him into his own man. Both children become independent souls. John marries a divorcee, moves from Boston to New York. His father, though deeply disappointed, is easily forgiving; he’s a different sort of person from the iron-fisted predecessors who were able to control him.
          Near his death he writes his son a letter in which he expresses misgivings. He looked back at his life and his elegiac conclusion is that “I cannot say I liked it very much.” “When I stopped to think of it, I had the unpleasant conviction that everything I have done has amounted to almost nothing.” Though he has known pleasures — nature, his enjoyment of his children when they were small — he sees an incapability to fully experience joy. “I have been taught since boyhood not to give way to sensuality. I think this afternoon, now that it is almost too late, that this viewpoint has been a little wrong.”
          Despite this summing up, the novel is not depressing. There’s a buoyancy to Apley. He never plunges into despair; he’s a man who accepts what is and carries on. He also has an ability to absorb himself in causes. That these causes do not amount to much provides both the tragedy of his life and much of the humor in the book. A life filled with minutiae can seem foolish. So can snobbery. While living in one residence, George sees a man outside in his shirt sleeves and decides at that moment that he will move to a more exclusive neighborhood. The narrowness of propriety is such that, on a tour of Europe with his wife, the Apleys constantly come across friends from Boston. Yet George Apley is not a caricature. In his quiet, resolute way he has moral fiber. His son tells Mr. Willing to write the truth because “You know, and I know, that Father had guts.” I believe John meant that his father could face the truth. In his letter to his son he acknowledges that a diminishment of spirit has occurred in him, not something easy to admit.
          Given the seeming lack of material, The Late George Apley is lively. It’s remarkable that an uneventful life can result in so rich a novel. I would say that any life is of interest if presented with perception. When I finished the book I felt that I knew George Apley. More important, I cared about him. No mean accomplishment for any writer. One cannot say that a book lacks passion if it stirs emotion in the reader.
                                                                                             *
          The date and place of Tillie Olsen’s birth is not known with certainty (her birth certificate was lost). It was probably1912 in Omaha, Nebraska. Her parents were Jewish immigrants; they participated in the abortive 1905 Russian revolution and had to flee the country. The family first settled on a Nebraska farm. After this failed, they moved to Omaha. There Samuel Lerner worked at various low-paying jobs (including that of a trimmer in a meat packing house, a job that Tillie would also hold). Both parents were life-long activists in socialist and humanitarian causes. Whatever was unjust would have a Lerner protesting it. It would be the same with Tillie. Her first arrest, when she was a teenager, was for distributing pro-unionization leaflets.
          Tillie was the second of seven children, and a lot of the responsibility for the younger siblings fell upon her. (At an early age she felt the absence of time and solitude in her life.) Ten-year-old Tillie shelled peanuts after school. But she did get an education; she was one of the few from her working-class neighborhood to “cross the tracks” and attend an academic high school. There she was ostracized socially by the more affluent students; it didn’t help that she stuttered. She had to drop out in the eleventh grade due to financial considerations. But, as she has observed, she did get a good education, something rare for a female of her social class. She was also introduced to literature.
          Tillie read whatever she could get her hands on. She found that the speech of the immigrants around her was not to be found. Nor were their experiences. Most books were written by members of the privileged classes. She felt that she had something to contribute, something that wasn’t there. She wanted to give a voice to “her people.” At a young age she dedicated herself to be a “great writer.”
          Out of school, Tillie took on low wage jobs and was active politically. A turning point in her life occurred when she was working in a tie factory; her station was next to the only open window and also near one of the few steam radiators; she developed pleurisy. It was then she was jailed for distributing leaflets. In prison her condition developed into tuberculosis.
          To recover, she moved to Minnesota and was free, for a time, of wage-earning and political work. She began to write Yonnondio in 1932 (the title is taken from a Walt Whitman poem and refers to a lament for the aborigines — a lament for the lost; I feel, artistically, that the title is a mistake). She was twenty years old. However, she became pregnant in the same month she began writing the novel; a daughter, Karla (named after Karl Marx) was born. Tillie only lived sporadically with the father (she was never married to him). She remembers this time as one of great poverty and stress.
          Yet here in Tillie Olsen’s biography comes a set of circumstances that I find perplexing. In 1934 the first chapter of Yonnondio was published in the Partisan Review under the title of “The Iron Throat.” The story was met with acclaim in New York’s literary/political circles. It was described as a work of a genius. Four publishing houses made efforts to locate Tillie Lerner. She eventually signed a contract with Random House; they offered her a stipend in return for completing a chapter every month. In 1935 Tillie sent two-year-old Karla to live with her parents and moved to Los Angeles. There she rubbed elbows with big-name authors. But she felt that she was looked upon as a curiosity by the Hollywood Left (the “cocktail set,” as she called them). These weren’t her people. She missed her daughter. In 1936 she forfeited her contract with Random House, moved to San Francisco, and brought Karla to live with her. After working on the novel intermittently, she abandoned it.
          I used the word “perplexing” to describe the events of the previous paragraph. How, from a person of such obscurity, does a chapter of Yonnondio appear on the desk of an editor of an influential New York magazine? I could see how the material would appeal to them. The Partisan Review began publishing in 1934 (the same year Tillie’s story appeared); it was founded under the auspices of the John Reed Society, which was affiliated with the Communist Party of America. A look at the brutalizing effects of industrialization — done artfully — and written by a twenty-year-old woman who had firsthand knowledge! But how did the story get to New York? I assume that Tillie’s political activities put her in contact with someone who passed the manuscript along.
          Also perplexing is the fact that the version of Yonnondio I read contains eight chapters; it’s a short novel. What prevented Tillie from producing those chapters? Why did she move to Los Angeles and the sophisticated literary circle there? She was given a unique opportunity, almost manna falling from heaven, but it seems that she frittered it away. Random House was a major publishing firm; her book would not languish in obscurity. If Yonnondio had appeared in 1935, when the inhuman conditions she described were at their height, could it have made an impact? I believe it would have, for the novel has the considerable power to make people feel what Olsen’s characters are suffering. As it turned out, the book would be completed and published in 1972, when those conditions were largely ameliorated.
          In 1936 Tillie Lerner began living with a Young Communist League comrade, Jack Olsen. They married eight years later. Tillie Lerner became Tillie Olsen. She worked a variety of jobs (waitress, hotel maid, secretary, etc.); she continued her political activism. She had three more children. She believed that the most important role in her life was that of mother.
          Since this is a literary study of Tillie Olsen, we can skip to 1953, when she was forty-one. With all her children in school, she enrolled in a creative writing class at San Francisco State University. In 1955 she won a Stanford University Fellowship for her story “I Stand Here Ironing.” She had eight months which she could devote to writing, free of the responsibility of a job. Still, the fellowship ran out, and she returned to a nine hour workday; another period of literary silence set in.
          Then, in 1959, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant, and in 1962 Tell Me a Riddle was published. It consists of the title story, which had won the O’Henry Award for Best Story of the Year in 1961, and three others, including “I Stand Here Ironing.”
          I give such attention to the dates because they reveal a lack of productivity. Again, she was blessed. She received two prestigious endowments, yet in a seven year period she came up with three stories (“Ironing” had been written prior to the Stanford Fellowship). Tillie Olsen — who wanted to give a voice to “her people,” who wanted to be a “great writer” — produced a very small body of work. It can’t be attributed entirely to the demands of wife, mother and wage-earner (significantly, much of her time was devoted to social activism, not to writing). It wasn’t a lack of talent. In her extremely eventful life, she had plenty of material. She had passion. She simply did not get the words down on paper. Did she ultimately fail in her self-appointed calling?
          Tell Me a Riddle, a few other stories, and Yonnondio constitute the full extent of her fiction. She wrote one non-fiction book, appropriately titled Silences. Much of it is composed of quotations from other writers and short observations. A key section, “Silences in Literature,” is a transcript of a talk Olsen gave at Radcliffe Institute. Silences is, in a sense, a book in which Tillie writes very little.
          After the publication of Tell Me a Riddle in 1962, Olsen became a member of the university/literary establishment. She received a dazzling array of grants, endowments and fellowships (Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, etc.). These provided her with financial resources, as did her teaching stints at many universities. She was in high demand as a lecturer. She remained active in a wide variety of causes, of which the women’s rights movement was prominent. She had respect and prestige and, among some (including the author Margaret Atwood), she is viewed with reverence.
          She died on the first day of 2007. Her four daughters were at her bedside.
          I will close with an account of the resurrection of Yonnondio. Forty years after she had begun the book the author, now well-known, was staying at the MacDowell Writers’ Colony. She brought with her the yellowed, tattered pages of the manuscript that her husband had come across in a drawer. In the five months she spent at MacDowell she entered (as she described it) into a partnership with her younger self; the first chapters offered almost no problems, but the rest was a process of struggling with versions, revisions, drafts and notes. She states that she did not write any new material, nor rewrite what was there; she simply brought to fruition what the young woman had done. Since the book was unfinished, she left it unfinished.
          The University of Nebraska’s Bison Books reissued the novel in 2004.
          What follows is the opening scene of Yonnondio:

The whistles always awoke Maisie. They pierced into her sleep like some guttural-voiced metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror. During the day if the whistle blew, she knew it meant death — somebody’s poppa or brother, perhaps her own — in that fearsome place below the ground, the mine.
“God damn that blowhorn,” she heard her father mutter. Creak of him getting out of bed. The door closed, with the yellow light from the kerosene lamp making a long crack on the floor. Clatter of dishes. Her mother’s tired, grimy voice.
“What’ll ya have? Coffee and eggs? There ain’t no bacon.”

          The book ends in the terrible heat of summer. Jim works in temperatures of 107 degrees (a hellish world where men and women are “steamed boiled broiled fried cooked. Geared, meshed”). He gets home and crawls onto a water-soaked pallet under the porch stoop and falls asleep, drugged by exhaustion. In the kitchen little Ben whispers to his older sister Maizie, “’Splain to me about bad dreams, tell me about boogie mans and scaredies and hell.” Anna, the mother, holds baby Bess, singing with heat-cracked lips, “ I Saw a Ship a-Sailing.” Bess grabs the lid of a fruit jar; she bangs it on the table; slam, bang, bang; she experiences the deep human satisfaction of achievement. “I can do, I can use my powers; I! I!” Heat and the constant thick dust in the air (is it from the Dust Bowl?) are almost suffocating. Will, the second child, comes home with a borrowed crystal set, and for the first time they hear radio sound. Anna goes out and wakens Jim; the windblown dust stings her face and arms. The novel’s closing words are Anna’s: “Here, I’ll help you. The air’s changin, Jim. Come in and get freshened up. I see for it to end tomorrow, at least get tolerable.”
          In this conclusion we see the persistence of hope. But it survives precariously. Yonnondio is not a treatise about injustice, though that element is present. Mine operators pay barely subsistence wages for deadly work; banks keep tenant farmers bound in a form of slavery; packinghouse owners use men and women until they’ve worn them down, then discard them. But the book is primarily a psychological study of six people who have to live in this brutal and brutalizing world. The members of the Holbrook family are sometimes brutish toward one another. Despair and exhaustion and deprivation are not the ingredients for a happy family life. Anna can be shrewish; Jim, who drinks when he is overwhelmed by the circumstances of his life, comes home in a violent mood; the children turn on each other. Blows and cruel words are common.
          Yet what survives is a close bond. Whatever their troubles, Anna and Jim love one another. And they love and have hopes for their children. But that is part of their despair. They see that the life they are giving the children is worse than the ones they were brought up in. “Seems we can’t do nothing for them in this damn world,” says Anna. And it truly seems that they can’t. Anna and Jim recognize that education is necessary if their children are to have a better life. But the schooling provided the two older Holbrook children resembles incarceration; both children turn away from it. When Anna takes out a library card, the insipid books the librarian selects for Maizie and Will lie untouched. They prefer the ever-fascinating mysteries and adventures of the city dump.
          The main character, the one through whose eyes most of the story is seen, is Maizie, six years old at the beginning of the book. She is a strange child; she has a dreamy nature, but her dreams are often disturbing. In the city her younger brother Will seems headed to become a street-smart tough. Little Ben is fear-ridden, obsessively so. Everyone in the family is a bit distorted by the circumstances of their lives. The innocent baby Bess asserts her individuality at the end of the book (“I! I!”) but what awaits her?
          Olsen employs a wide range of styles — interior monologue; the use of many voices; italicized fragments. But Yonnondio is most unique in how it commingles two types of perceptions. Often the book is as gritty and authentic as the pavement; but at times, abruptly, we are in an impressionistic collage of images and feelings. There is a fluency to this commingling because both perceptions are true to Maizie, who perceives her world through a lens that both makes reality more vivid and also distorts it.
          Perhaps the most masterful sequence involves Anna’s sickness. It is presented emotionally rather than medically (since poverty precluded any real medical care). Anna struggles to keep the family going in the face of a debilitating weakness, both of body and mind. Often she fails, drifting into a sleep that is clearly a prelude to death. Her husband and children watch with a dumb, hopeless fear. When Anna recovers — rises and returns to the duties of her life, and does so with purpose and determination — we have seen a resurrection of the spirit.
          The duties of life . . . Jim works, but Anna works almost as hard. They have too many children; she must clean a home that insists on staying filthy; she launders, cooks. She takes on jobs to supplement Jim’s income. She is always exhausted. The depiction of Anna is a tribute to motherhood. While they are living on the farm, Maizie meets Old Man Caldwell, and they strike up a close, almost spiritual, friendship. He is educated, and he tells her many things, trying to impart some sustaining knowledge to the child. About her mother he says, “Maizie. Live, don’t exist. Learn from your mother, who has had everything to grind out life and yet has kept life. Alive, felt what’s real, known what’s real. People can live their whole life not knowing.”
          The struggling Holbrooks suffer, but they can experience joy (watching a makeshift firework’s display, going on an expedition into empty lots looking for dandelions and other greens, even the simple act of singing). Economically powerless, they stubbornly assert their individuality. If they must escape — the father into drink, young Will onto the dangerous streets, Mazie into a fantasy world — they do it. It’s what they need to do to survive, so they do it.
          The novel was unfinished. What lay ahead for the Holbrooks? We recognize that they could be a happy family if given a chance. We come to believe in their strengths. All have the potential to achieve. But most likely the potential is doomed never to come to fruition. Tillie Olsen’s characters exist in a trap; I could see no way out for them. The Holbrooks, as a family, may not endure. In the “damn world” they are caught up in, time and its toll seem destined to grind them down physically and emotionally. It is a tragic story as old as man.
                                                                                              *
         To have and have not. Considerations arise, mainly regarding inequality. Putting it in the simplest terms, the Apleys being served the finest food on the finest china while the Holbrooks half starve is an ugly image. But that image never occurred to George Apley. He had servants and his family owned a textile mill; that was the extent of his familiarity with the working class. He made generous donations to organizations that aid the poor; he did so from a sense of obligation to those less fortunate and also because such donations reflected the status of the Apley name.
          Yet there are different forms of wealth and poverty. Caldwell’s words to Maizie about the need to learn from her mother — to live, to know and feel what’s real — have relevance for George Apley He is one of those people who, as Caldwell cautions, “can live their whole life not knowing.” Apley recognized this lack in himself — when it was too late to make up for it.
          It is interesting to note that George Apley’s ancestors, the ones who established the family fortune, were tough, hardworking, indomitable. The Holbrooks display that same toughness, drive, willingness to work, yet the economics of the society they live in require only strong backs, nothing else. From the brute labor of many a few make fortunes. The Holbrooks could not be blind to those facts. Although Yonnondio (in its unfinished form) never went into the subject of protest, anger is a natural response for the downtrodden. And from this anger came the ideologies of Socialism and Communism, which in turn led to the union movement. It is here that the two worlds, that of the Haves and the Have-Nots, collided, with club and brick and bomb and gun.
          But these considerations are not in the pages of The Late George Apley nor in Yonnondio. It is the coincidental fact that I happened to read the books consecutively which gives rise to these thoughts. What each author presented were people living the lives they were born into. John P. Marquand and Tillie Olsen both explored the human heart as they knew it.