novelist jerzy kosinski / visage of a painted bird

The Embellished Bird

James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski. New York: Dutton, 1996, pp. 336-337—

On weekends he [the novelist Jerzy Kosinski] sometimes went with George and Freddie Plimpton and their crowd to Pimpton’s mother’s place in West Hills, where parlor games were the order of the day. They playing hiding games like “murder” and “sardines”…To Plimpton’s surprise, after all his talk about hiding, in his apartment and during the war, Kosinski was not particularly good at the hiding games…
On the other hand, he demonstrated his ability to fold himself neatly into a bureau drawer, and when the situation was under his control, he played his usual pranks. 

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Gabrielle Selz, UnStill Life. W.W. Norton, 2014, p. 145—

In between her crying jags [in response to her husband’s departure], she [the author’s mother] dated. Once a man with thick black hair and the large beaked nose of a bird came to the front door to pick her up. He was introduced as Jerzy Kosinski, the author of a controversial book my mother had on her shelf, The Painted Bird, about a boy surviving the Holocaust. They didn’t go out for long. Kosinski was an eccentric who liked to disappear. Mom once discovered him curled up and hiding in a large bureau drawer. He was too strange for her tastes.

CD-ROM Package Design | Madi Luke

CD-ROM Package © Madi Luke 2016

Above Design for a CD-ROM portfolio by graphic design student Madison (Madi) Luke (©2016), at the University of Northern Iowa.

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As I read this recently, I was reminded of The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. The following is from Richard Neutra, Life and Shape. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962, p. 362—

Frank Lloyd Wright told me, I think significantly, not once but on two occasions, the story of a monkey in Malaya. It was caught by a planter, roped around the waist, and tied to a post on his screened porch. During the night the monkey bit off the rope near the post, bit through the screen mesh, and escaped into the jungle to his fellows. But they were no longer fellows to a monkey with a peculiarity—with a rope around his belly. They regarded him with hostility for being different, "and tore him limb from limb." I still remember Mr. Wright's baritone laughter which ended in a bitter smile. Frank Lloyd Wright did not simply have a strange rope around his belly—why did he link this story to himself? What really characterizes the relationship to others of the outstanding man, merely taken as the extra case of a vital individual? Is it tragedy—not only necessity—that the individual, even the best, the most alive, is really not effective , not vital, in a vacuum? Always very soon, sooner or later, he must be involved with others.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).