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