Erica Jong: looking for joy

Press, 3 August 1981, Page 10

Erica Jong: looking for joy

By

Anthea Disney

of ‘The Observer’

The problem with being continuously portrayed as a monster of depravity is that it is hard to live up to one’s reputation. ~ Erica Jong, the novelist whose first book, "Fear of Flying,” and second. “How To Save Your Own Life,” earned her the dislike of the male literary establishment, the adoration of many women and a great deal of money, is usually depicted as a brash, sexually voracious feminist So to meet her means experiencing the clash of preconceptions against the visible reality. At her designer home in secluded Connecticut, one’s first impressions of Ms Jong are that she’s a pleasant hostess, a delighted mother of two-year-old Molly, a fond and apparently devoted wife to author Jonathan Fast, and a rather serious, bookish person behind her blue-tinted spectacles.

Her blouse is buttoned almost to the neck and her small talk is of her daughter’s antics.

As a monster of depravity,. Erica Jong is a bit of a disappointment. She did not, however, wish that image upon herself. “It .was absolutely necessary for me to kick over the traces,” she says. “My liter-

ary reputation — or rather the lack of it — is the work of male reviewers who fear female sexuality and don’t like successful women.

“But I insist on the right to take risks and write honestly about feelings that are universal.”

For her success (“Fear of Flying” sold 6¥a million copies in paperback in the United States alone) she can thank the many earnest young women who hold out their hands to her in the street.

She no longer enjoys the celebrity she used to desire, but her husband has taught her that her own sense of privacy need not be made or broken by what others think or expect of her. After having to acclimatise herself to notoriety and the contempt of much of the literary establishment, this . rather well-educated woman has suddenly become enveloped in the praise she used to want so much and feel was unjustly withheld from her. “I've even had a rave review in - the “New York Times,” she says. “My mouth is still hanging open. I’d been denied literary respectability and I’d decided it was something that would never happen to me. So I had grown a stiff upper

lip to show myself I didn't care.”

She did, of course, and is plainly thrilled at the reversal that her latest work, “Fanny,” has created. This is a bawdy novel about what the author calls “a really heroic woman.” Fanny is a beautiful redhead, a foundling who is brought up in an aristocratic family in eighteenth-century Wiltshire.

Suffice it to say that everything happens to Fanny, from being raped by her stepfather to her initiation as a witch and a period as a female pirate on the high seas. It is, needless to say, a little unlikely. Yet the most important (actor about Fanny is her giving birth to a girl child (yes, of the aforesaid stepfather who turns out to be. of course, her real father) and of how motherhood changes this sometime highwaywoman and frequent prostitute.

The story is an elaborate fairy tale written in a Jongian version of the language of the day, which means basically that she has tried to capture the flavour of the eighteenth century without losing her readers through too much fidelity to detail. Curiously, Erica Jong began writing “Fanny" with the intent that she would use a literary device, a memoir from a mother to her daughter about the pitfalls of life, as a framework.

By the time she was halfway through, she found she as pregnant. When the book was threequarters finished. Erica Jong gave birth to a bright, redheaded daughter even though neither she nor her husband has red hair.

“I was writing about Fanny, who was redhaired, and I do believe it is no coincidence, even though that sounds weird,” she says. The book ends with Fanny finding peace in the countryside with a family inheritance, a tolerant man she loves, and her daughter whom she idolises..

Erica Jong has moved out to rural New England, is enamoured with her daughter and does, indeed, seem to have an unusually supportive husband.

“The book predicted what would happen in my own life,” the author says, looking slightly embarrassed that she is admitting a notion she herself says ‘sounds occult,”

“I started out to write about this heroic, elegant woman and I ended up writing a novel, the core of which is about how motherhood transforms this woman. "I could never have written the scene in which Fanny gives birth unless I myself had experienced it, and I would never have known and felt as a reality this transformation that motherhood brings to a woman if I had not had a daughter.” She says, looking back, everything she has written has been predictive.

"How to Save Your Own Life" turned out to be a preparation for me leaving my last husband, Allan Jong, and when I was still married to him I wrote a poem, “Mute Marriages,” which was about a woman frozen in a block of ice, who could only be thawed by love and passion.

“My God. this is precisely how I felt later, yet long before my unconscious knew it and I could write about it.” These events seem to have left her with a sense of foreboding about completing another book, for she superstitiously believes the ending she chooses could forecast her own future.

She also worries that, now she is personally happy, she won’t be able to write books that strike that personal, vital chord in others. “I can't write about a happy marriage because novels need conflict and a happy marriage would be a boring thing to write about. Yet I don’t want to w’rite again about divorce or a relationship breaking up, I might feel jinxed.” There are, she says, several novels growing in her head and she is planning to co-produce a film of “Fanny.”

There’s no doubt that Erica Jong will keep working because she despises what she calls "loafers” and has always felt happiest when waking up in the morning to a desk strewn with pages of unfinished manuscript. Anyone who has read her first two novels and assumed (as most people did) that Isadora Wing, the unhappy, fearful, Jewish, sexy novel-ist-poet who is married for the second time to the cold, reptilian Oriental shrink named Bennett Wing, is really Erica herself (who was an unhappy, fearful, etc, novelist-poet married for the second time to an Oriental psychiatrist) would be surprised by this content woman.

Her success is evident both in her confidence and her surroundings, yet the only sign of conspicuous consumption is his and hers Mercedes parked in the drive. Success has brought Erica Jong peace and a custombuilt study, and it has brought her a gently ironic man, Jon Fast, who makes model planes and is six years her junior. “It’s funny, I’ve wound up with someone who could be

my brother. We.came from the same kind of background, went to the same schools, his ancestry is similar to mine. I used to think we were brother and sister or doubles, but that’s a romantic illusion, of course.” In fact the only marital Cloud on the Jong-Fast horizon is that they both find it hard to have a good row and they are inclined to give in and feel resentful, so they visit a Manhattan therapist to deal with this problem. Erica says she has a fantasy of finding an elegant orgy palace because “neither Jon or I believes in absolute monogamy and we'd love a good orgy”; but when they jointly visited Plato’s Retreat, a Manhattan sex spa, the result was a disaster.

“We tried valiantly to make it with all those writhing bodies but we couldn’t even make it with each other.

“I don’t hop into bed easily and I've always wished I did, which is why I write about women who can?’

Isadora Wing simply would not understand. She also would find the happiness of her 38-year-old alter-ego and inventor rather hard to accept. “Many women of my generation had to go through a period of unlearning masochism in their relationships and that for me was the turning point. Once I renounced masochism I found I could start looking for joy.”