In Praise of Older Women’, eh? Where do I start? Well, I’d like to mention that Stephen Vizinczey’s, erm, modern classic was self-published in 1965 but has been out of print in Britain for the past twenty years. That’s a good thing. It’s also just been reissued by Penguin. That’s a bad thing. The, ahem, tastefully erotic lady on the cover, nipple suitably erect, is not so much a bad thing as a straightforward cringe, as is the horrendously self-obsessed, ridiculously generalised and quite frankly outdated prose contained within said cover.
I mean, I spent the best part of the book wondering what exactly it was meant to be. A novel? A memoir? A treatise? The blurb says ‘novel’, so we’ll go with that, but in reality it reads much more like a tedious old man writing an academic paper, at great length, about Werthers Originals. (Yes, despite the best efforts of the erotic lady, that’s how sexy it actually all is.) It wants to be Graham Greene circa The End of the Affair, all melancholy and profundity, but the unmistakeable scent of writerly pedantry and the all-pervasive obsessive self-interest are actually really, really boring.
You’re probably wondering about the actual subject matter. It won’t take long to sum it up: essentially, Stephen Vizinczey – whoops, sorry, I mean Andras Vajda, the main character – likes women. Especially Mummy’s friends. Under the tutelage of sexy women, boy thus grows into an irresistibly sexy man who has a string of OH GOD, NEVER-ENDING affairs with older women in a number of different countries. It’s like a Carry-On set in war-torn Europe: all the women are caricatured and furry (in all senses) and Andras Vajda never fails to get it up. Ever.
More frustrating than any of this, though, is Vizinczey’s ridiculous attitude towards the very women he supposedly venerates and idealises – at many points, it seems as if he, well, just doesn’t get it. ‘If deep down you hate [women], if you dream of humiliating them, if you enjoy ordering them around, then you are likely to be paid back in kind.’ Yes indeed! Thank you for pointing this difficult concept out. I’d also like to mention that if you kick your dog, it may bite you. Speaking of dogs, did you know that women can be trained? ‘I can neither respect nor trust senior cadets, generals, party leaders, millionaires, executives, nor any of their enterprises. Incidentally, this attitude seems to fascinate most women,’ writes Vizinczey, without a shred of irony.
And I’m not even going to mention the similarly irony-less poem which appears suddenly in the middle of the book, ‘Sermon to a Meeting of Onanists Anonymous’. Oh actually, go on then: ‘As a man’s cock rises so we rise above/our indifference to strangers/we learn to tolerate to care to love.’ Cor! Powerful stuff.
In conclusion, I suppose I have to acknowledge that it was 1965. Onanists Anonymous was a groundbreaking concept, I’m sure. And it may well be that we must excuse Vizinczey’s small-mindedness and self-obsession as being nothing more than a rather unfortunate product of its age. But then again, you know what they say about men with small minds…
