In Praise of Older Women- The Amourous Recollections of Andras Vajda

149 Pages·2016·0.81 MB·English

by  Vizinczey Stephen

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 pene-
trating 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 af-
firms its pleasures and joys. . . ." -- MAX LERNER, New
York Post
"Delightful ... András is a confirmed lover of wom-
en. 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 treat-
ment 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 maga-
zine 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 proposi-
tion.
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