Truth and lies in literature: Essays and reviews

by Stephen Vizinczey

"Gathered here is a selection of the essays [of] the distinguished Hungarian born novelist Stephen Vizinczey. . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."— Publishers Weekly"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek"Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Essays, Literary Criticism

339 pages, Hardcover

First published June 7, 1986

About the author

Hungarian author who studied under George Lukacs at the University of Budapest and graduated from the city's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in 1956. Three of his plays were banned by the Hungarian Communist regime and in he took part in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After a short stay in Italy, he ended up in Canada speaking only 50 words of English, and eventually taking Canadian citizenship. He learned English writing scripts for Canada's National Film Board and the CBC. He edited Canada's short-lived literary magazine, Exchange. In 1966 he moved to London and acquired British citizenship.

His best-known works are the novels 'In Praise of Older Women' (1965) and 'An Innocent Millionaire' (1983).

Vizinczey has also written two books of literary, philosophical and political essays: 'The Rules of Chaos' (1969) and 'Truth and Lies in Literature' (1985).

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, this is the way to write book reviews: funny, clever, opinionated, knowledgeable, and often more interesting than the books he writes about. Stephen Vizinczey is a novelist who also taught the art of writing. His essays and reviews are arguably his best work. Selected and introduced by his editor, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson at the Atlantic Monthly Press, these essays include "A Writer’s Ten Commandments" as well as essays on Vizinczey’s literary heroes ("at least once a year I reread almost everything by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Balzac. To my mind [Heinrich von] Kleist and these 19th-century French and Russian novelists were the greatest masters of prose, a constellation of unsurpassed geniuses such as we find in music from Bach to Beethoven…").

A section of the book is devoted to Russian writers: Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vizinczey's beloved Gogol. Every essay brings to light something unique about their writing and something in the authors’ lives which brought this uniqueness to fruition, or how the raw material becomes the art.

Reviewing the book Gogol: The Biography Of A Divided Soul by Henri Troyat and translated by Nanci Amphoux, Vizinczey starts out:

There is hardly a page of this book on which there isn’t something that I find deeply offensive. Henri Troyat’s subject is Gogol, but what this biography is really about is that warm, cosy sense of superiority that mediocre people feel when confronted by genius.

Vizinczey then goes on to discuss Gogol for a page or two, pointing out moments of great comic genius, only to return to M. Troyat and point out ways he missed his mark completely.

In his titular essay commissioned by Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, Vizinczey produced two versions, the one not published in the magazine beginning:

I read Billy Budd, Sailor some fifteen years ago but the passage of time has not softened its impact: I am still overcome by nausea whenever some admiring reference reminds me of it. Melville’s story fleshes out the grossest, meanest lie in all literature, the lie that a man can love his executioner…In Melville’s last book Authority does not ill-treat its subjects out of indifference, venality, incompetence, callousness, but for the common good. However arbitrary and cruel it may seem in its actions, it is always benign at heart… What disabling misconceptions about human nature, and society are inspired by such lies!

Later in the same essay, Vizinczey turns to speak how readers influence the idea of literature:

There are two basic kinds of literature. One helps you to understand, the other helps you to forget; the first helps you to be a free persona and a free citizen, the other helps people to manipulate you. One is like astronomy, the other is like astrology…Orwell said that most people cannot see artistic merit in novels which contradict their views, and this is the beginning of all aesthetics…Reading is a creative act, a continuous exercise of the imagination which gives flesh, feeling, colour, to the dead words on the page; we have to draw on the experience of all our senses to create a world in our mind, and we cannot do this without involving our subconscious and baring our ego. In short, we are extremely vulnerable when we read and are only happy with authors who share our inclinations, concerns, prejudices, illusions, pretentions, dreams, and who have the same values, the same attitudes to sex, politics, death, etc.

Vizinczey goes on to speak of Dickens, Stendhal, Proust, Balzac, but in a way that is so full of life and argument, full of recognition and the thrill of discovery, that one can see what Vizinczey is saying about truth and lies by his pairing of these writers.

Vizinczey is piquant, daring, vociferous on the subject of his literary heroes. In the section on German writers is reprinted his essay on the German writer Heinrich von Kleist commissioned by The Times. Vizinczey compares Kleist favorably with Shakespeare and tells us a time is due in which Kleist will get the approbation he yearned for. Vizinczey is so passionate and persuasive that we forget that Kleist wrote in the early 19th century. “If Stendhal tells us how people become lovers, Kleist tells us how people become murderers. It is hardly ever for a good reason.” He is describing Kleist’s very first play "The Schroffenstein Family" (1802) which

has one of the most potent love scenes ever conceived…Kleist’s Romeo undresses his Juliet and exchanges clothes with her while describing how he will undress her on their wedding night….the boy, knowing that his father is coming to kill the girl, talks her into exchanging clothes with him to save her life…they are murdered by their fathers—each killing his own child, thinking it’s the other. It’s hatred that kills, not love….We cannot understand anything profoundly unless it moves or shocks us so deeply that it touches our subconscious; great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn’t play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.

Kleist committed suicide at the age of 34. Impecunious and starved of critical attention, he despaired of being able to earn enough money to live. When a young woman of his acquaintance recently diagnosed with uterine cancer mentioned she would like to die but not alone, Kleist agreed that such a thing was better in company and obliged. Vizinczey uses letters, essays, and Kleist’s body of work to compile his history:

No writer can create a single character or a single scene beyond his emotional range. Kleist, whose works are charged with suddenly swelling passions, had an abnormal capacity for extreme emotions—for extreme joy as well extreme despair, extreme love as well as extreme hate. He lived, in the words an army friend, ‘exposed to the storms of his inner self’…Happiness, he now saw, was to ‘till a field, to plant a tree, to father a child’. He soon renounced these simple ambitions, but he felt them so deeply that they survive everywhere in his work, and all the ‘fiendish business’ of his stories and plays is set against the soundest longings of the heart for love, a home and family.

Vizinczy, born in 1933, was born in Hungary and did not begin to learn English until the age of twenty-four. He writes in English, having learned his craft while working with The National Film Board of Canada. His editor compares his nuance in English to Conrad and Nabokov before him. He is a remarkable writer of enormous personality and skill as this book of essays, and his own classic novel, In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of András Vajda, attests. Writers will thrill to read his enabling and energizing “Ten Commandments,” and reviewers would gain much from his own loosely-styled criticism so distant and so distinct from what we often read by professional reviewers. These are reviews for the ages.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this collection of stimulating essays and reviews is ever republished (as it seems it's going to be next year), it should be provided with a warning sticker: "Warning, causes serious urge to go out and read all books discussed." And bookstores selling this had better check the bibliography at the end and stock up on the classics mentioned there – or at least those that receive Vizinczey's praise. Chances are buyers will return soon enough to buy some of those too. His reasoning can go against the grain and his judgements may shock (just forget about all those 19th century British novels, they're all no good), but he's never less than entertaining and incomparably infectious – he makes you want to go out and read.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

As good as lit crit gets. Iconoclastic, informative, entertaining.

[1.1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really excellent collection of reviews and essays. Vizinczey has range and effortlessly covers everything from advice to writers, translations of literature, biographies and critical summaries of writers and works he admires, to criticism of other books (when something is boring, jargonistic, and lifeless on the page he attacks it with a gentle but firm wit, which is lovely—I wish he or a critic of his calibre were prominent in our time), critiques of prevailing narratives, and so much more. All of it is well-written, firstly, which makes it a joy to read, but also opinionated, so one gets an idea of Stephen.

Opinions, as we’ve learned in a world riven by op-eds, social media meltdowns/dog-piles, and pundits, don’t mean much. Most of the time they’re generated by committee, spread like a virus, and are not only ignorant, but unimaginative. It’s astounding many of them even get published, but that’s a problem for another day. I

Stephen Vizinczey is highly opinionated, yes. He is vociferous in some of his writing, and sharp, and incisive, but above all he is honest—and that alone is so refreshing that, no matter how often you disagree with him, or wonder where he’s going, this book is always rewarding to pick up and read. I’m certainly going to go through it again in about a year, maybe sooner.

If you can find it, this book is worth reading for the commandments to writers alone, and there’s not a weak essay in it.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Todavía no lo termino y me ha encantado. Espero encontrar más libros como éste. Hace mucha falta.

[Braqueman · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Vincenzo Politi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Vizinczey, the Hungarian maître à penser who teaches the English gentlemen how to write in English!

This collection of reviews, newspapers articles and literary criticism (including his 'commandments for the writer') is wit, insightful, unbelievably intelligent and incredibly, magnificently written. Chapeau!

[Carlo Mayer]

Finiti