Erica Jong and “Fear of Flying”
ERICA JONG, the poet and novelist, published “Fear of Flying” in 1973, a book which broadened notions of what serious female novelists could write about, and which still sells steadily 49 years later. Columbia University has arranged to inherit Jong’s literary papers. Yet “Fear of Flying” is infamous in some quarters and many people still refuse to see Jong as a serious writer.
She was born in 1942 and raised in a Jewish family in New York, the middle of three daughters. Her mother, Ema Mirsky Mann, was a Russian-Jewish bohemian, the best draftsman and painter in her class at the National Academy of Design. But as a woman, she had no chance of winning any of the design school prizes, and she bristled at never having a studio of her own in the family’s rambling apartment.
Ema’s feminist anger stoked Erica’s ambition and helped fix her subject matter. Ema was narcissistic and difficult; Erica’s Aunt Kitty was warm and nurturing. Jong’s Polish-Jewish father, Seymour Mann, was a minor musician on the vaudeville circuit who gave up that life, at his wife’s request, for a more dependable income as a traveling salesman of knick-knacks.
Seymour and Ema were very clearly in love, and talked openly of how much fun sex was. Speaking of her parents, Erica Jong once said: “You know, hippies were not invented in 1969.”
Erica was a bookworm child, always reading. Her father wanted her to be a doctor, and she entered Barnard pre-med — but made a mess of fetal-pig dissection. A poetry professor, Robert Pack, advised her: “Don’t worry, Erica. You’re a poet.” She edited the literary magazine, graduated in 1963 and got a Master’s in English from Columbia.
She wrote some well-received poetry but, as she’s said, “People hate ‘poetry.’ The very word scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.” Another of her themes was the way that women in the United States are both idealized and subjugated by men, often by the same man at the same time. She hated the humdrum in life and believed that poetry is what people speak in special moments, moments of terror or ecstasy. For that reason, she was very proud of being a poet.
But she didn’t become famous until she published “Fear of Flying,” a picaresque novel far lustier than most “serious” novels written by women — but also a novel full of frustration at female ambivalence.
Her first attempt at a novel had fallen short. She gave it to a man who’d edited the work of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. He said, wisely, ‘It’s not bad, it’s publishable — but it’s not in your own voice. Write a novel in the voice of your poems.’ She thought about that and decided he was right; she would write a novel that was like her poems: sad, passionate and female.
She’d always been nagged by the idea that “women’s writing” was treated as less than “writing” — which was assumed to be male. She hated the idea that ‘Women know less about the world, and their writing is bound by the limits of home and children…’ She also hated that male writers, male comedians, male satirists could use profanity in their work, and casual sex, but women could not. Why did women have to choose between being intellectual and sexual? Why couldn’t they be both?
Out of all this talent, ambition, and frustration, she found herself writing a novel, with a female narrator, about casual sex and traveling, about the existential journey. Her narrator, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, bore a certain resemblance to Erica Jong. Both were New York-Jewish female poets who’d married their brilliant first loves, divorced them, then married Chinese-American psychiatrists, and fallen out of love with them.
Overcoming a fear of flying, Isadora Wing jets off to a psychoanalytic conference in Vienna alongside her husband Bennett, a brooding Freudian analyst who sorts people into categories. In Vienna, Isadora has an affair with one of the other psychiatrists, a carefree Englishman who flaunts his refusal to be categorized.
Jong hoped she was claiming new territory as she wrote the novel. Sometimes she wrote with crazed precision and at other times she laughed hysterically and had a ball. Her heart was pounding, she wanted to turn back, but she felt ‘You must go ahead.’ She tried to calm herself by saying that no publisher was going to risk publishing this book.
Sometimes that gloomy conviction made it easier to write honestly, about certain things, the most notorious of which was her interest in “the zipless fuck” a fantasy of love-making with a handsome stranger purely for pleasure: no getting to know him, no ulterior motives or power games. Later she would say “Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.”
“Fear of Flying” is a novel about many things besides sex. It’s about the strange sort of triumphalism that comes with German guilt; how awkward are the overtures between honest poetry and feminist scholarship; how psychoanalysis often seems unable to decide whether to fool people, solve them, or entertain them; what wasted hours taste like; how comforting ephemeral pleasures can be; and how we go waltzing along, delivering bad news to lovers who only want inspiration. Her male targets are large and have trouble maneuvering — trucks without wheels. We’ve all known men like this, and wince in recognition.
She went out and promoted the book. When she began to be interviewed on talk shows, her father, the former vaudeville musician, advised her, “Never follow a dog act.”
She saw the book as something feminist, and there were women who read it with amazement and decided to try to live — or write — something similar. Erica Jong had the impression that most men who knew about “Fear of Flying” felt threatened by it. There were also a lot of people, young and old, male and female, who just got the book to skim the sexy parts.
In his New Yorker review, John Updike said, “The Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. “Fear of Flying” not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but also belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” — that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament.”
Jong loved the wry, quirky tributes she got from readers of “Fear of Flying.” One man smiled and told her: “Whenever I saw that book on a woman’s night table, I knew I was going to get lucky.” But the bad reviews for “Fear of Flying” were very hard to take. The mean, vicious reviews she read in cold light and with great intensity. Some of them she nearly memorized.
When Paul Theroux called Isadora Wing a “mammoth pudenda,” Jong replied, “Since Mr. Theroux has no personal acquaintance with the organ in question, I cannot help but wonder whether some anxieties about his own anatomy were at the root (at it were) of the review.”
Because of the subjects she tackled, people seemed to feel they had the right to ask her all kinds of prurient questions. Even her children weren’t immune. One reporter asked Jong’s daughter, “How many lovers has your mother had?” To which her daughter replied, “How many lovers has YOUR mother had?”
“Fear of Flying” has been published in Chinese and in Serbo-Croatian. She has made a lot of money from it, and wealth for a writer is unexpected and, in many ways, welcome. In 1996, Jong helped to endow the Barnard writing program.
But she is acerbic about the kind of fame which “Fear of Flying” brought her: “Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.” In her case, she felt she was a poet who decided to write a novel, but millions of people saw her as a novelist — and a dirty sex-novelist at that. And some of her friends seemed, without realizing it, to want her to be miserable to counter-balance the fame and money which had come to her.
Erica Jong aged and decided that sex was best with people you know well, and trust. Both zipless fucks and sex as an existential journey seemed like relics from a distant past. She looks at longing from a respectful distance now but in essays, has made connections with other stifled artists, and has argued passionately that love is worth fighting for.
She’s made her peace with fame, noting that the famous complain about fame “but never want to give it back — myself included.” She’s also made her peace with feeling paralyzed between life choices, and says, “Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.”