Subject
VN & Erica Jong
Date
Body
EDITOR's NOTE. "Sandy P. Klein" <taxi@flinet.com> reports the Washington
Post article excerpted below. The full text may be seen at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1997-02/09/071L-020997-idx.html
= = = =
The Author as Lover
By Marie Arana-Ward
Sunday, February 9 1997; Page X11
The Washington Post
THERE ARE BOOKS that mark genius and books that shift
gears. There are writers who 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
onto the sex-crazed, drug-hazed culture of the early '70s, she led
the way to a new kind of American heroine -- the carnal
obsessive. The queen of the "zipless" heat.
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 and 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 Nabokov. 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 in 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 Flying 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 dynamic 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."
= = = = = =
Post article excerpted below. The full text may be seen at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1997-02/09/071L-020997-idx.html
= = = =
The Author as Lover
By Marie Arana-Ward
Sunday, February 9 1997; Page X11
The Washington Post
THERE ARE BOOKS that mark genius and books that shift
gears. There are writers who 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
onto the sex-crazed, drug-hazed culture of the early '70s, she led
the way to a new kind of American heroine -- the carnal
obsessive. The queen of the "zipless" heat.
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 and 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 Nabokov. 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 in 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 Flying 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 dynamic 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."
= = = = = =