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Being There

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Jerzy Kosinski, the author of "Being There," had a long career as a distinguished author. After coming to the United States from his native Poland, Kosinski embarked on a writing career spanning nearly three decades. During this period he wrote nine novels and two collections of essays. The awards he collected over these years are too numerous to list here, but he did win an award for turning "Being There" into a screenplay. In the movie Peter Sellers played the role of Chauncey Gardiner (that's Sellers on the cover of the book, by the way). Jerzy Kosinski died in 1991.

If you have seen the film version of this book, you already know what the story is about. Chauncey is a gardener for a wealthy old invalid referred to cryptically as the "Old Man." Poor old Chauncey doesn't have much going on upstairs; he cannot read or write, and his days are spent watching television and working in the garden. The Old Man adopted Chauncey when he was a small child, and maintains an iron grip over his life. Chauncey has never seen the outside world, never interacted with people beyond the gates of the house, or left any trace of himself in the outside world. He's a sort of modern day Robinson Crusoe, isolated on his own private island in the middle of our bustling world.

When the Old Man finally succumbs to his illnesses, Chauncey is left to his own devices in a world he has only seen on television. After a slight accident that occurs a few minutes after he leaves his cocoon, Chauncey finds himself quickly moving up in the world. He is "adopted" by Benjamin and EE Rand, a wealthy family. When Chauncey spouts a few vague aphorisms about gardening, the Rands misunderstand him and begin to believe that Chauncey is a brilliant, wealthy industrialist with intelligent insights into the business world. Chauncey's star continues to climb as every person who meets him, from the president to the Soviet ambassador, thinks he's a charming, insightful man. Chauncey appears on television, his quotes begin to pop up in newspapers, and his name is on the lips of everybody who is anybody. The world is going crazy for Chauncey Gardiner, while Chauncey remains blissfully ignorant of his newfound status. A large part of Chauncey's success comes from his good looks and wearing suits he took from the Old Man. If the image makes the man, Chauncey can't help but succeed.

The back cover of this edition declares that Kosinski's book is a scathing indictment of the media culture, and there is much to back up that assertion in the book. Chauncey's fascination with television is the only way he can relate to those he meets in the larger world. When meeting people, Chauncey remembers how people act on television, and then he mimics their behavior. Since Chauncey is essentially a blank slate (no one can discover anything about him because he has no background), he resembles one of the images he loves to watch on television. Like a television character, Chauncey has no substance. He lives in the present, with no past and no future. It is up to others to fill in the details of Chauncey's existence, and this is exactly what happens when everyone around him projects their own needs and wants on to Chauncey.

A particularly annoying incident in the book concerns a sexual encounter Chauncey has with a partygoer. There is no need for this encounter to take place, and it considerably cheapens the value of the book. Why Kosinski felt this sexual encounter needed to be included is a mystery. Whatever the reason, the addition of this situation dampens the simplicity and innocence of the story.

Overall, reading "Being There" is still a treat. The movie is highly recommended as well. Peter Sellers longed to play Chauncey for years, and does an excellent job with the role. If memory serves correctly, this was Peter Sellers's last film role. If you have already seen the film, be sure and read the book as well.

A friend recommended Jerzy Kosinski to me, so I thought I'd start with a fairly familiar title, though I have yet to see the movie. "Being There" is quite short, though the story is by no means short on style and quality. Kosinski offers a powerful, unlikely hero in Chance, whose simple philosophies on tending a garden are misinterpreted by people around them as guidance for controlling the national economy. It is amusing to read how all these well-educated, self-important people twist Chance's words to suit their own purposes and beliefs, so much that this simple-minded gardener is, in the course of a few days, one of the most admired men in the nation!

I also like Kosinski's take on the media, as presented through Chance's love for television -- he accepts a name change to Chauncey Gardiner (as accidentally heard by EE Rand), thinking that is standard for people on television to do. The scene in particular where Chance is invited on a program to speak is fun to read, as Chance wonders how he will translate physically onscreen. Though this book was written twenty years ago, it still speaks to us today as a good satire on media and American culture, and how we tend to make heroes of people who do not necessarily fit the mold. It would have been interesting to see this work translated today, with the advent of cable television and the Internet.

Chance. the gardner, "knows not whence he came." His only memories are of his room, his television set, the garden that he tends, the old man who owns the house and garden, and a cook/housekeeper. The sum of all his knowledge comes from what he sees on his television set and what he has learned tending his garden. He doesn't read. He doesn't write. He really doesn't know that there is a world outside of his garden.

When the old man dies, Chance is thrown into a world about which he knows nothing. His one advantage coming into that world is that he has the old man's hand-me-down suits which are impeccably tailored and are old enough to have come back into style.

By chance, Chance is injured by a chauffeur driven limousine belonging to a very rich and influential man. (Thank goodness for the suit he is wearing! Through no fault of his own, he looks rich and successful.) He gives his name as Chance, the gardner and it is misunderstood as Chauncey Gardiner. His vast experience in things worldly, gained from viewing television, tells him that if someone tells him that is his name then that is his name.

Whenever Chance, now Chauncey, enters into a conversation, he speaks of what he knows, the garden. Within a very short time, his replies, such as, "For everything there is a season," in response to a question about the future economic climate, are taken to be the astute observations of a brilliant man.

These meaningless utterances, coupled with his total lack of a background, make him into a media idol and, seemingly, the ideal candidate for Vice President of the United States. After all, if he has no background, there's nothing in it for the opposition to attack, and his garden variety, visionary, comments don't have enough substance to be contradicted.

As a commentary on the media culture that existed when Kosinski wrote BEING THERE, and which still exists today, I don't think this book can be beat. Further, as a reflection on the ability of the "unwashed masses" to distinguish between hype and substance, it's rather frightening.

The book begins with the ambiguity of Chance's origins and ends in an ambiguous scene that leaves Chance's future open to interpretation. I think that this is the only intellectually honest ending possible for BEING THERE. I recommend BEING THERE for Kosinski's commentary on our media driven society and because of the inferred questions it asks us about ourselves.

After watching the film several times over the years -- but before reading the book -- I concluded that Being There was a prime candidate for one of the rare instances in which the cinematic version of a story was superior to the literature it was based on. The story is so simple and so much of it is communicated by expressions, gestures, and tone of voice that it seemed unlikely that the written word would be up to the task.

Instead, finally reading this thin but ambitious effort showed me again that good writing trumps good cinema almost every time.

To be sure, the film is good cinema. And the talented duo of Peter Sellers and Shirley McLean are so convincing in their silver screen roles that it is hard to imagine the characters they portray looking and sounding any different than the way they were played in the film (my effort to disassociate them from the story wasn't helped by the fact that my edition of the book has Mr. Sellers larger than life on its cover).

Yet the book takes the story to another level. Chance, the main character, is still a fortunate simpleton, But in the book author Jerzy Kosinski can reveal what is happening in his head, the swirling and disconcerting mystery that even the most obvious events seem to someone like him. These passages add an unexpected depth and darkness to the story, which is without most of the comic relief so prominent in the film.

The end result is a book that isn't the wry comedy with precision timing I expected after knowing the film so well but rather a biting and trenchant satire about the culture of modern media, politics, and business, and of the gullible nature of a people far too eager to follow anyone they think may be willing to lead.

I first became aware of this book as the basis for the remarkable film starring Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas. Kosinskis book, however, is just as remarkable in its own right.

The hero of the book is Chance, a mentally retarded adult who works as the gardener at the home of a wealthy retired New York lawyer. During the whole of his adult life, Chance has never left the house and garden; his only contact with the outside world is through television, which he watches obsessively. His life changes, however, when his employer dies, the house is sold and he is forced to leave. Chance is slightly injured when he is hit by a car belonging to Elizabeth Eve (EE), the wife of Benjamin Rand, a rich and influential Wall Street financier and a friend of the President. EE, mishearing Chance the gardener as Chauncey Gardiner and mistakenly believing Chance to be a successful businessman, invites him to stay with her and her husband at their home. A series of misunderstandings leads all concerned to believe that Chance is not only a businessman but also an economic prophet. He is invited to speak on national television where he talks about the only thing he understands, gardening. A series of platitudes about the changing of the seasons in the garden is taken to be an extended metaphor forecasting an upturn in the economy, and his supposed optimism strikes a chord with the viewing public. The book ends with the elderly, terminally ill, Rand about to name Chance as his heir and successor, and the President about to nominate him as his vice-presidential running-mate.

The book is short, a novella rather than a novel, of around 100 pages. The style is direct, simple and like a fable. It has been interpreted as a satire on the role of television in the modern age or on the American political system. Those elements are certainly present and were emphasised more in the film than in the book. (In Britain the film was widely taken to be a direct attack on the Reagan administration, even though it was actually made during the Carter years but not released here until after the presidential election). The significance of the book, however, is a deeper one.

In the film, Peter Sellers portrayed Chance as a lonely, pitiable character in late middle age, young only by comparison with his aged employer and the ageing Rand. It is an affecting performance, but subtly different from the Chance of Kosinskis book. Kosinskis Chance is relatively young, good-looking and emotionally detached from his surroundings. This detachment allows others to treat him as what in German would be called a Wunschbild, that is to say a picture of ones wishes, a blank canvas onto which one can paint ones own desires. Each of the other characters sees in the supposed Chauncey Gardiner whatever he or she wishes to see. Rand, who has no children with EE and who is estranged from the children of his first marriage, sees him as a potential successor to his business empire and almost as an adopted son. EE, sexually frustrated in a marriage to a much older man, sees him as a lover and a possible second husband after Rands death. The President sees him as the ideal candidate for Vice-President, a position he has been struggling to fill. The Soviet Ambassador to the UN sees him as a liberal, Russophile capitalist who will use his influence to further east-west relations. The American TV audience see him as the man who will lead them out of recession and into prosperity.

The book certainly is, in part, a commentary on the television age. It certainly is, in part, a political satire. (We can all think of politicians who have the ability to be all things to all men). Most importantly, however, it is a brilliant fable on the human capacity for self-delusion and for seeing others not for what they are but for what we would wish them to be.

Chance, the mentally handicapped hero of this story, has spent all his life working in the garden. Having never been on the other side of the wall surrounding the house he is living in, he has learned everything he knows about the world and its people from TV. Suddenly launched into the real world, dominated by money and power, Chance accidentally becomes a media superstar. Due to his metaphorical speeches about nature, wrongly interpreted as political statements by everybody, he becomes very popular. His road to success leads him straight to the top. Will Chance's emergence find its end in being the next President of the United States of America?

“Being There“ is a well written satire criticizing American society and the media in particular. Although this novel is fiction, Kosinski included some personal experience he gained. “Being There“ partly is an imaginative projection of his life. Connecting both, satirical and thrilling elements, Kosinski created a story which is worth to be read. The image of modern society mirrored by this novel will still survive in your mind when putting the book down.

"Being There" is a cute little book, a modern day fable. Chance (later christened "Chauncey Gardiner", a misunderstood form of "Chance, the gardener") has lived for forty-some years in an abbreviated world. There, he tended the garden of the Old Man, ate his food, and watched television. When the Old Man dies at the beginning, Chance is thrust into the world outside with no tangible proof of his existence: no birth certificate, tax statements, library cards, etc.

Dressed in the Old Man's elegant suits, Chance becomes drawn into the 1960's world of WASP-y social privilege: businessmen, journalists, the President. His simple statements about his garden or the seasons are understood as eloquent, moving metaphors for The Economy or Statesmanship. Repeated in the mouths of politicians and reporters, Chance's words take on a wholly different sort of meaning from that which he originally intended. Thus, the book's premise: that a man can be thrust into the spotlight by the compellingness of his image.

Chance is a mirror, as it were, in which others see only those meanings which they give to him. Moreover, he is a sympathetic figure, explicitly described as within himself, confident, and so a touching hero in today's multimedia age. With all the talk of cameras, looking and penetration, Kosinski's novel could probably delight a film theorist (television is the medium through which Chance learned of the world, and through which he filters his experiences when in the world). For the rest of us, this two-hour read is clever, amusing, and doesn't overstay its welcome.

"Being There" is a novel about the capricious issue of existence and identity in the television age, yet it is told in the manner of a child's fable, with simple, often beautiful prose and a narrative as processed through the consciousness of a simpleton.

That simpleton, Chance the Gardener, a.k.a. Chauncey Gardiner, is cast out of the garden he has tended which has been all he has ever known of the world, left to fend for himself in uncaring Manhattan. A fortuitous accident leaves him in the care of a dying plutocrat and his young, sexually frustrated wife, for both of whom Chance is the perfect tabula rasa upon which to affix their aspirations and sensibilities. How soon before they guess at Chance's true nature, and kick him out of their world? Or will he somehow avoid detection, with his storehouse of borrowed phrases and techniques he has learned from television?

Jerzy Kosinski can't tell a joke to save his life, but he writes with beautiful clarity.

"And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard," goes one early passage of Chance tending his garden. "Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden's surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing."

If "Being There" the novel suffers from one thing, it's "Being There" the movie. There, Chance is played by the sublime Peter Sellers, who finds every glimmer of humor in Chance's character, adds some more, and yet carries Kosinski's character to metaphoric heights the author himself didn't envision. There's also the fact that the film plays more assuredly with the video medium that is a central theme in both stories, throwing up bits of real commercials and children's TV to play up against the plot shifts.

What the book has going for it is its use of fable-like elements that don't translate so well onto film. The Russian ambassador tells Chance that he has "that certain Krylovian touch," referring to a popular Russian fable-writer, and its true enough. Near the end of the book, we are told by a White House observer that the sequence of events that have brought Chance to global attention span fill just four days, which is clearly not in the realm of reality as we know it, especially given the soporific pace of events in the book.

There's an edge to this fable: The Russian ambassador goes on to send Chance a copy of Krylov's fables in the original Russian, which we discover has been taken from a recently arrested Jewish dissident. But characters who present a voice of skepticism in the film, like Louise the cook and Dr. Allenby, are absent here. So too, alas, is the film's finest single moment, its enigmatic ending which actually underlines the fairy-tale quality of this story.

Chance does have some self-knowledge in the book, just enough to wonder who he is and whether he will become two people when he appears on television, the Chance on TV and the Chance who watches. Within its simple constructs, Kosinski asks some deep questions and presents us with food for thought. Plus he doesn't take very many pages to do it. Fables work better when told fast. "Being There" is an adult fable told very well.

A brilliant and terse novel about the precarious nature of power and influence, and about the folly of mass communication in a plastic culture. The main character is named "Chance," and that says it all: He's a semiretarded gardener who is fortunately graced with terrific grooming habits, a good set of fine clothes, and a careful pattern of speech. He ends up--totally obliviously--as an advisor to the President of the United States and possibly the next candidate! This book is not only intelligent--it's funny. If only it weren't so darn plausible.

The movie made from this book (also called "Being There") is as good as the book! It stars Peter Sellers, who is phenomenal.

FYI Jerzy Kosinski, the author, also wrote "The Painted Bird," a haunting and violent chronicle of the author's own experience as an accidentally abandoned child during World War Two. It is also noteworthy for its fatalistic emphasis on chance and randomness, on the ultimate meaninglessness and precariousness of personal attachments and identity.

As most folks probably recall, 'Being There' was a Peter Sellers film some twenty years ago with the memorable line "I like to watch". The film was well done, both funny and sad in equal measures. Most folks probably don't realize the film was based on book by the late Jerzy Kosinski, written some ten years earlier. I decided to see how the book compares with the film. I'm delighted to say it fairs very well indeed.

'Being There' is a short novel about an illiterate, dim-witted man who had done literally nothing in life but garden. During his life he has engaged in limited social intercourse, and none of the other sort of intercourse. But his life completely changes when his guardian dies. Thrust into the world, the rich and beautiful people he meet view him as deep thinker ... interpreting his gardening statements as profound metaphores. He becomes an overnight sensation.

Taken as a story by itself 'Being There' is just ordinary. The prose is adequate as are the characterizations. But 'Being There' is a scathing satire on how the most undeserving become stars in America. Clearly one can become a celeb without an ounce of intelligence or talent.


Bottom line: if you enjoyed the film you'll really enjoy the book.