U7008 A Ballantine Book 95¢
In Praise of Older Women
the amourous recollections of András Vajda
by Stephen Vizinczey
Few novels have ever enjoyed such extraordinary
success as Stephen Vizinczey’s first novel, In Praise
of Older Women .
Subtitled “the amorous recollections of András
Vajda,” this wildly funny, affectionate, and penetrating novel is “dedicated to older women and
is addressed to young men.” Recalling with irony
and insight his youthful love affairs with girls
his own age and with mature women — both in
Europe and in America — Vajda (now a middle-aged thirty) writes a book of memory and advice:
that a woman of a certain age — say thirty-five —
can be a more graceful, more intelligent, a better
lover, and a more delightful companion in sex,
than all the nubile young girls and perpetual teen—
agers idolized in advertising, films, and fiction.
An instantaneous best seller in England and
America, In Praise of Older Women has been
acclaimed by critics for its freshness and candor
and will soon be published in Sweden, Finland,
Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands.
PRAISE FOR IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN
“A rarity among books — an erotic novel in which
sexual experience is not a torment, a novel that affirms its pleasures and joys… .” — MAX LERNER, New
York Post
“Delightful … András is a confirmed lover of women. He likes to be with women, to talk to women, to
sleep with women. The novel is a series of his enjoy—
ments, but it differs from almost any other similar
novel I know in that every erotic episode is unique
and interesting.” — Washington Sunday Star
“In Praise of Older Women is extraordinary in its
modesty and buoyancy, its fearlessness and persistent
unemphasized sadness. It comes to the boundaries of
life, but only after alert and energetic explorations… .
It is a good novel.” — The Hudson Review
“A minor masterpiece of serious comedy. Its treatment of sex is both funny and honest, without a trace
of either post-Lawrentian portentousness or of the
pornographic snigger.” — IVON OWEN
Stephen Vizinczey was born in Hungary in 1933
and fled to the West after the Hungarian uprising in
1956. After a stay in Italy, he reached Canada where
he wrote scripts for the National Film Board, one of
which, Four Religions , won an Ohio TV award. In
1962, after founding and editing the literary magazine Exchange , he joined the Canadian Broadcasting
Company as a writer and producer. Most recently he
has been living in London with his wife and children,
and is at work on a play and a second novel.
In Praise of
Older Women
the amorous recollections of
András Vajda
by
Stephen Vizinczey
BALLANTINE BOOKS * NEW YORK
Copyright © 1965 by Stephen Vizinczey.
All rights reserved. AU names and characters in this book are
fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
Originally published in Canada by
Contemporary Canada Press
First edition: August, 1965
First Canadian paperbound edition: October, 1966
Second Canadian printing: November, 1966
First U.S. paperbound edition: January, 1967
Second U.S. printing: January, 1967
Chapters One and Two originally appeared in The Tamarack
Review and Chapter Twelve in Prism International.
Cover photo by Jack Jensen.
Printed in the United States of America.
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.
101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003
This book is dedicated to older women
and is addressed to young men —
and the connection between the two is my proposition.
Woher dein Recht, in jeglichem Kostüme
In jeder Maske wahr zu sein? — Ich rühme.
— RAINER MARIA RILKE
Contents
1. On Faith and Friendliness 11
2. On War and Prostitution 19
3. On Pride and Being Thirteen 34
4. On Young Girls 45
5. On Courage and Seeking Advice 59
6. On Becoming a Lover 72
7. On Being Promiscuous and Lonely 80
8. On Being Vain and Hopelessly in Love 87
9. On Don Juan’s Secret 100
10. On Taking It Easy 114
11. On Virgins 129
12. On Mothers of Little Children 143
13. On Anxiety and Rebellion 162
14. On Happiness with a Frigid Woman 175
15. On Grown Women as Teenage Girls 198
16. On More than Enough 215
To Young Men Without Lovers
In all your amours you should prefer old
women to young ones … because they have
greater knowledge of the world.
— Benjamin Franklin
This book is dedicated to older women and is addressed to young men — and the connection between the two is my proposition. I’m not an expert on sex, but I was a good student of the women I loved, and I’ll try to recall those happy and unhappy experiences which, I believe, made a man out of me.
I spent my first twenty-two years in Hungary, Austria and Italy, and my adventures in growing up differed considerably from the adventures of young men in North America. Our dreams and opportunities were influenced by dissimilar amorous conventions. North American culture glorifies the young couple, the happiness of honeymooners; in Europe it’s the affair of the young man and his older mistress that has the glamour of perfection. The young North American aspires to be a pioneer in love and pursues the virgin, while the European tends to value continuity and tradition and hopes to enrich himself with the wisdom and sensibility of the past. Unfortunately, the opportunities for young men to mingle with older women are diminishing, as over-industrialization everywhere splits the human community into age groups, replacing the crowded family home with teenage hangouts, old people’s homes and the quiet apartments of the middle-aged. Since I grew up in an integrated society, I have the extravagant notion that my recollections may help to bring about a better understanding of the truth that men and women are created equal regardless of their dates of birth — and may thereby stimulate a broader intercourse between the generations.
As I’m going to describe my own experiences, I ought to reassure the reader that I don’t intend to overwhelm him with my personal history. It’s his curiosity about himself that I hope to stimulate. What follows is a highly selective memoir centred not so much on the personality of the narrator as on the universal predicaments of love. Still, to the extent that this book is an autobiography, I am conscious, like Thurber, of Benvenuto Cellini’s stern dictum that a man should be at least forty years old and should have accomplished something of excellence before setting down the story of his life. I don’t fulfil either of these conditions. But, as Thurber says, “Nowadays, nobody who has a typewriter pays any attention to the old master’s quaint rules.”
András Vajda Associate Professor Department
of Philosophy University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon Canada 1965
One
On Faith and Friendliness
Everything comes to us from others …
To Be is to belong to someone.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I was born into a devout Roman Catholic family, and spent a great part of my first ten years among kindly Franciscan monks. My father was headmaster of a Catholic school and an accomplished church organist, who also had an unfortunate obsession with politics. He supported the reactionary but pro-clerical regime of Admiral Horthy and made speeches against the local Nazi movement. In 1935, when I was two years old, he was stabbed to death by a Nazi fanatic. His services to the Church and his untimely death (and the fact that there were several priests on both sides of our family) endeared me to the fathers, and I was always a welcome guest in their monastery. My mother and I were living then in the first, thousand-year-old city of Hungary, the name of which I won’t torment you with. We had an airy second-floor apartment on one of the main streets of the town — a narrow street of ancient churches and fashionable shops. We lived just a few minutes’ walk away from the monastery, which I used to visit even before I reached school age. So instead of having one father, I grew up with a whole order of them: they taught me to read and write, they talked to me about the lives of the saints and the history of the Church, they told me about the far-off cities where they had studied — Rome, Paris, Vienna — but above all they listened to whatever I wanted to say. They always had a warm and understanding smile for me, and I used to walk in the wide, cool corridors of their monastery as if I owned the place. I remember their loving company further back than my own mother’s, although, as I said, I lived alone with her from the age of two. She was a quiet and tender woman who always picked up things after me. Since I didn’t play much with other children, I was never in a fight; and between the monks and my mother, I was surrounded with radiant love and a sense of absolute freedom. I don’t think they ever tried to control me or bring me up, they just watched me grow, and the only restriction I felt was the awareness that they were all rooting for me to do my best. This may account for the fact that I became an open-hearted and affectionate boy and a conceited brat. Taking for granted that everyone would love me, I found it natural to love and admire everyone I met or heard about.
These happy emotions of mine were first directed to the saints and martyrs of the Church. At the age of seven or eight I had the romantic deterinination to become a missionary and, if at all possible, a martyr, on the rice-fields of China. I remember particularly one sunny afternoon when I didn’t feel like studying and stood at the window of my room watching the smartly dressed women walking back and forth along our street. I wondered whether, becoming a priest and taking a vow of celibacy, I would find it difficult to go through life without the company of those fluffy women who were walking by our house on their way to the hat-shop or the hairdresser to make themselves look even more angelic. My determination to become a priest thus confronted me with the problem of renouncing women even before I could possibly have wanted them. After feeling ashamed about my concern for some time, I finally asked my Father Confessor, a childlike, gray man in his sixties, how difficult he found it to go through life without women. He looked at me sternly and confined his answer to the remark that he didn’t think I would ever be a priest. I was taken aback by his belittling of my determination — just because I had wanted to know the weight of the sacrifice — and was afraid he would like me less. But he brightened up again and told me with a smile (he was never short of encouragement) that there were many ways to serve God.
I used to serve as acolyte at his masses: an early riser, he liked to say mass at six o’clock, and often there was no one else in the huge cathedral but him and me, feeling the mysterious and powerful presence of God. And though I’m an atheist now, I can still recall and cherish that feeling of elation, the four candles in the huge marbled silence, filled with echoes. It was there that I learned to sense and love elusive mystery — an inclination that women are born with and men may acquire, if they are lucky.
I dwell upon these still-glittering fragments of memory partly because it’s pleasant to think of them and partly, too, because I’m convinced that many boys ruin their best years — and their characters — with the mistaken notion that one has to be a rough-tough kid to become a man. They join a football or hockey team to be grownup, while in fact an empty church or a deserted country road would help them more to sense the world and themselves. 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.
To return to the question of celibacy as it begins to trouble a young Catholic boy, I must say that the women I saw from our apartment window weren’t solely responsible for my premature anxiety. Just as I was able to participate in the lives of a group of men at the monastery, so at home I was often welcomed into a community of women. My mother used to give weekly tea-and-cookie parties for her friends, widows and single women of her own age, between thirty and forty. I remember that the similarity of the atmosphere at the monastery and at my mother’s tea-and-cookie parties struck me as strange and wonderul. Both the Franciscans and my mother’s friends were a happy and cheerful lot, apparently quite content to live on their own. I felt myself the only human link between these two self-contained worlds and I was proud that I was welcome and enjoyed myself in both. I couldn’t imagine life without either of them and I sometimes still think that being a Franciscan monk with a harem of forty-year-old women would be the best way of living.
After a time I began to long for the afternoons when my mother’s friends would come and take my head between their warm, soft hands and tell me what dark eyes I had: it was a dizzying joy to have them touch me or to touch them. I tried to imitate the martyrs’ courage by jumping up to them when they arrived and greeting them with a kiss or a hug. Most of them looked surprised or bewildered on such occasions. “Heavens, Erzsi, you have a nervous jumpy boy!” they would say to my mother. A few of them suspected me, especially when I managed to have my hands fall on their breasts — for some reason this was more exciting than just touching their arms. However, these incidents always ended in laughter: I don’t remember them being very intent on anything for very long. I loved them all, but I used to wait most eagerly for Aunt Alice. She was a slightly plump, big-breasted blonde, with an absolutely fantastic perfume and a round, beautiful face. She used to pick me up and look into my eyes with mock anger and some coquettishness, I believe, admonishing me in a stern-soft voice: “You’re after my breasts, you devil!”
Aunt Alice was the only one who gave me my due as a personage of grave importance. Having become the first Hungarian Pope and suffered a martyr’s death in my imagination, I already viewed myself as a great saint, temporarily stranded in childhood. And though Aunt Alice attributed to me a different kind of greatness when she called me a devil, I felt that deep down we meant the same thing.
To free my mother from my company now and then, her friends used to take me for long walks or to the occasional movie. It was only Aunt Alice, however, who broke the news of our going by asking me for a date. “My handsome beau,” she would say with happy anticipation, “will you take me to the theatre?” I remember particularly one day when I was going out with her in my first pair of long trousers. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in the late spring or early fall — sometime before the United States entered the war, for we were going to see The Wizard of Oz . I had got my adult suit a few days before and was anxious to show it off to Aunt Alice, who was sure to appreciate it. When she finally arrived, in the midst of her perfume and powder, she got so involved in explaining to my mother why she was late, that she didn’t notice my new trousers. However, as we were about to leave, she gave forth a throaty “Aaaaahh!” and stepped back to gobble me up with her eyes. I held out my arm for her and as she took it she s
aid: ” I’ve got the handsomest escort today.” We were walking toward the door, arm in arm, a happy couple, when suddenly I heard my mother’s voice:
“András, did you remember to pee?”
I left the apartment with Aunt Alice, swearing to myself never to return. Even my blonde companion’s soothing remarks sounded outrageously condescending, and as we walked down the stairs I wondered how I could reestablish the old equilibrium of our relationship. Just before we stepped out into the street, I pinched her bottom. She pretended not to notice, but blushed deeply. I decided then to marry Aunt Alice when I grew up, for she understood me.
However, I don’t want to dramatize my boyhood by turning it into the story of my passion for that glorious lady. I was happiest with the Francisan fathers and at my mother’s weekly gatherings, when I saw all her friends together and could watch and listen to them chatting about fashion, the war, relatives, marriages and things I didn’t understand. The vast and silent cathedral and our living-room filled with all these cheerful, loud women, with the smell of their perfumes, with the light of their eyes — these are the strongest and most vivid images of my childhood.
I wonder, what kind of life would I have had if it hadn’t been for my mother’s tea-and-cookie parties? Perhaps it’s because of them that I’ve never thought of women as my enemies, as territories I have to conquer, but always as allies and friends — which I believe is the reason why they were friendly to me in turn. I’ve never met those she-devils modern fiction is so full of: they must be too busy with those men who look upon women as fortresses they have to attack and trample underfoot.
Still on the subject of friendliness toward all — and toward women in particular — I can’t help concluding that my utterly complete happiness at my mother’s weekly tea-and-cookie parties indicated an early and marked enthusiasm for the opposite sex. It’s obvious that this enthusiasm had a great deal to do with my later luck with women. And although I hope this memoir will be instructive, I have to confess that it won’t help you to make women more attracted to you than you are to them. If deep down you hate them, if you dream of humiliating them, if you enjoy ordering them around, then you are likely to be paid back in kind. They will want and love you just as much as you want and love them — and praise be to their generosity.
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