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’s legacy in our culture is as complicated as its birth was. The book’s movie rights were optioned, but a movie was never made. Erica sued for the rights back and lost. In those two sentences there live a thousand legal documents and just as many hurt feelings. The lawsuit consumed her. Her divorce consumed her. The unprecedented literary fame consumed her. She had sworn she would never write a sequel to Fear of Flying, but her next book was about a woman named Isadora who was suing a producer and movie studio and enduring a divorce amid unprecedented literary fame. She wrote three more books that were narrated by or featured Isadora as a character. But those books contain something slightly less than the promise of Fear of Flying; they lack its excitement, its ingenuity, its urgency. I don’t know, maybe they lack its youthful exuberance. Maybe they are just missing the surprise. But more likely, they are themselves a document of what happens when the lightning bolt of literary fame and success hits you so hard that, in your paralysis, you start to wonder what exactly people want from you in the first place. Don’t get me wrong; they are all worth reading. But in Erica’s later books—historical fiction about witches, about fourteen-year-old Sappho, about an eighteenth-century poet—where there is a spark of new territory, a reader is reminded of those first fists that held her lapels as she held her breath and read. It’s hard to know what she was thinking at that time and what it felt like to be inside of her mind. I met Erica for the first time in 2003, thirty years after the book’s publication. I was working at an Internet startup where I was in charge of hiring writing teachers for continuing education classes. Someone I knew had her email address and I invited her to meet me at Balthazar for lunch. She didn’t teach for us in the end; we couldn’t afford her. But I don’t think I ever thought she would. Instead, I used the lunch to tell her what she’d meant to me over the years—how she had legitimized the notion in modern books that a mouthy Jewish girl from Manhattan could also be intellectual and literary. We have all these dumb ways of categorizing books for women now, but back then, we were mostly left to read the men’s work. We had read every man’s musing and had allowed them to plant their flag to stand for all human experience. Our choices were to witness or to identify. With Erica, with Fear of Flying, the world started over, and all our stories were new and legitimate.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The Corks were both “climbers,” he in business, she in society; they seemed to me fascinating shams. I especially admired the way Kevin’s mother, so obviously a bohemian, hard drinker and hell raiser, had toned down her exuberance enough to win invitations to a few polite “functions,” those given by the Women’s Club if not by the Steinway Club (the Steinway pretended to be nothing but a little gathering of ladies who liked to play four-hand versions of “Mister Haydn’s” symphonies, though it was in fact the highest social pinnacle). In pursuit of such heights, Mrs. Cork had reduced her damns and hells by the end of the week with us to darns and hecks. I had to admire the way Mrs. Cork was pretending to be shocked by the innocent improprieties that so excited my stepmother. I could tell Mrs. Cork had palled around with real screwballs, even unwed couples—it was just a sense I had. When I took her out one day in a motorboat alone, she and I happily discussed opera. We cut the motor and drifted. I relaxed and became animated to the point of effeminacy; she relaxed and became coarser. “Oh, my boy,” she promised me in her brogue, “you want to hear fine singing, I’ll play you my John McCormack records, make you weep your damn eyes out of their bloody sockets. That ‘Lucevan le stelle,’ it’ll freeze your balls.” I shrieked with delight—we were conspirators who’d somehow found ourselves stranded together here in a world of unthrillable souls. I dreamed of running off and becoming a great singer; I walked through the woods and vocalized. Tonight we had not yet made our rapport explicit, but I was already wise to her. She had through circumstance ended up not on the La Scala stage but in this American cottage, married to an affable, overweight businessman. Now her job was to ingratiate herself with people who would help her husband in his career (lawyer for industry); she was retaining just enough brogue and temperament to be a “character.” Characters—conventional women with minor eccentricities—flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she’d failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas. “Time for bed, young fella,” my father said at last.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Helen Paper had a wide, regal forehead, straight dark hair pulled back from her face, curiously narrow hips and strong, thin legs. She was famous for the great globes of her breasts, as evident as her smile and almost as easy to acknowledge and so heavy that her shoulders had become very strong. How her breasts hung naturally I had no way of knowing, since in her surgically sturdy brassiere her form had been idealized into—well, two uncannily symmetrical globes, at once proud, inviting and (by virtue of their symmetry) respectable. But to describe her without mentioning her face would be absurd, since everyone was dazzled by those fine blue eyes, harder or perhaps less informative than one would have anticipated, and by that nose, so straight and classical, joined to the forehead without a bump or transition of any sort, the nose a prayer ascending above the altar of lips so rich and sweet that one could understand how men had once regarded women as spoils in wars worth fighting. She was a woman (for she surely seemed a woman despite her youth) supremely confident of her own appeal, her status as someone desirable in the abstract, that is, attractive and practicable to anyone under any conditions at any time, rather than in the concrete, to me now as mine. She wasn’t shy or passive, but to the extent she was a vessel she was full to the brim with the knowledge that she represented a prize. She was the custodian of her own beauty. She acted as though she were royalty and being beautiful a sort of Trooping the Colours. At any rate, I once watched her through a window (she didn’t know I was there) and she was acting very differently. She was with just one other person, a girl from school, and they were on the floor in front of the television with beers and a big bowl of popcorn. It was a summer night and it must have been very late and they were laughing and laughing. Helen Paper, wearing just shorts and halter, was sprawled on the floor sick with laugher, in a squalor of laughter. She kept saying, “Stop or you’ll make me pee.” Our date was quick, unremarkable (it’s the particular curse of adolescence that its events are never adequate to the feelings they inspire, that no unadorned retelling of those events can suggest the feelings). Tommy’s mother collected us all in her car (we were still too young to drive) and deposited us at the theater. Green spotlights buried in fake ferns in the lobby played on a marble fountain that had long since been drained.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Last summer, I ran into her during intermission at a performance of Hamlet at the Park Avenue Armory. She was with her grandson. She was able to recount for me nearly every rendition of Hamlet she’d ever seen, plus give me the Columbia ABD’s halftime commentary on the one we were seeing now. As she spoke, I had the same thought that I’ve had every time I’ve spoken with her—the same thought I had standing at that bookstand in Tel Aviv: There is nothing else like this. There is no one like this. There is nothing like Fear of Flying. There is no other Erica Jong. There never will be again. —Taffy Brodesser-Akner May 18, 2023 Alas! the love of women! it is known To be a lovely and a fearful thing; For all of theirs upon that die is thrown, And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring To them but mockeries of the past alone, And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring, Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel. They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust, Is always so to women; one sole bond Awaits them—treachery is all their trust; Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond Over their idol, till some wealthier lust Buys them in marriage—and what rests beyond? A thankless husband—next, a faithless lover— Then dressing, nursing, praying—and all’s over. Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers, Some mind their household, others dissipation, Some run away, and but exchange their cares, Losing the advantage of a virtuous station; Few changes e’er can better their affairs, Theirs being an unnatural situation, From the dull palace to the dirty hovel: Some play the devil, and then write a novel. —Lord Byron (from Don Juan) ONEEn Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same. —Anonymous (a woman) There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. My husband grabbed my hand therapeutically at the moment of takeoff.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Well, I thought it was amazing,’ pressed Kiki. ‘It’s obviously the work of a genius – ’ Howard groaned at the term. ‘Oh, Howard, come on – you have to be a genius to write music like that.’ ‘Music like what? Define genius.’ Kiki ignored the request. ‘I think the kids were quite moved,’ she said, squeezing Jerome’s arm lightly but saying no more. She would not expose him to his father’s ridicule. ‘And I was very moved. I  On Beauty don’t see how it’s possible not to be moved by music like that. You’re serious – you didn’t like it?’ ‘I liked it fine . . . it was fine. I just prefer music which isn’t trying to fake me into some metaphysical idea by the back door.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s like God’s music or something.’ ‘I rest my case,’ said Howard, and now turned from her and waved at Levi, who was stuck in the crowd, waving back at them. Levi nodded as Howard pointed to the gate where they should all meet up. ‘Howard,’ continued Kiki, because she was happiest when she could get him to talk to her about his ideas, ‘explain to me how what we just heard wasn’t the work of a genius . . . I mean, no matter what you say, there’s obviously a difference between something like that and something like . . .’ The family set off, continuing their debate, with the voices of the children now added to the dispute. The black boy with the elegant neck who had been sitting next to Zora strained to hear the disappearing remnants of a conversation he had been interested in, although he had not followed all of it. More and more these days he found himself listening to people talk, wanting to add something. He had wanted to add something just then, a point of information – it was from that movie. According to the film, Mozart died before he finished the thing, right? So someone else must have finished it – so that seemed relevant to that genius thing they were discussing. But he wasn’t in the habit of talking to strangers. Besides, the moment passed. It always did. He pulled his baseball cap down his forehead and checked in his pocket for his cell. He reached under his deckchair to retrieve his Discman – it was gone. He swore violently, padded his hand around the area in the darkness and found something, a Discman. But not his. His had a faint sticky residue on the bottom that he could always feel, the remains of a long-gone sticker of a silhouetted naked lady with a big afro. Apart from that the two Discmans were identical. It took him a second to figure it out. He rushed to get his hoodie off the back of his  kipps and belsey

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Nabokov’s responsiveness is characterized for me by the last evening of my first visit to Montreux in September 1966. During my two hours of conversation with the Nabokovs in their suite after dinner, Nabokov tried to imagine what the history of painting might have been like if photography had been invented in the Middle Ages; spoke about science fiction; asked me if I had noticed what was happening in Li’l Abner and then compared it, in learned fashion, with an analogous episode of a dozen years back; noted that a deodorant stick had been found among the many days’ siege provisions which the Texas sniper had with him on the tower; discoursed on a monstrous howler in the translation of Bely’s St. Petersburg; showed me a beautifully illustrated book on hummingbirds, and then discussed the birdlife of Lake Geneva; talked admiringly and often wittily of the work of Borges, Updike, Salinger, Genet, Andrei Sinyavsky (“Abram Tertz”), Burgess, and Graham Greene, always making precise critical discriminations; recalled his experiences in Hollywood while working on the screenplay of Lolita, and his having met Marilyn Monroe at a party (“A delightful actress. Delightful,” he said. “Which is your favorite Monroe film?”); talked of the Soviet writers he admired, summarizing their stratagems for survival; and defined for me exactly what kind of beetle Kafka’s Gregor Samsa was in The Metamorphosis (“It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths”). And did I know how a dung beetle laid its eggs? Since I did not, Nabokov rose and imitated the process, bending his head toward his waist as he walked slowly across the room, making a dung-rolling motion with his hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid. When Lenny Bruce’s name somehow came up, both Nabokov and his wife commented on how sad they had been to hear of Bruce’s death; he had been a favorite of theirs. But they disagreed about where it was that they had last seen Bruce; Mrs. Nabokov thought it had been on Jack Paar’s television show, while her husband—the scientist, linguist, and author of fifteen novels, who has written and published in three languages, and whose vast erudition is most clearly evidenced by the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, with its two volumes of annotations and one-hundred-page “Note on Prosody”—held out for the Ed Sullivan show.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Scott seemed an odd pair, he a grinning, skinny, forgetful little Latin teacher behind glasses cloudy with thumbprints, the fly of his gray, unpressed Brooks Brothers trousers sometimes open, usually half open, his hair worn in a salt-and-pepper crew cut, his shoulders fallen, perhaps broken under a perpetual burden of sin and duty and uxoriousness, which must be either one or the other. He was at his sweetest with Tim, his four-year-old son, a lovely wide-awake kid who alternated between bouts of boyish roughhousing and almost seraphic spells of listening. Yes, listening to adult conversation, to the radio, to the muted shoutings of the dorm during free time, to practically anything, even silence, which for him came across as a plenum, supersonic scrape and lift and settling, the sound of the feathered jets of the spheres. Whenever Tim clung to his father’s leg or sat on his lap and asked questions, Mr. Scott seemed most in focus. An admiration of his handsome, intelligent, good-natured little boy brightened and fattened the wavering flame in Mr. Scott’s eyes and sweetened the vinegar of his smile, for usually Mr. Scott smiled as if in queasy anticipation of a practical joke about to be played on him. Indeed, the students had offered him “a new bike” at an end-of-semester ceremony last year, but when he came bounding up the aisle with a glad grin they greeted him not with some sleek English racer to replace his battered old Schwinn but with a Bike athletic supporter (sour smile, “Very funny, you guys, a big yuck for your side”). His students counted on his being dazed. In Latin class, when he called attendance, someone different responded to each name each time, nor did Mr. Scott appear to notice when the same person answered to three different names in a row. Kids were always taping on his back the message “Kick me.” When he had to make an announcement in general assembly, he’d be unable to read his own writing. Soon he would have shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and he would be holding the paper an inch away from his eyes. He himself was the product of prep schools and his natural position in this rough, raw society would have been as one of those skinny little kids who don’t hit puberty until sixteen and who learn to take a lot of teasing until then and know how to dish out a few practical jokes in return (dead frog under the pillow).

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Along with his cowboy clothes he had taken up a gentle Western manner. No longer did he inveigh against Jews in high finance, he no longer denounced our idiot teachers, parents, classmates, the entirely barbaric hemisphere we were unfortunate enough to have been born on. The Juliette Greco record had been banished in favor of one by the black folk singer Odetta. Howie himself had taken up the guitar and he favored the old songs of the IWW period. His change in height had led to a change of wardrobe that had in turn inspired a change in his politics. No longer did he pore over hagiographies of the Führer; now he was reading Emma Goldman’s Living My Life. And this change was as temperamental as ideological, for suddenly he seemed sensitive to the labor of the many gardeners and cooks and janitors at Eton who were always in the background of everyone’s snapshots and who maintained the miles and miles of grounds. We’d stroll past a frosted-over greenhouse on a cold November afternoon and through the cloudy glass we’d see the Scottish gardeners hovering and stretching and reaching as they bedded down bulbs for the winter or repotted plants or misted giant tropical ferns, and Howie would start grumbling about the unfairness of things: “Why should they have to work so hard to make things beautiful for us?” I felt like pointing out that a gardener’s life was pleasantly varied by the seasons and offered chances for self-expression and in any event was a skilled craft, but Howie’s sympathy for what he called “the poor” came as such a welcome relief to last year’s fascism that I scarcely wanted to discourage it. Any sign of suffering moved Howie, even to the point of tears. He was also treating me with kindness and for the first time was willing to listen to me when I talked about my shrink or my homosexuality or my infatuation with the Scotts, although he was dubious about most of my enthusiasms. He thought psychoanalysis was a terrible waste of money and breath. As for homosexuality, he didn’t know what to think about it. Last year he had told me with a saurian little smile that the Führer had liquidated Ernst Röhm for his “inversion.” But now all of Howie’s views were becoming mammalian. I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He held out his long palm towards her – coloured a rich brown like Kiki’s, with all the lines drawn in a still darker shade. The goggles hung from his index finger. Zora moved to snatch them but instead nudged them from his finger. She thrust her hands into the water; they twirled on down to the bottom, the red band spiralling, inanimate, yet dancing. Zora took a shallow asthmatic breath and tried to dive. Halfway down the buoyancy of her own flesh reeled her back up, ass first. ‘You want me to – ?’ offered the boy and didn’t wait for the answer. He curved in on himself and shot down with barely a splash. He resurfaced a moment later with the goggles hanging from his wrist. He dropped them into her hands, another fumbling  the anatomy lesson move, for it took all the energy Zora had to tread water while simultaneously opening her palms to receive them. Without a word she kicked away to the side, trying her best to climb the ladder with dignity, and left the pool. Except she didn’t quite leave. For the time it takes to swim one length she stood by the side of the lifeguard’s chair and watched the smiling sun make its way through the water, watched the initial seal-pup flip-flop of the boy’s torso, the ploughing and lifting of two dark arms in turbine motion, the grinding muscles of the shoulders, the streamlined legs doing what all human legs could do if only they tried a little harder. For a whole twenty-three seconds the last thing on Zora’s mind was herself. ‘I knew I knew you – Mozart.’ He was dressed now, the necklines of several T-shirts visible underneath his Red Sox hoodie. His black jeans swamped the white scallop-shell toes of his sneakers. If Zora hadn’t just seen him almost as God intended, she would have had no idea of the contours beneath all of this. The only clue was that elegant neck of his, angling the head away from the body like a young animal looking about the world for the first time. He was sitting on the outdoor steps of the gym, legs wide open, earphones on, nodding to the music – Zora almost stood on him. ‘Sorry – if I can just . . .’ she murmured, stepping round. He slipped his earphones down to his neck, bounced up and kept pace with her down the stairs. ‘Hey, hat girl – yo, I’m talking to you – hey, slow down for a second there.’ Zora stopped at the bottom of the stairs, pushed the brim of her stupid hat up, looked into his face and recognized him at last. ‘Mozart,’ he repeated, cocking a finger at her. ‘Right? You took my player – my man Levi’s sister.’ ‘Zora, right.’ ‘Carl. Carl Thomas. I knew it was you. Levi’s sister.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91) “But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Handy, and Josh White, introduce me to Frankie Newton and tell tall tales about Ethel Waters. And these people were not meant to be looked on by me as celebrities, but as a part of Beauford's life and as part of my inheritance. I may have been with Beauford, for example, the first time I saw Paul Robeson, in concert, and in Othello: but I know that he bought tickets tor us-really, for me-to see and hear Miss Marian Anderson, at Carnegie Hall. Because of her color, Miss Anderson was not allowed to sing at The Met, nor, as far as The Daughters of The Amer ican Revolution were concerned, anywhere in Washington where white people might risk hearing her. Eleanor Roosevelt was appalled by this species of patriotism and arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Me morial. This was a quite marvellous and passionate event in those years, triggered by the indignation of one woman who had, clearly, it seemed to me, married beneath her. By this time, I was working for the Army--or the Yankee dollar!-in New Jersey. I hitchhiked, in sub�zero weather, out of what I will always remember as one of the lowest and most obscene circles of Hell, into Manhattan: where both Beauford and Miss Anderson were on hand to inform me that I had no right to permit myself to be defined by so pitiful a people. Not only was I not born to be a slave: I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave-master. They had, the mas ters, incontestably, the rope-in ti me, with enough, they would hang themselves with it. They were not to hang me: I was to sec to that. If Beauford and Miss Anderson were a part of my inheritance, I was a part of their hope. OTHER ESSAYS l still remember Miss Anderson, at the end of that concert, in a kind of smoky yellow gown, her skin copper and tan, roses in the air about her, roses at her feet. Beauford painted it, an enormous painting, he fixed it in time, for me, forever, and he painted it, he said, for me. Beauford was the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blas phemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and l as his Pupil. He became, f( >r me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to sec him broken but I never saw him bow. His example operated as an enormous protection: for the Village, then, and not only for a boy like me, was an alabaster maze perched above a boiling sea. To lose oneself in the maze was to f.1ll into the sea.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Then he put his hand, above the quilt, very softly, somewhere on her thigh. She began to cry. ‘Ah got a good feelin’ about this semester,’ said Smith, and whistled and released his sprightly Southern chuckle. ‘Expectin’ standing room only.’ On to the blackboard Smith was poster-gumming a reproduction of Rembrandt’s Dr Nicolaes Tulp Demonstrating the Anatomy of the Arm , , that clarion call of an Enlightenment not yet arrived, with its rational apostles gathered around a dead man, their faces uncannily lit by the holy light of science. The left hand of the doctor, raised in explicit imitation (or so Howard would argue to his students) of the benefactions of Christ; the gentleman at the back staring out at us, requesting admiration for the fearless humanity of the project, the rigorous scientific pursuance of the dictum Nosce te ipsium , ‘Know thyself ’ – Howard had a long shtick about this painting that never failed to captivate his army of shopping-day students, their new eyes boring holes into the old photocopy. Howard had seen it so many times he could no longer see it at all. He spoke with his back to it, pointing to what he needed to with the pencil in his left hand. But today Howard felt himself caught in the painting’s orbit. He could see himself laid out on that very table, his skin white and finished with the world, his arm cut open for students to examine. He turned back to the window. Suddenly he spotted the small but unmistakable figure of his daughter, clomping a speedy diagonal towards the English Department. ‘My daughter,’ said Howard, without meaning to. ‘Zora? She coming today?’ ‘Oh, yes – yes, I believe so.’ ‘She’s such a satisfying student, rilly she is.’  the anatomy lesson ‘She works terribly hard,’ agreed Howard. He saw Zora stop by the corner of the Greenman to speak with another girl. Even from here Howard could see she was standing much too close to this other person, closing in on her personal space in a way Americans do not enjoy. Why was she wearing his old hat? ‘Oh, ah know it. Ah was supervising her Joyce class and her Eliot class last semester. Compared to the other freshmen, she was lahk a text-eating machine – ah mean, she strips the area of sentiment and goes to work . Ah’m dealing with these kids who are still saying Ah really like the part when and Ah love the way – you know, that’s their high-school-analysis level. But Zora . . .’ Smith whistled again. ‘She’s awl business. Whatever she gits in front of her she rips apart to see how it works.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. At its most basic, Fear of Flying is a trailblazing, historic account of what it meant to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of what women were told they should want and what they actually do want. Any woman alive and reading today is so familiar with this grappling that it doesn’t feel like grappling; it feels like the human condition. It is important to remember that when Erica Jong wrote it down, when she took feminism’s glasses off (and then its slacks, and then its panties), she made this grappling accessible to a mass audience of women who, for the first time, understood that they weren’t alone. To do this now is de rigueur; in my own debut novel, the female characters struggle with this condition but, by the time I wrote it, it wasn’t new; it was just the most recent version (and probably, four years later, no longer is). In fact, my book was so much a tribute that it ends the same way Fear of Flying does: a missing person standing in the doorway, returning home. When my first novel was made into a TV show, the poster the network created to advertise on billboards and cab roofs contained a series of visual signifiers to indicate to an audience the tradition of the story we were telling. Right there in the middle of the poster was Manhattan being opened up by a zipper. It is a reference to Fear of Flying, and, when I saw it, I nearly collapsed, I was so proud. I knew where I came from. —

• 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.