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"In this beautifully written and thoroughly
researched work of historical fiction, Jong attempts to rescue
Sappho
from the classical tradition that characterizes her as a sexual or
social deviant as well as a victim of unrequited heterosexual love." *** "Jong's
historical novel reimagines the extraordinary life of the legendary Greek poet." ***
In Print: Zipless No More *** A Tale of Two Poets Jong maintains that there is no them or metaphor in lyric poetry -- or for that matter, song -- that was not created first by Sappho. She is justly celebrated for such lines as "I have a daughter like a golden flower" and "a subtle fire runs under my skin." "Every poet of consequence from Catullus to Sylvia Plath has rediscovered and reinterpreted Sappho," Jong says, "and all these years, she has never got the credit for it." In short, Jong contends that Sappho is the mother of all poets. It seems appropriate that Jong would take on the calumny that has attached itself to Sappho's reputation, since she began her career as a poet and has published six books of poetry in addition to her eight novels. Then, too, she's known for giving voice to unheard women's thoughts, as in her famous bestseller, "Fear of Flying," which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. "A lot of my books are an attempt to find women's histories that are the histories of women rewritten by men," Jong says. Sappho, who was Greed lived 2,600 years ago, 200 years after Homer and a short while after Plato. But unlike those writers, most of what remains of her poetry is fragments. Some of the latter, Jong reveals, were actually so little regarded that he papyrus they were written on was used to wrap mummies, and the poems were only preserved and discovered by chance. In addition to her new book and the anniversary of "Fear of Flying," Jong is working on another task, this one long-running -- turning her 1980 novel "Fanny" into a musical. Her top choice for the lead, which she once summed up by asking "What if Tom Jones were a woman?" she notes, is Bernadette Peters because, "I've been following her for years. She has a wonderful voice and her renditions of songs are not like anybody else's. "Fanny" has been optioned by the Manhattan Theater Club. At 61, Jong is still blonde, attractive and youthful-looking. She lives in a big, stylishly furnished apartment on the Upper East Side and in Weston, Conn., with her fourth husband, Kenneth David Burrows, who's a lawyer with a black standard poodle, Belinda Barkowitz. When she published "Fear of Flying," Jong says, she was a poet and medieval scholar in a Ph.D. program at Columbia. The book was a cataclysm, she recalls: "I went from being obscure to being the kind of person other people call in the middle of the night." She actually spent a year replying to readers who had written her about the book and their personal experiences; it wasn't until later that she realized that she didn't owe them anything and didn't have the time to do that. As a writer, she says, her primary motivation is to get the reader to "turn the page." Her next project will concern aging, the way in which women in particular find that they are devalued as they get older. These days, however, the women who helped liberate so many others from sexual
conservatism, says that "the door opened in the Sixties and Seventies to
sexual freedom hasn't fulfilled its promise. Younger people today, if
they're not totally self-destructive feel that they want to settle down with
partners." Her own daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of Jong and
her third husband Jonathan Fast, who is also a writer, has never read her
mother's books because she doesn't' want her writing to be influenced by
them. Jong-Fast who wrote "Normal Girl," is engaged and is
writing a series for Modern Bride about her upcoming wedding. *** Cliff Notes Most gentlemen don't like love, the Cole Porter tune goes: ''As madam Sappho in some sonnet said, / A slap and a tickle / Is all that the fickle / Male / Ever has in his head.'' Creative, influential women have always attracted more hostility than praise. The most famous of a tiny handful of women in Western antiquity whose writings have survived, the Greek poet Sappho has been imagined through 26 centuries in shapes that reflect the anxieties of their time and place. Ancient readers considered her a composer of exceptional power, a mortal Muse whose image they memorialized in monuments and coins. But they also turned her near uniqueness as a female writer into a morality tale of sexual and social deviance. On the basis of virtually no evidence outside her own artful poems, Athenian playwrights used Sappho as a character in their racy comedies. A few centuries later, Roman literary critics speculated that she was a prostitute -- the only plausible career, they thought, for a woman who wrote so perceptively about erotic desire. The mold for modern equations of female creativity with psychological abnormality -- the Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath stereotype -- is Ovid's portrayal of Sappho as a desolate melancholiac. And reading those famous love poems, expressing passion for both women and men, all the ancients wondered: whom did Sappho really love, and in what way exactly? The Sappho produced by this tradition comes in two versions: an accomplished seducer of beautiful young girls and a victim of heterosexual heartbreak who killed herself for love of a man. The Sappho that Erica Jong offers up in her historical fantasy ''Sappho's Leap'' is as hooked on slaps and tickles as Cole Porter's archetypal male. And Jong's fans wouldn't have it any other way. The author of the sexual-revolution classic ''Fear of Flying'' (1973) has a reputation to uphold, and she rises to the occasion by imagining Sappho as an updated compilation of every Jongian heroine to date. Despite the careful details describing the culture of the Greek islands in the sixth century B.C., this Sappho is a comfortably bisexual poet of the 21st century. Think swoons and sun-kissed skin, ripe flesh, ecstasy and anguish, and you're halfway to catching the drift of the novel. But only halfway. True, the first dozen chapters parade the characters through a soapy plot filled with unintentional hilarities, where Sappho flounces and flirts like Scarlett O'Hara (''You little minx,'' her lover says, ''you want to devour the world'') and makes love like a Harlequin heroine (''His arms enfolded me. His heart thundered against mine. . . . Time vanished. Space collapsed''). In her afterword, Jong testifies that she wrote the novel to correct centuries' worth of fictions about Sappho she finds mocking and unfair. This is a good cause, if a novel needs one; it's gratifying to encounter a Sappho whose sex drive is based in pleasure instead of neurosis, and who is interested in politics as well as pillow talk. (In fact, the total number of her lovers is small, but the relationships are complicated by modern ''commitment issues'' that occupy a quantity of pages.) The problem with framing the novel as an intervention into history is that it depends in part on making the fictional Sappho a plausible creator of the historical Sappho's poetry. Jong's own adaptations, interpolated through the book, show the poems' range: graceful calibrations of raw passion and allusive indirection, elegant turns of phrase capping bawdy banter. The utter lack of intuition that distinguishes Jong's young Sappho makes her authorship of this material simply impossible to believe. Things take a turn for the better when the newly widowed poet travels to Egypt and beyond in search of her lost daughter, Cleis, and her exiled lover, the poet Alcaeus (whose poetry survives, like Sappho's, in fragments recorded by ancient scholars or scrawled on scraps of papyrus). Weaving the ancient pseudo-biographical oddments together in all their glorious incoherence, and adding a few of her own, Jong invents a Sapphic odyssey through the Hebrew Scriptures, Greek history, philosophy and myth. As she steers the novel into the realm of the fantastical, creativity and light humor help redeem the thin characterizations. The mature Sappho, happily, knows irony. Sappho plays the role of Joseph when she rescues her brothers in Egypt (though, unlike Joseph in the story of Potiphar's wife, she revels in an affair with the lusty Pharaoh). The fable teller Aesop advises Sappho how to deal with her brothers' nemesis, the prostitute Rhodopis -- an amusing story, but one that showcases Jong's irritating habit of setting up strong women as Sappho's bitterest antagonists. She sees the Sirens and the Harpies (more female monsters), corrects Homer's account of the underworld and reminds a group of Platonic philosophers of Aphrodite's delights. It's as though a women's writing group took ''Clash of the Titans'' as its theme of the week. In one of the longest tales, recalling the camp appeal of ''Xena: Warrior Princess,'' Sappho and Aesop discover a separatist commune of Amazons. Their day-care system rivals Sweden's, but their literary taste is less progressive: they capture Sappho and demand that she write an epic ''Amazoniad.'' It is a huge success -- after the protofeminist Amazons dutifully censor the spicy parts. The queen faces a rebellion from a group of second-wave subjects, who protest old-fashioned separatism in favor of a sex-friendly new order. Will Sappho rule over them instead? the Amazons inquire. Sappho is intrigued at the prospect, but her answer is no: ''I loved the adulation and applause, but administration bored me.'' She leaves, after releasing Aesop from a cave, where he has been forced to spend days impregnating amorous Amazon virgins. With Aesop's help, Sappho founds a utopia using a Ten Commandments of sorts, in an amusing parody of the biblical account. But her quest is not over. Like Odysseus, Sappho must return home to deal with political and domestic tensions. The novel melts back into melodrama through a series of midlife crises, from Sappho's reconciliation with Alcaeus and her mother and daughter to her rediscovery of passion, first with her music students and then with Phaon, an enticing younger man. In the ancient tradition, Phaon is the cause of Sappho's suicidal leap from a sea cliff. The novel opened with her steps toward the edge; it reveals Sappho's fate in the last chapter. Erica Jong's celebrity will never rest on her literary talents. This is a book, after all, in which a friendly centaur can revive a languishing maiden with an ''arc of fire'' from its ''enormous'' phallus. But her effort to bring to life an ancient writer engrossed in politics, family and the creation of poetry is a relief from the relentlessly everyday sincerity of much current ''women-oriented'' writing. If only she had confronted the real historical mystery of how Sappho made her way in the violent, male-dominated world of ancient Greece -- such a novel would have done justice to the remarkable woman that Sappho obviously was. Joy Connolly teaches classics and political theory at Stanford University. --Joy Connolly, New York Times *** Read more about Sappho's Leap View Erica's speaking engagements for Sappho's Leap.
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