Jerzy Kosinski’s Traumas, Real and Invented

Los relatos de Kosinski sobre la Polonia en tiempos de guerra forjaron, y deshicieron, su reputación. Fotografía de Inge Morath / Fundación Inge Morath / Magnum

Los traumas de Jerzy Kosinski: reales e inventados

“Jerzy”, de Jerome Charyn, es un conmovedor intento de rastrear las conexiones entre las luchas de Kosinski en tiempos de guerra y las ficciones de posguerra.

Por  Ruth Franklin

20 de marzo de 2017

En 1982, Jerzy Kosinski, novelista y celebridad literaria polaco-estadounidense, apareció en la portada de la revista Times ,  fotografiado por Annie Leibovitz. Desnudo hasta la cintura, con el hombro apoyado en la puerta de un establo, calzaba botas de polo y pantalones de montar blancos ajustados; los arreos de caballo colgaban como un látigo de su mano izquierda. Su piel estaba bronceada y reluciente, su pecho lampiño, su expresión opaca: severa, cautelosa, quizás un poco confrontativa. El artículo que acompañaba el artículo, un perfil adulador de Barbara Gelb, lo calificaba de "el superviviente definitivo". Definitivamente como una "conocedora de supervivientes", Gelb escribió que, de todos los supervivientes del Holocausto que conoció, Kosinski era el más dañado —"física y psicológicamente"— y el más sincero al respecto: "con crudeza en su ficción, con ingenio en el salón".

Thomas Bernhard / The Art of Extinction

 

The Art of Extinction

By Ruth Franklin

December 17, 2006

In 1988, to commemorate Austria’s annexation by Adolf Hitler fifty years earlier, a new play was commissioned from Thomas Bernhard. The author of eleven novels and more than twenty plays, Bernhard had a well-deserved reputation as the country’s most provocative postwar writer: he spent his career alternately mocking and mourning Austria’s Nazi legacy, which, with typical bluntness, he once represented as a pile of manure on the stage. At first, he declined to participate in the commemoration, saying with caustic humor that a more appropriate gesture would be for all the shops once owned by Jews to display signs reading “Judenfrei.” But the author of plays like “The German Lunch Table,” in which family members gathered for a meal discover Nazis in their soup, could not resist such a rich opportunity to needle Austria’s political and cultural élite. “All my life I have been a trouble-maker,” he once wrote. “I am not the sort of person who leaves others in peace.”

The Great And the Good / Somerset Maugham’s sense of vocation.

The Great And the Good

Somerset Maugham’s sense of vocation.

Ruth Franklin

May 24, 2010

In Somerset Maugham’s novel “The Moon and Sixpence,” there is a scene in which Dirk Stroeve, a painter, visits an art dealer to inquire after the work of another artist, Charles Strickland, whose paintings he has persuaded the dealer to take on. Stroeve is himself a mediocre painter of blatantly commercial landscapes and peasant scenes, unrepentant about his lack of originality. “I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he says early on, “but I have something. I sell.” Yet he recognizes Strickland’s work as genius. He tells the dealer, “Remember Monet, who could not get anyone to buy his pictures for a hundred francs. What are they worth now?” The dealer questions this logic. “There were a hundred as good painters as Monet who couldn’t sell their pictures at that time, and their pictures are worth nothing still. How can one tell? Is merit enough to bring success?” Stroeve is infuriated. “How, then, will you recognize merit?” he asks. “There is only one way—by success,” the dealer replies. “Think of all the great artists of the past—Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ingres, Delacroix—they were all successful.”

Commercially successful but often dismissed by critics, Maugham maintained a balanced view of his talents and limitations.Illustration by Edward Sorel

Success came easily to Maugham, whose career embodies the vexing questions implicit in Stroeve’s argument with the art dealer: how do we recognize artistic merit, and what relation, if any, does it have to popularity? It is difficult to think of another writer whose work was once so ubiquitous and is now so thoroughly absent from the contemporary literary canon. As Selina Hastings writes in her new biography, “The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham” (Random House; $35)—the title is somewhat sensational, given that most of Maugham’s secrets have been open for some time—Maugham was for much of his life “the most famous writer in the world.” He once had four productions running simultaneously in London’s West End, his novels were best-sellers in England and America, and his works have been adapted for film and television more than ninety times. He spent his later years in style, in a villa on the French Riviera, and his death, in 1965, at the age of ninety-one, was front-page news in Europe and America. Yet during the seven years I spent studying English literature at two universities, three decades later, I do not recall anyone, professor or student, ever mentioning his work.