Penknife

At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves.  Eventually the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover agents and a sting operation in order to entrap them and Joe and Ken are sentenced to 6-month in jail. Ostensibly, its for their crimes against the library but really, as Joe puts it, “it was because we were queers.”  While inside, Orton is finally separated from Halliwell and from any remaining desire to fit in.  The result is liberating, particularly to his writing... 

By 1953 Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actors, but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well, he’s going to be Kenneth’s secretary. In time though, Joe recognizes his own passion and talent for writing and the two men start writing collaboratively, determined to make it big. Shunning society and material comfort they spend the better part of a decade locked in their bedsit writing and living off rice, sardines and golden syrup. By decade’s end they’ve written a handful of novels and plays all of which have been promptly turned down by publishers. The men not only feel rejected, they feel angry.  And they’re going to do something about it…

One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father’s suicide. Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton’s mother dies, his response is to pick up an Irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house. Joe and Kenneth have different ways of coping with their parents' deaths, but as young men growing up in dreary industrial England, they both have the same dream: before either considers writing, they’re both convinced that they belong on the stage. In 1951 they buy one-way tickets to London and begin a journey that will fail to bring them any success as actors but that will lead them to each other. Episode 1 chronicles the bleak childhoods that shape the pair inspiring one of them to become the most iconoclastic English dramatist of the 1960s, and the other to become a murderer…

A Village voice exposé denounces Kosinski for using ghostwriters and casts aspersions on his entire literary career. Nine years later Jerzy Kosinski is a broken man. His writing career is over; he’s managed to write only one novel which was unanimously panned. One night after going to the movies, he drowns himself in his bathtub. Across town, Mailer’s easing into the role of one of the aging titans of American letters. One of Mailer’s many mistresses publishes a tell-all memoir that includes the claim made by a number of people who knew him well: that the most manly, heterosexual man in America was actually bi-sexual. But he manages to live into old age and die peacefully before the book’s release, avoiding the issue and also avoiding any reckoning for stabbing his wife and for all the other horrible shit he said and did.

On July 9th, 1981 Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer and Jerzy Kosinki get together at an expensive Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to celebrate the imminent release of Abbot’s book. A week later Richard Adan is dead and Kosinksi and Mailer have a choice to make: Stand by Abbott or throw him under the bus? Mailer endures the negative publicity and supports his friend while Kosinski turns on both Abbott and the political Left. In doing so, he makes powerful enemies who will begin looking into the whispers that he’s used ghostwriters, plagiarized some of his novels and lied about his childhood. Their findings will destroy his career, and eventually, his life...

If you’ve made it to Episode 8 and part of you still likes Mailer and/or Kosinski, that’ll change with this episode. Jerzy Kosinski admits to having committed rape when he was a young man in Poland, and his adult behavior is just as horrific. As for Norman Mailer, he takes it upon himself to try to save the patriarchy from Second-wave feminism by attacking Kate Millet in The Prisoner of Sex and then at the so-called “Town Bloody Hall” by championing misogyny and homophobia. Needless to say, he makes a complete fool of himself and is absolutely owned by Germaine Greer, Susan Sontag, and Cynthia Ozick among others. 

Mailer’s violent ways continue both off and on the page. He fictionalizes the stabbing of his wife in an absurd, grotesque little novel aptly titled An American Dream. Not to be outdone, Jerzy Kosinki and his finest ghostwriter get to work on an even more grotesque little novel called Steps which will win him the National Book Award for fiction in 1969. That year's non-fiction winner is our guy Norman Mailer with his book The Armies of the Night about the Anti-war movement and his experience getting arrested at the March on the Pentagon. When he’s not getting arrested, Mailer’s now making movies. One devolves into a porno, another ends in Mailer getting nailed in the head with a hammer by Rip Torn. 

After spending the 1950s trying to follow up The Naked and the Dead with another hit, Mailer writes two poorly-received novels and mostly spends the decade getting stoned, drunk, angry and delusional. By 1960 he’s so far gone that he decides to run for Mayor of New York City. To celebrate his decision he throws a party that begins with him announcing his candidacy and ends with him stabbing his wife Adele in the chest with a rusty penknife, puncturing her pericardial sac and missing her heart by a matter of millimeters. Aside from a couple-week stay in the Bellevue Psych ward, the great white American writer receives no punishment for nearly murdering his wife and his career continues with hardly any blemish.

In fall of 1965 a book called The Painted Bird is published and begins to make waves across the literary world. It’s the story of a boy separated from his parents for six years during WW2. It follows him while he wanders the Polish countryside witnessing and enduring unimaginably sadistic torture and abuse. And as if the plot weren’t shocking enough, it’s made all the more sensational by the fact that it’s true! Yes, the author, a man named Jerzy Kosinski, managed to live to tell the tale. He’s compared to Anne Frank, his book is held up as one of the most important works of holocaust literature, and his life story is one of the most remarkable ever told! But...well, it’s all bullshit. Kosinski was never separated from his parents. Almost none of the events in the novel actually happened, and on top of that, he didn’t even write the book by himself. 

After defecting from Poland Jerzy Kosinski gets to work trying to make a name for himself in the States. He starts telling some incredibly tall tales about his childhood during the war and somehow manages to publish a few non-fiction books in English despite the fact that his grasp on the language is tentative, at best. In order to write his great book, Mailer sails across the Pacific to fight in World War 2. Well, he does a bit of fighting; mostly he makes pork and beans. But eventually he gathers enough material to sit down and write what he believes will be the war’s great novel, The Naked and the Dead. Whether or not he succeeds is up for debate, but he is definitely successful in teaching the world the word “fug.”