Playing It by Eye

By R.L. Sheppard

BEING THERE by Jerzy Kosinski. 142 pages. Harcourf Brace Jovanovich. $4.95.

Few first novels have been embraced with such praise and sympathy as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird--a taut, savage story of a stray city boy's brutalization by Middle European peasants during World War II. Three years after it was published in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps, a montage of violent and sadistic episodes perceived with an almost fetishistic precision. Being There is a change of pace, a tantalizing knuckle ball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters.

A good-looking, brain-damaged illiterate named Chance has spent his youth tending a rich man's garden. His only contact with the outside world is TV. To Chance's weak mind, melodramas, news, commercials, sporting events and test patterns all carry equal weight and value. When the rich man dies, Chance has to go out into the world.

Dressed in one of the old man's custom-tailored suits and toting a valise full of elegant haberdashery, he looks like a successful young businessman between jobs. At least that is what the young wife of an old and ailing industrialist thinks when her limousine bruises his leg.

Thereafter, coincidence takes control. "1 am Chance the gardener" is heard by the woman as "I am Chauncey Gardiner." When she brings him home for first aid and her husband asks Chance about his business, the simpleton's candid replies are interpreted as wise metaphors. When the President meets Chance while visiting the industrialist, he asks his opinion of the depressed stock market. "In a garden," says Chance, "growth has its season ... as long as the roots are not severed, all will be well." The President uses the line on TV and credits Chauncey Gardiner. The press assumes he is an economic adviser and lionizes him. Eventually Chance becomes a vice-presidential candidate.

Precision and Balance. Chance's resemblance to Voltaire's Candide ("We must cultivate our garden") and even to Buster Keaton's deadpan clown is fairly obvious. Despite the implausibility of the plot, the precision and balance of Kosinski's laconic prose, and his ability to animate a character who actually has no character at all, make Being There much more than the heavyhanded satiric fairy tale it might appear to be. More than an antihero, Chance is a non-character--the ultimate spectator--who reflects Kosinski's concern about the future of free will in the dense milieu of an advanced industrial society.

Kosinski, 37, has lived through--and now makes use of--some of the strongest direct experience that this century has had to offer. Like the six-year-old boy in The Painted Bird, he was separated from his Jewish parents during World War II and survived as a waif in the Polish countryside. Like Chance, he suffered a physical injury that left him mute for five years. After the war he was reunited with his parents and placed in a school for the handicapped.

Though he could not talk, he was self-reliant beyond his twelve years, and armed with a feeling of superiority that comes naturally to survivors. In retrospect, Kosinski compared himself to a locked fortress, "making no noise, so no one knew how many troops there really were inside."

Yet the author objects to the notion that The Painted Bird is autobiographical. "When you write fiction," he asserts, "the part of you that writes is totally set apart from the part of you that lives your own life." The view is not a quibble but a sophisticated discrimination about the abstracting processes of art. It is also a defense mechanism to keep the author's private self --the source of his creative energy --from the paralysis of being revealed, and so fixed in any one place.

So totally did Kosinski keep his private self apart from his social roles that he became his own most interesting fictional creation. As a political science student (1955-57) at the Communist-controlled Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, he led several lives. On the surface, he was a brilliant student of socialist theory who rose rapidly to an associate professorship. Within, he plotted his escape from the controls that threatened his individuality. A confident master of bureaucratic judo, Kosinski eventually used the weight of official structure against itself. He invented four fictitious professors to use as references--each with his own stationery, rubber stamps and distinct telephone voice. "They were the four best friends I had in Poland," he says. To prove their friendship, his professors endorsed Kosinski's application for a passport to go to the U.S. for further study.

Odd Jobs. While he waited, Kosinski carried a foil-wrapped egg of cyanide in his pocket and kept repeating to himself, "No matter what, I am going to depart." Miraculously, his scheme worked. On Dec. 20, 1957, he arrived at Idlewild Airport, completing what he considers the greatest creative act of his life.

The usual odd jobs--truck driver, bottle wiper--were followed by a Ford Foundation grant to continue his research. Under the pen name Joseph Novak, Kosinski published two studies of Communist political theory: The Future Is Ours, Comrade (1960) and No Third Path (1962). In 1962 he married Mary Hayward Weir, the 40-year-old widow of the founder of the National Steel Corp., and Kosinski's life changed again. He began to move in the world of the influential rich, some shadows of which fall on the pages of Being There. His wife died in 1968 after a long illness, and he has not remarried.

Today, Kosinski lives in Manhattan but commutes to New Haven, Conn., where, at the Yale School of Drama, he teaches two courses on nonconventional English prose and another called "Death and the Modern Imagination." Generally, he does not have much regard for American students. He once described many of them as dead souls: "At best, they sit and watch films or listen to music in a group, thus isolated by a collective medium which permits each of them to escape direct contact with the others."

Rhetorical Flourish. This will undoubtedly come as a shock to the millions of young people who boast of their vitality and their commitment to causes and intense relationships. Yet Kosinski sees them as living well within a more or less familiar totalitarian spectrum. They are, he thinks, "victims of a collective image which, like ubiquitous television, engulfs us." A rhetorical flourish, perhaps. But it comes from a man who has transcended far more sinister totalitarianisms by leaving nothing to Chance.

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