Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Fear of Flying wears its gossamer disguise as fiction with a breathtaking impudence; the difference between the Green Hornet and the Blue Wasp series for radio appears about the thickness of it. Adrian and Isadora playfully discuss how he will be portrayed in the book she will presumably write about their affair, and the sister whose husband later attempts sodomy on Isadora screams at her, “Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all.” The disinterested reader, of course, need not tremble, but the flashback sections about romances past do feel more spilled than told, and there is something a shade archetypical, or unanalyzed, about the heroine: for all the times she looks at herself nude, she remains visually misty, and the author’s nimble recourse to cultural and psychoanalytical tags at times verges on nervous patter. As a creator of scenes and characters, Ms. Jong is at her best in the present—that is, at the Vienna Congress of 1971, with Isadora running back and forth between her husband and her new lover, getting their inexhaustible and incompatible analyses of what is happening. Here, comedy becomes satire and distress becomes drama. The prose flies. Throughout, the poet’s verbal keenness rarely snags the flow of breathy vernacular; a few false shifts of tone, an occasional automatism of phrase (“intensely interested,” “poring over books,” “clutching my baby,” within six lines), a few clammy touches of jargon insignificantly mar a joyously extended performance. The novel is so full, indeed, that one wonders whether the author has enough leftover life for another novel. Fearless and fresh, tender and exact, Ms. Jong has arrived nonstop at the point of being a literary personality; may she now travel on toward Canterbury. —John Updike FEAR OF FLYING Erica Jong READERS GUIDEA CONVERSATION WITH ERICA JONGQ. Does it bother you when people assume the novel is simply autobiography? A. In the thirty years since Fear of Flying was published, the line between autobiography (or memoir) and fiction has blurred. Fear of Flying was at the forefront of this trend. But it was never a literal autobiography though it had autobiographical elements. It’s not unusual for a first novel to have such elements. Early on, some critics (like John Updike) saw similarities between my novel and Catcher in the Rye. That’s another book that uses an autobiographical New York City setting but also takes the protagonist on a journey that is mythical. Q. Is this a book only a young writer could write? Is there anything in the book that embarrasses you now?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  One of the kids sat at my feet and looked up at me worshipfully. I was thrilled. So poetry was, after all, the universal voice! There was something in Shakespeare which could appeal to even the most naive, untutored ear. All my beliefs seemed vindicated. I read with new inspiration: Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean. So o’er that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of noble race. This is an art Which does mend nature—change it rather; but The art itself is nature. (Shakespeare’s plea for open enrollment and/or miscegenation?) The kids began to get restless a few pages later and by then it was getting too cold to sit in one place anyway, so we packed up and moved on shortly after they did. “Wasn’t that great, darling?” I asked as we made our way out of the park. Brian laughed. “Vox populi is, in the main, a grunt,” he said. It was one of his favorite maxims; I don’t know where he got it. Later I discovered that my wallet was missing from the handbag which had lain open on the bench as we read. I wasn’t sure whether the kids lifted it or whether I’d lost it earlier and not noticed. For one mad moment I thought that maybe Brian took it to prove a point about “the common man.” Like my mother, Brian was a Hobbesian. At least until he discovered he was Jesus Christ and underwent a conversion of character and belief. His madness? What were the first signs of it? It’s hard to say. An old college friend recently told me that she knew from the start there was something odd about Brian and “would never have gotten involved with him.” But it was precisely Brian’s strangeness that I liked. He was eccentric, he was not like anyone else, he saw the world through a poet’s eyes (though he had little talent for writing poetry). He saw the universe as animated, as inhabited by spirits. Fruit spoke to him. When he peeled an apple he would make it seem to cry by means of ventriloquism. He used the same ventriloquist’s routine on tangerines and oranges and even bananas—making them sing and speak and even declaim in verse.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Seek out steady supervision by certain priestly males in no way softened by their spongy-making spiritual vocation. This seemed just the regimen for upgrading bookworms, velvet-robed Mama’s-boy aesthetes, into the decent vigorous gentlemen required to rule so vast an Empire. My own boyhood public library once stocked countless illustrated versions of these inspirational boy-in-formation yarns. Their detailed wood engravings showed Amazonian waterfalls, many a shirtless rescue. I’m afraid I consumed such works indiscriminately as any fat lady will eat whatever chocolate is brought into her home at Christmas. Edmund White’s novel posits the modern equivalent (psychic, sexual) of these bully-boy obstacle courses. Such novels abounded in mountaintop mishaps, brave St. Bernard dogs rigged with brandy casks while baying toward recent avalanches. The central heroic youth was soon buoyed—rowboatlike—along the locks and channels provided by a set of kind, worthy teachers. Each guide seemed skilled in a different practical art; each man proved versed in some code of earnest ethics. There was a best friend, another boy, as blond as our hero was brunet or vice versa. Strong bonds developed between these two ever-more athletic fellows, ties that—while always happily naturally physical—never got far below the belt of simple wrestling. As in the present book, such foreground strengthening took place in relation to a remote and disapproving father. Usually titled, he was off in some locale more exotic and dangerous, he was exploring a mine or developing a product that would prove, to the Empire, invaluable. He had always viewed his pallid boy as unworthy of the family name. And it was only after some singular demonstration of this boy’s physical courage—fishing a younger child out of a frozen lake was always good—only then did the father understand how his own son, by God, did after all possess the grit, the makings of a decent burly English gentleman. I sketch this pattern to suggest the way White plays musical theme and variation with it and many others. His own mid-twentieth-century boy’s tale charts a new indoor Alpine course, one of habituating vices, class-based dangers, lubricious temptations, latent cures. Our representative youth falls in love with boys (the golden and admired if heedless Tommy); he falls in love with girls (the sophisticated yet voluptuous Helen). These beloveds are inevitably the favorites of everyone at school; that’s the draw. And, even if our hero fails to make them love him, he—determined, almost cursed with the gift to please—at least contrives to date them both. A room full of books and LP records (jazz and classical) at the end of a long corridor in some faux-Tudor mansion in Grosse Pointe might not seem the zone of conventional peril. But White renders—in prose of startling jack-in-the-box compression and dark-to-red Sargent-esque elegance—a treacherous route no less lethal than the nineteenth century’s snowbound mountain passes. Of course, Grosse Pointe lacks the invigoration of physical danger endured in good male company.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Brian got straight A’s too, but he had what they lacked: style. He never appeared to spend any time studying. When he had a ten-page paper to write, he would take ten sheets of Corrasable bond out of the packet and type directly on them until he produced, in one sitting, an A paper. Often he would write these ten-page wonders on the very morning they were due. And he knew and knew and knew about things. Not just medieval history and Roman history, not just Renaissance philosophers and early church fathers, not just lay and investiture, pipe rolls and Political Augustinianism, Richard the Lionhearted and Rollo, Duke of Normandy, not just Abelard and Alcuin, Alexander the Great and Alfred the Great, not just Burckhardt and Beowulf, Averroës and Avignon, Goliardic poetry and Gregorian reform, Henry the Lion and Heraclites, the nature of heresy and the works of Thomas Hobbes, Julian the Apostate and Jacopone da Todi, the Nibelungenlied and the history of nominalism—but also wine vintages and restaurants, the names of all the trees in Central Park, the sexes of the ginkgos on Morningside Drive, the names of birds, the names of flowers, the dates when Shakespeare’s children were born, the exact spot where Shelley drowned, the chronology of Charlie Chaplin’s movies, the exact anatomy of cows (and consequently how to choose cuts of meat in the supermarket), the lyrics to every song Gilbert and Sullivan ever wrote, the Köchel listing of every Mozart composition, the Olympic champions in every sport for the past twenty years, the batting averages of every leading American baseball player, the characters in every novel by Dickens, the date the Mickey Mouse watch was first introduced, the dates and styles of vintage cars and how many of each were left and who owned them (Bugattis and Hispano-Suizas were his favorites), the kind of armor worn in the sixteenth century (and how it differed from armor of the thirteenth century), the way frogs fornicate and conifers mate, all the positions of sex in the Kama Sutra, the names of all the torture devices of the Middle Ages, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (This is not, by the way, my favorite cover, though it is the one I am obviously most sentimental about. My favorite Fear of Flying cover is the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, which is red with two white pear-shaped symmetrical orbs that become butt cheeks when they are clearly delineated by a zipper in the middle, a reference to Isadora’s fervent pursuit of a zipless fuck—string-free, obligation-free sex that results in neither attachment nor pregnancy, the female pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. The Penguin insignia is thoughtfully placed exactly where the clitoris would be.) Back at the Israeli book stand, I opened up the book and began reading it right there, just a glance at first, and then, like she had taken my lapels into her fists, I was inside the book, sliding down its glorious, wild, twisty sentences. I paused my reading only ever to turn to the back cover to see her picture: not a serious author photo, but something that looked like a candid snapshot. The cover was too furrowed to make her out completely, but I saw the long, straight, thick blond hair, the wide smile, the nose she would describe in those very pages as that of a Polish peasant. I don’t know how much time passed before the owner of the book stand told me he was going home. I pulled out my last shekels and made the purchase. I had never read anything like it. I had read great books by then—I was lucky to have an older sister with excellent taste and a propensity to leave her stuff lying around—and I had even read books in Fear of Flying’s same tradition: some of the ones that Updike mentioned, but others still that exist in the New York/Jewish/analyst’s couch vortex. None of them were like Fear of Flying, though. It seemed to have been written by its by-then PhD candidate (satire in Victorian England) in one frantic breath, typed as quickly as possible while the thought was in her head, a compendium of the ideas and reactions of the second-wave feminist hell-bent on finding the kind of love and sex that made you not hate yourself. Had there ever been a book as high up on the intellectual/educated/literate index as it was on the horny/boisterous/dirty one? For every Scheherazade reference, there’s a clitoral one; there is as much talk about existentialism as there is about libidinousness. There is Heathcliff, Hera, the Iliad, an A–Z understanding of Freud (part-objects!), Story of O, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marjorie Morningstar, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. Fear of Flying asks you to keep up with it; it expects you are as smart and educated and horny as it is—as she is. And once that’s established, it becomes the elevated, intellectually rigorous and totally raunchy saga of a woman’s desire; the non-apology of the self-aware Jew just existing; the perplexities of feminism; the constraints of these new, pioneering freedoms; the unabashed demand to be loved and satisfied.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  when thou saidst: ‘The world is renewed, justice returns and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from heaven.’8 Through thee I was a poet, through thee a Christian, but that thou mayest see better what I outline I will put forth my hand to fill in colour. Already the whole world was big with the true belief, sown by the apostles of the everlasting kingdom; and thy words, touched on above, harmonized so with the new preachers, that the habit took me of visiting them. They then became so holy in my sight, that when Domitian persecuted them,9 their wailings were not without tears of mine. And while by me yon world was trod, I succoured them, and their righteous lives made me despise all other sects; and ere in my poem I had brought the Greeks to Thebes’ rivers,10 I received baptism, but through fear I was a secret Christian, long time pretending paganism; and this lukewarmness made me speed round the fourth circle more than four times a hundred years. Thou therefore, who hast lifted the covering which hid from me the great good I tell of, while we have time to spare on the ascent, tell me, where is our ancient Terence, Cæcilius, Plautus, and Varro if thou knowest; tell me if they are dammed, and in what ward.” “They, and Persius, and I, and many others,” my Leader answered, “are with that Greek to whom the Muses gave suck more than to any other, in the first circle of the dark prison. Ofttimes we talk of the mount which hath our fostermothers ever with it. Euripides is there with us, and Antiphon, Simonides, Agathon, and many other Greeks, who once decked their brows with laurel.11 There are seen of thy people Antigone, Deiphyle and Argia, and Ismene so sad as she was. There is seen she who showed Langia; there is Tiresias’ daughter, and Thetis, and Deidamia with her sisters.”12 Now were both poets silent, intent anew on gazing around, freed from the ascent and from the walls; and already four handmaids of the day were left behind, and the fifth was at the chariot pole, directing yet upward its flaming horn,13 when my Leader: “I think it behoves us to turn our right shoulders to the edge and circle the mount as we are wont to do.” Thus custom there was our guide, and we took up our way with less doubt because of the assent of that worthy spirit. They journeyed on in front, and I, solitary, behind; and I hearkened to their discourse which gave me understanding in poesy. But soon the sweet converse was broken by a tree14 which we found in the midst of the way, with fruit wholesome and pleasant to smell. And even as a pine tree grows gradually less from bough to bough upwards, so did that downwards; I think so that none may go up.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The book is definitely therapeutic, not only for women but for men too. It should be read for one thing by every shrink, every psychiatrist, every psychologist. It should also be read by Jews. They take quite a drubbing in this book. It’s hard to call the book “anti-Semitic,” since the author herself is Jewish and knows whereof she speaks. In her biting humor and sarcasm she is merciless toward her own people. Of course she is not unique in this. One has only to think of Swift, O’Casey, Knut Hamsun, Shaw, Céline, and Henry Miller. Yet all of us were writers who loved their country. We merely despised our country’s inhabitants. Yes, I know that of all the peoples in the world the Jews are reputed to be foremost in their ability to make fun of themselves, acknowledge their short-comings. But if someone other than a Jew does this he is immediately called an anti-Semite. It’s silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons. Do not misunderstand. Erica Jong is far from being a misogynist or a misanthropist. I get the impression that she loves life, and people too. But her intelligence does not permit her to overlook their glaring faults. It is this gusto of hers which supplies us with some of the funniest and raciest passages. One is tempted to say—"She writes like a man"—only she doesn’t write like a man but like a 100% woman, a female, sometimes a “bitch.” In many ways she is more forthright, more honest, more daring than most male authors. That’s what I like about her. In short, she is a treat for sore eyes. Parenthetically, I wonder when or if Germaine Greer is going to give us a book on this order. Germaine Greer is another woman writer who tickles my fancy and elicits my admiration. Certainly, when I read her interview in Playboy, was it, I could scarcely believe my eyes. Men are no match for women of this sort. The interesting thing is that these two women are endowed with strong intellects, they are cultured, they have read well, and have excellent taste. But above all, they are fearless. I cannot help but wonder how Women’s Lib. regards this book of Erica Jong. Here is a liberated woman who tells of her need for men, or, as she sometimes puts it, her need for a lay. She admits to being horny, and how! We don’t hear enough from women on this subject. With all this, and she goes the limit, this book can scarcely be called “pornographic.” It is full of obscenity, whatever that means, but underneath it all, there is a most serious purpose. The book is full of meaning and a paean to life. The death-eaters are the shrinks, teachers, parents, and so on.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  For Thanksgiving Mrs. Scott had on an unprecedentedly girlish blue dress and a mauve ribbon bobby-pinned to her still-wet hair. She kept blinking mildly and smiling meekly as she brought in dish after dish to the heavy oak dining room table. DeQuincey stood to carve. He performed the ritual with solemnity. When we toasted one another with red wine, DeQuincey said to Father Burke, “I welcome you to the hospitality of our table; you are our honored guest,” and the priest smiled and inclined his head. I kept feeling that everyone but me was following a secret book of etiquette and that the deliberateness of the courtesy was as medieval as Burke’s theology. The dinner conversation was philosophical. Aristotle was dismissed in favor of Plato, a preference I again ascribed to the very improbability of Plato’s thought. It seemed that the more bizarre a belief, the more poetic it must be, and hence the more noble it was to embrace it. I couldn’t help sensing that the Scotts were, underneath everything, as American as I, just as skeptical of ideas, and that like me they were convinced by the sincerity of an impulse rather than the rigor of a system. Very well. By a snobbish reverse, the preposterous claims of Platonism and a Platonic Christianity were what most excited them, as though anything that so taxed one’s credulity must be—well, not true, but aristocratic, superior. When they’d talk about Original Sin or the Creation or the Devil they’d become agitated, their cheeks would flush and their eyes would sparkle, as though they were hypnotizing themselves into espousing this obvious nonsense. And the more vague and absurd the things they discussed (angels, the resurrection of the body), the more they used such words as precisely, undoubtedly, clearly and naturally, and each time they uttered such a word their eyes would dilate with glee—lying made them gleeful, just as children shriek with pleasure as they egg each other on to think up more and more gruesome details in a ghost story.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He also had a profound respect for public power, that compelling quality that Monty Kipps had in spades. If only, as a young man, Jack’s way of expressing himself had been a tad sprightlier, a shade more people-friendly (if one could have imagined, even abstractly, the possibility of having a beer with him), he too might have been a public person in the manner of Monty Kipps, or like Jack’s own late father, a senator for Massachusetts, or like his brother, a judge. But Jack was a university man from the cradle. And when he met people like Kipps, a man who straddled both worlds, Jack always deferred to them. ‘I cannot have you talking about a colleague of ours in that way, Claire, I just can’t. And you know that I can’t name names. I am trying to save you a lot of pointless pain here.’ ‘I see.’ Claire looked down at her small brown hands. They were quivering. The dome of her speckled grey-and-white head faced Jack, downy, he thought, like the feathers in a bird’s nest. ‘In a university . . .’ began Jack, preparing his best impression of a parson, but Claire stood up. ‘I know what happens in universities, Jack,’ she said sourly. ‘You can tell Zora congratulations. She made the class.’  ‘I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie,’ explained Kiki, leaning over the counter. ‘You know – tasty-looking.’ Kiki’s little laminated name tag tapped on the plastic sneeze-guard protecting the merchandise. This was her lunch hour. ‘It’s for my friend,’ she said bashfully, incorrectly. She hadn’t  On Beauty seen Carlene Kipps since that strange afternoon three weeks ago. ‘She’s not too well. I need a down home pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing French or . . . frilly.’ Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their speciality goods and smiled abstractly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren’t certain of the cause. ‘See that?’ said Kiki emphatically, pressing her index finger on the plastic, directly above an open-faced pie. The surrounding pastry was golden and in the centre sat a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. ‘ That’s what I’m talking about.’ A few minutes later Kiki was striding up the hill with her pie in its recycled cardboard box, tied with a green velvet ribbon. She was taking business into her own hands. For there had been a misunderstanding between Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps. Two days after their meeting, somebody had hand-delivered an extremely old-fashioned, unironic and frankly unAmerican visiting card to  Langham: Dear Kiki, Thank you so much for your kind visit. I should like to repay the call. Please let me know of a time that would be convenient to you, Yours truly Mrs C.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Levi because there was no point in worrying people unnecessarily. He made his farewells, pulling on his Michelin Man coat, thumping first sister and then brother hard between their shoulder blades. He pressed play on his iPod (the earphones of these had never left his ears). He got lucky. It was a beautiful song by the fattest man in rap: a -pound, Bronx-born, Hispanic genius. Only twenty-five years old when he died of a coronary, but still very much alive to Levi and millions of kids like Levi. Out of the coffee shop and down the street Levi bounced to the fat man’s ingenious boasts, similar in their formality (as Erskine had once tried to explain) to those epic boasts one finds in Milton, say, or in  On Beauty the Iliad . These comparisons meant nothing at all to Levi. His body simply loved this song; he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was dancing down the street, the wind at his back making him as fleet of foot as Gene Kelly. Soon he could see the church steeple and then, as he got a block closer, a flash of the wash-white bed-sheets, knotted to black railings. He wasn’t so late. A few of the guys were still unpacking. Felix – who was the ‘leader’, or at least the guy who held the purse strings – waved. Levi jogged up to meet him. They knocked fists, clasped hands. Some people’s hands are sweaty, most are moist, and then there are a few rare souls like Felix whose hands are as dry and cool as stone. Levi wondered whether it was something to do with his blackness. Felix was blacker than any black man Levi ever met in his life. His skin was like slate. Levi had this idea that he would never say out loud and that he knew didn’t make sense, but anyway he had this idea that Felix was like the essence of blackness in some way. You looked at Felix and thought: This is what it’s all about, being this different; this is what white people fear and adore and want and dread. He was as purely black as – on the other side of things – those weird Swedish guys with translucent eyelashes are purely white. It was like, if you looked up black in a dictionary . . . It was awesome.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis. ‘Do you like her?’ Carlene shakily passed Kiki a cup of tea, while Clotilde placed a piece of pie on a fussy china plate next to her on the piano seat. Before Clotilde could be thanked, she was backing out of the room, closing the door behind her. ‘Like . . . ?’ ‘Maıˆtresse Erzulie,’ said Carlene, pointing to the painting. ‘You were admiring her, I thought.’ ‘She’s fabulous ,’ replied Kiki, only now taking the time to look at her properly. In the centre of the frame there was a tall, naked black woman wearing only a red bandanna and standing in a fantastical white space, surrounded all about by tropical branches and kaleido-scopic fruit and flowers. Four pink birds, one green parrot. Three  the anatomy lesson humming birds. Many brown butterflies. It was painted in a primitive, childlike style, everything flat on the canvas. No perspective, no depth. ‘It’s a Hyppolite. It’s worth a great deal, I believe, but that’s not why I love it. I got it in Haiti itself on my very first visit, before I met my husband.’ ‘It’s lovely. I just love portraits. We don’t have any paintings in our house. At least, none of human beings.’ ‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ said Carlene and looked stricken. ‘But you must come here whenever you want and look at mine. I have many. They’re my company – they’re the greater part of my joy . I realized that quite recently. But she’s my favourite. She’s a great Voodoo goddess, Erzulie. She’s called the Black Virgin – also, the Violent Venus. Poor Clotilde won’t look at her, can’t even be in the same room as her – did you notice? A superstition.’ ‘ Really . So she’s a symbol?’ ‘Oh, yes . She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon . . . and she’s the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, and , on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.’ ‘Phew. That’s a lot of symbolizing.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it? It’s rather like all the Catholic saints rolled into one being.’ ‘That’s interesting . . .’ began Kiki shyly, giving herself a moment to remember a thesis of Howard’s, which she now wished to reproduce as her own for Carlene. ‘Because . . . we’re so binary, of course, in the way we think. We tend to think in opposites, in the Christian world. We’re structured like that – Howard always says that’s the trouble.’ ‘That’s a clever way to put it. I like her parrots.’ Kiki smiled, relieved she did not need to go any further down this uncertain path. ‘ Good parrots. So, does she avenge herself on men?’ ‘Yes, I believe so.’ ‘I need to get me some of that,’ said Kiki, half under her breath, not really meaning for it to be heard.  On Beauty

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Even at the cottage he would set up an office and work till dawn when he wasn’t outdoors doing manual labor under artificial light, his “hobby.” But now a houseful of guests had forced him to modify his hours and habits. Had Mrs. Cork been a beauty he might have suffered the presence of her family more gladly; he was a great fancier of women and they brought out in him a courtliness as rich and old as the best port. His irritable misanthropy vanished in the presence of a beautiful woman. She could even be a child, a lovely little girl; she would still excite gallantry in him. Once a ten-year-old charmer who was staying with us announced at midnight that she wanted chocolate and my father drove fifty miles to a nearby town, dragged the owner of a candy store out of bed and paid a hundred dollars for twenty opera creams. He once gave the same amount as a tip to a full-bodied, glossy-lipped singer in an Italian restaurant who had serenaded him with a wobbling but surprisingly intimate rendition of “Vissi d’arte” to an accordion accompaniment executed by a hunchback with Bell’s palsy freezing half his face while the other half modestly winked and smiled. The only part of his customary life my father could maintain during the Corks’ visit was filling every waking moment with what used to be called “classical” music, though most of it was romantic, Brahms in particular. He had always had hundreds of records, which he played on a Meissen phonograph that stood as a separate, massive piece of furniture in one corner of his office. I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the German Requiem was “damn nice” or that the violin and cello concerto was “one hell of a piece,” and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Fuit quidam multis officiis in aula Caesaris clarus atque conspicuus, ipsi etiam probe spectatus. Hune insimulatum quorundam astu proiecit extorrem sae- viens invidia : sed uxor eius Plotina, quaedam rarae fidei atque singularis pudicitiae femina, quae decimo partus stipendio viri familiam fundaverat, spretis atque contemptis urbicae luxuriae deliciis, fugientis 1 The MSS have something like praetereunte me orato. 'The correction to practereuntem dum irato (i.e. Mars) is due to Crusius. 306 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VII clothes sewn ill together, in so much that you might see all his breast and strong belly naked. As soon as he was entered in, he said: “God speed ye, soldiers of Mars, and my faithful com- panions, I pray you make me welcome as one of your band, and I will ensure you that you shall have a man of singular courage and lively audacity, for I had rather receive wounds upon my body than money or gold in my hands; and as for death (which other men do fear) I care nothing at all for it. Yet think you not that I am an abject or a beggar, neither judge you my virtue and prowess by my ragged clothes, for I have been a captain of a great company, and wasted all the country of Macedonia; I am the renowned thief Haemus the Thracian, whose name whole countries and nations do greatly fear: I am the son of Theron the notable thief, nourished with human blood, brought up amongst the stoutest of such a band, and finally I am inheritor and follower of my father’s virtues. Yet I lost in a short time all my ancient company and all my riches by one assault which I made, to my hurt, upon a factor of the Prince, which sometime had received a wage of two hundred pounds, but then had been cast down from his rank by fortune. Hearken, and I will tell you the whole matter in order. * There was a certain man in the Court of the Emperor which had many offices and high renown, and in great favour with the Prince himself, who at last by the envy and cunning of divers persons was banished away and compelled to forsake the Court: but his wife Plotina, a woman of rare faith and singular shamefastness, having borne ten children to her husband to be the foundation of his house, despised all worldly pomp and delicacy of living in : 307 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Kiki, and nodded and smiled but found she could go no further than this without betraying more than she wanted to. ‘We saw The Shipbuilder and His Wife in London – the Queen lent it out to the National Gallery – nice of her, huh, right? It was fabulous . . . the working up of the paint,’ said Claire urgently, and yet practically to herself, ‘the physicality of it, like he’s digging in to the canvas to get what’s really in those faces, in that marriage – that’s the thing, I think. It’s almost anti -portraiture: he doesn’t want you to look at the faces; he wants you to look at the souls . The faces are just a way in . It’s the purest kind of genius.’ A tricky silence followed this, not necessarily noticeable to Claire herself. She had a way of saying things that couldn’t be answered. Kiki was still smiling, looking down at the rough, hardy skin of her own black toes. And if it were not for the bedside charm of my mother, thought Kiki dreamily, there would have been no inherited house; and if it were not for the house, there would have been no money to send me to New York – would I have met Howard, would I know people like this? ‘Except I think Howard’s actually coming from a contrary position, darling – when he’s discussed it, if you remember – he’s weighing in against – would we say the culture myth of Rembrandt, his genius, etcetera?’ said Warren doubtfully, with the scientist’s reticence when using the language of artists. ‘Oh, of course that’s right,’ said Claire tightly – she seemed not to want to discuss the subject. ‘He doesn’t like.’ ‘No,’ said Kiki, equally glad to pass on to other topics. ‘He doesn’t like.’ ‘What does Howard like?’ asked Warren wryly. ‘Therein lies the mystery.’ Just then Murdoch began to yap furiously, and yank on the lead  kipps and belsey that Warren held in his hand. The three of them tried both cooing and chastising, but Murdoch was moving purposefully towards a toddler who was waddling along with a stuffed frog, held high above his head like a standard. Murdoch cornered the boy between his mother’s legs. The child wept. The woman knelt down by the child and hugged him to her, glaring at Murdoch and his handlers. ‘That’s my husband’s fault – sorry about that,’ said Claire, without enough contrition to satisfy. ‘My husband’s not used to dogs. It’s not actually his dog.’ ‘It’s a dachshund , it’s not going to kill anybody,’ said Kiki crossly, as the woman marched off. Kiki crouched to pet Murdoch on his flat head. She looked up again to find Claire and Warren squabbling, using only their eyes, each trying to impel the other to speak. Claire lost.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When I was eleven I started going every day after school to a bookshop which was near the hotel where my mother and sister and I lived. I was fascinated by a woman who worked there. She moved and talked and even sang as though she were on a big stage and not in a very small store. I had seen an overweight and coquettish diva portray Carmen, and this woman seemed just as ready for the role—a peasant blouse worn off the shoulders and so low as to reveal the tops of large breasts; black hair drawn back into a ponytail that hopped almost of its own accord from her back up onto her shoulder, where it would perch like a pet as she nuzzled it with her cheek; a tiny waist sadistically cinched in by a stout black belt that laced up the front; ample hips in rolling motion under a long skirt that swirled in meticulously ironed pleats around her; and small flat feet with painted nails in sandals she remained true to even on snowy days. She bathed herself in a heavy, ruttish perfume that suggested neither a girl nor a matron but rather the overripe coquette, the sort of imposing beauty one could imagine a weak nineteenth-century king taking on as his mistress. This scent, as shameless as her half-naked body, billowed to conceal or shrank to disclose her other abiding odor, the smell of burning cigarettes. She could sit for hours on a high stool behind the counter with an open book and kick her pleated skirt with a dangling leg and stab out one cigarette after another into a small black ashtray from a restaurant in New York. On television I’d seen the host of a New York nightclub introduce the viewing public to celebrities; some of this glamour now attended the woman’s smoking. Each of her butts was lavishly smeared with blood-red lipstick; the growing mound of smoldering butts resembled an open grave, ghastly trough of quartered torsos. As she smoked she hummed throatily, then exhaled, coughed, paused; her eyebrows shot up, her trembling upper lip curled back on one side to reveal a big, red-flecked front tooth, her jaw dropped, her spine grew, her massive shoulders shook—and out came a high, high head tone. Then a snatch of nasal Gounod tossed off saucily, scales sung in muted vocalese ripped open here and there to full volume (dark sleeves slashed with crimson silk), then a bit of hey-nonny-nonny.… She turned a page in the novel and blindly reached for the smoking ashtray.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In all of her writing, Audre Lorde offers us language to articulate how we might heal our fractured sociopolitical climate. She gives us instructions for making tools with which we can dismantle the houses of our oppressors. She remakes language with which we can revel in our sensual and sexual selves. She forges a space within which we can hold ourselves and each other accountable to both our needs and the greater good. Anthologies like this are so very necessary because, all too often, people misappropriate the words and ideas of black women. They do so selectively, using the parts that serve their aims, and abandoning those parts that don’t. People will, for example, parrot Lorde’s ideas about dismantling the master’s house without taking into account the context from which Lorde crafted those ideas. Lorde is such a brilliant and eloquent writer; she has such a way of shaping language that of course people want to repeat her words to their own ends. But her work is far more than something pretty to parrot. In this collection of Lorde’s prose and poetry, you will be able to appreciate the grace, power, and fierce intelligence of her writing, to understand where she was writing from and why, and to bear witness to all the unforgettable ways she made herself, and all black women, gloriously visible. PROSE Poetry Is Not a Luxury The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/” * and of impotence.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  At this time, curiously enough, Kate Stevens was by way of being engaged to Ned Bancroft; but already it was plain that she was in love with Smith and my outspoken admiration of Smith helped her, I hope, as I am sure it helped him, to a better mutual understanding. Bancroft accepted the situation with extraordinary self-sacrifice, losing neither Smith’s nor Kate’s friendship: I have seldom seen nobler self-abnegation: indeed his high-mindedness in this crisis was what first won my admiration and showed me his other fine qualities. Almost in the beginning I had serious disquietude: every little while Smith was ill and had to keep his bed for a day or two. There was no explanation of this illness which puzzled me and caused me a certain anxiety. One day in mid-winter there was a new development. Smith was in doubt how to act and confided in me. He had found Professor Kellogg, in whose house he lived, trying to kiss the pretty help, Rose, entirely against her will: Smith was emphatic on this point, the girl was struggling angrily to free herself, when by chance he interrupted them. I relieved Smith’s solemn gravity a little by roaring with laughter: the idea of an old Professor and clergyman trying to win a young girl by force filled me with amusement: “What a fool the man must be!” was my English judgment; Smith took the American high moral tone at first. “Think of his disloyalty to his wife in the same house”, he cried, “and then the scandal if the girl talked and she’s sure to talk!” “Sure not to talk”, I corrected, “girls are afraid of the effect of such revelations; besides a word from you asking her to shield Mrs. Kellogg will ensure her silence.” “Oh, I cannot advise her”, cried Smith, “I will not be mixed up in it: I told Kellogg at the time, I must leave the house, yet I don’t know where to go! It’s too disgraceful of him! His wife is really a dear woman!” For the first time I became conscious of a rooted difference between Smith and myself: his high moral condemnation on very insufficient data seemed to me childish; but no doubt many of my readers will think my tolerance a proof of my shameless libertinism! However I jumped at the opportunity of talking to Rose on such a scabrous matter and at the same time solved Smith’s difficulty by proposing that he should come and take room and board with the Gregorys—a great stroke of practical diplomacy on my part, or so it appeared to me; for thereby I did the Gregorys, Smith and myself an immense, an incalculable service. Smith jumped at the idea, asked me to see about it at once and let him know and then rang for Rose.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  In tenacious old families certain facial characteristics keep recurring as indicants and maker’s marks. The Nabokov nose (e.g. my grandfather’s) is of the Russian type with a soft round upturned tip and a gentle inslope in profile; the Korff nose (e.g. mine) is a handsome Germanic organ with a boldly boned bridge and a slightly tilted, distinctly grooved, fleshy end. The supercilious or surprised Nabokovs have rising eyebrows only proximally haired, thus fading toward the temples; the Korff eyebrow is more finely arched but likewise rather scanty. Otherwise the Nabokovs, as they recede through the picture gallery of time into the shadows, soon join the dim Rukavishnikovs of whom I knew only my mother and her brother Vasiliy, too small a sample for my present purpose. On the other hand, I see very clearly the women of the Korff line, beautiful, lily-and-rose girls, their high, flushed pommettes, pale blue eyes and that small beauty spot on one cheek, a patchlike mark, which my grandmother, my father, three or four of his siblings, some of my twenty-five cousins, my younger sister and my son Dmitri inherited in various stages of intensity as more or less distinct copies of the same print. My German great-grandfather, Baron Ferdinand von Korff, who married Nina Aleksandrovna Shishkov (1819–1895), was born in Königsberg in 1805 and after a successful military career, died in 1869 in his wife’s Volgan domain near Saratov. He was the grandson of Wilhelm Carl, Baron von Korff (1739–1799) and Eleonore Margarethe, Baroness von der Osten-Sacken (1731–1786), and the son of Nicolaus von Korff (d. 1812), a major in the Prussian army, and Antoinette Theodora Graun (d. 1859), who was the granddaughter of Carl Heinrich Graun, the composer. Antoinette’s mother, Elisabeth née Fischer (born 1760), was the daughter of Regina born Hartung (1732–1805), daughter of Johann Heinrich Hartung (1699–1765), head of a well-known publishing house in Königsberg. Elisabeth was a celebrated beauty. After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer’s son, in 1795, she married the minor poet Christian August von Stägemann, and was the “motherly friend,” as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers). He is said to have called on the family, to say adieu before traveling to Wannsee—for the carrying out of an enthusiastic suicide pact with a sick lady—but was not admitted, it being laundry day in the Stägemann household. The number and diversity of contacts that my ancestors had with the world of letters are truly remarkable.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And within the present pearl shineth the light of Romeo, whose beauteous and great work was so ill answered. But the Provencals who wrought against him have not the laugh; wherefore he taketh an ill path who maketh of another’s good work his own loss. Four daughters, and each one a queen, had Raymond Berengar; and this was wrought for him by Romeo, a lowly and an alien man; then words uttered askance moved him to demand account of this just man, who gave him five and seven for every ten; then took his way in poverty and age; and might the world know the heart he had within him, begging his life by crust and crust, much as it praiseth, it would praise him more.”13 1. Constantine reigned A.D. 306-337. Justinian A.D. 527-565. Constantinople is relatively near to the site of ancient Troy. Æneas took Lavinia with her father’s consent, though she was already betrothed to Turnus, King of the Latins.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?” and 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 luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but 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. Though Isadora Wing, as shamelessly and obsessively as Alexander Portnoy, rubs the reader’s nose in the fantasies and phobias and family slapstick of growing up, she avoids the solipsism that turns Roth’s hero unwittingly cruel; nor does she, like Holden Caulfield, though no less sensitive to phoniness, make of innocence an ideal. She remains alert to this world. “How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on the street corners for you to admire them.” Admiring she is, even of the impotence, madness, and defective hygiene of her many awful lovers. Feminist since birth (she says), radicalized at the age of thirteen “on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary,” Isadora Wing nevertheless has more kind words for the male body than any author since the penning of Fanny Hill: “He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. That was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice.” Her account of her travails among these befuddled beauties, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations. The second of four daughters of a would-be paintress and a father who designed “ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets,” Isadora grew up in a fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. She heavy pets (let’s call it) at thirteen, remorsefully tries to starve herself at fourteen, embarks upon a series of psychiatrists (the first one is Dr.