FICTION FINE-TUNED IN 'KOSINSKI'.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: "Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography"

Author: James Park Sloan 

Data: Illustrated. 505 pages, Dutton; $27.95

Our rating: Four Stars

When his harrowing tale is done and he has described for yet a second time the death by suicide of the novelist Jerzy Kosinski at age 58 early on the morning of May 3, 1991, James Park Sloan concludes that "few creative figures have left a more problematic oeuvre, and almost any categorical statement about it is subject to challenge."

This may be true enough, but one thing implicit in everything Sloan writes in his fascinating biography is that Kosinski was an artist of inauthenticity. This quality defines the very shape of Sloan's story.

As he traces Kosinski's life from his birth in Lodz, Poland, through his rise to literary celebrity in America, he keeps reminding us that Kosinski was building a house of cards that eventually would be blown away by the scandal of expose.

More important, his explanation of Kosinski's makeup is based on what he sees as the novelist's inauthenticity. The eventual expose, a story in the Village Voice of June 22, 1982, by Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith, accused Kosinski of two transgressions: first, trafficking with the CIA, which Sloan concludes he did not do; and second, depending on others to help him write his books, which Sloan corroborates in detail.

But a bigger scandal, which Sloan depicts Kosinski as running from for most of his life, lay in the truth behind the autobiographical novel that made his reputation, "The Painted Bird" (1965).

This tells of a boy who was abandoned by his parents to face the Holocaust alone. It begins, "In the first weeks of World War II, in the fall of 1939, a 6-year-old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe was sent by his parents, like thousands of other children, to the shelter of a distant village."

Yet the truth skillfully reconstructed by Sloan - himself a novelist ("The Case History of Comrade V"), as well as a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago - is that Kosinski remained with his parents throughout World War II. What enabled him to survive was not his childhood capacity for suffering so much as the brilliant cunning of his father, who not only foresaw what the Nazis would do when they occupied Poland but also worked out a strategy for hiding his family in plain sight.

What then accounts for Kosinski's flagrant alteration of the truth, both in his novel and in the tales he trotted out to fascinate new friends in his dizzying clamber up the daisy chain of social success? Sloan attributes Kosinski's fantasy in part to an Oedipal conflict stirred up by an exacting father and a seductive mother.

But more important, Kosinski's experience in surviving as a Jew among non-Jews taught him the value of inauthenticity. He learned to apprehend life at a remove, going through the motions "as if" he were alive and feeling. This is a condition among Holocaust survivors known psychoanalytically as alexithymia, a regression of feeling that, in Sloan's words, "makes the effects useless in the processing of information."

"Throughout his writing career," Sloan continues, "Kosinski would feel the need to appropriate an episode first as an autobiographical 'fact' before rendering it in the form of fiction."

A high-school friend of Kosinski described three stages in the production of a Kosinski story. In Sloan's paraphrase: "First, something happened. Second, something happened and Kosinski was involved in it. Third, Kosinski was the chief character in what happened."

Thus Kosinski made up "The Painted Bird," and thus he fashioned the myth of himself.

What is most impressive in Sloan's narrative is not so much Kosinski's outrageousness as the brilliant inventiveness with which he filled the vacuum of his being.

And his incredible nerve. A student of Kosinski's recalls how, once when they were walking through a rough New Haven, Conn., neighborhood, they were bumped and jostled by a large man. Kosinski pretended to pull a pistol from his briefcase, stuck his finger in the man's ribs and demanded an apology, which he duly got.

Many such vivid anecdotes decorate Sloan's text. They seem doubly compelling in a narrative driven irresistibly by the tension between Kosinski's manic energy and the hollowness that eventually would destroy him.

The only drawback is that much about Kosinski remains elusive. Perhaps this is inevitable considering that he fashioned his career out of smoke and mirrors, but one still would like to know if he was the champion skier he often claimed to be, or if his photographs were really first-rate, or what he was like as a teacher.

Sloan gives us syllabuses and classroom stunts like Kosinski's announcing deadpan that as a requirement for a course called "Death and the Modern Imagination," one of his students would have to die. But you never get a straightforward description of Kosinski's performance in the classroom.

Of course, the possibility remains that such a description was removed from Sloan's text. Several times he makes cross-references to information not present, suggesting that his book was cut.

Yet despite such ragged edges, this biography remains extremely worthwhile. If Sloan is left-handed in his defense of novels by Kosinski such as "Steps" and "Being There," if he convinces us that his subject was the very opposite of Joseph Conrad, whose English could be understood only on paper, he nevertheless offers a plausible explanation of Kosinski's character and redeems him somewhat as a literary figure.

"As a thinker-doer, Kosinski belongs to the tradition in which the margins of culture inform the center," Sloan writes. "As a writer, he was clearly not the stylist he was initially credited as being - the surfaces of his books owed too much to others - but neither was he the pure fraud that facile and incompletely informed criticism made him out to be. He was, if nothing else, a great storyteller, whose stories at their best seemed to have mythic resonances."

In short, if Kosinski was ultimately hollow at the core, that hollowness was a profound reflection of the horrifying history that shaped him.

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Photo no caption (Book cover - JERZY KOSINSKI)