whether the high honor they paid The Painted Bird may not have been motivated
to further deflect attention from their own collaboration:
Kosinski returned to New York on April 14, and only two weeks later received the best news of all from Europe. On May 2,
Flammarion cabled Houghton Mifflin that L'Oiseau bariole had been awarded the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger - the annual
award given in France for the best foreign book of the year. Previous winners included Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, Heinrich
Boll, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Lewis, Angus Wilson, and Nikos Kazantzakis. New York might be the center of publishing, but
Paris was still, to many minds, the intellectual center of the universe, and Kosinski had swept the French intellectual world off its
feet. Any who had doubted the aesthetic merits of The Painted Bird were now shamed into silence. The authority of the "eleven
distinguished jurors" was an absolute in New York as in Paris; Kosinski's first novel had swept the board.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 234-235)
The question has been raised on the Ukrainian Archive of what
conditions are likely to lead to the creation of a great liar. One such
condition might be a modest intellectual endowment which limits the
achievement that is possible by legitimate means. In Jerzy Kosinski's
case, Sloan drops many clues indicating that Kosinski's academic
career was a disaster, among these clues being political maneuvering
on Kosinski's part as a substitute for performance, which
maneuvering occasionally degenerated into "the dog ate my
homework" quality excuses, in this case being made on Kosinski's
behalf by patron Strzetelski:
Kosinski had used his time fruitfully, Strzetelski argued, in spite of his impaired health and "the accident (combustion of his right
hand) which made him unable to write during almost the whole 1959 Spring Session." It was the first and last mention in the file
of the injury to Kosinski's hand, which had not impaired his ability to produce lengthy correspondence.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 123)
Kosinski was unable to rise to academic standards. He disappointed
his friends. He was shunned by responsible scholars:
Unlike Kosinski, Krauze took the discipline of sociology very seriously; he was deeply committed to his studies, and it troubled
him that Kosinski was so blithely dismissive of its rigor and of the hurdles required in getting the Ph.D. By then Kosinski was busy
looking at alternative ways to get approval of his dissertation. One of them involved Feliks Gross: he proposed a transfer to
CCNY, where he would finish his doctorate under Gross's supervision. In Krauze's view, Kosinski had simply run into a buzzsaw
in Lazarsfeld, his Columbia supervisor, a man who could not be charmed into dropping the rigor of his requirements. Gross too
promptly grasped that Kosinski was trying to get around the question of methodological rigor; he politely demurred and excused
himself from being a part of it.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 169)
The pedestrian task of writing an examination, for Kosinski became a
trauma, and his capacity for academic work deteriorated to the level
of the pitiable:
[H]e had neglected the necessary preparation for his doctoral qualifying exam, the deadline for which now loomed.
On February 19 [1963] Kosinski sat for the examination as required. Midway through, he informed the proctor that he was unable
to continue. [...] [H]is flight from the doctoral exam marked a low point in his life in America - his academic career blocked, with
no alternative in sight.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 186)
But Kosinski was not only a student who could not study - he was
also, and more importantly, a writer who could not write:
Kosinski did well enough in spoken English, to be sure; his accent and his occasional Slavicisms were charming. But writing was
a different matter. He was, quite simply, no Conrad. In writing English, the omission of articles or the clustering of modifiers did
not strike readers as charming; instead, it made the writer appear ignorant, half-educated, even stupid. Conrad wrote like an
angel but could not make himself understood when he opened his mouth; with Kosinski, it was exactly the other way around.
Which might not have been such a handicap had not Kosinski been a writer by profession.