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Contents

1. A Bitter Thought
2. Making a Killing - the 19th Century Origins of a 20th Century Drama of Greed, Love and Malice
3. First Impressions
4. Money Is the Only Home
5. A View of Toledo
6. Father and Son
7. Help from the Dead
8. Hope Deferred
9. Rumors of War
10. The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus
11. An Incident Involving an Apple
12. Touch and Go
13. Interesting Combinations
14. The Weekend Marriage
15. Why Not?
16. Past Crimes and a New Blunder
17. An Island of the Very Rich
18. The Twists and Turns of Falling in Love
19. The Twists and Turns of Falling in Love (Cont'd)
20. Second Chance
21. A Monstrous Remark
22. A Successful Woman
23. The Triangle
24. Love and Deceit
25. Business Associates
26. Moment of Truth
27. Friends
28. A Very Expensive Lecture
29. Fame
30. A Loving Couple
31. Kindred Spirits
32. Paranoia
33. A Beautiful Idea
34. The Contract
35. Oh, to Be Rich and Good!
36. Phone Calls, Cables, Letters
37. Games Lawyers Play
38. Who Cares?
39. Games Lawyers Play (Cont'd)
40. Games Lawyers Play (Cont'd)
41. Each Man Is His Own Victim
42. A Wife's Coughing
43. A New Life
44. A Kind of Immortality

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Foreword

"Stephen Vizinczey's name is difficult to spell or pronounce but it is worth learning, because he is a master of our time," wrote the leading Spanish weekly Epoca last year, commenting on the Spanish edition of An Innocent Millionaire. It is safe to say that there is no other English-language novelist writing about America who is so widely read and praised around the world and at the same time so little known in the United States.

Born in Hungary in 1933, Vizinczey was a young poet and playwright in his student days: three of his plays were banned by the Communist regime. His father, a Catholic antifascist teacher, was assassinated by the Nazis; under the Communists one of his uncles was beaten to death as he was being persuaded to sign away his land to the collective. Such formative experiences may account for some of the violent turns in Vizinczey's writing. After fighting in the defeated revolution of 1956, he escaped to the West, knowing about fifty words of English. Now he is described as a master of the language and praised for "teaching the English how to write English" (Anthony Burgess). After living in Montreal, Toronto, New York, and then Anna Maria Island, he eventually settled in London. "Having learned to write well in his adopted tongue," wrote the Los Angeles critic Bruce Bebb, "it would have been easy for him to shape a career as a Communist-baiter, one of those pathetic sycophants who pretend to see only evil on the east side of the Iron Curtain and only good in the West. Instead he chose to kick against the pricks wherever he went." Though Vizinczey's books were banned in Communist countries, it is true that he never conformed to the anti-Communist stereotype of the Cold War period. His chief inspiration as a novelist comes from a young European's sudden shock and amazement at finding himself in North America. Both In Praise of Older Women and An Innocent Millionaire portray our continent in the light of a European childhood; they reflect America through European eyes.

They have not found favor with America's literary establishment. The title of In Praise of Older Women has entered the language, but when the novel was first published in 1966 it was so little noticed in New York that it had to be remaindered after three months. Nevertheless, it has survived the changing attitudes and tastes of more than two decades. Just in 1990 it has been published in new Swedish, German, and Portuguese translations, and the Spanish translation has gone through fourteen printings in the last two years alone. Few novels praised by our literary journals and touted by the mass media have shown such widespread and enduring appeal. The Hungarian translation, finally published in Vizinczey's native land in 1990, appeared in a first edition of 100,000 copies. The present University of Chicago Press edition is the forty-first in English.

Vizinczey's attack on leading New York critics in his "Anatomy of Serious Rubbish, or The Bay of Pigs of the American Literary Establishment," published in The Rules of Chaos (1970), gained him no friends in the media, nor did his portrayal of New York in An Innocent Millionaire, which was rejected by every New York publisher before its success in England. Though it was eventually published in New York, it remained for foreign critics to point out that "An Innocent Millionaire shows all the worms in the Big Apple" (Antonio Deblas) and "Vizinczey's New York attorneys make Balzac's shyster lawyers look like little orphan boys" (Martin Halter). The New York Times Book Review, while praising Vizinczey's "vividly epigrammatic prose" and calling the novel "a rare accomplishment, a contemporary adventure told with style, wit and wisdom," gave it only a brief notice, and didn't mention that An Innocent Millionaire had anything to do with New York. Most leading publications, including the daily New York Times, have never reviewed it.

Critics in the rest of the country, less bound to literary fashion and politics and to seasonal trends in publishing, have always been kinder to Vizinczey's books. Back in 1966, when In Praise of Older Women was being ignored by all the authoritative journals, young Larry McMurtry, reviewing it for the Houston Post, called it "a pleasure, a brilliant first novel" and found that "Mr. Vizinczey writes of women beautifully, with sympathy, tact and delight, and he writes about sex with more lucidity and grace than most writers ever acquire." As for An Innocent Millionaire, many reviewers across the United States greeted it with as much enthusiasm as critics in Britain, Canada, Latin America, and Europe, likening it to the great nineteenth-century classics.

We hope that these editions of Vizinczey's novels and his collection of essays and reviews, Truth and Lies in Literature, will give many American readers the joy of discovery.

- Morris Philipson
Director, The University of Chicago Press

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