Quote of the Day (Kosinski)

“A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.” – Jerzy Kosinski
(With all due respect, this statement from the Polish émigré novelist—born on this date in 1933—provides a license to lie with impunity. It also got Kosinski in no end of hot water in 1982, when Eliot Fremont-Smith and Geoffrey Stokes of The Village Voice wrote an expose that called his achievements into question. The article, and subsequent ones it provoked, includes charges that he plagiarized from Polish sources; that editors ghost-wrote his novels and that translators played an unusually heavy role in rendering his work into English; that the CIA underwrote at least a few books; and that his Holocaust novel The Painted Bird, reputed to be autobiographical, had maligned as abusive a Polish family that had saved the lives of his family and others during the Nazi occupation. John Corry of The New York Times counterattacked the Voice article, but some of the stain remained. I don’t believe critical opinion about Kosinski really recovered during his lifetime, and he committed suicide nine years later. The whole thing might have been avoided if he had not developed such a reputation for making up good stories with little resemblance to reality for the sake of dazzling cocktail-party listeners.)