Jong, Gifted & Back

Erica Jong will always be associated with the concept of the zipless fuck. Indeed, she has long since stated that she believes the zipless thing will be on my tombstone, a cryptic and needlessly coy reference to the fact that in her first book, Fear of Flying, she coined the phrase as a synonym for glorious, guilt-free fucking.
The book was first published more than 20 years ago and has since sold a phenomenal 121/2 million copies, and been translated into twenty seven languages. As such the influence of this so-called sexual aviator has been incalculable and has continued to filter down through subsequent books such as How To Save Your Own Life, Fanny, Parachutes, Serenissimi, Fear of Fifty and five volumes of poetry.
However, her latest book, a novel entitled Of Blessed Memory, is undoubtedly Erica Jong s most ambitious work to date. It s a beautifully written and quite fascinating chronicle of the lives of four Jewish mothers and daughters which spans the entire length of the twentieth century and beyond. Set in the year 2005 and told through the eyes of the feisty narrator, Sara, it tells the tales of great grandmother Sarah Solomon, who fled to America in 1906 in order to escape from the Russian pogrom; grandmother Salome who was lusting her way through Paris during the 1930s; and her mother, Sally, who became a Rolling Stone-acclaimed folk singer of the 1960s.
As with all her books, Of Blessed Memory is also a subterranean autobiography of Erica Jong, a woman who describes herself as a left-leaning Jewish feminist and devout pagan who was born in New York City, the second of three daughters of a vaudeville-musician father turned antique doll dealer, and a mother who was an amateur painter. Erica originally planned to become a doctor, but switched to English Literature at Barnard College, NY, obtaining her master s degree in 1965. She has been married four times, to market researcher Michael Werthman, child psychologist Allan Jong, writer Jonathan Fast (which led to the birth of her only child, Molly) and current beau, Ken Burrows, a divorce lawyer.
Jong is 55 years old, and divides her time between an apartment in Manhattan and a country home in Connecticut. She was in Dublin recently to promote Of Blessed Memory. We met in the Shelbourne, not for afternoon tea, but for a mineral water and a coke.
Joe Jackson: Your writings have one thing in common with rock n roll. Back in 1958, right-wing and clearly uptight author Vance Packard cautioned that such music stirred the animal instinct in modern teenagers and was attempting a total breakdown of all reticence about sex. Growing up in the 1950s, did music serve that purpose for you?
Erica Jong: No. Because I was too uptight myself! And literary. But now I do realise that rock n roll, which brought African-American rhythms and melodies into popular culture was, back then, looked upon as the beginning of the fall of Western Civilisation! Because it was very un-stoppered and sexual, and had elements of African music that made people want to dance to it and enjoy themselves sexually, or otherwise. That also was the problem in America. Certain people were afraid that other people would start having fun, which is a reaction I never did understand! Why would people be concerned if other people had guilt-free sex, for example? The point is that this never quite happens, because we all have so much guilt within us that no matter how much we liberate ourselves the guilt comes back.
But not with the same velocity, allowing for the process of liberation that has evolved throughout this century, surely?
Other forms do. We produce AIDS epidemics. We produce other things to stop ourselves from having pleasure. The urge to displeasure is very strong.
So do you agree with author Judith Warner who, taking a cue from Fear of Flying, suggested that modern women are definitely not flying. That, instead, they suffer from negative therapeutic reaction and are fearful of sex in the age of AIDS, fearful of love and commitment, fearful of their bodies, of food . . . ?
Yes. But, even in terms of sex, I never advocated simply the concept of limitless, guilt-free fucking, though some people obviously have read Fear of Flying in that way. What I wanted to do was write about the inner workings of a woman s mind and all the fantasies she had. I remember, when I was writing Fear of Flying I was thinking I want to lay bare what goes on in a woman s head. As in, the fantasies she has when she s sitting on a train, for example, and looks at a man she fancies and has this whole relationship in her head. I felt that a woman s life had not been written about in that way. Men were starting to do it because literature was post the Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer trial, post Lolita by Nabokov. So, in the 70s you had books like John Updike s Couples and Philip Roth s Portnoy s Complaint . But there wasn t a parallel book that laid bare the mind of a woman.
Nevertheless, to take that another step and then say that because you have sexual fantasies you should leap on every man you fantasise about, is a really crude simplification of the whole thing. People are not really capable of that. Nor is it desirable, as a whole generation found out in the Sixties. Just having sex with people whose names you don t know wears thin pretty fast. People wake up very depressed, in hotel rooms, thinking who was that stranger? It s great as a fantasy, but in reality it s not so fantastic. For all the ecstatic moments one has, there are many more when one says what did I do last night? So that reading of my book is an over-simplification. But, yes, we should all be in touch with our fantasies, aware of what we re feeling. And, yes, women have sexual desires as well as men. Yet what you do with those fantasies which ones you act on and which ones you don t is a matter of personal selection and choice.
Whatever about their choices of late, more and more women seem to be writing about those sexual experiences in a more explicit manner than ever before. Even so, one commentator has suggested that much of this writing as in, say, Kathryn s Harrison s book about her sexual relationship with her father or Naomi Wolf s Promiscuities is caving in to victim feminism. Do you agree with the view that guilt is partly propelling these women towards such confessions?
I m so sorry that, these days, at the heart of every woman s story there seems to be this victimised incest. Ought I to be embarrassed by the fact that neither my father nor my grand-father molested me? Or the fact that I had men in my life, when I was growing up, who were kind to me and loved me and didn t stick their fingers up my vagina? I almost feel ashamed to confess that I was not molested, it seems so unfashionable right now. It really has become so fashionable to claim you were raped as a child! Not that some kids weren t raped and not that it s not a problem. It is. But now it s become sort of a frenzy, as in this is the source of all my problems. I was raped in childhood.
Also, I think it s dangerous in the sense that if we start saying that childhood rape is the origin of all women s problems then we stop working on legal equality and reproductive equality. We should be working on those because we are just at the very beginning of having those equalities. We should be concentrating on those things instead of getting up on stage and saying, daddy raped me. That said, I haven t read Kathryn Harrison s The Kiss yet. But I love Naomi Wolfe s Promiscuities. In that book she tries to do a history of sex, from a woman s point of view. It s about time! And it s a good book.
In a recent Hot Press interview Naomi did, however, admit that she probably allowed her female friends to be more explicit about their sexual history in Promiscuities than she allowed herself to be, fearing that to write too candidly in what she describes as the first person sexual would lead to the accusation that she is a slut.
That s a very honest thing for her to admit. I appreciate that kind of honesty. And one is always accused of something like that if one dares to stick one s head up.
You certainly were. At the time it was published, Fear of Flying was described as licentious tripe and you yourself were called a pervert for writing such a book. How dominant a response was that?
It continues to be! In fact, there is a feminist scholar in Indianapolis who has written a whole book on the attacks on me, chronicling them over a twenty-five-year period. She s written a whole feminist treatise on how my career was marked by that kind of response. And it can be very wounding. You work on a book for three years and care about it desperately, play with words, change things, then put your heart out on a platter and people say you are prostitute when you publish it. They misinterpret things and that can be painful.
You have revealed that such responses feed into your own greatest fear which is that of going against convention and having love and approval taken away.
That is the fear, but I will not be silenced by all this. I understand now that uppity women have been silenced throughout history. Silenced, stoned, burned as witches, you name it. Yet I will not be silenced. I come from a long line of uppity women! (Laughs.)
In Fear of Fifty you also write about the amount of sexual energy that is invested in creative work.
I believe that it is absolutely the same energy. It s just different forms of the same creative fluid, or whatever you want to call it. You can expend it on running a mile, writing a poem, having sex. It s all the same creative force. I don t see it as separate. And there certainly is a strong element of the sexual in creating something, be that poetry, music, a novel. You read the work and skip around the room, whatever.
Rather than just skip around a room, or whatever, I think it was Anthony Burgess who claimed that he masturbates after he writes a good passage.
Many, many, many writers have said that, meaning that writing is an erotic charge.
Which sometimes needs to be discharged?
Yes.
So can Erica Jong be content discharging this core sexual energy through her art and a monogamous relationship? Have you streamlined all your passions in that sense, from the time of your wild days, to the situation you now find yourself in?
(Laughs.) Obviously, if you look at my life, you will see that I believe in serial monogamy. I have, after all, been married four times. And even though I may say that monogamy is theoretically impossible, in practice, I have been monogamous because it just works better. It doesn t upset the trust between two people. Also, I treasure being truly intimate with one person. In other words, I want to be really intimate with the person I m with, so I don t want to be lying, which breaks the intimacy. And that is a specific choice. It is me saying that although I believe, theoretically, that monogamy isn t possible, in practice it works better for me. Because most people can t handle jealousy too well. That was the lesson of the 60s. At first it was oh, we re going to abolish jealousy and then we discovered it wasn t that easy at all to abolish jealousy. However cool you are you still feel angry and jealous.
And being in a monogamous relationship right now, you don t feel that your wings have been clipped in any way?
No. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. These are choices I make. They are not choices that are thrust upon me. I wouldn t be monogamous because someone else insisted I be. In fact, my husband knows that about me. And he would never insist. It would always be freely chosen. I mean, what would he do if I said to him if you ever sleep with somebody else, I ll cut your balls off? That would be the thing that would make him want to rebel and go out and fuck somebody else.
There is one section in your new book which seems like a perfect metaphor for the move from a time of random fucking to finding satisfaction in stillness. It s that point at which Max who had studied Tantra and many other meditative techniques would remain inside Sally without moving and look at her with the softest expression as she reached climax again and again but not lose his erection. And when she asks why don t you come? he says: When you come, the feminine part of me comes and the manna is released into my soul. To Tantric lovers this is all probably very feasible but do you see that state of union as the most divine?
Yes. And I m sure that the Tantric people are right to say that when you stop thinking of sex in terms of coming, or not coming, you reach another level of sex. I m sure of that. I ve had sex where I didn t have an orgasm but I felt very pleasured by the man s orgasm. It s terrible to have to be counting up the number of times he came, the number of times I came. That s awful.
But isn t this what pop culture too often reduces sex to? As in rock music, movies, television and maybe most especially, magazines like Loaded and Cosmopolitan?
Yes. And I hate that. It s terribly reductive. On the highest level, sex is not about that. Sex is about wholly entering into another person and feeling that person s being, however that is. It s not just a question of friction and the number of orgasms you get. I really do hate that mechanistic view of sex. And it is very dominant, endlessly perpetuated through magazines, films, popular music, even computers. I just launched a website in connection with this book, and the only question people ask is, how many hits did you get on your website? That, to me, is like how many times did you come? Our whole culture seems to have reduced us to just that mechanistic level, which is something I ll always react against.
As in also writing about the far-from-mechanistic Kingdom of the Three Slipperies in your new book, which is a place lovers go when a woman, as you say, harvests the man s copious come from my vagina and smears it on my cheeks, my lips, my tongue. Do you hope that this highly sensual and dizzingly erotic little concept will become as popular as the notion of the zipless fuck ?
(Laughs.) As the book has only just been published it s too early to say if it will or not! But do you know that whole idea of the Kingdom of the Three Slipperies came out of a dream I had? I write down my dreams when I wake up. I do talk in my sleep and I woke up one morning and did say to Ken, Okay, darling, we re in the Kingdom of the Three Slipperies, but we can stay there. He was wide awake and he said, later, do you know what you said earlier? What is the Kingdom of the Three Slipperies? I said, I haven t the faintest idea! But isn t it juicy? Isn t it great? Just that phrase? Then I made that whole fantasy around it, which I love!
It s mouth-watering, in every sense, for both the woman and the man involved!
Isn t it just! (Laughs.) And a friend of mine who read the book also said, Oh, Erica, only you would have a sexual fantasy where the main object is a pair of shoes! But I am a shoe freak! I love shoes in different colours. And I want some shoe designer to design shoes where the high-heels are cocks standing on end!
We ll run a competition in Hot Press, to find the right designer who can rise to the challenge. There is one guy called Ian Galvin and I m pretty sure he d be into that kind of thing.
Great! And I promise to model them for your magazine! But, seriously, why is it that nobody has picked up on this idea a cock-heeled shoe?
Moving quickly on. In your new book you have the character of Sarah, at one point, giving head to Levitsky who clearly can t rise to the occasion. Nevertheless, she still describes herself as a red hot Yiddish mama. But is this Erica Jong imposing her own late twentieth century perspective on Jewish women who lived earlier in the century, in terms of their sense of sexual freedom?
Not at all. My grandfather had a lover in the early part of the century and she was just like that! She s the mother of one of my closest friends, Grace, who is much older than I am and who has been a sort of mentor to me. And her mother, my grandfather s mistress, did live in a menage-`-trois with three men! Indeed, there was a whole period in anarchist New York when these women went to Ibsen plays as if their lives depended on it and believed that Ibsen was the great genius pointing the way to the new equity between the sexes. But we forget that there were feminists before us. At the turn of the century, right before suffrage came to America, in 1920, there was a tremendous amount of feminism.
Some of those old Yiddish grandma s had stories to tell that would curl your hair! I ve met some of them. It s just that they became very clever as they got older and didn t talk about this all the time! We see them as these old grannies, whereas, in fact, they too, had wild youths. So that kind of assertion of female power, and choice, is absolutely true to its time. These were great old broads!
So is the narrator in Of Blessed memory, Sara, acting as a surrogate for Erica Jong when she says she wants to rescue from oblivion Jewish women of this century? That certainly seems to be a central theme of the book.
It is. With this book I really wanted to change the archetype of the Jewish woman in America. Up until now we ve really been pilloried as Mrs Portnoy, the devouring mother that makes the little boy so guilty and impotent that he is unable to thrive. I wanted to rescue these women from that kind of stereotype, show how amazing they were. And are. They were very full bodied and able. And many made a living of their own, had various love affairs, did everything. They were whole people!
Ultimately, how then do you view Of Blessed Memory? As a metaphorical stone thrown though those stained-glass windows in the Council of Jewish History building in New York, which contains only images of male Jewish icons such as Adam, Noah, Spinoza and Freud? Does such a building really exist?
Not by that name. It s more an amalgamation of many such Jewish institutions I ve known. And they are very male dominated, very sexist. The Jews have been pretty good at sexism, since Biblical times, y know! So, yes, my book is basically an attempt to redress the balance. And I did send it to my friend Margaret Atwood and she said how clever of you, to write the Old Testament from the female point of view. You ve taken the whole Abraham and Isaac story but done it through women. And I think, in a way, she is really onto something in that analysis. Of Blessed Memory is a female version of Genesis.
However, not all of its leading Jewish female characters survive. As in the case of Sally, the folk singer who, it s claimed, is based on Judy Collins.
One of my very good friends at home is Judy Collins and yes, people have accused me of writing about Judy s life. But Judy is not a Russian-Jewish girl that grew up at Ethical-Culture school, for God s sake! Other people say it has to be Carly Simon, who I know not nearly as well as Judy. Actually, the truth is that I know a lot of people in the music business and, at one point, I was going to write a novel about it and began interviewing rock singers for that project.
So Sally is not either Judy or Carly or Joni Mitchell, she s a combination of all, but mostly me. As in the self-destructive part of myself that is not a survivor, that often wanted to go down with the ship. Because there is a dark side of me. And Sally is the one heroine who does go down with the ship. She doesn t want to make music anymore, so she gives up. And I did realise you can t write a book in which all the heroines are indomitable. There had to be one who was not, who got pulled down by her dark side. By her drinking. And who wraps her car around a tree because she can t go on anymore. I ve certainly known a lot of people like that. And there is part of me that has longed for that kind of oblivion, at times.
Near the end of your book, the narrator is warned that there are many Jewish people who would want to destroy any part of the record that says anything negative about the chosen people. One presumes that Jewish fundamentalists would, for example, frown on the assertion of female power in this novel, sexual or otherwise.
Yes. A lot of people are angry about this book. Angry that there is sexuality and God and Judaism all mixed up together. It s not pure they say. And that hurts like hell. I feel so vulnerable publishing a book like this. I want to be buoyant, but it hurts. Yet I recognise that response as a technique to silence talented women. And, as I said earlier, I will not let anyone silence me. But we certainly do have our fundamentalists. They re destroying the peace-process in Israel. The Jewish fundamentalists are a tiny fraction of the population in Israel yet they are closing off streets for the Sabbath, settling territories that don t really belong to them, doing everything they can to wreck whatever chance we have of peace. So, yes, we have fundamentalists, just like the Moslems and Catholics do. And I think the greatest danger in the world today is fundamentalism of every persuasion.
Of Blessed Memory addresses a key question, which is: Can we let Hitler define Jewish history for us, or should we define it ourselves? By this do you mean that Jews must move beyond the kind of victim-mentality that enslaves, for example, the Irish in relation to the Famine.
That is what I mean. One of the main things I m saying in this book is that we ve really allowed the Holocaust to put a huge shadow on Jewish history. I would never deny the Holocaust, but it is time to go beyond the Holocaust, to talk about the joyous things Jews have produced, not just talk of Jews as being the victim of the Western World. We were victims of prejudice, in the way that Armenians were at the beginning of this century and other groups have been at different points in time. And we must not forget that. But we also have a life-affirming side of our culture and we must cherish this. And, yes, the same thing probably does apply, equally to the Irish, in terms of the Famine. There is a parallel. You can t deny that England oppressed Ireland economically. There was a vast economic depression that went on, which Swift wrote about brilliantly 250 years ago, in relation to the Modest Proposal. So you had the feeling of one country battening another country. Nevertheless, I wouldn t compare the Famine to the Holocaust because there was not, for example, the equivalent of a Final Solution , where the Germans deliberately decided to eliminate a whole race of people.
Either way, it is time to move beyond that form of victim-mentality. That definitely is what I hope this book will help Jewish people do. I also, as I said earlier, hope that Of Blessed Memory wipes away forever the archetype of Jewish women, in particular. If it does even that then this will be my greatest achievement with the book. n
Of Blessed Memory is published by Bloomsbury at #14.99 (hardback).