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Contents

Introduction by Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson
Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE
A Writer's Ten Commandments

FRANCE
Why Eng. Lit. Is Not Enough
Putting Rousseau Down
One of the Very Few
Stendhal's Torch of Genius
The Unfinished Masterpiece
Loving Bids for Freedom
Last Word on the Media
The Man Who Told Us About Going Mad
Voice from the Fringe of Madness
A Horse at the Opera
Good Faith and Bad
A Passion for the Impersonal

CRUELTY AND DEATH
Europe's Inner Demons
Wolves Dressed in Papal Robes
Mind of a Mass Murderer
The Latest Pseudo-Science
Cannibals and Christians
Level Look at Death
Honour, Mafia Style
The Brave Men Who Fight the Mafia

GERMANY
The Power of Pretentiousness
The Letters of Thomas Mann
The Genius Whose Time Has Come
Extracts from Kleist
Who Killed Kleist

SEX, SOCIETY, POLITICS
The Lessons of Robert Kennedy
Condemned World, Literary Kingdom
What Generation Gap
A True Heroine
A Tangle of Anarchists
Demolition Job on Male Myths and Bogus Social Science
Fearless Absurdities
An Anthropologist Observes the Ik

RUSSIA
Seeing Through Human Muddle
Grand Master of Despair
The Tolstoy Tree
Where Are Pasternak's Royalties
How Brainwashing Succeeds
Chronicles of Blood

WHAT MATTERS MOST
Leonardo's Regret
The Proudest Genius of this Realm
The Greatest of Friends
Rules of the Game
Equivocal Hero
The Wisest Art
The American Vice President Who Claimed to Be a British Subject
Truth and Lies in Literature

CHRISTIANITY, COMMUNISM AND POETRY
A Revolutionary in Cuernavaca
The Bishop of Platitudes
The Cardinal's Conscience
Double Suicide
The Way to Disaster
Hungarian Life-lines
Commentary on a Poem

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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 occupation to be conducted in secret and more often than not in sorrow or guilt. It was suddenly acknowledged to be glorious, liberating, actually enjoyable. Again, it was not an entirely popular 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 Millionaire, did not appear until 1983. Like its predecessor, it divided critical opinion. Some dismissed Vizinczey as a thinking 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 prejudice. 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, charlatans, heroes and murderers.

The book also contains two autobiographical essays, one a remarkable meditation on George Faludy's poem 'The Execution 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. 'Thou Shalt Not Drink, Smoke or Take Drugs'; 'Thou Shalt Not Have Expensive Habits'; 'Thou Shalt Dream and Write and Dream and Rewrite'; 'Thou Shalt Not Be Vain'; 'Thou Shalt Not Be Modest'; 'Thou Shalt Not Let a Day Pass Without Re-reading Something Great' (the list includes Kleist, Swift, Sterne, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, 'almost everything by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Balzac'); 'Thou Shalt Not Worship London/New York/Paris'; 'Thou Shalt Write to Please Thyself'; 'Thou Shalt Be Hard to Please'.

A voluptuary with ascetic habits? An immodest man without vanity? An internationalist who despises great cities? The apparent contradictions are intriguing. But what emerges most forcibly is Vizinczey's blazing conviction that a writer must write for himself above all and must at all times keep his critical faculties finely honed. James Thurber once wrote a book called Lanterns and Lances, and the title could as easily apply to this book. Vizinczey's lanterns shed light, often dazzling, on dark corners, often murky ones. His lances are sharp and pointed, with a devastating cutting edge. Both are wielded with brilliance.

CHRISTOPHER SINCLAIR-STEVENSON

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