Siren Songs
'Sappho's Leap' by Erica Jong

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers

Sunday, May 4, 2003; Page BW07


SAPPHO'S LEAP
By Erica Jong
Norton. 316 pp. $24.95

Sappho of Lesbos, the world's most famous woman poet, is a person about whom nothing is known for sure except that she lived around 2,700 years ago. Her poetry has come down to us in fragments; and from it we can -- or at least do -- glean certain details, most famously that she was an enthusiastic lover of both men and women. For the most part, however, the poet's history is a tangle of myth, rumor, joke, scandal, fantasy and invention. Her story has been taken up through the ages by any number of writers, most of whom finished her off by having her leap from a cliff into the sea for the love of a beautiful youth.

A 21st-century reconsideration is clearly in order, and Erica Jong has stepped in to make it. Jong's Sappho ("a cross between Madonna and Sylvia Plath," as the author describes her in an afterword) is the object of a wager between two gods who bicker throughout the book: Zeus, an obnoxious guy, directly from Mars ("At this point we need a rape or a war. A rape and a war! Let's go!"), and Aphrodite, snappish but confident ("This woman will be a myth for three millennia if you let me finish her story").

And, indeed, Sappho discovers that her songs are irresistibly seductive, speaking as they do to the hungers and wants of others, to "their lust, their throbbing need." It is a talent that initially gets her into trouble, as does her love for the poet Alcaeus, and the two go into exile. After a heroic bout of sex, Sappho is dragged back home and forced to marry the paunchy sot Cercylas ("Damn you, Sappho . . . I will have your maidenhead!"). She outwits him, managing to present the child she bears as his. But motherhood, she tells us with characteristic eloquence, is attended by "tempestuous emotions," and her mind becomes "a seething cauldron" as she worries that her baby will be snatched away by the gods, who "are nothing if not capricious."

She visits a priestess of Isis for advice on the future, is smitten, and in time the two repair to a sarcophagus roomy enough for "ecstasies of mutual release." The idyll ends when Sappho's mother absconds with the baby. Sappho, now short of funds, acquires a manager and begins to shape a career as "The Legendary Sappho of Lesbos." Her adventures, informed by a search for Alcaeus and her child, include a lyrical dream encounter with Helen of Troy ("her white thighs the color of cream rising") and, at one point, a close encounter with an island of beautiful women who sing siren songs from their nether parts.

She goes to Delphi where "wisdom ruled if it ruled nowhere else," sets up a consultancy in oracular interpretation, hooks up with Aesop and becomes stranded in the land of the Amazons. Here, she composes the "Amazoniad" and decides, whatever the cost in time and energy, to become the "female Odysseus" -- though the "prospect was so exhausting that I put my head down on the floor of the cave and surrendered to the arms of Morpheus." No kidding.

Her odyssey takes her all over the Mediterranean, to Hades, to the remains of the Minotaur's maze, to an island where she founds a utopian community ("People are nothing if not adaptable") and into the fleshpots of Egypt. There, under pain of death, ("The threat of execution greatly concentrates the mind"), she surrenders to Pharaoh Necho ("He ravished me like a conqueror and fell in love with me like a schoolboy"). Her travels continue and much, much later, she sets up a school for girls to teach them song and, naturally, sex. Of course, there is trouble, but I will reveal no more, except to note that there "is nothing like a pretty boy who adores you to mend your heart when you have been undone by the treachery of women."

Without wanting to agree with Zeus, one has to say that this story lacks something -- life, perhaps, and certainly a sense of history. Sex and pagan ritual -- in which menstrual blood, a kind of trademark with Jong, figures prominently -- are present in as much, or more, detail as one could wish; but whenever such matters as transportation are involved, they are glossed over with the fabulist's brush: "Using their elders' knowledge of the sea, they improvised a great galley with many sails and many oars and prepared to put out to sea." The story, steeped in vague wisdom, is a concoction of posited emotions, insisted-upon sensuality and trumped-up enchantment -- all conveyed in language that, as Sappho might put it, is nothing if not laughable. •

Katherine A. Powers, who reviews audio books for Book World, is a columnist for the Boston Globe.