The Lesson of Jerzy Kosinski’s Telex Machine

Maria Konwicki is in town visiting her father, the celebrated Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki. This is her first trip to her native Poland in six years, and after three weeks, she’s grown stir-crazy for New York City, her home now. On this particular morning, however, her spirits are riding high: Her plane for the States departs tomorrow.

“I have two grown daughters,” says the 61-year-old Konwicki, graciously squiring his guests from the West--a reporter and photographer--into his comfortable living room where coffee and cake are served. “And being a fair man, I’ve given one to America and one to Poland.”

This is the sort of duality that amuses and preoccupies Konwicki: the “strange fate” that is his as a father and also as a Pole. This is the stuff of his droll, surrealistic fiction--work that explores the role of fate, history and the unconscious in the minds and actions of his wandering and tormented anti-heroes, which are often as not Konwicki himself.

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Konwicki’s books routinely draw critical encomiums. A British critic placed the prolific writer--whose work spans four decades and as many genres--in a class of three along with Soviet expatriate Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Czech writer Milan Kundera. According to Ewa Kuryluk, writing last year in the New York Times, Konwicki achieved “the stature of a prophet” in Poland upon the 1979 publication in the underground press of “A Minor Apocalypse.” The book, which appeared in the United States four years later, is the parable of a day in the life of Konwicki, who wrestles with a plan to set himself on fire to protest Poland’s impending “voluntary” union with the Soviet Union. “Moonrise, Moonset,” a literary journal about Poland’s watershed year, 1981, published here last fall, was hailed as Konwicki’s best.

With his two latest books in Polish--the newly published “Bohin,” a romance novel that the author describes as a “lighter book on my list,” and “New World and Environs,” a 1986 sequel to “Moonrise”--Konwicki has returned to a state press, using his growing international stature as leverage to set the terms.

“When I submitted the books, I said, ‘If you can publish them without censoring, that’s fine, but if they have to be censored, I’ll have to withdraw them.’ ” Konwicki answers questions in Polish, then takes a deep, meaningful draw on his cigarette and peers out from behind his tortoise-shell glasses, waiting for his translator to deliver the goods in English.

The editions were large by Polish standards--30,000 copies each--and Konwicki says they sold out in a “few hours,” but he knows of no plans for subsequent editions (“Because I’m a somewhat dangerous author”). Farrar, Straus plans to publish the books in the next several years.

Perhaps more astonishing to a Westerner than Konwicki’s productiveness is his versatility. In addition to the novels, Konwicki has written and directed half a dozen films such as “The Issa Valley,” a screen adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Konwicki collaborated with Andrzej Wadja on a screenplay for the 1987 French film, “Chronical of Love Affairs,” based on his novel by the same name. Konwicki is currently at work on a screenplay adaptation of “The Beggars,” a classic 19th-Century work by the Polish-Lithuanian writer Adam Mickiewicz, which Konwicki will direct.

“Throughout my whole life, I was always starting something new, including my film career,” he says. “I get easily bored with everything.” Wearing a red V-neck sweater with elbow guards and clunky work boots, Konwicki gesticulates throughout the interview with an energy that contradicts his hunched posture. Stage-directing, Konwicki instructs my photographer to “get off his chair and start” shooting. And then, playing to the camera, Konwicki moves to a cane-back rocker. Behind him in the room are 18th- and 19th-Century oil paintings of bucolic landscapes and a crucifixion, statuary on the bookshelves amid his own titles and a large Hitachi TV and VCR.

Konwicki’s resume would seem to follow the story line of recent Polish history. Born in 1926 in Wilno, then the Lithuanian section of Poland (which since World War II has been incorporated into the Soviet Union), Konwicki came of age during the war, fighting in the resistance with the Home Army.

After the war, Konwicki threw in his lot with the Communists, becoming a leading figure among the generation of gung-ho younger writers, the “pimpled ones.” He wrote stories exalting the working man, and his first novel, “Power,” adhered to the state-decreed “Socialist Realist” standards of the time. But like many of his peers, he grew disenchanted with the communist order and, by 1963 had written, under veil of allegory, a book critical of the state called “A Dreambook for Our Time.” The book drew the attention of Philip Roth, editor of Penguin’s “Writers From the Other Europe” series, and was included there in in 1976.

Though his early conversion to communism continues to follow him--it’s been held against him by younger Solidarity-shaped writers who yearn for democracy--Konwicki says he harbors no regrets about his early decisions, even those he might now regard as “mistakes.”

“Because they do stack up into a sort of pyramid of experiences, very useful in literature,” he says. “I’ve lived through pretty much what has been offered to live through.”

Though Konwicki has resolutely staked out his turf in Poland, he is nonetheless endlessly fascinated by the contrast between Poland and America, between East and West, between the menacing, soulless and nonsensical aspects of Soviet-style communism, with which the Polish government is saddled, and the pitfalls of commercialism to which Western writers--and culture--so often fall victim.

“(Steven) Spielberg, a very talented artist, even he couldn’t resist the temptation (of making millions) and started making films for children. What is the artistic canon for children?” Konwicki asks rhetorically. “The basic canon for children is clowning. . . . It’s the infantilizing of commercial art that has influenced all of world art.”

Jerzy Kosinski, whom Konwicki met on a recent trip to America, is another case in point. The Warsaw author was struck by the presence of a Telex machine near Kosinski’s study, instantaneously dispatching book reviews and the like. This represented for Konwicki the intrusion of commerce into an author’s sacred space. Polish writers, by contrast, are “free of the market; we don’t depend on it.”

“I don’t have to court my readers,” Konwicki says with pride. “I don’t have to wonder what kind of book should I write so that it grabs the reader.”

Likewise, Konwicki contends, the audience can suffer at the hands of overcommercialization. “The form of readership in the West seems to be related to a large extent to the high standard of living. Poorer societies generally seem to seek compensation for poverty” in literature and the arts. Indeed, there is a bookstore on every other corner in Polish cities, and the interest in literature from Poland and the world is high. Being well-read is “a Slavic trait,” Konwicki asserts. “Russians also read a lot. Maybe it’s a kind of retreat, a kind of spiritual immigration.”

Konwicki himself is a household word here, a kind of crown prince of literature in a culture that still pays Old World homage to its national treasures. This posture hearkens back to the 19th Century, when Polish writers helped preserve the language and culture at a time when the country’s three militaristic neighbors had partitioned Poland, erasing it from the map until after World War I.

Konwicki is not unaware of his status here. Every day from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., he spends a ritualistic 1 1/2 hours at the Czytelnik Cafe near Plac Trzechkrzyzy in central Warsaw, hobnobbing with an elite of Polish writers, artists, film makers, actors and the occasional foreigner.

It is a cafe with only one table, and Konwicki decides who’s welcome, though he jokes, “I don’t take any percentage” of the house. “We have a lot of time on our hands in Poland. One thinks all the time. One thinks about what surrounds one, particularly our strange fate.”

Whatever the compensations in Warsaw, it nevertheless seems to trouble Konwicki that his books in English translation--”prestigious successes” though they are--have never sold very well. “The American reader reads what every day they are told they should be reading in advertisements. A book is an object of trade, just like socks or shoes,” Konwicki says. “So for instance with Michener (author of the best-selling book of 1983, “Poland”), there’s an agreement ahead of time that he’s writing a best seller, and regardless of whether anyone will read it or not, everyone feels he should buy it.”

By contrast, “(for) those of us who are a part of the ‘provincial literatures,’ ” he says, “It seems as though we’re making a permanent debut with each book.”

However, “Bohin” may remedy this situation and finally put Konwicki’s name on the commercial charts. “After a cycle of books, after I’ve struggled with a million things which surround me which I’m trying to work out, I tried to write a book, just a good read.” Konwicki likens “Bohin” to “Gone With the Wind”--Polish-Lithuanian-style, of course. Set in the 19th Century after the unsuccessful January uprising of 1863, the story involves a “risky romance” between Konwicki’s fictionalized grandmother--a member of the impoverished and dispirited landed gentry--and a young Jew who takes part in the uprising for her.

Maria Konwicki says that her father’s American translator believes this book represents “a new beginning” for the author. “He thinks it’s his best book,” she says, quickly adding, “but that’s his point of view.”

A slight smile plays on Konwicki’s lips and then, quickly, he calls the interview to a halt. Chivalrously he begs fatigue on the part of the translator. (She’s “on her last legs,” he says.)

Perhaps he’s grown bored. Perhaps the morning interview is spilling over into his writing hours. No, that’s not it. He does not have a regimen. “A regular writing schedule would constitute a literary device,” he says. “I like to approach a sheet of paper in the most natural way possible. I write lying down.”

Then, with a theatrical flourish, Konwicki reaches for his bookshelf and whips out a copy of the January National Geographic to illustrate. There he is, pictured in shadowy recumbency, on his back, pen in hand, telephone by his side. There he’ll remain, in school libraries and on coffee tables around America. This pleases him enormously.