According to Eliot Weinberger, an American writer, essayist, editor and translator, Kosi?ski was not the author of
The Painted Bird. Weinberger alleged in his 2000 book
Karmic Traces that Kosi?ski was not fluent in English at the time of its writing.
In a review of
Jerzy Kosi?ski: A Biography by James Park Sloan, D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University wrote "For years Kosinski passed off
The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience during the Holocaust. Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosinski confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences. Upon accepting the book for publication Santillana said, "It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography." Although he backed away from this claim, Kosinski never wholly disavowed it."
M. A. Orthofer addressed Weinberger's assertion by saying:"Kosinski was, in many respects, a fake — possibly near as genuine a one as Weinberger could want. (One aspect of the best fakes is the lingering doubt that, possibly, there is some authenticity behind them — as is the case with Kosinski.) Kosinski famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right."
Kosi?ski himself addressed these claims in the introduction to the 1976 reissue of
The Painted Bird, saying that "Well-intentioned writers critics, and readers sought facts to back up their claims that the novel was autobiographical. They wanted to cast me in the role of spokesman for my generation, especially for those who had survived the war; but for me survival was an individual action that earned the survivor the right to speak only for himself. Facts about my life and my origins, I felt, should not be used to test the book's authenticity, any more than they should be used to encourage readers to read
The Painted Bird. Furthermore, I felt then, as I do now, that fiction and autobiography are very different modes."
Plagiarism allegations
In June 1982, a
Village Voice report by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith accused Kosi?ski of plagiarism, claiming that much of his work was derivative of prewar books unfamiliar to English readers, and that
Being There was a plagiarism of
Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy ...
The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma ... a 1932 Polish bestseller by Tadeusz Do??ga-Mostowicz. They also alleged Kosi?ski wrote
The Painted Bird in Polish, and had it secretly translated into English. The report claimed that Kosi?ski's books had actually been ghost-written by "assistant editors", finding stylistic differences among Kosi?ski's novels. Kosi?ski, according to them, had depended upon his free-lance editors for "the sort of composition that we usually call writing." American biographer James Sloan notes that New York poet, publisher and translator, George Reavey, claimed to have written
The Painted Bird for Kosi?ski.
The article found a more realistic picture of Kosi?ski's life during the Holocaust ... a view which was supported by biographers Joanna Siedlecka and Sloan. The article asserted that
The Painted Bird, assumed by some to be semi-autobiographical, was largely a work of fiction. The information showed that rather than wandering the Polish countryside, as his fictional character did, Kosi?ski spent the war years in hiding with a Polish Catholic family.
Terence Blacker, a profitable English publisher (who helped publish Kosi?ski's books ) and author of children's books and mysteries for adults, wrote in his article published in
The Independent in 2002:
"The significant point about Jerzy Kosi?ski was that ... his books ... had a vision and a voice consistent with one another and with the man himself. The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds. He seemed to have had an adventurous and rather kinky sexuality which, to many, made him all the more suspect. All in all, he was a perfect candidate for the snarling pack of literary hangers-on to turn on. There is something about a storyteller becoming rich and having a reasonably full private life that has a powerful potential to irritate so that, when things go wrong, it causes a very special kind of joy."
D.G. Myers responded to Blacker's assertions in his review of
Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography by James Park Sloan:
"This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity. 'There was a hollow space at the center of Kosinski that had resulted from denying his past,' Sloan writes, 'and his whole life had become a race to fill in that hollow space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward upon himself like a burnt-out star.' On this theory, Kosinski emerges as a classic borderline personality, frantically defending himself against all-out psychosis.
Journalist John Corry, wrote a 6,000-word feature article in
The New York Times in November 1982, responding and defending Kosi?ski, which appeared on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. Among other things, Corry alleged that reports claiming that "Kosinski was a plagiarist in the pay of the C.I.A. were the product of a Polish Communist disinformation campaign."
Kosi?ski himself responded that he had never maintained that the book was autobiographical, even though years earlier he confided to Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, that his manuscript "draws upon a childhood spent, by the casual chances of war, in the remotest villages of Eastern Europe." In 1988 he wrote
The Hermit of 69th Street, in which he sought to demonstrate the absurdity of investigating prior work by inserting footnotes for practically every term in the book. "Ironically," wrote theatre critic Lucy Komisar, "possibly his only true book... about a successful author who is shown to be a fraud."
(ibid.)Despite repudiation of the
Village Voice allegations in detailed articles in the New York
Times, the Los Angeles
Times, and other publications, Kozinski remained tainted. "I think it contributed to his death," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a friend and fellow Polish exile.