STEPHEN VIZINCZEY TRUTH Liam LITERATURE Truth & Lies in Literature "Transports the reader in an intellectual and emotional odys- sey.. Stunning. In drawing out the truth (and lies) about reality set forth in literature (he tackles some non-fiction in the process) Vizinczey imparts more about man and the state than a library of scholarly tomes." — Lynn Scarlett, Reason "He is one of the few contemporary writers who can use the word 'moral' without quotation marks.... At the center of Vizinczey's criticism is his devotion to the major 19th-century novelists — French, German and Russian (but not British). To read [his] reviews and essays is to reconfirm the suspicion that not all thinkers and writers are ideologues, that some few can distinguish between truth and lies, even in literature." — Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor "Mr. Vizinczey is a formidable scourge. .. a powerful diagnostician of the political lie wherever it turns up, in the West as well as in the East." — Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London) "A breath of the kind of fresh air that gives academics cold shoulders. ... The great virtue of this collection lies in its steady concern with serious matters, of life and death. —Fredric Raphael, The Sunday Times (London) "Truth & Lies in Literature deserves classic status for the vigorous common sense the author brings to his wide reading. Vizinczey has no patience with trends in criticism like struc- turalism or deconstruction that fiddle with word patterns. Instead his concern lies with the portrayal of human charac- ters in the full range of their passions and attitudes." —Fredric Koppel, The Commercial Appeal "A unique international literary voice. Vizinczey, whose life has been forever marked by his experience in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, has a large spirit, an enormous heart and a relentless sense of freedom. [He] has done us all an incalculable service by pointing out with passion and lucidity that our cultural heritage is not repressive and re- strictive, as many would have us believe, but liberating, rebellious, and, yes, joyful." — Norman Snider, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) "The real function of the critic should be to draw the reader to the work of art, and that is precisely what Vizinczey, one of the greatest critics I have ever encountered, does." —Edwin Howard, Memphis Business Journal "[Vizinczey's] views are as strong as his style, which is swift and vigorous, never sloppy and never, never dull." — Jeffrey M. Landaw, Baltimore Sun "A great book, a fascinating and invigorating book, a book of extraordinary passion and sense. .. The author has the audacity to plunk literature down in the midst of strife, bold and indefatigable, as the articulated conscience of the world." — Trevor Ferguson, Montreal Gazette "One of the best books for writers ever published, by one of the best loth-century writers ever published." —Alan Twigg, Vancouver Province "Excellent. ... [Vizinczey's] essays and reviews are a very uncommon mixture of exuberance and severity. When he loves a writer — such as Kleist or Balzac — he wastes no time on mean qualifications: his intelligent passion to explain why has the boldness and glamour of a cavalry charge." —Paul Chipchase, The Sunday Telegraph (London) Truth and Lies in Literature ESSAYS AND REVIEWS by STEPHEN VIZINCZEY Selected and introduced by CHRISTOPHER SINCLAIR-STEVENSON THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS By Stephen Vizinczey In Praise of Older Women The Rules of Chaos An Innocent Millionaire The University ofChicago Press, Chicago 60637 © 1986 by Stephen Vizinczey All rights reserved. Published 1986 University of Chicago Press edition 1988 Printed in the United States of America 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 5 4 3 2 1 Lines from "New Year Letter" from W H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, © 1941, renewed 1969 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vizinczey, Stephen, 1933— Truth and lies in literature : essays and reviews / by Stephen Vizinczey: selected and introduced by Christopher Sinclair- Stevenson. p. cm. Originally published: Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press, c1986. I. Title. [PR6072.19T7 19881 824'.914—dc19 87-30179 ISBN 0-226-85884-7 (pbk.) C I P Contents Introduction by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson Acknowledgments PROLOGUE A Writer's Ten Commandments FRANCE Why Eng. Lit. Is Not Enough 11 Putting Rousseau Down 16 One of the Very Few 20 Stendhal's Torch of Genius 56 The Unfinished Masterpiece 6r Loving Bids for Freedom 65 Last Word on the Media 69 The Man Who Told Us About Going Mad 72 Voice from the Fringe of Madness 76 A Horse at the Opera 79 Good Faith and Bad 82 A Passion for the Impersonal 86 CRUELTY AND DEATH Europe's Inner Demons 93 Wolves Dressed in Papal Robes 97 Mind of a Mass Murderer 102 The Latest Pseudo-Science 1o6 Cannibals and Christians I I 1 Level Look at Death 115 Honour, Mafia Style I i 8 The Brave Men Who Fight the Mafia 123 GERMANY The Power of Pretentiousness 1 37 The Letters of Thomas Mann 1 45 The Genius Whose Time Has Come 1 5o [v] Extracts from Kleist 18o Who Killed Kleist? 186 SEX, SOCIETY, POLITICS The Lessons of Robert Kennedy 193 Condemned World, Literary Kingdom 197 What Generation Gap? 200 A True Heroine 203 A Tangle of Anarchists 208 Demolition Job on Male Myths and Bogus Social Science 212 Fearless Absurdities 216 An Anthropologist Observes the 1k 221 RUSSIA Seeing Through Human Muddle 227 Grand Master of Despair 232 The Tolstoy Tree 236 Where Are Pasternak's Royalties? 240 How Brainwashing Succeeds 244 Chronicles of Blood 247 WHAT MATTERS MOST Leonardo's Regret 255 The Proudest Genius of this Realm 258 The Greatest of Friends 263 Rules of the Game 267 Equivocal Hero 271 The Wisest Art 274 The American Vice President Who Claimed to Be a British Subject 277 Truth and Lies in Literature 281 CHRISTIANITY, COMMUNISM AND POETRY A Revolutionary in Cuernavaca 299 The Bishop of Platitudes 304 The Cardinal's Conscience 308 Double Suicide 312 The Way to Disaster 316 Hungarian Life-lines 319 Commentary on a Poem 322 II vi i Introduction Stephen Vizinczey is a man of strong, indeed passionate, views. He is not a graduate of the milk-and-water school of criticism, content to write elegant, urbane disquisitions on this or that, a mandarin of the British literary tradition. His pen is sharp, and often dipped in acid. He is not, therefore, a popular writer. Writers who strip away the emperor's new clothes seldom are. He was born in Hungary in 1933, was educated at the University of Budapest and the Hungarian Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. Three of his plays were banned by the communist regime. He fought in the 1956 revolution and escaped to the West. His knowledge of English was almost non-existent. But, like Conrad and Nabokov before him, his ear for the nuances and resonances of English was remarkable. He has never lost his Hungarian accent, but he writes like a magician. Oddly, though perhaps not oddly, he learned his craft while working for the National Film Board of Canada, writing documentaries, and later editing a literary/political magazine, Exchange. When his first novel, In Praise of Older Women, was published in 1965 (he took the risk — he had to take the risk — of publishing it himself) Stephen Vizinczey became immediately famous. It has been called a modern erotic classic, an erotic novel in which sexual experience is not a torment, a post-pornographic book. It seemed, in an uncanny way, to catch the mood of, to encapsulate, a generation. Sex was no longer a furtive occupa- tion to be conducted in secret and more often than not in sorrow or guilt. It was suddenly acknowledged to be glorious, liberat- ing, actually enjoyable. Again, it was not an entirely popular [ vii view, and many critics greeted it with hostility or silence. Even so, In Praise of Older Women has gone through thirty-six printings in English; it is still in print. Vizinczey moved to England in 1966, and published a collection of philosophical and political essays, The Rules of Chaos, three years later. His second novel, An Innocent Mil- lionaire, did not appear until 1983. Like its predecessor, it divided critical opinion. Some dismissed Vizinczey as a think- ing man's Harold Robbins; others saw past the thin veneer of the adventure novel into the layers of subtlety beneath. Brigid Brophy spoke of the book's ironies, of the energy of invention, of the perfect pitch of the narrative tone. Anthony Burgess, who shares Vizinczey's sheer love of words, was both entertained and moved. 'Here is a novel,' he said, 'set bang in the middle of our decadent, polluted, corrupt world that in some curious way breathes a kind of desperate hope.' Stephen Vizinczey's new book, like The Rules of Chaos, is a collection, containing both despair and hope, praise and pre- judice. He has three great literary heroes, Stendhal, Balzac and Kleist, and all three are represented. Other writers are here: Tolstoy and Gogol, Nerval and Rousseau, Thomas Mann and Norman Mailer. There are essays on the nature of cruelty and of death; on feminists and male chauvinists; on anthropologists and sociobiologists; on religion and politics; on critics, charla- tans, heroes and murderers. The book also contains two autobiographical essays, one a remarkable meditation on George Faludy's poem 'The Execu- tion of Imre Nagy' and Hungary's long history of fighting, losing and enduring ('Hungarians love a loser'), the other a writer's ten commandments. The latter produces a curious, vivid identikit picture of this most individualistic of writers.