the language in which he was published. Whenever he wrote a simple business letter, his reputation was at risk. Even a letter he
wrote to his British agent, Peter Janson-Smith, required a hasty followup; the solecisms and grammatical errors were explained
as the result of failure to proofread.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 174)
In view of Kosinski's inability to write, it is little wonder that he was
accused of using ghost writers and translators who contributed more
than their translation. He was also accused of plagiarism:
On June 22, 1982, two journalists writing in the Village Voice challenged the veracity of Kosinski's basic account of himself. They
challenged his extensive use of private editors in the production of his novels and insinuated that The Painted Bird, his
masterpiece, and Being There, which had been made into a hit movie, had been plagiarized from other sources.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 6)
The accusation that Kosinski's Being There was plagiarized was
particularly easy to document:
In its protagonist, its structure, its specific events, and its conclusion, the book bore an extraordinarily close resemblance to
[Tadeusz] Dolega-Mostowicz's 1932 novel The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, which Kosinski had described with such excitement
two decades earlier to his friend Stanislaw Pomorski. The question of plagiarism is a serious one, and not susceptible of easy
and final answer; ultimately the text of Being There resembles the text of Nikodem Dyzma in ways that, had Dolega-Mostowicz
been alive and interested in pressing the matter, might have challenged law courts as to a reasonable definition of plagiarism.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 292)
As in the case of other great frauds like Stephen Glass, Jerzy Kosinski
for a time appeared unassailable no matter how outrageous his
falsehoods. The reference below is to a letter from Jerzy Kosinski to
The Nation literary editor Betsy Pochoda:
The letter had been riddled with such errors that, in her view, its author could not possibly have been the writer of Kosinski's
award-winning novels. Over the years she had picked up literary gossip about Kosinski's supposed "ghost writers" and had
decided that such gossip was altogether plausible. In early 1982 she shared her opinion with Navasky, and made him a strange
bet. People well enough situated in America, she bet him, could get away with anything, even if their most shameful secrets were
revealed.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 384)
A second condition which might promote the creation of a great liar
might be an environment which condones or even encourages lying.
Sloan demonstrates that at least Jerzy Kosinski's mother did indeed
provided such an environment, and goes on to describe how such
lying may have originated as a survival tactic. Please note that
Sloan's description of the wartime environment which might have
created a subculture based on lying not only provides an excuse for
habitual lying, but provides also an excuse for greeting with a
measure of skepticism some of the more extreme stories told by
immigrants coming from such a subculture. The situation Sloan
describes below is one in which Jerzy Kosinski's career success has
depended upon his telling stories of his youth which his mother,
Elzbieta Kosinski, would know to be untrue, and with the mother
arrived from Poland to dote on her successful son in New York:
At the same time, there was a dilemma to be resolved. By that time he had regaled the entire Polish emigre circle and much of
Mary Wier's New York society with stories of his catastrophic and solitary adventures during the war - the wandering from village
to village, the dog that had leaped at his heels, the loss of speech, the reunion at the orphanage where he was identified by his
resemblance to this mother and the mark on his rib cage. What if conversation got around to those wartime experiences? What,
God forbid, if someone casually asked her where the adult Kosinskis had been during the war? The question had come up, and
he had managed to get away with vague answers. Sweden, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have