Erica Jong

MOVING THROUGH A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

As Jong’s character Isadora Wing observes in How To Save Your Own Life, published in 1977, "Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to people who need them at the times when they need them." Clearly millions of women needed Fear of Flying in the early 1970s. By early 1975 it had hit number one on the New York Times Best-Seller list. Jong became a high-voltage celebrity, and celebrity would be the target of her deft satire in her second novel, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).

Like Fear of Flying, How To Save Your Own Life is narrated by Isadora, who will also be central to Parachutes & Kisses (1984) and will "author" Any Woman’s Blues (1990), a manuscript brought to print by a fictitious feminist critic after a plane Isadora is piloting disappears mysteriously over the South Pacific. But in none of these sequels will Isadora be as much of  "amanuensis to the Zeitgeist" (as she puts it) as she turned out to be in Fear of Flying.

Jong, who in her first book of poems celebrated the multilayered nature of the onion, creates onion-like layers of authorship and authenticity and in her "Isadora" tetralogy. By the time How to Save Your Own Life comes out, Isadora Wing, the fictional heroine of Fear of Flying, is herself the author of the novel Candida Confesses, a book that (like Fear of Flying) contained many autobiographical elements and brought its author celebrity, notoriety, ill-fated movie deals, and kinky mash notes from flakes in all corners of the country. Isadora, who is herself Jong’s creation, spends much time discussing the ways in which Candida Wong (Isadora’s creation) is and is not modeled on Isadora Wing. Meanwhile, back in real life, Erica Jong moves through a distinctly parallel universe during these years spending much time discussing the ways in which Isadora Wing is and is not Erica Jong.

Critical responses to these volumes almost always veered into "did she or didn’t she" speculations about the extent to which Isadora’s experiences reflected Jong’s. As Jong told Playboy interviewer Gretchen McNeese in 1975, "Sure, there’s a lot of me in Isadora, but a lot of characters and events in the book are totally invented. I didn’t set out to write autobiography; I set out to write a satirical novel about a woman in search of her own identity, and I did not stick to facts very closely—frequently not at all." Correspondences between Jong’s life and that of her heroine were striking: both had grown up in a family of painters in a middle-class Jewish home in Manhattan; both had gone to Barnard; both had published poetry before turning to fiction; both had been married to Chinese-American psychoanalysts; and both had published an exuberantly bawdy first novel that triggered endless probing into what, exactly, was taken from life and what was made up. In the family of "portraitists and still-life painters" in which she grew up, Isadora observes in How to Save Your Own Life, "It was family wisdom that you painted what you had at home…. You could learn chiaroscuro, color, composition as well from an apple or an onion or your own familiar face as from the fountains of Rome or the storm clouds of Venice." Isadora tells us that

I had modeled Candida after myself, yet she was both more and less than the real Isadora. Superficially, the likeness was easy enough to spot: a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side, a writer of poems and stories, a compulsive daydreamer. Yet Candida was frozen in a book, while I was, I hoped, growing. I had outgrown many of the desires that motivated her, many of the fears that trapped her. Yet my public insisted on an exact equivalency between her and me—because my heroine, astoundingly enough, had turned out to be amanuensis to the Zeitgeist.

This amazing development surprised no one more than me. When I invented Candida Wong (with her wise-ass manner, her outspokenness about sex, and her determined bookishness), I was convinced that she was either unfit for print or else so precious that no one but a few other wise-ass Jewish girls from the Upper West Side could relate to her. But I was wrong. As Candida felt, so felt the nation. And no one could have been more surprised than her creator.

Millions of copies later, I began to wonder whether I had created Candida or whether she had, in fact, created me.

Clearly Isadora had done much to catapult Jong to the celebrity that she chronicled in the sequels—but that celebrity turned out to be a decidedly mixed blessing.

Jong herself was trapped, in some ways, by the success Fear of Flying had enjoyed. First, she was trapped by the impossible demand of coming up with a second act to the revolution: Fear of Flying helped usher in such fresh possibilities for honesty in women’s writing, helped open the culture to so much that had been repressed before, that by the time How to Save Your Own Life came out four years later, it couldn’t help but seem at least somewhat derivative as it continued doing more of the same. Secondly, the sheer enormity of the sales of Fear of Flying led some critics to think of her work as "popular culture" rather than "literature," as if mass appeal somehow disqualified a novel from being taken seriously as art; this classification gave critics an excuse to focus on the heroine’s sexual exploits, or the roman à clef aspects of the book, rather than focusing on Jong’s talents as a satirist of contemporary manners and mores. This is unfortunate, since those talents are considerable.

How to Save Your Own Life finds Isadora still married to a psychiatrist "who regarded life as a long disease, alleviated by little fifty-minute bloodlettings of words from the couch." There was something in her husband’s "very manner, carriage, and monotonous way of speaking" that Isadora finds "life-denying." But she doesn’t have the courage to leave him and set out on her own until he confesses to having had a long-term affair back in Heidelberg with a mutual friend, a housewife to whom he made love in Isadora’s study, amidst her unpublished manuscripts. Outraged by this betrayal, Isadora sets out for Hollywood lured by a possible motion picture deal.

En route Jong paints a gallery of unforgettable figures with walk-on parts, one of whom—Jeannie Morton-- is a thinly-veiled version of the poet Anne Sexton, whose "images (even of God) were kitchen images, plain aluminum utensils to serve the Lord, Pyrex casseroles to simmer the Holy Spirit." Morton, Isadora tells readers, 

was easy to mock. Where a male poet would have been taken seriously—even if he saw God in a hunting knife or the wound of a war buddy—she was mocked because it is harder for many people to understand that the womb (with its red blood) is as apt a vessel for the muse or for God as the penis (with its white sperm).

Another memorable character is Gretchen, a tall, blonde Marxist-feminist lawyer who "has so much life-force that she makes everyone else in the room feel drained." Gretchen is the owner of a loft reserved for romantic assignations and inventor of the "F" Questionnaire "a simple quiz designed for feminists to determine which men are safe to fuck." Then there is Holly, a painter who lives surrounded by African violets, potted avocados, lemon trees, and gardenias, and who has often explained to Isadora, "with considerable passion, that the fern, that ancient botanical specimen, has the ideal life situation. It is self-nourishing, self-fertilizing, contains sexual and asexual life-styles within its own lifetime, and it is actually immortal. Or at least some part of it is always alive." Isadora has "never met anyone who clearly wanted to be a plant, but Holly makes it seem extremely attractive." And then there is Hope, an old family friend "who gave everything away. She was a human potlatch." It is Isadora’s relationships with these intensely-caring, vividly-drawn women-friends that prompted Craig Fisher to describe the book (in the Los Angeles Times) as "a paean to friendship."

How to Save Your Own Life is also a lively satire on Hollywood. Isadora tells, for example, that "there is a certain kind of grayish, stoop-shouldered beaten screenwriter one meets in Hollywood," who once (he says) could have written a novel, but who believes it is now too late. 

He was rich, but he was not happy. He had seen his lifework rewritten by illiterate producers, his best aphorisms mangled by arrogant actors, his philosophical nuggets crushed by directors, mushed by assistant directors, and trampled to dust by the Italian-leather soles of executive producers’ shoes. He was a beaten man, an intellectual derelict, a Bowery bum of letters. They had taken away his words and given him money instead. And it was a lousy bargain. He spent an hour wishing he were me.

 Then there is the self-made "millionaire with a weakness for trendy self-improvement and a tendency to sound like a California Khalil Gibran" who spouts platitudes while joined by Isadora and others "all naked and simmering in a great redwood tub of bubbling water—like kreplach bobbing in a vat of chicken soup." Isadora writes.

We live in a society," Isadora writes, where everyone habitually lies about their feelings—so there is an immense gratitude toward anyone who even tries to tell the truth. I suppose this is why certain authors are worshipped as cult figures. We may disdain truth in our daily lives but we are that much more relieved and exhilarated when we find someone at least trying to express it in a book.

Telling the truth about her feelings is something Isadora does well . "There was all sorts of sex in my life and not very much intimacy," she writes, before Josh Ace, the new love of her life, enters the scene. (As Jong told the Playboy interviewer, "Men consider intimacy as a weakness. That’s part of the sexist brainwashing our society subjects men to.) The movie doesn’t materialize but the new man does. How to Save Your Own Life ends with Isadora enthralled by her new love, an aspiring writer several years her junior who is good at both intimacy and sex.

Seven years later, however, Isadora’s fortunes have changed. When Parachutes & Kisses begins, Josh has left, blaming Isadora for the gap between his modest reputation and her exploding one, and Isadora is a single mother struggling to work, find love and companionship, and raise a bright three-year-old with the help of a motley series of nannies (including one obsessed with hellfire and brimstone and another obsessed with a loutish carpenter). As Jong observed to Gil Pyrah of the (London) Times, the book "is about having it all in the 1980s. Isadora exemplified the 1970s woman and now, in the 1980s, we are trying to be single parents, breadwinners, and feminine at the same time."

There is still a lot of sex in the book despite the fact that, as Isadora tells us, "it isn’t fashionable to write too much about sex anymore."

In the seventies, post-Portnoy, you couldn’t pick up a novel, it seemed without getting sperm on your hands. Not only the hacksters and fucksters, but literary writers, good writers, had to chart the interiors of vaginas as if they were the caves of Lascaux (and all primordial truth were writ therein). Women were discovering the poetry of penises; men were unmasking before the Great Goddess Cunt.

But then the hacksters got hold of sex and ruined it for everyone—like condominium developers ruining Florida. They took the license to explore Lascaux as a license to kill little girls; they turned the poetry of the penis into stag films so loathsome they made you want to become a nun. Before long the puritans were howling—"See! We told you how awful sex is! You should have listened to us! We were right about censorship! Put the mask back on!"

And all the poetry of the penis, the sweet sexuality that peeked out of the fly of the Brooks Brothers pants for a brief decade was in danger of being covered up again….And Isadora’s old buddies, the feminists, are passing out leaflets on street corners protesting pornography, trying to make the world believe that people molest little girls because of pornography (rather than pornography flourishes because people want to molest little girls), and in general doing their best to blur the distinction between sex and rage.

Times have changed since 1973—and not only when it comes to writing about sex in literature. By 1984, feminism itself is increasingly subject to new attacks, and this hostility inevitably rubbed off on the most famous feminist heroine of the previous decade, Isadora Wing.

In Parachutes & Kisses Isadora does much more than jump in and out of bed (she survives single-parenthood, develops a sustaining relationship with a new love, and travels to Russia in search of her roots. One critic, Lillian Robinson, even credits her with embarking on her own version of the Odyssey). She still seeks the same combinations of work and love that eluded her in her earlier incarnation. But if Isadora’s needs remain basically the same, the feminism that helped validate and fuel them had, by 1984, to some extent gone out of fashion. Whether due to changes in the Zeitgeist or changes in Jong’s own style or both (this book, unlike the others, has a third-person, rather than first-person narrator), the book received decidedly mixed reviews. Citing the "postfeminist" political climate of the eighties, Charlotte Templin noted that "A number of reviewers fault Isadora for her failures in family life" and criticize her lack of sympathy for the mid-life crises of men.