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)

  Its publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, had given it a healthy first run of about thirty thousand copies, but those sold out immediately upon publication of a rave review by John Updike in the New Yorker. He called the book a “winner” in the first sentence, said it had “class and sass, brightness and bite” in the second, and placed it in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint. An octogeneric Henry Miller declared that there was finally a female Tropic of Cancer. It was these masculine endorsements—the enraged New York Times review, written by Terry Stokes and dripping with misogyny, allegations of whining, and a soupçon of antisemitism seemed to have backfired—that created the frenzy at the scarcity of new, buyable copies as the world awaited Fear of Flying ’s second printing. But Holt never gave it a second run—there was a theory that they were having money problems—and so the book remained a critical hit and an object of desperate desire to those who couldn’t get their hands on it. A year later, it was published in paperback, debuting at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. As I write this half a century later, Fear of Flying has sold more than twenty million copies around the world. Fear of Flying was Erica Jong’s first novel, but not her first book. She was a Barnard graduate, with a master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature, working toward a PhD at Columbia, and had already published two books of poetry to gracious reviews. The novel made her an instant celebrity. She was cast upon the kind of endless book tour that overtakes an author when a publisher is caught short by a book’s success: more than a year of hastily scheduled panels, readings at colleges and bookstores, bookings on late-night TV, where she had to fend off the sexism of the men who wondered why a nice girl like her was writing so blatantly about sex; she had to endure the confrontations and the castigations of the women who blamed her for contributing to the disintegration of the American family. To each of these people, Erica calmly and simply made her case for women being sexual, emotional, intelligent, sentient, existent—she used her book tour to make a case for the woman as human being.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was Ron. The diners behind him complained of the draught. ‘Oh my God – you’ve got to see this guy. He’s amazing . Downstairs. He’s blowing everybody away .’ ‘This better be good – we’re smoking.’ ‘Zoor – I’m telling you. He’s like Keats with a knapsack.’ The three made their way back downstairs. Once in the basement, they could get only a foot further than the double doors and had to stand. They could hear but not see. The whole audience was on its feet swaying together, the music passing through the crowd like wind through a cornfield. The voice that was so exciting this room expressed itself with precision (it was the first time all night that nobody missed a word) and threw out complicated multisyllabic lines with apparent ease. The chorus was a simple repeated line, sung flat, yet sweetly: But it ain’t like that . The verses, by contrast, spun a witty, articulate tale about the various obstacles in the spiritual and material progress of a young black man. In the first verse, he was trying to prove he had Native American blood in order to get into the top colleges in the country. This – close to the bone in a college town – drew broad laughter. The following verse, concerning a girlfriend who had gone ahead with an abortion without informing him, included the following rhymes, completed without obvious pause for breath, and at incredible speed: My life to you seems wrong / Here’s me trynta to do these songs / When you paged me / To say ‘Carl, baby, I’m two weeks gone’ / Dropped the pager / In my teacup / start to feel I could redeem this / Now I know I need to treat ya / Neat and sweet and never cheat ya / in a week I went to see ya / No need to drag my ass on ‘Leeza’ / Was gonna get my Dr Spock on / Dat’s the medic, not the Klingon / But you already spoke with yo’ girls at work / And done decided I’m a jerk / Now, since  the anatomy lesson when does workin’ Macca D’s / Make this bitch the new authority / On my goddamn paternity? / Say what, Boo? Excuse me? / And yeah, I know you figured I’d be pleased / Depopulated by decree – But it ain’t like that. It elicited a spontaneous basement-wide gasp, followed by more laughter. People whistled and clapped. ‘Oh, that’s quite brilliant,’ said Claire to Ron, who in response held his head with both hands and pretended to swoon. Zora found a Moroccan footstool and climbed on to it.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Thus he hath gone and goes without rest since he died; such coin he pays back in satisfaction who yonder is too daring.” And I: “If that spirit who awaits the brink of life, ere he repents, abides there below, and mounts not up hither, unless holy prayers aid him, until so much time be passed as he hath lived,10 how has the coming here been vouchsafed to him?” “When he lived in highest glory,” said he, “in the market-place of Siena he stationed himself of his free will and put away all shame; and there, to deliver his friend from the pains he was suffering in Charles’s prison, he bought himself to tremble in every vein. No more will I tell, and darkly I know that I speak, but short time will pass ere thy neighbours will act so, that thou shalt be able to interpret it.11 This deed released him from those confines.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I’m sorry about your goggles, man. You still mad about that? I didn’t think nobody was using them. My man Anthony works in the locker room – he gets me in without a pass – so, you know.’ Zora did not know. The sing-song bird call of the traffic lights started up so that the blind might know when to walk. ‘I was just saying – you go to a lot of those things?’ asked Carl as they crossed the street together. ‘Like the Mozart?’ ‘Umm . . . I guess not . . . probably not as much as I should. Studying takes up a lot of my time, I guess.’ ‘You freshman?’ ‘Sophomore. First day.’ ‘Wellington?’ Zora nodded. They were approaching the main campus building. He seemed to want to slow her down, to put off the moment when she passed through the gate and out of his world. ‘ Scene . Educated sister. That’s cool, man – that’s really – that’s an amazing thing right there, that’s . . . good for you, you’re going the right way about your shit and all that – that’s the prize, education. We all gotta keep our eyes on the prize if we’re gonna rise, right? Wellington. Hmph. That’s nice.’ Zora smiled feebly. ‘No, man, you worked for it, you deserved it,’ said Carl, and looked around himself distractedly. He reminded her of the young boys she used to mentor in Boston – taking them to the park, to the movies – back when she had time to do that kind of stuff. His attention span was like theirs. And always the toe-tapping and head-nodding as if stillness was the danger. ‘ ’Cos the thing about Mozart, right,’ he said suddenly. ‘This is the thing right here – I mean about the Requiem – I don’t know  On Beauty too much about his other shit, but that Requiem, that we were listening to – OK, so you know the Lacrimosa part?’ His fingers worked the air like a maestro, hoping to conduct the reaction he wanted out of his new companion. ‘The Lacrimosa – you know it, man.’ ‘Er . . . no,’ said Zora, nothing with alarm her fellow students pouring in to register. She was late already. ‘It’s like the eighth bit,’ said Carl impatiently. ‘I sampled it for this tune I made, after I heard it at that show, right – and it’s crazy – with all the angels singing higher and higher and those violins, man – swish dah DAH, swish da DAH, swish da DAH – it’s amazing listening to that – and it sounds mad cool when you put words over the top and a beat below – you know the part, it’s like – ’ said Carl and began to hum the tune again. ‘I really don’t know it. I’m not really a classical music type of – ’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Educated sister. That’s cool, man – that’s really – that’s an amazing thing right there, that’s . . . good for you, you’re going the right way about your shit and all that – that’s the prize, education. We all gotta keep our eyes on the prize if we’re gonna rise, right? Wellington. Hmph. That’s nice.’ Zora smiled feebly. ‘No, man, you worked for it, you deserved it,’ said Carl, and looked around himself distractedly. He reminded her of the young boys she used to mentor in Boston – taking them to the park, to the movies – back when she had time to do that kind of stuff. His attention span was like theirs. And always the toe-tapping and head-nodding as if stillness was the danger. ‘ ’Cos the thing about Mozart, right,’ he said suddenly. ‘This is the thing right here – I mean about the Requiem – I don’t know  On Beauty too much about his other shit, but that Requiem, that we were listening to – OK, so you know the Lacrimosa part?’ His fingers worked the air like a maestro, hoping to conduct the reaction he wanted out of his new companion. ‘The Lacrimosa – you know it, man.’ ‘Er . . . no,’ said Zora, nothing with alarm her fellow students pouring in to register. She was late already. ‘It’s like the eighth bit,’ said Carl impatiently. ‘I sampled it for this tune I made, after I heard it at that show, right – and it’s crazy – with all the angels singing higher and higher and those violins, man – swish dah DAH, swish da DAH, swish da DAH – it’s amazing listening to that – and it sounds mad cool when you put words over the top and a beat below – you know the part, it’s like – ’ said Carl and began to hum the tune again. ‘I really don’t know it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There are notebook pages of half-poems, lists of things she’d like to do, drafts of a Fear of Flying musical (“Why am IIIIII...so afraid to flyyyyyy?”). She has at least one living ex-husband who remembers everything. She has a devoted daughter who is also a good listener and who collected stories from the carousel of her chaotic childhood. Together, a picture emerged. The story of the publication of Fear of Flying is the story of Fear of Flying. It’s the story of a woman, brilliant and cheerful and optimistic and energetic and voracious, eager to engage in her work, in her life, her beating, bloody heart out for anyone to see, flattered by the attention, overwhelmed and left lonely by how few people could really understand what it means to have the book that contains your insides widely consumed by the public. It’s the story of a woman who can roll a Mephistopheles reference off her tongue as easily as she can pull out a blow job pun. It is magnificent. I told her this. Even though she doesn’t remember that time, she can still talk with incredible specificity and depth about the writing process and its challenges. She’s happy she seemed to have had a good time back then, even if it was complicated. She smiled, and I could see the broad grin of that back cover as if a day hadn’t passed for either her or for me. 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.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again. The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg was my main hero. I spent a lot of time staring at her on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta. I owned VHS copies of all her movies, but many of them were too powerful to watch often. The Color Purple was too sad. Ghost filled me with too much longing, and Whoopi only had a small part in it. Sister Act was tricky because the songs got stuck in my head and made me want to laugh, run wild, dance, be impassioned, or whatnot. That would not be good for my sleep. I could only handle it once a week or so. I usually watched Soapdish and The Player back-to-back as though they were two volumes of a single film. On my visits to Rite Aid to pick up my pills, I’d buy a pre-owned VHS tape, maybe a box of microwave popcorn, sometimes a two-liter bottle of Diet Sprite if I felt I had the strength to carry it home. Those cheap movies were usually terrible— Showgirls, Enemy of the State, I’ll Be Home for Christmas starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas, whose face unnerved me—but I didn’t mind watching them once or twice. The stupider the movie, the less my mind had to work. But I preferred the familiar—Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg, doing what they always do. • • • WHEN I WENT TO SEE Dr. Tuttle in early August for my monthly in-person visit, she wore a white sleeveless nightgown with tattered lace across her bosom and huge honey-tinted sunglasses with blinders. She still had the neck brace on. “I had a procedure done on my eyes,” she explained, “and the central air has sprung a leak. Excuse the humidity.” Sweat bubbled across her chest and arms like blisters. Her hair frizzed up and out. The fat cats lay on the fainting sofa. “They’re overheated,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Better not disturb them.” There was no place else to sit, so I stood against the bookshelf, bracing myself and taking shallow breaths. The smell of ammonia in the room was intense. It seemed to be coming from the cats. “Did you bring your book of nightmares?” Dr. Tuttle asked, sitting down behind her desk. “I forgot my journal today,” I said. “The nightmares have been getting worse and worse, though,” I lied. My dreams had actually mellowed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. I returned to her life a couple of years ago, when I was lucky enough to be hired to write a screenplay about what happened to her around the time of Fear of Flying’s publication. She couldn’t help me much with the facts. By then, she was experiencing memory problems, which have only worsened since. She couldn’t recall her feelings around the time of the publication, or any of the events or people she met. She could only recall the shame of losing her lawsuit and her regret for filing it in the first place. I went searching. Her archives are housed at Columbia, where she finished her classwork but not her dissertation. Inside those boxes are her literary legacy and the living memory of the electric life she lived. Big New Yorker day books that mark her meetings, her ideas, her doodles, her to-do lists. Letters from everyone from Ingmar Bergman to Henry Miller to Joan Rivers extolling her bravery and warning her to not let all that Hollywood shit get her down.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My other mother never screams, and I owe everything I am to her. At thirteen I follow her through all the art museums of Europe, and through her eyes I see Turner’s storms and Tiepolo’s skies and Monet’s haystacks and Rodin’s monument to Balzac and Botticelli’s Primavera and da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. At fourteen I get the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay for my birthday, at fifteen e.e. cummings, at sixteen William Butler Yeats, at seventeen Emily Dickinson, and at eighteen my mother and I are no longer on speaking terms. She introduces me to Shaw, to Colette, to Orwell, to Simone de Beauvoir. She furiously debates Marxism with me at the dinner table. She gives me ballet lessons and piano lessons and weekly tickets to the New York Philharmonic (where I am bored and spend much time in the ladies’ room applying Revlon’s Powder Pink Lustrous Lipstick to my thirteen-year-old lips). I go to the Art Students League every Saturday and my mother painstakingly criticizes my drawings. She shepherds my career as if it were her own: I must learn cast and figure drawing in charcoal first, then still lifes in pastels, then finally oil painting. When I apply for the High School of Music and Art, my mother worries over my portfolio with me, takes me to the exam, and reassures me, as I worriedly recapitulate each part of it to her. When I decide I want to be a doctor as well as an artist, she starts buying me books on biology. When I start writing poetry, she listens to each poem and praises it as if I were Yeats. All my adolescent maunderings are beautiful to her. All my drawings, greeting cards, cartoons, posters, oil paintings presage future greatness to her. Surely no girl could have a more devoted mother, a mother more interested in her becoming a whole person, in becoming, if she wished, an artist. Then why am I so furious with her? And why does she make me feel that I am nothing but a blurred carbon copy of her? That I have never had a single thought of my own? That I have no freedom, no independence, no identity at all? Perhaps sex accounted for my fury. Perhaps sex was the real Pandora’s box. My mother believed in free love, in dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne, in dancing in the Greek Isles, in performing the Rites of Spring. Yet of course, she did not, or why did she say that boys wouldn’t respect me unless I “played hard to get"? That boys wouldn’t chase me if I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” that boys wouldn’t call me if I “made myself cheap"? Sex. I was terrified of the tremendous power it had over me. The energy, the excitement, the power to make me feel totally crazy! What about that? How do you make that jibe with “playing hard to get"?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It is also in part through Poe that Nabokov manages to suggest some consistently held attitudes toward language and literature. H.H. says of his artistic labors, “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?.” The rhetorical question is coy enough, because he has answered it at the beginning of his narrative; he hasn’t failed, but neither can he ever be entirely successful, because “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”—an admission many Romantic and Symbolist writers would not make. Nabokov’s remark about Joyce’s giving “too much verbal body to words” (Playboy interview) succinctly defines the burden the post-Romantics placed on the word, as though it were an endlessly resonant object rather than one component in a referential system of signs (see seva ascendes … quidquam for a parody of Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing). H.H.’s acknowledgment of the limitations of language leaves many writers open to criticism, especially Romantic poets such as Poe. “When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville,” said Nabokov; “I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,” writes John Shade in Pale Fire (line 632 of the poem); the implications are clear enough. In Lolita, his choice of both subject matter and narrator parody Poe’s designation, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” of the “most poetical topic in the world”; “the death of a beautiful woman … and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” (see also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., p. 236). Both Annabel Lee and Lolita “die,” the latter figuratively as well as literally, in terms of her fading nymphic qualities and escape from H.H., who seems to invoke yet another of Poe’s lost ladies when he calls Lolita “Lenore” (though the primary allusion is to Bürger’s poem, said Nabokov; see Lenore).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki was reminded of that famous poem of Claire’s about an orgasm that seemed to take apart all the different elements of an orgasm and lay them out along the page, the way a mechanic dismantles an engine. It was one of the few poems by Claire that Kiki had felt she understood without having to be talked through it by her husband or her daughter. ‘Honey,’ said Warren. He touched Claire’s hand lightly but with intent. ‘So where’s Howard?’ ‘Missing in action,’ said Kiki, and smiled at Warren warmly. ‘Probably in a bar with Erskine.’ ‘God – I haven’t seen Howard in for ever ,’ said Claire. ‘Working on the Rembrandt still, though?’ persisted Warren. He was the son of a fireman, and Kiki liked this best about him,  On Beauty although she knew all the other ideas she connected with this one were romantic notions on her part, not relevant to the real lived existence of a busy biochemist. He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies. ‘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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At Cornell (where the annotator was his student in 1953–1954), Nabokov would begin his first class by saying, “Great novels are above all great fairy tales.… Literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. It is said that literature was born with the fable of the boy crying, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ as he was being chased by the animal. This was not the birth of literature; it happened instead the day the lad cried ‘Wolf!’ and the tricked hunters saw no wolf … the magic of art is manifested in the dream about the wolf, in the shadow of the invented wolf.” As suggested in the Introduction, Nabokov goes to great lengths to show the reader that the boy has been crying “Wolf!” all along, and that the subject of Nabokov’s art is in part the relationship between the old boy and the nonexistent wolf. See I have only words to play with. dazzling coincidences … poets love: evident everywhere in Nabokov’s work is his “poet’s love” of coincidence. The verbal figurations and “coincidences” limned in Who’s Who in the Limelight are of great consequence, for H.H. alludes to “actors, producers, playwrights, and shots of static scenes” which prefigure the action of the novel. The three entries in this imaginary yearbook represent H.H., Lolita, and, obviously, Quilty. Although no “producer” is listed, it will shortly be seen that he reveals his name covertly (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), and shows his hand throughout. The importance of Who’s Who in the Limelight is also discussed in the Introduction, here and here. Pym, Roland: Pym is the title character in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838); he is also mentioned in Nabokov’s poem, “The Refrigerator Awakes” (1942), in Poems (p. 12). The name suits H.H. well, because, like Pym’s, his is a first-person narrative that begins in the spirit of hoax but evolves into something very different. See James … Hoaxton for “Hoaxton.” As for “Roland,” Nabokov intended no allusions to the medieval Chanson de Roland, to the character in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or to Browning’s Childe Roland. For Poe, see Lo-lee-ta.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And being thus no less endued with eloquence than with singular learning, he wrote many books for them that should come after: whereof part by negli- gence of times be intercepted, and part now extant, do sufficiently declare with how much wisdom and doctrine he flourished, and with how much virtue he excelled amongst the rude and barbarous people. The like was Anacharsis amongst the most luskish Seythes. But amongst the books of Lucius Apuleius, which are perished and prevented, howbeit greatly desired of us nowadays, one was entituled Banquet- ing Questions, another entreating of the nature of fish, another of the generation of beasts, another containing his Epigrams, and another called Herma- goras: but such as are now extant are the four books named Floridorum, wherein is contained a flourishin style and a savoury kind of learning, which delighteth, holdeth, and rejoiceth the reader marvellously ; wherein you shall find a great variety of things, as leaping one from another: one excellent and copious oration, containing all the grace and virtue of the art oratory, whereby he cleareth himself of the crime of art magie, which was slanderously objected against him by his envious adversaries, wherein is contained such force of eloquence and doctrine as he seemeth to XX THE LIFE OF LUCIUS APULEIUS pass and excel himself. There is another book of the god or spirit of Socrates, whereof S. Augustine maketh mention in his book of the definition of spirits and description of men: two other books of the opinion of Plato, wherein is briefly contained that which before was largely expressed: one book of Cosmo- graphy, comprising many things of Aristotle’s Meteors: the dialogue of Trismegistus translated by him out of Greek into Latin, so fine, that it rather seemeth with more eloquence turned into Latin, than it was before written in Greek : but principally these eleven books of the Golden .Ass are enriched with such pleasant matter, with such excellency and variety of flourishing tales, that nothing may be more sweet and delectable; whereby worthily they may be entituled, The Books of the Golden Ass, for the passing style and matter therein. For what can be more acceptable than this Ass of Gold in- deed? Howbeit there may be many which would rather entitle it Metamorphosis, that is to say, a transfiguration or transformation, by reason of the argument and matter therein. xxi abes dem day re istas be vos ia di. a aan ja - eats gii zeit xw oae 3. ER MD manors oy dive 2 Aes ed bm T3 THE PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR TO HIS SON FAUSTINUS AND UNTO THE READERS OF THIS BOOK That I to thee some joyous jests may show in gentle glose, And frankly feed thy bended ears with passing pleasant prose: So that thou deign in seemly sort this wanton book to view, That is set-out and garnished fine, with written phrases new. I will declare how one by hap his human figure lost,

• 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)

  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. — 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.

• 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)

  Jong LoveErica Jong’s first novel, Fear of Flying, feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. 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.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Each student’s poem was only a slight variation on the poem they had brought in the week before, and all poems were consistently met with Claire’s useful mix of violent affection and genuine insight. So Ron’s poems were always about modern sexual alienation, and Daisy’s poems were always about New York, Chantelle’s were always about the black struggle, and Zora’s were the kind that appear to have been generated by a random word-generating machine. It was Claire’s great gift as a teacher to find  the anatomy lesson something of worth in all these efforts and to speak to their authors as if they were already household names in poetry-loving homes across America. And what a thing it is, at nineteen years old, to be told that a new Daisy poem is a perfect example of the Daisy oeuvre, that it is indeed evidence of a Daisy at the height of her powers, exercising all the traditional, much loved, Daisy strengths! Claire was an excellent teacher. She reminded you how noble it was to write poetry; how miraculous it should feel to communicate what is most intimate to you, and to do so in this stylized way, through rhyme and metre, images and ideas. After each student had read their work and it had been discussed seriously and pertinently, Claire would finish by reading a poem by a great, usually dead poet, and encourage her class to discuss this poem no differently than they had discussed the others. And in this way one learned to imagine continuity between one’s own poetry and the poetry of the world. What a feeling! You walked out of that class if not shoulder to shoulder with Keats and Dickinson and Eliot and the rest, then at least in the same echo chamber, in the same roll-call of history. The transformation was most noticeable on Carl. Three weeks ago he had attended his first class wearing a comic, sceptical slouch. He read his lyrics in a grumpy mumble and seemed angered by the interested appreciation with which they were met. ‘It’s not even a poem ,’ he countered. ‘It’s rap.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Claire asked. ‘They two different things,’ Carl had argued, ‘two different art forms. Except rap ain’t no art form. It’s just rap .’ ‘So it can’t be discussed?’ ‘You can discuss it – I ain’t stopping you.’ The first thing Claire did with Carl’s rap that day was show him of what it was made. Iambs, spondees, trochees, anapaests. Passionately Carl denied any knowledge of these arcane arts. He was used to being feˆted at the Bus Stop but not in a classroom.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  See frock-fold ... Browning for another reference to Pippa Passes, and Pale Fire, p. 186. For My Last Duchess’s Fra Pandolf, see Pale Fire, p. 246. J’ai toujours ... Dublinois: “I have always admired the [ormonde] work of the sublime Dubliner.” The sublime one is James Joyce, but ormonde does not exist in French; it refers to Dublin’s Hotel Ormond (no e), whose restaurant provides the setting for the so-called “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, and whose name is a most Joycean pun—hors [de ce] monde (“out-of-this-world,” a further tribute). (See also Keys, p. 20.) The reverential allusion is delivered obliquely in the requisite Joycean manner. Also in the Dubliner’s spirit is the “jolls-joyce” car in which the hero of Ada rides in one scene (p. 473). See outspoken book: Ulysses. In a 1966 National Educational Television network interview, Nabokov said the “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Bely’s St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time.” “On fait son grand Joyce after doing one’s petit Proust,” reads a parenthetical statement in Ada, added to the “manuscript” by gently derisive Ada herself, “In [her] lovely hand” (p. 169). When Véra Nabokov saw some of the opened pages of the annotator’s copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visible beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, she turned to her husband and said, “Darling, it looks like your copy of Ulysses.” Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce and Nabokov, he dismissed the possibility of formal “influence”: “My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early ’twenties, was in the ’thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the ’fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell” (Wisconsin Studies interview). See children-colors ... a passage in James Joyce. In addition to admiring Joyce, Nabokov also knew him. “I saw [Joyce] a few times in Paris in the late thirties,” recalled Nabokov. “Paul and Lucie Léon, close friends of his, were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a French lecture I had been asked to deliver on Pushkin under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the Nouvelle Revue Française). I had happened to replace at the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, author of a bestselling novel, I remember its title, La Rue du Chat qui Pěche, but not the lady’s name.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Sed in mea Fotide non operosus sed inordinatus or- natus addebat gratiam. Uberes enim crines leniter remissos et cervice dependulos ac dein per colla dis- positos sensimque sinuato patagio residentes paulisper ad finem conglobatos in summum verticem nodus as- 10 trinxerat. Nec diutius quivi tantum cruciatum volup- 62 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II so excellent in beauty, though she were thrown down from heaven, sprung of the seas, nourished of the floods, though she were Venus herself, accompanied with the Graces, waited upon by all the court of Cupids, girded with her beautiful scarf of love, sweet like cinnamon and bedewed with balsam ; yet if she appeared bald she could in no wise please, no, not her own Vulcan. O how well doth a fair colour and a brilliant sheen agree with glittering hair! Be- hold it encountereth with the beams of the sun like swift lightning, or doth softly reflect them back again, or changeth clean contrary into another grace. Sometimes the beauty of the hair, shining like gold, resembles the colour of honey ; sometimes, when it is raven black, the blue plume and azure feathers about the necks of doves, especially when it is anointed with the nard of Arabia, or trimly tuffed out with the teeth of a fine comb; and if it be tied up in the nape of the neck, it seemeth to the lover that beholdetli the same as a glass that yieldeth forth a more pleasant and gracious comeliness. The same is it if it should be gathered thick on the crown of the head, or if it should hang down scattering be- hind on the shoulders of the woman. Finally, there is such a dignity in the hair, that whatsoever she be, though she never be so bravely attired with gold, silks, precious stones, and other rich and gorgeous ornaments, yet if her hair be not curiously set forth, she cannot seem fair. But in my Fotis not her studied care thereof but rather its disorderliness did increase her beauty : her rich tresses hung gently about her shoulders, and were dispersed abroad upon every part of her neck hanging from the nape, and fell fairly down enwound in a kerchief, until at last they were trussed up Egi 3 11 LUCIUS APULEIUS tatis eximiae sustinere, sed pronus in eam, qua fine