Walking after midnight: on Steps, sex, power, identity, and the mystery of Jerzy Kosinski

I first read Steps ten years ago. I knew nothing about the book or its author. I’d picked it up more or less randomly in a bookstore and found I’d gotten a dozen pages in before coming up for air. It was my first Jerzy Kosinski, and looking back now, it seems it must have really hooked me, because I know that by the end of that year I was traveling through Central and Eastern Europe with a stack of books that were at least half Kosinski. It felt appropriate to be reading this body of work, so startling in its exacting perversions and flights of savagery, while moving through a part of the world where people seemed always to be consuming such tremendous amounts of meat, and while I brooded over the end of what felt like an especially bloody century. I was very young and hadn’t yet realized that all centuries are bloody. By pure chance, it was also during this trip that I first saw Being There, the movie adapted by Kosinski from his own novel, which happened to be screening at a Prague cinematheque.

I return to Steps now because I’ve been meaning to and because I’ve long wanted to direct readers to this strange and, it still seems to me, kind of forgotten Polish-American author, one who was not so long ago such a sensation, as well as a source of much controversy, particularly concerning the authorship of his most acclaimed novel The Painted Bird. For many reasons Steps seems an ideal introduction to Kosinski, though it was long after reading it that I realized just how emblematic of Kosinski’s philosophy it was.

When I first read Steps, with its many very brief first-person anecdotes and tales spanning wildly diverse places, milieus, professions and situations, I’d just assumed its narrators were many. Much later I read Passing By, a collection of Kosinski’s essays, and noted that he kept referring to “the protagonist of Steps.” It hadn’t occurred to me that all the scenarios contained within this book could happen to one person. More importantly, it hadn’t occurred to me that one person could perform such a variety of actions, some tender, some cruel, some altruistic, some murderous. Like I said, I was very young. And I wasn’t yet familiar with the novels of Jerzy Kosinski.

The protagonist of Steps begins by recounting a story in which he enters a poor village to have his laundry done. When he goes to pick up his clothes a young seamstress eyes his credit cards as he shuffles his belongings around. She asks what they are and he explains that with these plastic cards one can buy whatever ones wants without using any money. He tells her that if she meets him later in secret he’ll take her away, buy her things, and she’ll no longer be poor. The episode ends with the protagonist simply fulfilling this vaguely sinister promise. The next episode reverses the power dynamic of the first. The protagonist finds himself on a small, impoverished island with no funds. Desperate and starving, he meets some tourists, older, unattractive women, who feed him but in exchange ravish his youthful flesh. These stories set the tone for all that follows.

Steps is about power and identity, about domination and metamorphosis. Nothing is fixed. Sexual desire is most characteristically described in terms of the desire to possess another. The narration itself is rigorously dispassionate, carefully isolating memory from emotion. So if my initial inability to register the novel as being the story of one person seems naïve or unobservant, my only real defense lies in the fact that the protagonist makes no effort whatsoever to unify his memories and experience with any overt sense of self-development or emotional build. And this is what makes the book, along with all of Kosinski’s best work, so fascinating, chilling in its detachment and depiction of oppression, moving in its proposal that a person can do or become anything he or she wants to. (Should I add here that Kosinski took his own life?)

The protagonist shifts consistently between voyeur—tellingly, he was a sniper while in the army—and instigator of action. In another early episode he works as a ski instructor at a resort near a tuberculosis clinic. At night he watches some of the other male instructors tryst with some female patients in the open area between their facilities. He describes their meeting in the moonlit snow: “The silhouettes touched and merged as if they were fragments of a shadow being mended.” The night and the distance renders the people into shadows; contact renders them into a single mass. Later the protagonist conducts his own affair with a particularly ill patient. She makes love to him by touching his image in her mirror; he later makes love to her by touching her photographed image.

Kosinski is not an author who finds sexuality banal. The routes to sexual contact seem infinite under his gaze. These routes are at times abhorrent, with incidents including deception, prostitution, bestiality, incest and rape. In one of the most fully fleshed out episodes, based on a real incident, the protagonist, again traveling in the countryside, discovers a woman whose been held captive in a cage by a farmer and alerts the police. However, before he does so he confesses, “there was something very tempting in this situation, where one could become completely oneself with another human being.”

In the book’s italicized intermediary passages by contrast, conversations between two lovers, the honesty with which sexual contact and romantic love is discussed is disarming, brave and often insightful. “You only know me in a certain way,” one lover explains, imparting upon the other the unavoidable, involuntary ways we tailor our identities for the view of others. This unknowability isn’t meant to invoke despair but rather to acknowledge the ways we enter into each other’s stories, touch each other’s lives and beings, and how we change, relentlessly, in spite of the dictates of memories and people who claim to have us pegged.

The constant gardener: Being There on DVD

Going back to its opening scenes, especially as they read in the novel, Being There submits itself as perhaps our most acute modern take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Before the death of his employer, Chance (Peter Sellers) spent his whole life confined within the high walls of an affluent mansion, meeting few others, tending the old man’s garden, and experiencing the external world entirely through the shadow play of television. The catch to this spin on the allegory is that liberation from his cave doesn’t necessarily enlighten Chance but rather leads to inspired farce, one with the distinctive blend of affection and dismay for American life that marks the perspective of the observant outsider, which is exactly what the late Polish-born writer Jerzy Kosinski was.

Kosinski’s eponymous novella was published in 1970, a sharp if unusually slight work from a period marked by dark, at times positively gruesome novels, including The Painted Bird, Kosinski’s controversial 1965 semi-autobiographical chronicle of an abandoned child’s harrowing survival during World War II. As directed by Hal Ashby, the 1979 film, adapted with surprising fidelity by Kosinski himself, is leisurely, almost whimsical, and, thanks largely to Sellers’ sublimely restrained central performance—his penultimate—it’s also very funny. Chance, who due to a misunderstanding adopts the name Chauncey Gardiner, resembles a permanently sedated child. His mind is placid. He can only convey ideas through gardening metaphors, can only understand human behaviour when it echoes televised simulations. Yet, thanks to outrageous fortune, Chance befriends a wealthy, dying financier (Melvyn Douglas), influences the American President (Jack Warden), arouses the friendship of the Soviet ambassador (Richard Basehart), inflames the passions of a fetching society woman (Shirley MacLaine), and becomes a sensation, a celebrity without a past.

Being There, especially when seen in the wake of the Bush administration, speaks to the adoration of naïveté that can imperil American political discourse. Yet despite the dangers he represents, Chance himself is never rendered as anything more than benignly vacuous, an inoffensive, (literally) impotent blank, a man whose homespun wisdom and pop cultural breeding disguises what finally feels like an alien entity, no more of this world than Benjamin Button or Truman Burbank. He could have easily a creation of Philip K. Dick's. Chance’s TV-derived approximation of humanness is a satirical reflection on reflection itself, the reflection of the world through a sentimental, infantilized, implicitly racist and commercially dictated mirror. So Being There also functions as a documentary on what everybody was watching 30 years ago—remember Cheech and Chong’s star-laden ‘Basketball Jones’?

Despite a bit of unevenness—the scenes of the President in bed with the first lady feel, oddly enough, like a bad sitcom—I think Being There holds up well, and that it will continue to look different for each successive generation. And, along with his appearance in Reds, it remains one of the very few traces of Kosinski’s strange, unusual presence in the movies. 

Lost—and found—in translation: Roberto Bolaño and César Aira: new works in English

When an author’s writing is introduced to a new language it sometimes happens that his body of work, which likely emerged gradually in the countries that share his mother tongue, comes over those for whom this work is newly translated like an avalanche. It can be exciting. I remember when, within a very compact space of time, everything by Paul Auster was appearing in Spanish translation in Mexico. Suddenly everyone I knew in Mexico was reading Auster’s work enthusiastically, surveying the whole oeuvre at once, gobbling it up and talking about it. Something similar is happening now with the work of Roberto Bolaño. Following the hugely successful debut of his novel The Savage Detectives in English translation last year, it seems now like everybody’s reading Bolaño. In the literary cliques of Anglophone North America, the guy’s a sudden star, with a significant body of work to back it up. Difference between he and Auster, is, sadly, that Bolaño’s not around to enjoy it.

Born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile, Bolaño lived a largely vagabond existence, residing at different times in Mexico, France and Spain, which might go some distance to explaining his late start in getting published. Yet while his published work only started to build up in the 1990s, it quickly drew attention for its striking, wicked wit, perverse invention and thematic daring. “When I read Bolaño,” wrote Nicole Krauss in a not uncommon appraisal, “I think: Everything is possible again.” He died in 2003 at the age of 50. The Savage Detectives is now in paper and Bolaño’s last major work to be translated into English, his posthumous epic 2666, is set to appear this fall. Yet a less-heralded—and comparatively slim, and thus less daunting—volume has just recently found its way to bookstores and is not only very much worth checking out but arguably makes for an intriguing starting point for the uninitiated.

Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, $26.50) is a biographical dictionary of 20th century New World fascists, varied personae of varied background and literary, social or political ambition who each is some way locate their inspiration in the heinous doomed pursuits of, among others, Hitler. These figures are fictional, entirely plausible, oddly pathetic and uniformly fascinating to track through the brief sketches Bolaño provides. The peculiar structure of the book draws upon similarly structured works by Borges or Stanislaw Lem, but pushes formal play and mythical reverie into an altogether more deeply sinister abyss.

In Nazi Literature in the Americas we meet, among many others, Luz Mendiluce Thompson, daughter to the renown Argentinean poetess, a socialite and publisher, who spent her insane, promiscuous and frustrated years treasuring a photo of herself as a baby being held by Hitler. We meet Ignacio Zubieta, polo player, great dancer and bibliophile, who might have been a beloved popular figure had he not left Colombia to fight for both Franco and the Nazis. We meet Jim O’Bannon, American football player and poet, “equally susceptible to the allure of force and a yearning for delicate perishable things,” who loved the Beats, but wound up beating up Allen Ginsberg when he belatedly sniffed out the legendary author’s homosexuality.

In every case, the point to these tales is less about sympathizing with these individuals than it is about recognizing how easily evil can slip into an individual’s unruly path through life, a theme that lines the work of Jerzy Kosinski, among others. Most interestingly, Bolaño himself, far from assuming a detached role, appears in the final, Graham Greenesque entry, in which he encounters a figure with whom he shares much in common while becoming instrumental in his execution.

My still-fresh interest in Bolaño’s writing recently led me to César Aira, a perhaps even more peculiar Argentinean novelist whose work Bolaño had praised and written prefaces for. Aira is wildly prolific, in part because his books are so very short, but only a few of them have appeared in English. The one I’ve thus far been able to sample is How I Became a Nun (New Directions, $17.50), which takes the form of a memoir focused on Aira’s seventh year of life, the period that led to “the invention of my memory.” Aira tells of moving to the city and being taken out by his father to try ice cream for the first time, an episode that ends in hysterical, hilarious tragedy when it turns out that the ice cream is lace with cyanide and the confusion builds to the point where Aira’s enraged and embarrassed father beats the ice cream vendor to death.

Religious rhetoric abounds, yet, puzzlingly, the promise of the title never comes to fruition. Fantasies, out of body experiences, dwarves and radio programmes featuring a child Jesus leading a variation on Our Gang come to vibrant life in these pages, one episode leading to the next in a way that’s at once organic, silly, insightful and feeling very much like the writer is making it up as he goes. A troubled, unusually introspective identity is taking shape, the narrative complicated above all by the unremarked-upon contention that the author is actually a girl, though everyone else refers to Aira as a boy. How I Became a Nun plays jazz with memory and perpetual storytelling, that important branch of magic realism. It’s thrilling, if perhaps so willing to slide off every conceivable template as to feel terribly slight. I for one found it absorbing from start to finish, and even if it hardly carried the weight of the work I’ve read thus far from Bolaño, I would have to agree with Bolaño’s statement that “One you’ve started reading Aira, you don’t want to stop.”