August, 1966
by Brigid Brophy, London Magazine

BRIGID BROPHY
IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN by Stephen Vizinczey. (Barrie & Rockliff:
215.)
Stephen Vizinczey has created a modern, Hungarian Cherubino. By
a superb incongruity (but not an unprecedented one, since da Ponte
eventually reached the same continent), the author and his Cherubino
have alike fetched up in Canada.
In Praise of Older Women is a novel in the form
of a document by its hero, Andras Vajda. The fictitious András
is now 'Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University
of Saskatchewan Saskatoo, a formula he appends, no doubt in Nabokovian
fascination with the barbaric syllables, after signing his preface
to his book. Canada opens and (the last chapter brings the hero
up to date) closes the text; and the narrator's Canadian present
pierces, for ironic moments, through the very texture, setting off
and distancing the whole to admirably baroque effect.
Ostensibly András is writing a treatise to help-or at least
comfort - his Canadian students: 'I seem to spend most of my time
between lectures listening to male students complaining about their
misadventures with female students. I tell them that girls are just
as maddening in sexy old Europe as they are in Saskatoon.' This
purpose provides a yoke in which the reflective and the recollective
can run side by side. The book's title promises a discourse, its
sub.. title ('the amorous recollections of András Vajda)
a narrative; and András's autobiographical account of his
life in sexy old Europe proceeds br chapters named like Ciceronian
essays-.'On Courage and Seeking Advice', 'On Virgins', 'On' (András
has reached Canada) 'Grown Women As Teenage Girls'.
A Cherubino from the start, András can scarcely remember
the time when ogni donna didn't make him palpitar. In 1945, he is
at a military school in Hungary; he is swept with the general flight
into Austria, where, 'going through blacked-out Vienna in the middle
of the night, I lost the other cadets'; he is eventually adopted
by the American Army and, quickly picking up enough American to
interpret between the soldiers and Hungarian women refugees, becomes,
at the age of eleven, a 'virgin pimp'. And already 'I was so inflamed
by all the talk and caresses, that I was in a state of permanent
erection.'
András shares, too, Cherubino's wise reaction to 1a gloria
militar 'ever since those weeks of shock, hunger arid exhaustion,
the only forms self indulgence I recoil from are hatred and violence.
It was then that I must have acquired the sensibilities of a libertine:
when one sees too many corpses one is likely to lose one's inhibitions
about living bodies'.
In a plain, linear, very stylish American, András continues
with his return to Hungary -on which country he occasionally reflects
with a touch of Nabokov's academic un- guist's irony: the small
daughter of one of his mistresses has only to remark 'He always
walks away. . . It's a mania with him', and András footnotes
the dialogue 'Mania is one of the most common Hungarian words, for
obvious reasons'. That it Is a Communist Hungary to which he returns
András indicates by elegant, economical methods-barely more
than the casual mention that, as an undergraduate, he tries to seduce
a girl who is known to him 'only from the Marxism-Leninism classes
. With the same feathery strokes (but it's a finn, a wrought-iron
feather), he puts in, almost as though they were the weather in
the background of his adventures, the atmospheres of political oppression
and suspicion and, finally, the 1956 Revolution, when he leaves
Hungary.
In a page or two Mr Vizinczey conveys, through András, the
entire agony of the exile-the nauseous weightlessness which overtakes
a person suddenly released from the determining pressures of accidental
circumstance. At the border, the refugees are met by a choice of
bus, each marked with its ultimate destination. 'I happened', writes
András, 'to be standing beside the yellow letters "Sweden".
If I stepped on that bus, I would meet women in Stockholm and we'd
fall in love-but if I moved on to the next vehicle, we'd never even
learn of each other's existence.' An unknown girl gets on to the
Brazil bus, and András notices she has a broken tooth: 'If
it hadn't been for that tooth, I might be writing these recollections
in Portuguese.' András gets on to the bus for Italy.
His progress (which ends by a transplantation from Italy to Canada)
is touched in by the unemphasized changes in how he is addressed
in the dialogue: András; Andrea; Andy. All the way, the people
who thus address him are girls he would like to make love to and
older women whom he does-which is the burden of his message to the
young men of Canada. (He writes, of his adolescence, what hundreds
of people could, with the geography transposed, write of theirs:
'The sensation in Budapest at the time was Claude Autant-Lara s
film Devil in the Flesh, which I went to see at least a dozen times.')
András's fiascos with girls are wildly funny, and yet they,
and the advice they occasion, are saved from the merely funny -
for - ten - minutes facetiousness of the Sunday papers funny columns
by resting on an intellectual emotional structure. András
is rarities: a genuinely educated man., and a man who genuinely
likes women. 'I thought you Europeans were supposed o be heroes
in the war of the sexes! a Canadian woman says to him and he replies
'I'm a pacifist'. The Department of Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan,
would as a matter of fact be lucky to get András.
One of his antithetically turned paragraphs ('Since we no longer
reproach ourselves for failing to conform to absolute ethical precepts,
we beat ourselves with the stick of psychological insight. . . We're
too understanding to condemn our actions; we condemn our motives
instead') contains more thought than a volume by Simone de Beauvoir.
And he knows where to put the punctuation.
This Cherubino couldn't, as Kierkegaard suspected the original one
might, grow into Don Giovanni. András is so td speak entitled
to his cogency of observation (well-born Hungarian ladies assuming
the manner of martyrs on going out to prostitute themselves; a frigid
woman who behaves, as she receives András into her body,
'more like a considerate hostess than a lover ), because his love,
though inconstant to its objects, is constant in genuinely being
love. His sensuousness justifies itself, like the extravagance of
champagne, by its own effervescence; it's not only a symptom of
András's pleasure, but a pleasing entity, of whose existence
one is glad; it even collects about itself the nimbus, the holiness,
which consecrates the inconstancies of Cherubino and of Helen of
Troy.
'And though I'm an atheist now', András remarks in writing
about his early boyhood, when he served as an acolyte; ' I can still
. . . cherish that feeling of elation, the four candles in the huge
marbled silence. . . . The Franciscan fathers would, I hope, forgive
me for saying that I would never have been able to understand and
enjoy women as much as I do if the Church.. hadn't taught me to
experience elation and awe.'
Indeed, this Cherubino becomes not Don Giovanni but middle-aged-at
the moment, on the last page of the book, when a Canadian woman
he has lusted after but proved impotent to take consoles him Oh,
well . . . one orgasm more or less doesn't really matter, does it?'.
But long before that he's perceived the sadness in eroticism-when
he sees the failure of eroticism to attach one person to another
for ever as the failure of the life instinct to attach any person
to living for ever: 'No argument can till the void of a dead feeling-
that reminder of the ultimate void, our final inconstancy. We're
untrue even to life.'


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