The Write Advice 216: EUDORA WELTY

 

At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.  I believe if I stopped to wonder what so-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed.  I care what my friends think, very deeply — and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down.  But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates.

      It’s so much an inward thing that reading the proofs later can be a real shock. When I received them for my first book — no, I guess it was for Delta Wedding — I thought, I didn’t write this.  It was a page of dialogue — I might as well have never seen it before.  I wrote to my editor, John Woodburn, and told him something had happened to that page in the typesetting.  He was kind, not even surprised — maybe this happens to all writers.  He called me up and read me from the manuscript — word for word what the proofs said.  Proofs don’t shock me any longer, yet there’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned.

 

 

The Art of Fiction #47  [The Paris Review #55, Fall 1972]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of North American novelist, journalist and photographer EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001):

 

 

 

https://eudorawelty.org/biography/

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 089: EUDORA WELTY

 

 

The Write Advice 078: LARRY McMURTRY

 

 

The Write Advice 029: ANNIE PROULX

 

Poet of the Month 100: JOHN DONNE

 

JOHN DONNE

1572 – 1631

 

 

 

 

LOVE'S DIET

 

 

To what a cumbersome unwieldiness

And burdensome corpulence my love had grown,

    But that I did, to make it less,

    And keep it in proportion,

Give it a diet, made it feed upon

That which love worst endures, discretion.

 

Above one sigh a day I allowed him not,

Of which my fortune, and my faults had part;

    And if sometimes by stealth he got

    A she sigh from my mistress' heart,

And thought to feast on that, I let him see

'Twas neither very sound, nor meant to me.

 

If he wrung from me a tear, I brined it so

With scorn or shame, that him it nourished not;

    If he sucked hers, I let him know

    'Twas not a tear, which he had got,

His drink was counterfeit, as was his meat;

For, eyes which roll towards all, weep not, but sweat.

 

What ever he would dictate, I writ that,

But burnt my letters; When she writ to me,

    And that favour made him fat

    I said, if any title be

Conveyed by this, Ah, what doth it avail,

To be the fortieth name in an entail?

 

Thus I reclaimed my buzzard love, to fly

At what, and when, and how, and where I choose;

    Now negligent of sport I lie,

    And now as other Fawkners use,

I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh and weep;

And the game killed, or lost, go talk, and sleep.

 

 

 

 

Written c 1592 – 1600

Published 1633

 

 

 

 

 

entail = legal term describing the bequeathing 

of property to a specified group rather than an individual inheritor

 

Fawkners = archaic form of 'Falconers'

 

spring = term describing a game bird rising from cover

 

 

 

 

 

John Donne is arguably the most fascinating and most contradictory figure in the history of English poetry.  His Songs and Sonnets are among the most passionate, erotic, witty and engaging love poems ever written, their subject matter vastly at odds, or so it would seem, with his later career as a respected theologian and the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.  It is from one of Donne's sermons that the phrase 'No man is an island' derives — an eternally relevant reminder of the fact that the lives of all human beings are intertwined, no matter what their sex, religion, ethnicity or social status.

Donne (his surname is pronounced 'Dunn' to rhyme with 'fun' by most scholars) was born in his parents' home in Bread Street in the city of London some time in the first half of 1572.  His maternal grandfather John Heywood was a singer, musician and creator of short dramatic skits, referred to as 'interludes,' that were performed in the presence of Elizabeth I and in the metropolitan legal colleges and chambers collectively known as the Inns of Court.  The Heywood family was directly related to the English Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, a highly-ranked statesman whose defiance of Henry VIII and subsequent execution for refusing to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession because it repudiated the authority of the Pope saw him canonised by the Church in 1886.

Donne's father could boast of no such noble connections.  An ironmonger by trade, he prospered in his business but died in his early forties, leaving behind six surviving children and an estate valued at approximately £3500.  Six months after his death, his thirty year old widow Elizabeth married the fifty year old physician and widower John Symynges, a fellow Catholic whom it was likely she and her deceased husband had been acquainted with for several years.  In 1583 the reconfigured Symynges family moved to a house located close to London's St Bartholomew's Hospital where, within two years, Donne's younger sisters both fell ill and died.

Donne was originally educated by a Catholic tutor hired by his wealthy stepfather, a risky move in a country where 'the old religion,' as it was known, had been more or less outlawed by then in all but name.  One of Donne's maternal uncles was the exiled Jesuit priest Jasper Heywood who re-entered England via the Continent and conducted masses in secret until he was arrested in 1583 and tried for the crime of treason.  As Donne would recall in his 1610 anti-Catholic polemical work Pseudo-Martyr: 'I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom…'.

In 1584 Donne and his younger brother Henry were sent to Oxford University to further their education, lodging in Hart Hall (now known as Hertford College) which was home to many fellow Catholics including Henry Wotton, someone who was to remain Donne's close friend until his death.  Donne spent three years at Oxford before leaving — without obtaining a degree because he would have been expected to sign the Oath of Supremacy that denied Papal power and acknowledged Elizabeth I as head of the Church of England — for Cambridge where he did not seek admittance to a college but was able to study rhetoric, history, philosophy, French, Italian, science and mathematics and immerse himself in the literary life of the city and the works of its rising poet-dramatists including Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. 

 

Donne left Cambridge around the age of seventeen but did not return to the house of his mother who, following the death of Dr Symynges in 1588, had become the wife of another Catholic gentleman named Richard Rainsford.  Elizabeth Rainsford and her new husband soon relocated to Antwerp in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands where, they hoped, they would be free to practice their religion without falling foul of the government or an emerging and increasingly militant group of Protestant extremists known as the Puritans.

Little is known about the next phase of Donne's life.  Some scholars believe he may have spent time on the Continent, perhaps as a soldier fighting in Sir Francis Drake's 1589 Spanish campaign, while others conjecture that he visited the Low Countries and France before travelling to Italy to spend time with his exiled Jesuit uncle Jasper Heywood.  The next definite mention of him occurs in 1591 when he was accepted at Thavies Inn, one of the London Courts of Chancery, as a law student.  In May 1592 he entered nearby Lincoln's Inn to further his legal studies, a move that introduced him to life at the royal Court and placed in him the orbit of high profile Protestant students such as Thomas Egerton, son of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal.  

 

The Inns of Court were also hotbeds of literary activity, with poet/playwrights including John Davies, Thomas Lodge and John Marston regularly displaying their satirical wit at the Revels that were a common feature of life as a footloose young male law student.  It was during this time that Donne himself probably began to write, producing epigrams and satires in the prevailing literary fashion before going on to create his Elegies and some of his earliest and, for their time, most scandalous love poetry (some of which would not be deemed 'decent' enough to publish until the late nineteenth century).  

 

But Donne's time at Lincoln's Inn was not without its tragedies.  In the spring of 1593 his brother Henry, now a student at his former alma mater Thavies Inn, was arrested after a Catholic priest was discovered in his room. The priest, whose name was William Harrington, was subsequently tried for sedition and executed, by which time Henry himself, long since confined to the dank and disease ridden prison at Newgate, was dead of the plague.  It was probably after these traumatic events that Donne began to seriously contemplate abandoning the religion of his forefathers and converting to Protestantism, a change inspired as much by self-preservation and his hopes of obtaining some sort of paid position at the Court of Elizabeth I as it was by his growing disillusion with the insularity, pedantry and obsession with martyrdom which had become intrinsic components of the faith he had been raised in.

The desire to distance himself from the activities of his brother and their Catholic background were no doubt critical in persuading Donne to join the English expeditionary force being assembled by Lord General Robert Devereux, otherwise known as the Earl of Essex, to attack the Spanish port city of Cadiz.  Henry Wotton was employed as Essex's secretary at the time, a fact that aided Donne's cause and saw him granted permission to join the other young men of good (if not noble) birth as a member of the invading Protestant forces.  Donne and his fellow adventurers left Plymouth on 3 June 1596, with the poet personally witnessing the sinking of the Spanish flagship the San Felipe by Walter Ralegh thirteen days later, a horrifying sight he was later to memorialize in an epigram titled The Burnt Ship:

 

Out of a fired ship, which, by no way

But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,

Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came

Near the foe's ships, did by their shot decay;

So all were lost, which in the ship were found,

    They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship

         drown'd.

 

 

 

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex

 

 

Donne's return to England and to his temporarily abandoned legal studies proved to be short-lived.  A little over one year later he joined a new expedition, led again by Essex and Ralegh, which had been assembled to wipe out was left of the Spanish fleet in the Azores archipelago and seize the treasure that these ships were transporting back to Spain from its colonies in South America and the West Indies.  Luck was not with the English this time, with a lack of wind hampering their progress and frustrating Ralegh who, after attacking the island of Fayal and enduring the loss of many men, returned to Plymouth battered, depleted and empty-handed in late October 1597.  

 

This time Donne did not return to Lincoln's Inn to resume his legal studies.  Now twenty-five years old, the veteran of two royally sanctioned expeditionary campaigns and a fluent speaker of the Spanish, French and Italian languages, he was appointed Chief Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton who, in addition to his position as Lord Keeper of the Seal, also presided over the House of Lords and the Court of the Star Chamber and served as the senior judge in the perpetually busy Court of Chancery.  Egerton was a supremely powerful figure in Elizabethan England, a former Catholic who had renounced his now suspicious faith as a means of furthering his career, a highly-placed civil servant who was personally involved in the hunting down of clandestine priests and other religious dissidents — a role not lost upon Donne who became part of his official household, living more or less as a member of the Egerton family in York House close to the sprawling, twenty-three acre city-within-a-city that was the Palace of Whitehall. 

 

It was at York House, while carrying out his duties as Egerton's schedule-maker, guest-greeter, researcher and document-drafter, that Donne met Ann More, the fourteen year old daughter of the new Lady Egerton's short-tempered brother, Sir George More.  Donne fell deeply in love with Ann during the course of the next two years, something he was careful to keep secret from his employer despite his favoured status as Egerton's trusted secretary and confidante.  

 

But trouble was brewing.  Donne's former hero, the dashing but dangerously erratic Earl of Essex, was consigned by the Queen to the care of his friend Lord Egerton who in essence became his gaoler, his gaol being the luxurious home-away-from-home that was the already severely overcrowded York House.  In early 1600 the new Lady Egerton died, effectively removing any reason for Ann, her ward, to remain in London.  Ann was sent back to Losely Park, her father's estate in rural Surrey, leaving Donne to wonder if he would ever see or be allowed to speak with her again. 

 

Donne did not have much leisure in which to dwell upon his loss.  Egerton soon remarried, with the third Lady Egerton bringing more than forty of her own household to live at York House.  This meant there was no longer space for Donne to lodge in his master's house, obliging him to move to his own quarters further along the Strand either in or in close proximity to (sources disagree) another bustling business/residential complex known as the Savoy.  He was living here in February 1601 when the now freed Earl of Essex launched what was to be his ill-fated coup against the Queen that resulted in him and several of his followers being arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London.  (Henry Wotton, Donne's old Oxford friend, had wisely decamped to France to avoid being hauled in for questioning and packed off to gaol along with his former boss and that nobleman's regretful allies.)  Essex was swiftly tried for treason and sentenced to death, a legal process that Donne, in his capacity as Egerton's law clerk, directly participated in despite his oft-expressed aversion to all forms of corporal and capital punishment.  

 

 

Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley

   

 

In October 1601, nearly a year after the execution of Essex and many of his supporters, Donne was appointed the Member of Parliament for Brackley, a Northamptonshire borough under the direct control of Egerton who felt it wise to have his most trusted employee take up the position prior to the convening of what would be the final Parliament that Elizabeth I would be alive to convene and preside over.  One of Donne's fellow MPs was Sir George More who had returned to London to attend Parliament accompanied by his daughter.  Ann More and Donne renewed their acquaintance, possibly in secret, and three weeks before Christmas became man and wife at a small private ceremony presided over by Donne's friend Samuel Brooke and witnessed by that Anglican cleric's brother, Donne's even closer friend Christopher Brooke.  The newlyweds spent their wedding night apart, the groom in his London apartment and the bride in lodgings rented by her unsuspecting father.  George More was not informed of his daughter's marriage because, being not yet sixteen, Ann was still legally forbidden to marry without his consent.

 

The discovery of the marriage, which remained a secret until well into February 1602 when Donne himself wrote to his father-in-law to inform him that it had taken place, effectively ended the bridegroom's fledgling political career and whatever hopes he had formerly cherished of obtaining some kind of paid position at Court.  Donne was immediately imprisoned along with the Brooke brothers, consigned to the death trap that was London's unhygienic Fleet Prison where he quickly succumbed to a fever.  Although his stay in the Fleet was short — he spent all of what remained of his inheritance to prove that his marriage to Ann was legally valid — it marked the beginning of a very different life for him, one that began with the loss of his position at Egerton's secretary and saw him and Ann become totally dependent on the charity of Francis Wolley, Ann's unhappily married nineteen year old cousin, to put food on their table and a roof over their heads.

 

The newlyweds moved into a house on Wolley's estate at Pyrford in Surrey and were living here, somewhat reconciled to her father but not completely, in early 1603 when the recently deceased Elizabeth I was replaced on the throne by her cousin James VI of Scotland.  Life at Court was utterly transformed under the reign of the new monarch, a transformation that Donne could only observe from Pyrford like the poor relation he had now quite literally become.  Many of his former friends and acquaintances were knighted by the new King while his father-in-law was named Treasurer of the Household to Charles, the Prince of Wales.  While Donne himself received no honours he did earn the patronage and friendship of Henry Goodyer, an aristocratic, well-connected courtier who was able to keep him apprised of potential job opportunities and provide an outlet for his growing sense of melancholy.  Donne was also able to re-establish a connection with Henry Wotton who had deemed it safe to return to England following the death of Elizabeth I and the end of Tudor rule.

 

In February 1605 Donne, often ill and growing ever more restless and discouraged about his future, applied for and was granted a licence by the King to travel overseas with a younger companion named Walter Chute and a full retinue of horses and servants.  The purpose of the journey remains unknown — the companions almost certainly spent time in Paris and had moved on to Venice by the beginning of the autumn —  although it seems likely that Donne hoped to revive his stalled political career by using the trip to sharpen his linguistic skills and establish himself in the eyes of the King as a useful would-be diplomat.  He returned to Pyrford in the spring of 1606 — still alarmed, as the entire country was, by the attempt the Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes had made in November 1605 to assassinate the King by blowing up Parliament with gunpowder — to be greeted by his anxious young wife and new infant son George.  (A third son named Francis would follow in 1607.)  

 

With his family growing and no prospect of obtaining a meaningful job on the horizon, Francis Wolley intervened with his uncle George More to obtain the Donnes an allowance of £80 per year, the interest on Ann's long withheld dowry of £800.  Obtaining this income allowed them and their growing family — Ann would give birth to twelve children prior to her childbearing-related death in 1617 — to leave Pyrford and rent a large but draughty cottage of their own in the village of Mitcham, one hour by horseback from London.  It was here, in the house that the unhappy poet variously described as his 'prison,' 'dungeon' and 'hospital,' that he devoted himself to researching points of law and divinity and writing heartfelt letters to Henry Goodyer and other sympathetic friends, a group which now included his fellow poet (and convicted murderer) Ben Jonson. 

 

 

Ben Jonson

 

 

Donne completed a number of poems and several prose pieces at Mitcham — Biathanatos, a defence of the act of suicide being the most controversial of the latter — while continuing to search in vain for some type of remunerative position at Court.  While his searches were unsuccessful, his charm, erudition and courtesy did manage to endear him to several important personages including Magdalen Herbert, a culture-loving gentlewoman who was familiar with his writings.  He exchanged many letters with Mrs Herbert throughout 1607 and 1608 and also befriended Lucy Russell, the Countess of Bedford, one of Queen Anne's Ladies in Waiting and someone whose patronage had likewise been sought by Ben Jonson and several other cash-strapped poets.  

 

Yet not even Lucy Russell could help Donne obtain the Court position he continued to seek.  Apparently, the King remembered the alleged illegality of Donne's secret marriage to Ann and did not view him as a suitable candidate for a position on his staff — a fact that led to Donne being summoned to a meeting with the Reverend Dr Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, who recommended that he abandon his political/diplomatic ambitions and consider taking holy orders to become a Protestant clergyman.  Donne rejected Morton's well intended advice — and the comfortable Church-provided living that would have followed his ordination —explaining that he did not wish to bring 'that sacred calling' into dishonour by having it associated with a life as filled with 'irregularity' as his life had been.  This no doubt referred to his growing status as a much admired but still unpublished poet, creator of verse that frequently referenced the sexual adventures he had enjoyed as a young man but had come to bitterly regret since his marriage.  

 

Yet Morton had more than altruism in mind when he offered Donne a way out of the 'prison' that his life at Mitcham had become.  As one of the highest ranking clergymen in England Morton was actively engaged in defending Protestantism against its homegrown and foreign-based Catholic detractors and saw in Donne a potential literary ally — someone who, in 1610, made a personal contribution to this war of words by publishing a polemical work titled Pseudo-martyr, dedicated to the King, which called on English Papists to abandon their militant attempts to overthrow the nation's rightful monarch.  James I, as he had been known since accepting the crown and creating the Kingdom of Great Britain, was so impressed by Donne's arguments that he all but commanded the reluctant author to enter the ministry.  

 

Although Donne continued to resist the idea of taking holy orders his thoughts remained very much focused on religion, with the composition of what came to be known as his Holy Sonnets taking up much of his time between 1609 and 1614, a period which also saw him return briefly — and unhappily — to the Continent as the companion to Robert Drury and that nobleman's devout, well educated wife Anne.   While the elaborately sycophantic elegy he wrote in honour of the Drury's deceased daughter did not win him the favour of former aristocratic patrons like Lucy Russell (who apparently felt that the tributes he had written for them had somehow been cheapened by its appearance), their patronage allowed him to move his young family from Mitcham to a town house in Drury Lane in London, a fashionable area that offered easier access to Court and to the courtiers whose influence he still hoped to exploit to obtain a position as a member of the King's staff. 

 

 

Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford

 

 

For the next three years Donne would, by means of flattery and sometimes outright begging, seek the assistance of several important figures in the orbit of the King and even briefly return to Parliament as an MP, this time representing the borough of Taunton.  While these activities did represent progress of a kind, they did not change the King's mind about what profession he felt Donne was best suited to follow.  Yet Donne still struggled to accept the idea that he could ever become 'pure' enough in mind and spirit to join the clergy.  

 

In November 1614 the issue came to a head with the death of Donne's seven year old son Francis, the third of his children to die since the beginning of that year.  (Drury Lane, fashionable address though it was, was no more hygienic than any other part of overcrowded, stinking, plague-ridden London.)  Suffering from recurring bouts of illness and faced with ever-mounting debts, Donne made peace with his doubts and announced that he would take holy orders, confirming his new vocation by publishing a commentary on the opening verses of the first two books of The Bible titled Essays in Divinity.  

 

These commentaries were, in a sense, test runs for the sermons that would, following Donne's ordination on 23 January 1615 and elevation to the revered position of Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1621, make him arguably the most famous, widely read clergyman in England.  But his newfound social and financial security came at a high cost.  On 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, his wife Ann died, an incalculable loss — despite their frequent and sometimes lengthy separations — from which he never fully recovered.  It had been his love for Ann, and his hasty and perhaps ill-advised decision to marry her, which had ruined his career prospects even as it had inspired much of his best, most moving poetry.  He blamed himself for her death and transmuted the physical passion he had shared with her into an equally fierce passion for God and his new calling as an Anglican cleric.

By the time the Reverend Dr Donne, as he was now known, was installed as the Dean of St Paul's in 1621 he had been at the centre of Court life for four years, serving as a Royal Chaplain and as Minister to the Benchers at Lincoln's Inn in addition to being awarded the livings of three parishes in Huntingdonshire, Kent and Bedfordshire.  He also took one last journey to Europe, accompanying the diplomat James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, to Germany in 1618 in the capacity of that Court favourite's personal chaplain.  

 

Donne's position was now so secure that, by 1623, he was able to negotiate a favourable marriage settlement with the former actor and theatre owner Ned Alleyn for the hand of his eldest daughter Constance despite having suffered what had been the life-threatening illness which had inspired his greatest work of prose, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.  Nor was his position at Court weakened by the death of James I on 27 March 1625 and the accession of his son Charles I to the throne.  In 1626 Donne was appointed a governor of the charitable institution known as the Charterhouse and later served as an ecclesiastical judge in both the Court of Delegates and the Court of High Commission, the latter being the same court he had applied to in order to validate his marriage some twenty-five years earlier. 

 

 

JOHN DONNE, c 1600

 

 

Yet tragedy awaited Donne again in January 1627 when his eighteen year old daughter Lucy, who was staying with her recently widowed sister Constance, suddenly died.  Hers was to be one of many deaths Donne would be forced to contend with during that year, including those of his dearest friend Henry Goodyer and that of his former patroness, the now strictly Puritan Lucy Russell.  

 

It was also in 1627 that Donne brought his eighty year old mother to the Deanery of St Paul's to live with him — a long delayed 'duty' that carried with it the irony of having a woman who, despite intense pressure to do so, had never abandoned her Catholic faith residing as his guest within the most visible physical symbol of the English Protestant church.  Elizabeth would remain his houseguest until her death in early 1630, an event which no doubt contributed to Donne, whose health had never been robust, falling ill and becoming confined to his bed.  He remained in bed — famously leaving it to be measured for the winding sheet he would be buried in — until he somehow found the strength to get up and preach what was to be his last-ever sermon, delivered in the royal presence of Charles I, on 25 February 1631.  In a little over a month Donne was dead, leaving the world on 31 March 1631 at the age of fifty-nine.  

 

Although Donne's final sermon had been published under the evocative title Death's Duel literally weeks after he had preached it to the new monarch, two more years would pass before the first edition of his poems would roll off the presses.  By then his literary heritage, both secular and sacred, was firmly in the control of his eldest son, also named John, who had followed him into the Church and spent most of his life suing others for what he deemed to be his denied rights to oversee and publish (and thereby profit from) new editions of his father's work.  But, as more than one scholar has noted, it was thanks to the greed of John Donne fils that so much of the work of John Donne père survived the cataclysm of the English Civil War and remained available to be 'rediscovered and re-evaluated' by them and the likes of his fellow poet TS Eliot in the first half of the twentieth century where his unusual syntax, unambiguous language and insistence on the importance of conveying individual experience seemed to make him one of the earliest practitioners of Modernism. 

HOLY SONNETS

XIV

Batter my heart, three personed God; for, you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, overthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labour to admit to you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love, and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unto your enemy:

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

Written c 1609-1614

Published 1633

Use the link below to read more poems by English poet, essayist and clergyman JOHN DONNE:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 026: ROBERT SOUTHWELL

Poet of the Month 078: MARY WROTH

 

The Write Advice 215: CHINUA ACHEBE

 

…I think writing is such a serious thing that one ought to take it fairly easily and slowly, you know, at its own pace.  I don't like forcing a story.  Some days, weeks even, I can't write anything, and I don't want to go to the table and start scribbling, you see, I feel it's—it is an important thing and ought to be taken seriously.

 

Radio interview 1962 

[Reprinted in African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews (1972)]

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of Nigerian novelist CHINUA ACHEBE [1930–2013]:

https://www.thoughtco.com/chinua-achebe-biography-4176505

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 037: THICH NHAT HANH 

 

Think About It 107: ANNE HELEN PETERSEN

 

The desire for the cool job that you're passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we'll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the 'honor' of performing it.  The rhetoric of 'Do what you love, and you'll never work another day in your life' is a burnout trap.  By cloaking the labor in the language of 'passion,' we're prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.

      …The desirability of 'lovable' jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: so many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect.  There's always someone just as passionate to take your place.  Benefits packages can be slashed or nonexistent; freelance rates can be lowered to the point of bare sustenance, especially in the arts.  In many cases, instead of offering a writer money for the content that goes on a website, the writer essentially pays the website in free labor for the opportunity of a byline.  At the same time, employers can raise the minimum qualifications for the job, necessitating more school, another degree, more training — even if that training may or may not be necessary — in order to even be considered.

      In this way, 'cool' jobs and internships become case studies in supply-and-demand: Even if the job itself isn't ultimately fulfilling, or demands so much work at so little pay so as to extinguish whatever passion might exist, the challenge of being the one in a thousand who 'makes it work' renders the job all the more desirable.

 

Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation (2020)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a September 2020 article about North American writer and journalist ANNE HELEN PETERSEN and her book Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation:

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/22/anne-helen-petersen-millennial-burnout-work-life

 

 

 

 

 

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Words for the Music 028: THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

 

THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

OBSCURITY KNOCKS

THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS

    from the 1990 Go! Discs LP

Cake

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OBSCURITY KNOCKS 

 

 

 

Always at the foot of the photographs

That's me there

Snug as a bug in a mugshot pose

A foul-mouthed rogue

Owner of this corner and not much more

Still these days 

I'm better placed to get my just rewards

I'll pound out a tune and very soon

I'll have too much to say

And a dead stupid name 

 

And though I ought to be learning

I feel like a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

Calendars crumble

I'm knee deep in numbers

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

 

Rubbing shoulders with the sheets till two

Looking at my watch

And I'm half-past caring

In the lap of luxury it comes to mind

Is this headboard hard?

Am I a lap behind?

But to face doom in a sock-stenched room

All by myself

Is the kind of fate I never contemplate

Lots of people would cry

Though none spring to mind

 

And though I ought to be learning

I feel like a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

Calendars crumble

I'm knee deep in numbers

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

 

Know what it's like

To sigh at the sight

Of the first quarter of life?

Ever stopped to think

And found that nothing was there?

 

They laugh to see such fun

I'm playing blind man's bluff 

All by myself 

(All by myself)

And they're chanting a line

From a nursery rhyme

Sing ba-ba bleary eyes 

have you any idea?

 

Years of learning I must be a veteran

Of oh I like your poetry but I hate your poems

And the calendar's cluttered

With days that are numbered

I've turned twenty-one

I've twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Ought to be learning

Twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Feel like a veteran

Twist, I'm bust, I'm wrong again

Calendar's cluttered

With days that are numbered

And I know what it's like

To sigh at the sight

Of the first quarter of life

And I know what it's like

 

 

 

 

Words and music

JOHN DOUGLAS, STEPHEN DOUGLAS, 

PAUL LIVINGSTON, GEORGE McDAID  

and  

FRANCIS READER

 

 

 

© 1990 Go! Discs UK

 

 

 

 

 

What do we expect of a so-called 'classic' popular song?  A simple but evocative title?  A catchy, easily reproducible melody?  Lyrics that reference and/or illuminate some aspect of our own life experience in unique and unexpected ways, using language mercifully devoid of the clichés that make so much of what is deemed to be 'contemporary pop' so instantly forgettable if not mindlessly awful?   

 

Obscurity Knocks, released by Scottish band The Trash Can Sinatras in 1990, ticked all of these boxes, perhaps explaining why it remains the favourite song of many people who came of age in the heady days of Britpop, an audience that can recall a time when genuine originality was prized and popularity was more than a matter of conforming to the right set of algorithims.

 

The most striking elements of Obscurity Knocks are its title and lyrics, which are at once clever, knowing, innocent and, most crucially of all, surprising.  Little of the imagery is borrowed and what is borrowed — eg. 'Snug as a bug' — is juxtaposed with imagery that is deliberately, often gloriously disarming.  The rhymes are also unusually structured, stressing sounds — for example, the 'ug' sound repeated three times in the third line of the first verse — that are generally avoided by lyricists because they are short and staccato rather than long and round.  (Think of words like 'love,' 'glove,' 'dove' and 'above' and how many times these have appeared in popular songs since popular songs were invented.)  This is capped off by a soaring chorus and not one but two — yes, two! — middle-eight sections, boldly repeated one after the other before the extended final chorus.  

 

Nary a cliché in sight.  And when you add an irresistibly jangly guitar riff and a vocal that makes no apology for its use of Scottish English rather than standard British or North American English (the most overused form of the language on the planet and particularly so in the field of popular music) you have all the ingredients necessary to create a three and a half minute masterpiece.  Of course, this was no guarantee of commercial success in 1990 just as it remains no guarantee of success today.  Obscurity Knocks became a cult favourite rather than a chart favourite, with its accompanying three track EP rising to #86 in the UK and remaining there for a month while it rose to #12 on the Billboard alternative chart, no doubt aided by some consistent exposure on what used to be the vitally important sales tool known as US college radio.  

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Scottish band THE TRASH CAN SINATRAS:

 

 

 

https://trashcansinatras.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

Words for the Music 025: ROBYN HITCHCOCK

 

 

Words for the Music 022: PHIL JUDD

 

 

Words for the Music 011: KIRSTY MacCOLL

 

 

Being There (1970) by JERZY KOSINSKI

Bantam Books US film tie-in edition, 1979

For some time he stood in the garden looking around lazily in the morning sun.  Then he disconnected the sprinkler and walked back to his room.  He turned on the TV, sat down on the bed, and flicked the channel changer several times.  Country houses, skyscrapers, newly built apartment houses, churches shot across the screen.  He turned the set off.  The image died; only a small blue dot hung in the center of the screen, as if forgotten by the rest of the world to which it belonged; then it too disappeared.  The screen filled with grayness; it might have been a slab of stone.

    Chance got up and now, on the way to the gate, he remembered to pick up the old key that for years had hung untouched on a board in the corridor next to his room.  He walked to the gate and inserted the key; then, pulling the gate open, he crossed the threshold, abandoned the key in the lock, and closed the gate behind him.  Now he could never return to the garden.

     He was outside the gate.  The sunlight dazzled his eyes.  The sidewalks carried the passers-by away, the tops of the parked cars shimmered in the heat.

   He was surprised:  the street, the cars, the buildings, the people, the faint sounds were images already burned into his memory.  So far, everything outside the gate resembled what he had seen on TV; if anything, objects and people were bigger, yet slower, simpler and more cumbersome.  He had the feeling that he had seen it all.

 

The Novel:  There is something irresistibly appealing about Being There, Jerzy Kosinski's third, very short novel that was published to almost universal acclaim in 1970.  The elegantly narrated story of Chance, an orphaned idiot-savant who emerges from the safe home of his guardian — a person he knows only as 'the Old Man' — into a world he comprehends exclusively through the distancing lens of television has the dream-like quality of a fable or fairy tale, offering a vision of what was then the 'modern world' that remains totally unique and disturbingly relevant in our own age of fake news and spurious celebrity.

 

The story begins with Chance working in the Old Man's garden (a modern version of the Garden of Eden), a task he relishes because, apart from watching television, it's the only activity he has been encouraged and entrusted to pursue unsupervised since childhood.  He can neither read nor write nor, we're told, 'understand much of what others were saying to him or around him' — other qualities he shares with the Biblical figure of Adam as depicted in the Old Testament.  Chance has never ventured beyond the garden gate into the outside world or had any form of social contact with anyone besides the Old Man (a stand-in for God) and Louise, the Jamaican-born maid who prepares his meals and serves them to him in his room each day.  

 

It is Louise who discovers the Old Man dead in his bed one morning, a discovery that results in her returning to her native Jamaica (where she too promptly dies) and, in time, brings a pair of lawyers snooping round the house.  Finding no mention of Chance in his dead employer's business papers, they question him regarding his identity, receiving the forthright reply that he is and always has been the gardener.  "No one knows the garden better than I," he calmly informs his baffled visitors.  "From the time I was a child, I am the only one who has ever worked here."  Unable to produce any documentation to verify his identity, Chance is told that the house will be sealed the following day and that he — a person with no valid claim to any part of the Old Man's estate as far as they can ascertain — must be gone from it by noon.

 

Chance does as he's told, taking an old-fashioned but almost brand new suitcase from the attic and packing his few meager possessions into it.  He then walks through the gate for the first time into the outside world (the ejection from Paradise), not getting too far along the street before the weight of the suitcase and the heat of the day oblige him to stop and rest.  As he steps off the sidewalk he is struck by a reversing limousine, its bumper pinning his left leg against the bumper of the vehicle immediately behind it.  A fashionably dressed young woman soon emerges from the back seat of the limousine and, after inspecting Chance's damaged leg, offers to take him to her own home where her sick husband — an elderly financier named Benjamin Rand — is being cared for round-the-clock by his personal team of physicians.  After the woman introduces herself to him as EE, short for Elizabeth Eve (Eve being the other inhabitant of the Garden of Eden), Chance introduces himself to her as he has seen other men on television do when meeting somebody for the first time.  "I am Chance," he explains, "the gardener."  EE mishears this as 'Chauncey Gardiner' and this becomes his new name.

 

Bantam Books, c 1972

 

 

Chance loses consciousness before they reach the Rand home, awakening several hours later to find himself installed in one of its many large comfortable bedrooms.  A doctor visits and assures him that his leg is not broken and will be fine after he receives regularly scheduled injections to help control the pain caused by his injury.  EE is soon at his side, filled with remorse for what her chauffeur has done to him and, after being informed that he has no wife and family, requesting that he do her the favor of staying with herself and her husband as their guests until he's fully recovered.  Chance is happy to accept EE's generous offer and, that night, dines with her and Rand who, he's surprised to learn, is significantly older than his wife and nearly as infirm as the Old Man whose garden he was recently forced to abandon.  

 

Rand pumps his visitor for information about himself, taking Chance's comments about having no pressing business of his own to attend to and seeking a new garden to work in metaphorically rather than literally as they're intended to be taken.  Concluding that his guest must be a cagey fellow businessman, Rand asks Chance to meet with his associates at the First American Finance Corporation, perhaps with the view to helping him locate the new 'garden' he claims to be searching for.  Chance promises to think the offer over, completely incapable of understanding what his host is actually talking about.

 

The next day Rand tells Chance that he wants him to meet the US President, who will be visiting him at home before going on to address a meeting of the Financial Institute in the city.  This meeting takes place a few hours later, with the President making the same erroneous assumptions about Chance's background and profession that Rand so eagerly leapt to the previous evening.  When asked by the President what he thinks about the 'bad season' on Wall Street, Chance replies as any experienced horticulturalist might:  "In a garden… growth has its season.  There are spring and summer, but there are also fall and winter.  And then spring and summer again.  As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well."  The President is impressed by what he takes to be Chance's refreshingly optimistic statement about the health of the national economy, referencing it in the speech he delivers that afternoon and mentioning the name 'Chauncey Gardiner' to the reporters who attend his post-speech press conference.  Suddenly everybody wants to know who the President's mysterious new policy advisor is, prompting the producers of This Evening, a popular TV news program, to invite Chance to appear on that evening's edition of the show as a last-minute replacement for the suddenly (conveniently?) unavailable Vice President.

 

Chance's first television appearance is a triumph, with his comments about gardening again taken completely out of context by the program's host and its politically divided studio audience.  He becomes an instant celebrity, his good looks commented upon by a famous actress and his performance enthusiastically praised by Rand when he returns to the latter's mansion following the broadcast.  

 

But EE, now on her way home after a visit to Denver, still finds herself puzzled by the identity of their new houseguest.  Who exactly is Mr Gardiner and where exactly does he hail from?  Although she once took the liberty of rummaging through his belongings while he was sleeping, she found 'no documents among them, no checks, no money, no credit cards; she was not able to find even the stray stub of a theater ticket… Presumably, his personal affairs were attended to by a business or a bank which remained at his instant disposal.  For he was obviously well to do.'  She wonders if he has suffered a serious financial reversal or is on the run from the woman he loves, unable to decide if he should return to her or not.  EE herself is physically attracted to him and fantasizes about the two of them making love.  (The biblical loss of innocence.)  'The thought of seducing him, of making him lose his composure, excited her.  The more withdrawn he was, the more she wanted him to look at her and to acknowledge her desire, to recognize her as a willing mistress.'

 

Later that evening EE asks Chance to come to her room where, no longer able to control herself, she tries to seduce him.  But Chance, who has no idea what sex is and has never experienced an erection, sits there passively while his hostess tearfully confesses that she loves him and wants them to be physically intimate with each other, convincing herself that his disinterest in the idea of making love to her is the product of self-restraint motivated by feelings of loyalty to her dying husband. 

 

 

Grove Press, 1999

 

 

The next morning Chance is once again the talk of the town, with reporters now referring to him as 'one of the chief architects of the President's policy speech.'  EE, who missed his television appearance because she was traveling again, is thrilled by his success and asks him to consider continuing to live with herself and Rand who, she says, "feels so much more secure with you under the same roof."  She also arranges for Chance to accompany her to a social event she's expected to attend that evening in her capacity as a member of the United Nations Hospitality Committee, an event at which Chance succeeds in unwittingly convincing the Secretary-General of that organization and various foreign dignitaries of his genius just as he's unintentionally convinced the Rands and everybody else that he's a man in possession of exceptional levels of intelligence and insight.  The Russian Ambassador sends a classified report about him to Moscow, while the US President becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of solid information his aides have been able to dig up about him — someone, he huffily reminds them, he has now quoted publicly on two separate occasions.

 

EE whisks Chance off to a sumptuous party being held in the townhouse of one of her society friends, where he once again makes a favorable impression on everyone he meets including a publisher who almost immediately offers him a book deal.  When he states that he can't write, the publisher is quick to assure him that this makes no difference as he'll be provided with the company's best editor and a full-time research assistant.  He's also propositioned by another male guest who asks him if he'd like to sneak off upstairs and 'do it.'  Ignorant of what the man has in mind, Chance innocently replies that he likes to watch.  Aroused by this statement, his new friend leads Chance to a bedroom where, after some kissing and caressing which provokes absolutely no response from the baffled gardener, he strips naked and proceeds to masturbate.  'The man was certainly ill,' Chance decides.  The man reaches for Chance's shoe, pressing his erect penis against the sole of it.  'From under the shoe a white substance coursed forth in short spurts… The man twitched for the last time… He closed his eyes.  Chance reclaimed his foot and quietly left.' 

 

Later that same night, Chance has a similar experience with EE when, unable to sleep, she once again visits him in his room where, as usual, she finds him contentedly watching television.  This time she makes no effort to restrain herself.  She gets into bed with Chance, lasciviously rubbing her naked body against his unresponsive, pyjama-clad one only to be told, as he told the masturbating man at the party, that he likes to watch.  EE is initially angered by this, suggesting that it proves he's not attracted to her, but soon concludes that he wants to watch her touch herself rather than engage in the act of intercourse with her.  EE finds herself liberated by what she assumes to be his voyeurism, telling him after bringing herself to orgasm that he has made her free and, before dropping off to sleep, asking him to accompany her to yet another social function, this time a ball, to be held in the nation's capital the following evening.

 

Chance attends the ball in Washington with EE as required, unaware that he now has his own KGB dossier and code name and that, like the Russians, the US Government is still unable to learn anything definite about his background, education or financial status.  But this is not necessarily the hurdle it appears to be to those supervising the President's re-election campaign.  Chauncey Gardiner, they decide, will make the ideal Vice President.  The newcomer is well-liked, well-spoken and, most importantly, comes across on television as being 'one of us.'  

 

Chance, of course, is happily oblivious to all of this.  Leaving the noise and glare of the party behind, he steps outside into the cool night air, finding himself in a garden where he's once again able to find the peace he has sought and missed so much since being ejected from the Old Man's house a week earlier.  He is where a gardener belongs and, for him, nothing could be more delightful or more emotionally rewarding.

 

Being There is the gentlest and most accessible of its author's nine published novels, largely due to the detached child-like personality of its protagonist — a man who sets out to deceive no one but ends up deceiving the President of the United States and every other person he encounters merely by being himself and speaking the truth about horticulture, the one subject he possesses a legitimately extensive knowledge of.  Chance is, in fact, a blank page — the code name he is given by the KGB — upon which everybody else is free to create their own made-to-order version of him, thereby satisfying their particular requirements and expectations while remaining blissfully ignorant of the truth.  His unworldliness makes him seem the opposite of unworldly, while his naïvete makes him seem the opposite of naïve to people trained, thanks to the media, to automatically accept everything they see and hear at face value.  He is also that oldest of literary devices — the 'wise fool' whose adventures confirm how gullible human beings are and how willing we are to believe whatever supports our personal agendas, misguided or just plain foolish though these may be.  He is, as one reviewer described him, 'a fabulous creature of our age' whose story continues to resonate in a world where celebrity is wrongly equated with qualities like intelligence and talent and a convicted felon and former host of a reality television program was twice elected the leader of the most powerful, well-armed nation on earth despite his unrepentant narcissism, sexism and racism and his widely televised attempt to overthrow its legitimately elected government.   

 

JERZY KOSINSKI, c 1960

 

 

The Writer:  Jerzy Kosinski's final novel, published three years before his death on 3 May 1991, was titled The Hermit of 69th Street.  Subtitled The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky, it is a lengthy metafictional work concerning Mr Kosky's attempt to write a book while displaying an obsessive concern with verifying his facts.  The book is filled with hundreds of detailed footnotes, many of which are fictional or, if not, are often consciously and deliberately inaccurate.  Savaged by the critics, the novel subsequently sank without a trace, viewed as a kind of bad literary joke that few readers possessed the interest or the stamina to tackle.  But it was clearly a book that Kosinski felt compelled to write, given the controversy that marred the latter half of his career and saw him accused, among other things, of being a liar and a plagiarist.  'Kosky' is Kosinski with the 'sin' removed, a writer determined to defend himself against those who had besmirched his reputation and cast doubt on the authenticity of his work and the validity of his literary legacy.  It was yet another strange chapter in what had been an exceedingly strange life.

 

Kosinski was born Józef Lewinkopf in the Polish city of Lodz on 14 June 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.  After Poland was invaded by the Nazis on 1 September 1939, his Jewish parents Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta fled south with their sons (there is evidence to suggest that Jurek, as Kosinski was affectionately known by his parents, had a younger brother named Henio or Henryk), changing their surname to Kosinski — a common one in their predominantly Catholic homeland.  By early 1942 the refugees were living in a small apartment in a village called Dąbrowa Rzeczycka where they were protected and assisted by various members of the local, non-Jewish community.  Kosinski himself received a baptismal certificate from the parish priest and sometimes served as an altar boy in his church, possibly inspiring his lifelong love of disguises and other, more overt forms of deception.

 

When the war ended the family relocated to the resort town of Jelenia Góra close to the Czech border, where Kosinski took up skiing and resumed his interrupted education before leaving again to serve as a sharpshooter in the Polish army (and possibly pay a brief visit to the Soviet Union).  By 1955 he was a graduate of the University of Lodz, having obtained degrees in history and social sciences, and was studying for a PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw while supporting himself as a teacher's assistant.  Eager to emigrate from Communist-controlled Poland to the democratic United States, he allegedly invented a dummy foundation and supplied affidavits from three fictional 'professors' who guaranteed he would return to his homeland if he was granted the right to study overseas.  He arrived in New York in 1957 and, after working at a variety of jobs including carpark attendant, truck driver and cinema projectionist, eventually completed his degree at Columbia University. 

 

In 1960 Kosinski, writing under the pen name Joseph Novak to protect his family who were still Polish citizens and therefore subject to reprisals from its Soviet-backed government, published The Future is Ours, Comrade, a collection of anti-Communist essays which some later claimed were suggested by if not actually written on the orders of the CIA.  (Others claimed that this was a rumor deliberately spread by the Polish government to discredit Kosinski, who had officially become a defector by failing to return to Poland.)  This was followed two years later by No Third Path, a second collection of essays published under the same family protecting pseudonym.  

 

JERZY KOSINSKI, c 1979

 

 

The latter publication brought the young exile to the attention of Mary Hayward Weir, the forty-seven year old widow of a steel magnate who, impressed by his writing, hired him to organize and catalog her library.  They were soon married despite an eighteen year difference in their ages, dividing their time between Hayward's Park Avenue duplex and her various vacation homes where Kosinski, an effective and gripping storyteller, dazzled her wealthy, well-connected friends — including Dorothy de Santillana, an editor who worked for the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin — with horrific tales of his childhood as a tramautized mute on the run from the Nazis and gangs of brutal Christian peasants in the freezing Polish countryside.  These stories eventually became The Painted Bird, his first work of what he described as 'autofiction' published in 1965, the same year he became a US citizen.

 

The Painted Bird was immediately hailed as the shocking but poignant testimony of a Holocaust survivor, universally praised by critics for what they assumed to be its stark unflinching truthfulness.  The book made its thirty-two year old author an overnight celebrity and probably helped him gain the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1967 and the Ford Foundation grant he received the following year, the latter allowing him to enrol at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University and go on to teach North American prose at Princeton and Yale.  He was by now divorced from Mary Weir who would die in 1968, the same year he married marketing consultant Katherina 'Kiki' von Fraunhofer, from what he always claimed was a brain tumour — a lie he transformed into literary 'fact' in his second novel Steps which would again receive high praise from the critics and go on to win that year's National Book Award.  His first wife, a depressive alcoholic, actually took her own life, with the brain tumour story concocted by Kosinski to allow him to play the role of the grieving widower — a role he continued to play for the remainder of his life despite the fact that he and Weir had separated and divorced in 1966, a full two years before her death. 

 

Kosinki's third novel Being There, published in 1970, was another bestseller and saw him win that year's American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.  Two terms as the President of the US chapter of PEN America, an organization of poets, editors and novelists dedicated to ending censorship and promoting free speech internationally, followed in 1973 and 1974, as did other honors including a B'Rith Shalom Humanitarian Freedom Award and an ACLU First Amendment Award. 

 

Kosinski was by now a very famous man, a frequent visitor to popular New York sex clubs like Plato's Retreat, the Hellfire S&M Parlor and The Vault, somebody whose friends included industrialists and politicians, the Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski, the actor Warren Beatty (in whose 1982 film Reds he would portray Russian revolutionary leader Grigori Zinoviev), Tonight Show hosts Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers and former Beatle George Harrison to whom his penultimate novel Pinball would be dedicated in 1982.  He was also hounded by English actor Peter Sellers who became obsessed with obtaining the film rights to Being There, only to be consistently rebuffed by Kosinski who felt he lacked the talent required to capture the elusive personality of the mysterious, child-like Chance.  Eventually Kosinski relented and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1979 film which earned Sellers an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, with many critics agreeing that it was arguably the best performance of the English star's long but patchy film career.

 

Trouble was looming for Kosinski, however, in the form of an article published in The Village Voice in June 1982 which accused him of plagiarizing the plot of Being There from a Polish novel of the early 1930s titled The Career of Nicodemus Dzyma written by the prolific, well regarded novelist Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz.  Like Chance, the novel's hero is a nobody who stumbles into success and rises to become a powerful politician, eventually ordering that his former boss be executed so his true identity as an ordinary workmen won't be revealed to his new friends and lover who have convinced themselves that he's a genius.  The authors of the article further claimed that The Painted Bird had not been written by Kosinski at all but by a publisher and translator named George Reavey who had been paid a fee by Kosinski to do so.  Their third accusation, that the experiences described in the novel were entirely the product of Kosinski's imagination and not the authentic experiences of a Holocaust survivor, seriously damaged his literary reputation in North America and abroad, a situation worsened by his unwillingness to categorically confirm that the book was not autobiographical but rather a work of 'autofiction' extrapolated from what he had heard and allegedly witnessed as a child.

 

The accusations meant the end of Kosinski's credibility as both a writer and a public figure, with people weighing in on both sides of the argument to berate or defend him according to their biases while he, a lifelong hypochondriac, began to speak of himself as a sick old man despite the fact that he was an extremely fit, polo playing forty-nine year old, an expert skiier and award-winning photographer who continued to indulge his passion for voyeurism in New York's hardcore sex clubs.  He spent the final years of his life working obsessively to finish The Hermit of 69th Street, writing dozens of drafts of what was by far his longest novel in an effort, some thought, to exonerate himself and repair his damaged reputation. 

 

 

JERZY KOSINSKI, 1988

 

 

Even his seemingly triumphant return to Poland in 1988 to promote the first Polish edition of The Painted Bird had its downside, with the inhabitants of Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, the village in which he and his family had been sheltered and protected between 1940 and 1945, angrily declaring that his portrayals of them were altogether false, as were his claims that he had been beaten, starved, sexually molested, thrown into a manure pile and rendered mute as the result of the cruel treatment they had collectively subjected him to.  As one villager put it when she was interviewed for a 1995 BBC documentary about his past:  "If he was alive and turned up here, then for all the nonsense he wrote about… those villagers who looked after him, knowing that they were risking their lives… for that I would personally slaughter him with a knife!"

 

Kosinski ultimately failed to restore his public reputation, a failure some of his friends believe prompted his decision to take an overdose of barbituates washed down with alcohol and asphyxiate himself in his bathtub by tying a plastic bag over his head.  But even in death there were those who did not or could not accept this interpretation of events.  Kosinski spent the last evening of his life at a party hosted by his fellow writer Gay Talese, who strenuously denied that his friend had seemed in any way maudlin or depressed (which, of course, does not prove that he was neither of these things given his lifelong, seemingly innate talent for deception).  Kosinski had by this time reconnected with his Jewish heritage, founding and presiding over an organization called the Jewish Presence Foundation which set out to raise awareness of Jewish contributions to world culture and encourage Jewish empowerment, something he unpopularly insisted could only become possible by consigning the Holocaust to the past and ceasing to refer to it.  He also participated in the creation of the AmerBank, the first western financial institution to be chartered by the new government of post-Communist Poland.  He was still wealthy enough to travel and continued to do so frequently with his second wife Kiki in the weeks preceding his death, continuing to enjoy the jet-setting lifestyle he had been living, virtually non-stop, since marrying his first wife in 1962.

 

What matters, in the end, is not Kosinski's truthfulness but the works of art he left behind in both written and visual form.  He may have written none of his books or he may have written or partially written all of them.  The point is that somebody wrote them, just as somebody who may or may not have been William Shakespeare wrote the plays we now attribute to England's most iconic playwright.  Kosinski created at least two enduring classics of late twentieth century literature in The Painted Bird and Being There, with the latter displaying as many dissimilarities to The Career of Nicodemus Dzyma as it does similarities, particularly in terms of electronic media which was still in its infancy in 1932.  Where should the line be drawn between fiction and fabrication?  When it comes to untangling the complex life and work of Jerzy Kosinski, it is impossible to tell where reality ends and fiction begins. 

 

 

 

 

Use the links below to read Her Private Devil, a 1999 article about the sex life of JERZY KOSINSKI written by his former lover and fellow sex club devotee LAURIE STEIBER and The Rise and Fall of Jerzy Kosinski, an illuminating 2007 essay by PHILIP ROUTH.

 

http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/1063/

http://www.artsandopinion.com/2007_v6_n6/routh-3.htm

 

 

 

 

All seven novels by JERZY KOSINSKI remain in print, as does the 1992 nonfiction collection Passing By: Selected Essays 1962–1991 that he was in the process of compiling at the time of his death.

 

 

Lorimar Productions, 1979

 

 

The film adaptation of Being There, with a script co-written by JERZY KOSINSKI and ROBERT C JONES (although only KOSINSKI received screen credit for it), was released by Lorimar Productions on 19 December 1979.  Directed by HAL ASHBY, the film starred PETER SELLERS as Chance, SHIRLEY MACLAINE as Eve Rand and MELVYN DOUGLAS as her husband Benjamin Rand.  

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 024: JERZY KOSINSKI

 

 

 
Think About it 085: JERZY KOSINSKI

 

 

 
Mother Night (1962) by KURT VONNEGUT