31 August 1995

At the beginning of 1975, Stephen Vizinczey wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: “If we want to know how the world hangs together, we must read Pushkin, Gogol, Kleist, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy; if we want to know how the world falls apart, we must read Dostoevsky...” At the beginning of 1996 - after re-reading In Praise of Older Women, An Innocent Millionaire, Truth and Lies in Literature (all published in Mexico by Grijalbo) – the re-reader of these living books acquired this certainty: “If we want to know how the world hangs together, and how it falls apart, we must read this indispensable Hungarian writer Stephen Vizinczey.”

At the end of August 1995, some words of Vizinczey’s in relation to his most recent novel, The Man with the Magic Touch, reached the readers of etcétera. Today - through 12 pages which were dated in England but arrived in an envelope posted from Spain - Stephen talked about An Innocent Millionaire, his second novel, by which Anthony Burgess was “entertained but also deeply moved: here is a novel set bang in the middle of our decadent, polluted, corrupt world that, in some curious way, breathes a kind of desperate hope.”

Gloria Vizinczey, in London, translated the questions from Spanish into English. Alfredo Espino, in Mexico City, translated Stephen’s answers from English into Spanish. For their generousity, all thanks are due to her and to him.

(Excerpt)
SV Questioned about Schopenhauer
Etcetera
by José Luis Perdomo Orellana and SV

Etcétera: Reading or re-reading the thoughts of Andras Vajda leaves me with the keen desire to love women more and to be alert, keenly alert, to the possibilities for love that life offers us. The exact opposite happens after reading some lines of Schopenhauer. Dear Stephen, what certitudes would Andras Vajda, the lecturer in philosophy, would set against Arthur Schopenhauer’s maxims? I am giving you some quotes and I want you to comment.

Schopenhauer: Love sometimes makes even the greatest geniuses do silly things. It has a way of slipping its billets-doux and little locks of hair even into ministers' portfolios and philosophers' manuscripts - which does not prevent it from being the daily instigator of the most bitter and tangled disputes. It ruptures the most precious friendships, breaks the strongest bonds and chooses now life or health, now wealth, noble lineage or happiness as its victims. It turns the honourable man into a man without honour, the loyal man into a traitor. Love seems to be like a demon that exerts himself to turn everything upside down, to mix everything up, to destroy everything.”

SV: There is a lot more to love than locks of hair, and Schopenhauer hated his mother too much to know anything about love. What he says can be said of any passion - ambition, envy, hate, greed, the lust for power. Passions create and destroy, while the dread of feeling, which is what Schopenhauer suffered from, only destroys. Love is superior to the other passions because it creates less misery and confusion than any other and protects people from far worse passions - for passions are exclusive, they exclude or minimize all other concerns and feelings. For instance, It is impossible to be passionately in love and equally passionate about power, for instance. Your Schopenhauer reminds me of what Stendhal wrote in On Love. "While the zealous nobody is consumed by boredom, avarice, hate and all the icy and bitter passions, I spend a cheerful night dreaming of her." Andras Vajda could say the same. The certitudes that he would set against Schopenhauer's ravings are his own lived experiences - and that is what he actually does, as his memoirs attempt to record the blessings of love.

Schopenhauer: Love satisfied leads more often to misery than happiness.

SV: Schopenhauer:had no interest in women and evidently suffered from women wanting to talk to him and keep up some kind of more specifically human intercourse even after he had his orgasm. That must have made him really miserable. Poor man.

Schopenhauer : If you could turn all the scoundrels into eunuchs, lock up all the stupid women in convents, provide all persons of character with a whole harem and all intelligent and witty young women with men (real men), you would very soon see a generation who would give us an age superior even to the Age of Pericles.

SV: I think in this common assumption of German culture (even worse in Nietzsche than in Schopenhauer) you find one of the notions that led to Auschwitz. The trouble with genetics and modern genetic engineering is that the same genes can be responsible for quite different results. An energetic and imaginative scoundrel married to a stupid woman can have a genius for a son. If Schopenhauer had ever looked at any large family (and there were plenty of them in his day) he would have seen how utterly different children of the same parents can be.

Schopenhauer: Women see nothing more than what they have in front of their eyes, they concentrate solely on the present, take appearances for reality and prefer trifles to more important things.

SV: I think women have a greater capacity for living in the present - their sensory perception seems to be greater than most men's. As for trifles, taking appearances for reality, etc., Schopenhauer himself is a good example of the fact that there is very little difference between the sexes when it comes to human failings.

Schopenhauer: A woman's very appearance reveals that she is not destined either for great endeavours of the intelligence nor for great material endeavours.

SV: I thought that Schopenhauer berated women for taking appearances for reality!

Schopenhauer: What makes women particularly suited to looking after us and bringing us up in early childhood is that they continue to be childish, trivial and limited in intelligence. They remain big children throughout their life, sort of halfway between child and man.

SV : It is true that there is a stronger bond between mothers and children than between fathers and children, and no wonder, since the mother and the child are together for nine months even before the child is born. Probably for this reason, most women have a greater aptitude for looking after people (adults and well as children) than most men do, but that's a positive quality not a limitation. In fact it takes more intelligence to look after children than to do most of things men and women do in offices. If Schopenhauer had ever looked after children he would have known this.

Schopenhauer:: At the bottom of their hearts, women imagine that men have come into the world to earn money and women to spend it. If they are prevented from doing so while their husband is alive, they make up for it after he dies.

SV :This is a very good description of a certain kind of woman - I would guess that there are actually more of them today than in Schopenhauer's time, particularly in the Western world, and they have become a kind of social movement under the banner of feminism. But even this is a half-truth. It's one of the great and universal flaws of human beings, male or female, that they are inclined to think that other people were born to earn and they themselves were born to spend. It's certainly most of all politicians, male or female.

Schopenhauer: Men's understanding must be clouded by love to call this stunted, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped and short-legged sex beautiful. All the beauty of the female sex resides in the instinct of love which drives us to them.

SV : There speaks a man who found women repulsive. Listening to Schopenhauer on women is like listening to a blind man talking about colours.

Schopenhauer: What can you expect from women if you reflect that in the whole world the female sex has been unable to produce a single truly great genius, nor a complete and original work of art, nor a single labour of enduring value, in whatever field you like to name. Isolated and partial exceptions do not change things in the least: taken together, women are and will always be the most consummate and incurable nonentities.

SV : I am not one of those people who say that there are no differences between the sexes. As I said in my review of Kate Millett's Sexual Politicis, that men's greatest flaws come from erection anxiety, their need to harden, to get worked up - it is the source of the kind of madness that made hundreds of thousands of men march on foot from France to Moscow. It is impossible to imagine hundreds of thousands of women joining such an idiotic enterprise. Women's limitiation has something to do with the fact that not all men can satisy them. Every woman can satisy a man, which is why men are less appreciative; women are dependent on the man's skill and enthusiasm as a lover. A woman is more likely to sell her soul and warp her mind for an orgasm than a man for the simple reason that she cannot get an orgasm from every man.

As for women being intellectually or artistically inferior.- I cannot begin to tell you how many stupid men have told me that there are no women Beethovens. There may be one tomorrow. Women have far greater imaginative powers and far greater emotional range than men. It is undeniable that up to now the world has seen far fewer female geniuses than male geniuses (how many it has produced we will never know), but leaving aside geniuses, the average level of intelligence is undoubtedly higher among women than men. I certainly have come across more brilliant women than men.