Corrupt Conquistador

By Stefan Kanfer

COCKPIT byJERZYKOSINSKI 248 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.

"Let's say I'm a protagonist from someone else's novel."

So suggests Tarden, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit. If Tarden is indeed a creature from some other writer's galaxy, that author is manifestly Dostoyevsky. For like his predecessor, Kosinski explores the classic antinomies of rationality--and of experience that defeats reason and mocks humanity.

Tarden is a predatory double agent now on the run from his American employers, known only as The Service. He has stolen enough to permit a life of ease. But there is no such word as leisure in the Tarden lexicon. A compulsive wanderer, he prowls the dry surfaces of the globe, uprooting lives and unearthing scandal. Half voyeur, half behavioral experimenter, he sees himself as a psychosexual conquistador, forever searching for--what? Even Tarden cannot say.

Pascal theorized that all the world's troubles originated from man's inability to sit still in a room. Tarden's life is an enactment of that aphorism. His encounters serve chiefly to erode his soul and corrupt those who enter his life. A girl who falls in love with him leaps from a roof and becomes paralyzed. His closest friend goes insane and attempts to decapitate him. A mistress who has misbehaved is turned over to three derelicts to be gang-raped. Yet Tarden is also capable of whimsical decencies. A political prisoner is released when Tarden blackmails his jailers; like the poor folk in Grimm's fairy tales, people who aid the agent are given windfall rewards.

He is fascinated with technology: cameras, tape recorders, sports cars that become, perhaps as in Western society, an extension of the senses and a substitute reality. He has a special affinity for the world of skiing, both for its lyrical freedom and its terror.

I-Am-A-Camerawork. For all his adrenal meanderings, Tarden is not without wit. He often affects an officer's uniform of no known country, then parades through towns watching functionaries cringe and scrape before him. By seizing upon the paranoid fantasies of East European officials, he forces a bureaucracy to fall of its own weight and makes good his escape--as did his creator 18 years ago.

But these are pin lights in a field of black. Kosinski's terse, unstructured style has always created images of power and authenticity. Here he uses I-am-a-camerawork to fill the mind's eye, with scenes following one another like projected slides. Incidents are unobtrusively introduced until the reader seems to be a guest, then a participant in Tarden's intrigues. Some of those plans include obsessive sexual anguish that amounts to sadomasochism. Others concern the pornography of violence; a skiing accident, stained with blood and waste, and a murder by radar are as gripping and horrific as any passage in any of this year's thrillers.

Ironically, it is in such moments that the author's invited comparison with Dostoyevsky weakens. Though Kosinski ends with a paragraph from The Possessed, the brilliant Polish exile reaches the depths, not the peaks, of his Russian master. At Dostoyevsky's most pathological, he still illuminated his worst sinners, sometimes with anguished faith, sometimes with a grieving moral sense. Kosinski's protagonist views sex as a corrosive, never as delight or even consolation; for Tarden, all other characters exist as so many laboratory animals awaiting his stimulus.

Lacking a human dimension, the spy seldom grows large enough to tell universal truths. Instead, he becomes an extension of the tortured child of Kosinski's indelible first novel, The Painted Bird, and the deracinated hero of his second greatest work, Steps. Like these central characters, Kosinski once fled the hell of war and totalitarianism; like them, he suffered unnamed--and perhaps unnameable--trauma. Cockpit seems to be a refraction of those anguished early years. If it is, then the novel's epigraph need not be from Dostoyevsky but from Auden, whose insight remains the subtext for all acts of vengeance: land the public know What all schoolchildren learn Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Jerzy Kosinski's work glistens with social observation and psychological apprehension. Not since Conrad has an Eastern European found so profound a voice in the English tongue. Such relentless talent, such flashes of genius, make the reader hope one day for a book that can look past retribution to seek a

State of grace.

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