Washington Post Book World, February 9, 1997

The Author as Lover

There are books that mark genius and books that shift gears. There are writers that plumb hearts and those who find doors. Erica Jong may not be listed in the Oxford Companion to American Literature, but she will long be remembered by baby boomers as the woman who shifted the gears and threw open the door to a full frontal view of contemporary female sexuality in fiction. When Jong's edgy Isadora Wing (Fear of Flying) burst on to the sex-crazed, drug-hazed culture of the early '70s, she led the way to a new kind of American heroin--the carnal obsessive. The queen of the "zipless" heat.

Jong grew up New York City, the second daughter of a painter and a musician. Her mother was a portrait artist whose parents had emigrated from Russia; her father a songwriter who turned businessman in order to support the various generations that inhabited their West Side apartment.

"We had all the problems of a New York Jewish intellectual family," she recalls, referring to that singular mix of Manhattan neurosis and fizz. "It was hard to get a word in at the dinner table. When I first saw Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, I thought he writing about me.'

She attended New York's public High School of Music and Art in the '50s, filling her notebooks with sketches and poetry, and reading her work out loud to anyone at home who would listen. Her favorite childhood book at 12 was Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess, a Victorian novel about a little girl shut in a garret. "After that, a rush of Russian novels, with no particular emotional equipment in place to understand them."

She studied writing at Barnard and 18th century English literature at Columbia, "reading novels like bonbons" and combing poetry with Robert Pack, Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. By the time she was working on her PhD, she had produced two books of poetry, Fruits & Vegetables and Halflives. "I was such an academic, I don't recognize myself when I look back. I knew exactly how to write tedious, footnoted tomes, and never suspected I would do anything else."

But in the late '60s she tried her hand at a novel. "It was after I'd read some Nabokav. My story was about a male poet who sets out to kill his doppelganger."

Aaron Asher, an editor at Holt, read it and offered his advice. "'Someone will probably publish this,' he said. 'I don't want to. Some day you'll thank me for it.'

"And then he said another thing: 'That female voice in your poems. Why isn't it in this novel?'

"It was my Aha moment, as if a wind had come m behind me, pushing. I began to think--John Updike had written Couples, Henry Miller had Published Tropic of Cancer, Roth had done Portnoy's Complaint--males were writing about the bedroom. Why not women? Why not me? But we were still undiscovered country--no one had written about what goes on in a woman's head with any nakedness, and by the time I shelved the first manuscript and went off and finished the new one, I had decided no one would want to publish it."

Asher did. At first, Fear of Fling was received as a literary feat. Updike reviewed it in the New Yorker. Henry Miller wrote about it elsewhere. And then, when it was published in paperback, the book's dynamics changed entirely. "There was a media frenzy. A scandal. Here was this young woman coming out of nowhere to talk about sex. And she had blond hair... The book became a bestseller for extraliterary reasons. I felt exposed, traumatized.

Jong has produced numerous books since, but none with the impact of Fear of Flying. The two Isadora sequels--How to Save Your Own Life (1977) and Parachutes and Kisses (1984)--never quite reached the greater public's consciousness. But Jong has been tireless in production. To date she has published six volumes of poetry and six novels (among them, Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980) and Any Woman's Blues (1990). Her seventh novel, the multigenerational saga Inventing Memory, will be released in June. She has written nonfiction as well: The Devil at Large, about her friendship with Henry Miller, and Fear of Fifty, her mid-life memoir about what she calls the Whiplash Generation--women raised to be Doris Day, wanting to be Gloria Steinem, and raising their daughters in the retrograde age of Princess Di and Madonna.

"I'm always asked in seminars to stand for contemporary womanhood," she says. And I'm glad to do it. I like being a mentor. She marvels at current bestsellers like The Rules, which counsels young women to lure marriage partners by appearing demure and naïve. "It's as if they've just discovered flirting. Here's a generation that grew up on Oprah--describing every aspect of their lives on national TV-- and then they have to be told not to give their secrets away on the first date. Pretty amusing, eh?"

-Marie Arana-Ward

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