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Authors: Erica Jong

BOOK: How to Save Your Own Life
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They assembled one by one and hovered near the ceiling; I called the roll and each of them answered (in the most acerbic words he knew).
The first to arrive was an aging midget-
cum
-literary critic who combed his hair over his bald spot, wore elevator shoes to reach the willowy college girls he seduced at writers' conferences, had owed five different first novels to five different publishers for the past twenty years, and once, many years ago, had paid a visit to my college writing class, where he told the tender, pre-Fem-Lib sophomore maidens that women were biologically incapable of writing either poetry or prose. He now reviewed books for a magazine of awesome influence and he had broken pub date to call Candida “a mammoth pudenda.” He also hated Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, and Isaac Bashevis Singer-so it was almost an honor to be attacked by him, but still, on a night like this, his words rang in my ears like the thundering voice of Truth: “a mammoth pudenda,” “spoiled by success,” and, finally, “Ms. Wing would do well to realize that popularity, too, may be a form of purgatory.” I didn't know, really, what the last thundering judgment meant, but it terrified me. The hostile tone was riveting—and so very final somehow. Why were my bad reviews so irresistibly mnemonic, my good ones so instantly forgettable? A mystery. The bad reviews all had the authoritative sound of my mother's voice.
Herbert Honig checked in with his jaunty black eyepatch, his auburn goatee, his psoriasis (and the heartbreak that accompanies it), his penchant for “borrowing” his graduate students' original research, and his half-dozen remaindered novels. He pronounced me “a polemical pornographer” and left immediately for Yaddo (with an adoring female Ph.D. candidate for whom he had craftily obtained a fellowship there concurrent with his own). Next, I heard from Darryl W. Vaskin (the gray-bearded professor of seventeenth-century literature at Harvard) that my poetry was not as good as George Herbert's (with whom I had not realized, till that moment, I was competing). After that, Reah Taylor Carnovsky appeared (behind her shelflike bosom and her mustachioed upper lip) to pronounce me “a piddling poetaster.” (Reah made her living putting other women writers down, so it could not be said she was biased toward her own sex. She had studied with Herbert Honig at Yale and shared his fondness for pontifical judgments.) She too immediately left for Yaddo to complete her new book on adumbrations of the Industrial Revolution in the imagery of Keats.
When the critics had all checked in, reassuring me that I was totally talentless, an egregious exhibitionist, and a panting publicity hound, my fans followed. Not my rational, well-beloved fans, my faithful readers who wrote me notes of gratitude—but the crazies: the proctologist from Mississippi who wanted me to send him my soiled underthings in a plastic bag and who enclosed a check for fifty-three dollars (a mysteriously arrived-at figure) so that I might replace them; the “pastor” from New Jersey who said I sounded like “a very broadminded individual” and wanted me to correspond with him now that his wife had “passed on” (the pastor's epistolary style resembled a page torn from an “adult” novel, shrink-wrapped against prying fingers on Forty-second Street); the industrialist from Buffalo who called at midnight to ask if he might visit me “for a cup of truth”; the self-styled “scrap-metal millionaire” from San Diego who just wanted to know how I “felt about coproph agia,” and didn't I agree that “love juice” was “packed with vitamins”?
What had I done to deserve the attentions of such people? Surely they correctly perceived something twisted in my own personality, some warp in my soul that corresponded with theirs, some high-pitched whistle of perversion that could be picked up only by their own finely tuned perverts' ears.
I was dying. Under the beating of the critics' black wings, under the perverts' urine-stained sheets, in the hum of the stone-cold “conditioned” air, I was sinking into the grave as surely as my cancer-ridden grandmother had, as surely as any derelict in the Bowery, as surely as the Jews gassed at Auschwitz had. My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust. I seemed to see through to my own bones (which glowed greenish, as under a fluoroscope), and to actually feel the flesh falling from them, softening and rotting. I thought of hanged men letting go of their bowels, shitting in their pants even as they hung limply in air, rotting corpses on carts during the London Plague, rotting corpses stacked against the walls of Siena during the Black Death. There would be nothing left of my face but black eyeholes and glaring teeth. Isadora, Candida-it was all one. The woman, the portrait of the woman-both crumbling and dying; the flesh rotting, the paper turning to dust, the canvas peeling, and the critics' voices of death thundering above all my struggles to be heard, to live, to celebrate life.
I was a fish gasping on the bed and they were the fishermen reeling me in from the ceiling. They had me on the hook of my own mortality; fame was the bait I had swallowed and now it was stuck in my throat, stopping my screams. All my attempts at poetry, my love of Keats, of Whitman, of Blake-had come to this. They were going to silence me, silence me, and go on talking about the adumbrations of the Industrial Revolution among the dead.
Dead. You have to be dead to make the grade. But the flesh is already falling off the bone and there is no pyramid to mark the tomb where I lie, no plaque to mark the house where I write, no place even in the anthologies because they have declared me dead.
The dead have declared me dead! I know, with the absolute certainty of a nightmare, that I am dying. My uterus is a stone in my rotting carcass; I have no child; my three books have been declared dead by the thundering voices of the critics; my readers have forsaken me; only the perverts care. The necrophiliacs come forward to fuck my corpse-and as they pound away at my cunt, the flesh falls away like rotting meat, leaving only the gleaming greenish-white shark-jaw of the pelvic arch.
I am covered with sweat. My heart is pounding as if it is about to take flight, leave my chest cavity, shoot to the moon. I bound out of bed, turn on the light, pace, look at myself in the mirror to see if I'm still there, race back to the night table, pick up the phone and stand there stupidly, wanting to call someone, wanting to talk to someone, anyone who'll comfort me.
Bennett. It's three in the morning-but what if I call Bennett ? A cold wind passes over my body with that thought. Bennett would be angry at being awakened. Bennett might not be home (and if he isn‘t-I don't want to know). Bennett would never understand.
My soul sinks still deeper with this realization: my husband -I cannot even call my own husband at a time like this.
I stand there holding the phone. I think of calling Jeffrey, my closest male friend, my occasional lover. He would call me if he were panicked in a hotel room. He has called me. But what about his wife? I'd wake his wife—and she'd suspect something about our relationship which, despite the occasional once-or-twice-a-year mercy fuck, really isn't true. And she's too paranoid not to be upset by my call.
Well, maybe I should call Bennett. Maybe I'm being neurotic to think he won't want to talk to me. It's absurd. I will call him.
I dial the hotel operator, wait fourteen rings to get her, and give the New York area code and number. I'm shaking as I do this. Whenever I call Bennett from out of town, I'm somehow always sure he's with another woman or not home. Why I think this, I can't say. To my knowledge Bennett has never ...
“Hello?”
“Hello,” comes Bennett's tentative sleepy voice.
“Bennett darling, I know it's crazy calling like this but I have to talk to you. I had such a panic just now. I can't sleep and I'm sure I'm dying. I know it sounds crazy, but ...” Somehow, I feel the need to apologize, to explain.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“I don't know. Maybe three o‘clock. I can't sleep.”
“I have a patient at seven-thirty,” he says grumpily. “I can't sleep late like you can.”
“Please talk to me-just for a little while, okay? I called because I had the weirdest fantasy. My flesh was rotting, and falling off my bones. It was horrible.” I shudder just thinking of it again.
“Well, why don't you get up and write a poem?” Bennett says sleepily and with what seems to be-or do I imagine it?—an edge of snideness. Then he goes on: “If you can't tolerate separation like this, maybe you shouldn't leave me for three days.”
I am momentarily speechless, but already anger is replacing panic. “Well, it's certainly clear I can't call you when I feel lousy,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you're certainly not very sympathetic, are you?”
“Why don't you write it down to tell your analyst?” Bennett says flatly. “Or write a poem.
I
have to get back to sleep or I'll never get up in the morning for my patient.”
“I know, Bennett,” I say bitterly. “You sell it. I know you can't be expected to give it away free.”
“Don't be angry,” he says, missing the point.
“Who's angry?”
“See you tomorrow?” he asks.
“If you're lucky.”
“Good-bye, Isadora. I refuse to fight.”
He hangs up.
I stand there, holding the phone, listening to the hundreds of miles of static between Chicago and New York, between Bennett and me.
Bennett tells all in Woodstock ...
Jealousy
is all the fun you think they had....
In the morning the demons were gone, burned off by the sun, banished by daylight. At 10:00 A.M., I participated in still another panel on women and creativity (probably my tenth on the subject that year), and flew home, totally exhausted, longing for my own bed, my own man, my own child.
A cab from Kennedy, a long discussion with the driver about how he could write a best seller if he only had the time—and finally I was home.
Let me invite you into my house-the rambling co-op I shared with Bennett on Seventy-seventh Street. It was the block I'd played hopscotch on, learned to ride a bike on. We were living there because my grandfather had given us the apartment—the same apartment Bennett's lawyer later claimed belonged solely to him.
His part of the apartment was middle-aged and middle-class. I was never allowed to hang posters or buy bright-colored furniture for the living room or foyer or dining room because a patient might be shocked. Bennett subscribed to the totally inexplicable theory that psychiatrists-who, after all, deal with all that is kinky and imaginative about the human soul: dreams, fantasies, sexual obsessions-ought somehow to comport themselves like accountants. And furnish their offices like dentists' waiting rooms in the suburbs. Why he believed this, I cannot tell you. But he was as fierce about it as if he were a Roman Catholic fighting the Protestants on the issue of transubstantiation. As a result, the front of our apartment looked like a dentist's waiting room in the suburbs and the back of it was a riotous gallery of my rebellion. Posters of me covered the walls; strange art objects made by my friends were strewn about; books were stacked on the floor, clothes draped over chairs, baskets of cut flowers from various admirers of mine distributed here and there on littered surfaces. Everything seemed dashingly colorful, messy, homey, and warm.
A European journalist once came to the apartment to interview me and used up all her resultant column-inches on a description of the place and what it reflected about my marriage. A cheap shot, perhaps, but nevertheless accurate. The apartment was the key to our marriage in many ways. In fact there were times when I doubted whether Bennett would have married me at all if I had not come with a co-op.
It's always nice to come home-even if home has a “white-sound” machine in the foyer and resembles the interior of a dentist's office. The first thing I always do is kick off my shoes, strip naked, and open the mail. I read my fan mail in the nude —one form of nakedness greeting another.
During the previous spring, I ought to say, the mail had become as unmanageable and guilt-provoking as the Sunday Times. For six months after my novel was published, I had done nothing but answer all my correspondents at length, and now, though I'd largely stopped that, I still felt torn about it.
Though I'd certainly had my share of the crazies who came to haunt me in lonely hotel rooms, I had to admit in daylight that most of my mail was touching, heartfelt, and serious. The trouble was: there was no way to answer it. Even if I'd had the time to write to them all, there was absolutely no way to answer the questions my correspondents posed. I didn't know the answers myself. If I did, would I be in such lousy shape?
Dear Candida/Isadora,
I have never written a fan letter before, and I am very nervouse writing this to you. But what-the-hell.
Youre book hit me right between-the-eyes like nothing I have ever read. Your right about men and women and sex and the man-woman relationship and EVERYTHING ! ! ! I used to think all Womans Libbers were a load-of-shit, till I read you. (Youre book, I mean). Then I knew how right you are.
The problem is I have three children (they are loveley kids 3, 6, and 8) and my husband is very jealouse and there is no way for me to go away like you did and get Adventure or Sex or even have time to think about my Development as a Human Being and Woman. I am frequently horney, never have climaxed (Come) with my husband who says women don't need it. Is he right? Should I argue with him? He is a nise man though he gambles a little and their are the kids. I would like to be a Woman Libber like yourself but my husband blows up if I even go to a girlfriend's house and stay until midnight. Or even Eleven.(P.M.) He says I can't go out unless I can earn the money for the babysitter and how can I earn the money for the babysitter when the kids bug me all day and I never finished High School because my first boy was born right before graduation? I tell him their youre kids too but he says the Mother is the responsable one and I feel guilty. Maybe he is right?! He works hard earning money for us all to eat and life is no pic nick for him either I am aware. What would you do in my position? I am writting to you because youre books shows how intelligent plus warm you are. I spoke to our minister who is supposed to be very forward-minded but he didn't say anything really that was Practical. I know your Jewish and maybe that doesn't apply but the Old Testament people were Jewish and they certainly knew alot us Christians could be helped by. Hope you won't think I'm a bigott. Actually my girlfriend is Jewish and youre Main Character (which is also you I believe) is exactly like me in all respects though Jewish. Please write right away or even you could call me Collect in San Antonio because I am so desparate plus beside-myself and I hope this is not an Imposition. I married my husband for security but I think he also fools behind my back (I have Proof too) and why shouldn't I have a night off to see my girlfriend not to mention other men though I am not that kind-of-girl.
Thanking you in advance for all youre help.
Sincerely yours,
Mrs. Henry Laffont

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