A pen pal of mine in a nearby state recently published her first novel and was surprised when it was referred to under the heading of women’s fiction. She had never placed herself in any category, and wondered what the term meant. Did it imply some limit to her writing? Did it refer to specific subject matter, or just any fiction by a woman? Could a woman not write a women’s novel? she wondered. Could a man write one?
What we decided through the exchange of several letters was that the term had once been derogatory, used mostly by male reviewers, but had since been adopted by the oppressed class as a matter of pride. People who use the term usually do have some subject matter in mind, though it is no easy thing to pin them down on it. One can imagine someone sitting down to write a women’s novel the way people apparently write young adult novels, or fantasy novels (though I have always felt that first-rate writers avoid all categories; categories imply concession). A major factor is that many critics, and all publishers, adore labels, which relieve them of having to speak clearly, or to think. My friend and I decided that the term woman writer is probably a compliment when used by a woman, but might conceal a sneer if it is used by a man.
The subject comes up because I have just finished a book by my favorite woman writer, but can imagine a chorus of protests as I announce this choice. “She’s not a woman writer,” I can hear people saying. “She. . . .”(A vague sputtering here. The words that almost emerged were “writes like a man.”) “She only writes about one thing. We know why you like her writing.”
The same protests were voiced — even louder — at the publication of her first novel, Fear of Flying.
Erica Jong emerged on the literary scene in 1973 as a messy problem, as if a sensitive artist had begun to behave outrageously in public. She had started out as a poet, acquired the small reputation that poets have. Her first novel had a stunning impact. It was written with the abandon of a poet gone mad. It moved at a breathless pace, its metaphors startling and slangy. It was not all that sexually explicit — I have known people to pick it up on its reputation and be disappointed — but it had a constant sexual undercurrent. Its protagonist, Isadora Wing, had sex on the brain. Furthermore, she thought about sex in a way that, in books up to then, only men had. She admired men’s tight pants from behind, looked for suspicious bulges when they turned around, and if she liked what she saw she “creamed” her “jeans.” The early Isadora was somewhat inhibited in her behavior, but not in what she said. If she could think it she could say it, with a vividness that stuck in your mind like a dart.
Male reviewers — picture an uptight bespectacled man who haunts the library stacks (sounds like me) — didn’t know what to make of this person. They didn’t like the idea that they were being thought of in this way. They didn’t want their pants inspected for bulges. Many reacted violently. They called Fear of Flying a dirty book. At least one column I saw attacked it as being sloppy in syntax and poorly written (exactly the reaction of a grammarian who wants to keep all his buttons buttoned). Paul Theroux — to his eternal discredit, in my opinion — called it a “crappy” novel, and referred to its heroine as a “mammoth pudenda.”
Jong’s readers, however, loved it, and bought it — literally — by the millions. A novel that even its author had thought of as a personal private fantasy struck a chord with countless women. Many wrote to tell her she had expressed their feelings exactly. They had been feeling that way, but no one had had the nerve to say so.
My own guess is that male reviewers objected to the book not because it was sexual, not because it treated men as sex objects, but because they found something objectionable in Jong’s tone. Men were accustomed to women’s fiction; they might even grudgingly — if very slowly — allow it a significant place in world literature, but now (they had known this would happen!) a woman had stepped out of her niche altogether. She was an upstart. She was an uppity woman. She didn’t know her place.
I therefore felt that the one characterization of Jong that made sense (though I couldn’t help thinking it had been stumbled upon by accident) was when she was called a female Henry Miller. Miller, too, had written early novels that had been sexually notorious but not especially explicit. They had the same sexual undercurrent as Jong’s, the same colossal nerve, the same verve and gusto, the willingness to say anything, the same kind of egotistical monologist as a narrator. As Jong was an upstart from her gender, Miller had been one from the gutter. This isn’t literature! the critics shouted. Get back in your hole!
Jong’s Isadora Wing fiction (she has written one non-Isadora novel, and published eleven books in all) famously follows the outlines of her own life, but the question of whether or not it is autobiographical — though certainly interesting — is beside the point. The vital fact is that she deals directly and openly with the most important personal issues of her day. The action in her novels partakes of jet-set glamor (by the time of How to Save Your Own Life Isadora is an enormously successful author, and even Fear of Flying opens at a convention of psychoanalysts in Vienna), but the emotions she faces are those everyone feels. Her fiction manages to be domestic and glamorous at once. It lives out our wildest fantasies and treats our common concerns.
Fear of Flying, for all its verbal daring, was not terribly daring in what it described. It focused on that moment in a woman’s life when she feels an overwhelming need to escape, but though Isadora did run from her husband and have an illicit interlude, the end of the novel found her back in his hotel room in a warm bath, having escaped only the fear that was driving her. By the beginning of How to Save Your Own Life she has gotten out of both the bathtub and the marriage. She has also become a best-selling author (her novel in its fictional guise was entitled Candida Confesses). How to Save describes a period of confusion in Isadora’s life; she has entered a new landscape and recognizes nothing. It is less satisfying than Flying as a novel but perhaps more satisfying as a piece of writing; Isadora has lost some of her breathy exuberance and seems more human. Toward the end of the novel, at the height of her confusion, she stumbles into an orgy, and what follows is perhaps my favorite scene in all of Jong’s fiction, one in which a therapist — also fresh from the orgy — listens to a catalogue of her woes and speaks, briefly, with the voice of sweet reason. How to Save ends when she takes up with a younger man named Josh, one who entered the battle of the sexes slightly later than her other men and who has ground rules that are somewhat more liberated. The novel ends with a series of love poems to him.
It is thus a little disconcerting to find out at the beginning of Parachutes and Kisses that Josh has also turned out to be a schmuck. Jong almost had me believing in romantic love — I was at least reserving judgment — but although Isadora and Josh had managed to stay together long enough to have a baby, they are now bitterly divided, largely because he is also a writer and resents her success. (There is an obvious moral here. Never marry another writer whose first novel sold six million copies.) As the novel opens she is living with her daughter in a huge house in the Connecticut countryside, with two complete writing studios in separate wings but only one writer to use them.
Parachutes and Kisses finally delivers on the early promise of its heroine. After mostly just talking about it for two novels, Isadora becomes wildly promiscuous, whipping around the New England countryside in a Mercedes with the license plate QUIM and diving into bed with almost anyone who asks (everyone asks). She is carrying on with “a drugged-out disc jockey . . . a cuddly Jewish banker . . . a blue-eyed Southern writer . . . a cute Swedish real-estate developer . . . a lapsed rabbi . . . an antiques dealer . . . a twenty-six-year-old medical student . . . a plastic surgeon . . . and so many others she’s practically lost track.” (Can’t blame her.) The sex she has with these people is described in some detail and at considerable length. Critics normally frown on such activity. (It was George Orwell who pointed out that Tropic of Cancer got few good notices because critics are afraid of being perceived as enjoying a dirty book.) I am not frowning. The sex is marvelously described, the scenes are often hilarious, and if a novelist of manners can use an encounter at a tea party to reveal character, I see no reason that an encounter in bed shouldn’t be even more revealing. If Erica Jong is a female Henry Miller, this book is her Sexus.
Though there is another subplot, about the death of Isadora’s grandfather and her search for her roots — she even travels to Russia — and though the novel eventually shows how unsatisfactory promiscuity is (no big news) and leads Isadora into the arms of yet another, even younger, true love, the real pleasure of any Jong novel is the insights that come up along the way and her felicity in expressing them. She once again confronts a host of issues that face her generation — the desire of women in their late thirties finally to have babies; her love for her daughter and the difficulties of raising her alone; a women’s essential rivalry (however much they both try to avoid it) with her husband; the perils of success; a woman’s need simultaneously to be loved and to be independent — and states her very personal feeling about them. There is never a trace of a tired opinion in the writing of Erica Jong.
It is a simple thing to criticize Jong and her fiction. She is a terrific egotist, often without seeming to know it. She goes off on tangents. She has a tendency in her late fiction to be self-pitying (it is hard to feel sorry for a millionaire author, even though that kind of success obviously has its problems). Her heroine kisses and tells, often rather nastily. She adores a man in one novel and can find nothing good to say about him in the next. Jong’s novels have all been open-ended, and often seem to be about nothing more specific than yet another chunk of Isadora’s life. Jong is vulnerable to criticism because of the life her heroine leads and because of the chances she takes in revealing herself. But she is unfailingly honest, nearly always interesting, and wildly entertaining. One can criticize her novels as novels while adoring them as books.
I have no idea whether or not Erica Jong qualifies as a woman writer. She writes of matters of the heart, though she does not limit herself to that organ. Her novels are domestic, but often about the bizarre domesticity of the Seventies and Eighties, when your lover has to leave before dawn so your daughter won’t wonder what he’s doing there. If she does not find a niche in the pantheon of woman writers, she will certainly find one in another group, of writers who are unabashedly egotistical and painfully honest, who find in an intricate examination of their own lives the lives of everyone, who seem almost to live their lives in order to write about them, to offer themselves as martyrs to art. Traditional female authors like Jane Austen and Barbara Pym may be turning in their graves at the thought of this woman writer, but the shade of Colette — as much a scandal in her own day as Erica Jong — is quietly smiling.
The Isadora Wing Novels
of Erica Jong
Fear of Flying Signet 311 pp.
How to Save Your Own Life Signet 310 pp.
Parachutes and Kisses NAL Books 405 pp. $16.95
An excerpt from
How To Save Your Own Life
Later that afternoon I had an invitation to visit a famous old American writer (formerly an expatriate in Paris) whose declining years had brought him, like so many other frantic bohemians, to bourgeois comfort on the edge of the Pacific. Kurt Hammer had honed his underground reputation on tattered copies of his reputed-to-be pornographic novels, smuggled in through customs in the days when sex was considered unfit for print. Now that sex was everywhere in print, his royalties were fading. Censorship, which had once made him seem a modern Marquis de Sade, had receded, leaving him exposed as something of a romantic, a man in love with love — and especially in love with words.
Now eighty-seven, he spent the whole day in bed, writing and sleeping and entertaining disciples. They came from all over the world, and when they didn’t come, he wrote to them in longhand on yellow pads. From his bed he communicated with the entire world! He wrote in a free sloping hand not unlike my own — and it was not unusual for him to write as many as twenty letters in the course of one day. I mailed a stack of twenty-two for him the afternoon after I visited him. They were addressed to Sweden, Japan, France, Yugoslavia, the Middle East. Kurt had been accused of male chauvinism by the women’s movement, and that piqued and intrigued him. He corresponded with feminists all over the world and he admitted as often as possible that women were the superior sex. “No man lives as long as I have,” he said, “without discovering that.”
Seeing this whimsical, elfin octogenarian (with a freckled bald dome and the antic grin of a child who’s just gotten into some delicious trouble), it was hard to make sense of his image as a monster of depravity and machismo.
“I’m supposed to be a dirty old man dontcha know,” Kurt said mischievously, in a voice that still said Brooklyn. “Aren’t you afraid to sit on my bed?”
I giggled. He looked pretty harmless to me. “Whatever I answer, you’ll be insulted!”
“I’m beyond being insulted. The whole world is cake to me. Every morning when I wake up, I say to myself: What? Not dead yet? Sometimes I feel so lousy I think I am dead. But all I ask is that the next world be as interesting as this one. I’m not interested in Nirvana. Nirvana is a goddamned bore. I can’t think of anything worse, in fact. What I want are the extremes — the good, the bad, the shit, the Chopin. By the way, do you like Chopin?”
I nodded.
“I love him. For me, nobody touches my heart like Chopin. I’d give up every book — every book dontcha know — if I could just have written one prelude like Chopin. That’s the truth.”
I stayed with Kurt for hours, talking about his writing, my writing, feminism, poetry, my marriage, his marriages. He had the intense interest in the young that comes to writers when they are beyond competition, when their life’s work is a completed thing, when they know for sure that all books constitute a communal enterprise. I told him how painful it was to read vicious things about myself in the press, and he blew up at me.
“I never want to hear you use that word painful again,” he said. “Do you realize what they said about Whitman?”
“No,” I conceded.
“ ‘A pig rooting among garbage.’ That was the review when Leaves of Grass came out. Do you read Leaves of Grass?”
“Yes. I love it.”
“And have you ever heard of that review?”
“No,” I confessed.
“So don’t let me catch you saying ‘painful.’ Pain is not something you waste on newspaper hacks. In fact, I’ve never seen the point of pain at all. The trick is not how much pain you feel — but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses. When you wind up in bed at the age of eighty-seven like me, the only pain you’ll feel is for all the useless pain you felt, all the times you let yourself not do something because of fear and cowardice, all the times you let the bastards and the kibbitzers and the life-shrinkers hold you back. Watch out for the death-people, do you see what I mean? The people who want to die and want everyone else to die with them. They’re the ones to avoid. If you can learn to avoid them, you’ll be fine. And in your writing too, don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re doing, only how to destroy, to silence everyone — including themselves after a while. They need you — or they have nothing to write about — but you don’t need them. Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I hate this word painful?”
Outside the window of Kurt’s bedroom, the Pacific was about to swallow the sun. In New York, it was already night — if New York still existed. I was beginning to doubt it.
What was this myth, I wondered, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, that literacy ended when you crossed the George Washington Bridge? Certainly no one could have been more chauvinistic about New York than I, who had spent nearly my entire life in the same neighborhood, so it was all the more exhilarating to discover that there was intelligent life west of the Rockies. I was thinking of my afternoon with Kurt as I raced back to the Beverly Hills Hotel to change for a party being held in my honor by friends from the East. Kurt made me feel that it was okay to be eighty-seven — as long as you got there with as few regrets as possible.
There would always be arthritis and arteriosclerosis and all the other mortal diseases of the flesh — but your spirit didn’t have to die an untimely death. For the first time, I had a vision of myself at eighty-seven — a faint vision, perhaps, but a vision nonetheless. I was going to be a terrific old lady someday! I was going to be surrounded by students, disciples — maybe even grandchildren. My life — which a month ago had seemed over — was just beginning. What was thirty-two compared to Kurt’s eighty-seven? Where did I get off talking to him about pain? I may have been born into this world against my better judgment — but I was staying as a matter of choice, and nobody was going to kick me out until I was good and ready.
I left my rented car in the lot and sprinted, skipped, and ran back to my suite, itching to put some words on paper. I slammed the door, kicked off my shoes, sprawled out on the bed with the notebook Jeannie had given me, opened to the first page and wrote, giggling all the while:
How to Save Your Own Life
The Wit & Wisdom of Isadora Wing
(Amanuensis to the Zeitgeist)
“Have Pen, will travel”
- Renounce useless guilt.
- Don’t make a cult of suffering.
- Live in the Now (or at least the Soon).
- Always do the things you fear the most; courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
- Trust all joy.
- If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere.
- Get ready to be eighty-seven.
From How to Save Your Own Life
by Erica Jong
Copyright © 1977 by Erica Jong
Reprinted by permission of Holt, Reinhart
and Winston, Publishers.
