Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit

There was a time when American fiction writers were celebrities.

Throughout the 1970s, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote turned up regularly on late-night television, and you could count on each to be outspoken and opinionated, and to meet America’s vision of a public intellectual.

Then there was Jerzy Kosinski. Charming and witty, with his Polish accent and full head of hair, he wasn’t gruff like Mailer, sniffingly condescending like Vidal or weird as Capote. Kosinski made 14 appearances between 1971 and 1980 on The Tonight Show, making him recognizable enough that when Bantam Books reprinted several of his novels in the early 1980s, his portrait was prominent on each front cover.

Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski and his family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who aided Polish Jews. After the war, his father aligned with Poland’s newfound Communist regime and Kosinski, forging official documentation, migrated to the U.S.

Nearly all his books were best sellers; he’s best known for Being There (1971) and The Painted Bird (1965), novels that won him accolades, literary awards and were later adapted as films.

His book Cockpit, published 50 years ago in 1975, although superficially about a former operative in a security agency called "the Service," isn’t a spy novel. Novel may not be the right word to describe it either. Like his Steps (1968), the book is constructed of random vignettes written in the first person. Cockpit’s protagonist (a cold and clinical word, but this shoe fits) is a Class A sociopath, ticking every box: a lack of conscience; patterns of antisocial behaviors and attitudes; controlling with threats or aggression; manipulating others using intelligence, charm or charisma.

Most of the pieces in Cockpit revolve around violence or sex, sometimes both; the sexual content is often reminiscent of those “erotic” ghost-written letters used to run in Penthouse Forum. Sometimes it’s English-as-a-second-language awkward (“I induced her orgasm”).

It’s a claustrophobic read not helped by the lack of chapters, points where you can catch your breath. The copy just flows on and after a while, the cumulative examples of animal cruelty, mimicking bureaucrats to frighten people, stealing mail, scaring children, retracting one’s penis to make women believe it was amputated, and just the overall creepiness is wearying. At one point the narrator, speaking of the hours spent secretly photographing, developing and enlarging photos of his sexual activities, says, “I am overcome by its pointlessness.”

Understood.

Since most of the narrator’s antics – secret surveillance, trolling, photographing (not even filming) sex – seem almost mainstream these days, Cockpit is creepy, but almost quaint.

Plagued by allegation of plagiarism and deteriorating health, Kosinski died by suicide in 1991, ingesting lethal amounts of drugs and alcohol, then sealing the deal with a plastic bag around his head. 

Unless there’s some sort of Kosinski revival, like a biopic -- and he's probably worthy of such treatment -- I'm not sure if anybody is still reading him. As with many other celebrity authors, the guys who dominated The New York Times best-seller lists for decades, he seems to have dropped out of public consciousness.