Frankfurter Ailgemeine Zeitung - 6 October 2004
They were all praying for me to do my best
The ABC of bodies: Stephen Vizinczey takes a dizzying
look at the future of the past
By Werner Spies

A book comes back. Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women"
is said to have reached five million readers since its first appearance
forty years ago. The depiction of restless, ever-new approches to
body and soul finds an echo in the fate that has befallen the title.
The first German edition, whih came on the market in 1967, was called
,,Frauen zum Pflucken". This stupid praise of a harvest festival
changed in 1988 to Lob der erfahrenen Frauen. And now, at the third
attempt, a new translation of the novel is announced as ,,Wie ich
lernte, die Frauen zu lieben".
Such changeableness may strike the reader as a symbol
for the Tantalus-wishes that are described in constantly changing
variations on these pages. But actually the publisher's attempt
to establish the book with a new title arises from a basic misunderstanding.
Here what the author expresses magnificently, the shadowed melancholy
of spasmic, irretrievable convergences, gets lost. For something
of what Tanizaki was able to express with his initiation into the
Japanese psyche can be heard in an undertone in Vizinczey's novel:
Tanizaki's tract In Praise of Shadows (1933-34) substantiates the
rise in passion from the elegiac twilights on the border between
time and space. And if we know that this book, which is apparently
based on autobiographical experience, was written by a native Hungarian,
there is no getting away from the fact that the experiences with
Countess 5, Fräulein Mozart, Klan, Ilona, Zsuzsa, Boby, Paola
and Ann could lead to the closing sentence from ,,Bluebeard":
,,you were the most beautiful of my women, the most beautiful of
all."
The insistence on ,,older women", which the
title expressively underlines, is not only about profiting from
the passionate enjoyment of experience and refinement. The author
provides the reasons for it in scenes which make same-age relationships
seem devoid of tension - indeed hopeless. For the adolescent the
sight of bodies which are at some remove from his own time becomes
a dizzying look into the future of the past. Apart from the theatrical
excitement and thrilling pain of parting and mutual feeling, every
meeting recapitulates something of the Feldmarschallin and Octavian
[in Richard Strauss's Rosen/cavalier]. Everything that occurs gains,
thanks to András's strict Catholic upbringing, an additional,
forbidden exaltation. The fetichism of things, the adoration, which
are fixed upon the slightest details of the strange body, reach
liturgical depths.
Slowly András, still paralysed by anxiety
about sin and damnation, finds his way into the ABC of bodies. This
is fostered by a moral experience which Georges Bataille in his
treatise ,,"L'érotisme" tracks down in an expressive
sentence from the Marquis de Sade: ,,There is no better way to familiarize
oneself with death than to connect it with the idea of excess."
The idea of a mystic communion, to which András's exalted
fantasies of martyrdom lead directly, lure the teenager [child]
under the protective skirts of the women who welcome him into a
fatherless household with sweets and caresses. The hero experiences
this initiation in the most ardent way. Only only one thing makes
him mistrustful: ,,The only restriction that I felt was the consciousness
that they were all praying for me to do my best."
After the first scenes, after the witty depictions
of lapdog eroticism which the young boy gets from his mother's tea-parties,
one begins to get an idea of the pattern of the book. It is lucky
that this investigation appeals to us, because otherwise the reading
of it would seem all too harmless. For the forty years that the
book already has to its credit have ensured that what was provocative
at one time and ensured the big printings has long since disappeared.
Descriptions of perfumes, of haif-undressings, of exploratory touchings
- which little András, as precocious as he is ignorant, has
to begin with - belong to a long biblical and literary tradition.
One thinks of Potiphar's wife or the lustful Brunelda in Kafka's
Metamorphosis.
The upbringing-novel, or rather, the punishment-novel,
which expels Karl to Amerika, was bound to attract Vizinczey. For
he himself followed in the footsteps of Karl Rossmann. When he describes
how the refugees flocking from Budapest see buses at the Austrian
border with signs on them displaying their various destinations
in big letters - Switzerland, the United States, New Zealand, Australia,
Canada, or Vienna - we think of the grotesque scene-setting with
which Kafka, in the Nature Theatre in Oklahoma, assigns the immigrants
to their workplaces. Also The Confessions of Felix Krull did not
pass by this book without leaving a trace. The tricky, immoral side
of Felix Krull, his ability to come to an arrangement, are part
of it. That leads András gradually, by way of pimping in
the American army camp, to the satisfaction of the claims made by
his need. We think of Felix Krull's amorous contract-labour in the
bed of Madame Houpflé, from whom, at the lady's request,
nothing virginal but at least money and jewellery are to be purloined.
All this takes place in slow motion, in a systematic
way. The women come and go, one after another. The first-person
narrator lets the women act they will, sketches a sort of lesson
on temperaments. The sequel gives no prizes for a display of cloned
beauties. He is interested in the initial irrelevance of the physical.
This disappears sometimes behind a glowing interpretation. András
adds up the various realities, gives the impression that he has
to assemble woman out of them. We think of the most famous commonplace
of erotic synthesis, the genesis of the portrait of Helena which
Zeuxis was supposed to paint for the temple of Hera in Kroton. Zeuxis
selected five women from the city and assembled the most desirable
body parts from each into one overall picture. Vizinczey too - although
he also gives so many details - follows a platonic idea.
But the most important effect of the book has to
do with time - with meticulously calculated time. First the decisions
from which the seducer draws energy and courage make for tingling
anticipation of what he finally experiences. It's all about the
leap into cold water. It's not without reason that the wait on the
edge of the Lukács Bath, that relic of Ottoman glory in Budapest,
plays an initiatory role. For it comes down to the right moment.
The reader feels this from the very first pages. And he thinks of
what distinguishes the content of the book, the ,,older women"
and the decision making test of courage.
He can hardly wait for the allusion to Julien Sorel and Madame de
Renal. Soon he comes upon the remark that the 19th century Russian
and French novelists counted among András's favourite reading.
For, the narrator writes, ,,They taught me a great deal about the
women whom I was to meet in my life." But then comes the decisive
reference to Stendhal's book. ,,There's a passage in The Red and
the Black which was very much on my mind in those days. It's about
young Julien Sorel's fear of approaching Madame de Renal, who has
engaged him as tutor for her children... Julien: ,The moment the
clock strikes ten, I will do what I've promised myself all day I
would do this evening, or I will go up to my room and blow my brains
out.'
The present time and history become the decisive
second theme. Like all important or at least readable erotic books,
Vizinczey's book is played before the background of dramatic world
events. Just like Casanova's memoirs, the account András's
love life reacts to his own time, even if it is sometimes related
in a cursory manner. The childhood in Székesfehérvár
and later in Budapest serves as a background to the early picaresque
fumblings. The Nazis' murder of András's father, who belongs
to the anti-fascist circle around Admiral Horthy, the end of the
war with its mountains of corpses, the spyings and the Stalinist
terror, the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the flight to Austria,
exile, which led the author to Canada, all this belongs to history.
The book devotes many pages to the Hungarian resistance. Suddenly
the theme of the novel becomes meaningless. The extended descriptions
granted to the meeting with the American army in Salzburg lead to
the following: ,,Citizens of great states tend to believe that victories
are forever; Hungarians focus their minds on the decay of power,
on the inevitable fall of the victors and the resurgence of the
vanquished."
Regarded in this way, the energy to erase blank
spots from the map of passion is tied to the tenor and despair of
the time. Fear serves as a foil to the quest for tenderness. It's
about hideouts and escape attempts. Politics supplies the book,
which again and again could easily succumb to burbling on, with
retaining walls. In the place of meaningless repetition comes a
mixture of reflection and precise seduction. To this the author
adds a flawless portrayal of body places and gymnastically difficult
contacts. The detail emerges from the factual description.


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