- This is an interesting article about Erica Jong written in 1999.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3847972,00.html
What this woman wants
When Fear Of Flying was published 25 years ago, it was an immense success - millions found liberation in its message that what women should want is sex and - above all - adultery. But was that truly a radical stance? Suzie Mackenzie asks its author, Erica Jong, where this manifesto has taken her. Portrait by Melanie Dunea
It was Jean-Paul Sartre who once remarked that if Freud had come from a background in which he was starving, he would have singled out hunger rather than sexuality as the basis for human activity. It's a simple point.
And then, free floating around these, situated we know not where, some would say in the heart, some the groin - there is desire, wanting. It's a tricky one desire, because it can't be sated and it doesn't go away. All your basic needs can be met, you can be living in the world's biggest democracy, and you will still feel desire. There is even an argument that you would feel desire more intensely, when all your needs are met.
So it is not intended ironically when I say that I can see life must have been tough for Erica Jong. She was born in New York, on the Upper West Side, into a close, Jewish family in which she lacked nothing. Not stability. 'My parents had and have a great marriage.' Not money, not love, not respect, not education, not culture, all was in situ. The middle child of three daughters, her father was 'a wealthy songwriter' turned businessman. 'So tenacious he would have been a success at anything. That's where I get my tenacity.' Her mother was an artist who felt under-appreciated. 'She was always saying that had she been a man she would have been much more renowned. That's where I get my feminism, the sense of wanting to conquer.'
She doesn't add that this may also be where she gets her frustration, the sense of nothing ever being enough. She was given everything, including a view of the world. Holidays were in Europe - staying in luxury hotels - the Gritti in Venice, the Grosvenor House in London. A slightly lopsided view. Lopsided, too, in her parents' politics. 'They were bohemians, the hippies of their time. Not communists, but receptive to communist views. A lot of their friends were blacklisted during the McCarthy witch-hunts.'
She was brought up to believe she would be successful. As she explains, like so many Jews of his generation, her father was unable to finish his education, he didn't want the same to happen to the daughter he adores. 'I adore my father and he adores me.' So proud. She went to Barnard College, reading English and Italian literature, then to Columbia to do a Masters degree. She wanted to write, she wanted to be a poet. These were ascertainable wants. Her first book was a collection of poems, Fruit And Vegetables - the poems are execrable. But she never knew this. Like the child, dressing up in front of a mirror, she saw the image her parents gave her. Lovely.
Sex. Lots of it for Erica Jong. Always, as far as I can tell, with men. Lots of them, too. Sex, she notes somewhere, started in 1969. Jong didn't invent sex, but she reinvented it for a generation. The baby boomers, the American 'me' generation who reaped the benefits of post-war prosperity. It was mid-Sixties to mid-Seventies, the liberation decade, for blacks, for gays, for women - the opening up of the culture from repression. But women like Jong - white, upper-middle-class, educated - were, she says, used to freedom: 'My parents were not disciplinarians. They gave me a tremendous gift - freedom to say and do anything I liked without being disowned.' Women like her didn't have anything to be liberated from. She didn't need anything. Her rights were observed.
She wanted, of course she did - it was like some hunger inside her. She must have wanted at the very least, some kind of liberation from the oppressive normality of her parents. She must have wanted something else to do - she was now on to a PhD - and the life of an academic. 'What people don't realise about me is that I was on my way to becoming Harold Bloom. People who miss that don't get who I am.' She wanted a form of self-expression - but not too distant from her parents' expectations of her. She didn't want to be an outsider. Far too tame for that. And when she hit on it, it was like a reflex in her, an instinct. She started having sex and couldn't stop. Sex and creativity combined and she wrote her first book about the freedom that comes from sex. And, in particular, the freedom that comes from having sex with other men when you are married.
When Fear Of Flying came out it wasn't recognised at first for what it was - as Jong sees it, a book, a time-bomb, that would revolutionise the female pre-conscious, unconscious and conscious mind, that is women's needs, their desires, their rights. Her first real sex, in 1969, was with a psychoanalyst, a friend of her second husband, while on a psychoanalysis conference, in Vienna no less. So it's no surprise that, from this milieu, she took Freud's fundamental idea - that sexuality is the basis of all repression, that sexual desire is not simply sexual desire, but something that will encroach upon the whole personality. And she borrowed something else from the institution of psychoanalysis - the sense of a closed environment, of someone locked into a world. It's a discrepancy that goes to the heart of analysis - that here is this person, supposedly opening up, and they do it in the confines of a room, privately, with no recognition of the public, political realm.
Jong's writing, her fiction and her essays, reflects this. It's all about openness, yet you can't get in. Reading Fear Of Flying, you can't help wondering how someone can write a book about how exciting sex is and make it sound so boring.
When at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, Newsnight brought Jong on for a comment, there was a moment of thinking: Hello, what's she doing here? But, of course, it is adultery, and not sex, that is her subject. She's been writing about it for 25 years. Adultery, which she dressed up all that time ago as sexual liberation, without ever seeming to recognise that adultery depends for its existence on the ultimate bourgeois convention, marriage.
She always had marriage on her mind. If sex within marriage is de facto dull as she claims ('Sex by definition is something you have with someone other than a spouse...'), adulterous sex is premised on precisely that same structure. But, according to Jong, it is the transgression that defines us. 'Forbidden sex gives us ourselves because selfhood is still forbidden to women.' Like the little girl ticked off by daddy, she needs the disapprobation to feel complete. This is fine when you are five or 15. It is an absurdity when you are over 50.
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rzp