Picked-Up Pieces (64 page)

Still, after
Divine Right’s Trip
, in which America and its general populace form a backdrop for young tourists trailing their roots in some nirvana between here and Mars, it is salutary to read a novel in which the young and the middle-aged are interlocked, albeit in gruesome struggle. To judge by
Geronimo Rex
, young men like Bobby Dove Fleece still writhe and tremble under the old religious taboos; girls like Sylvia Wyche still struggle to save their hymens for their fiancés; instructors like Dr. Perrino still think they have something to teach; and all generations are mired equally in the squalid but substantial provincial ambience. Father and son, in this novel, lust after the same slut and the same muse. Mr. Hannah is nowhere better than he is in showing the complex currents of parent-child sympathy that swirl around acts of overt rebellion. Perhaps the South has a certain retarded solidarity; certainly Gurney Norman’s pageant of reconciliation occurs more plausibly in Kentucky than on an
Iowa corn farm or in a California orchard. Perhaps, too, the art of fiction is intrinsically mediating and anti-propagandistic; it reduces general issues to the faceted confusion of private lives, with their undoctrinaire mixing of personal quirk, conscious intention, and elementary biology. Of these two novels, Mr. Norman’s is winged with surer purpose and Mr. Hannah’s has the richer sense of circumstance. One rather skims, the other wallows; both give a fresh angle on the great American subject of Growing Up, and both offer the same American advice: Don’t do it until you must.

F
EAR OF
F
LYING
, by Erica Jong. 340 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.

Erica Jong’s first novel 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 notably 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, and masturbates as often, 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.

Admiring she is even of the impotence, madness, and defective hygiene of her many awful lovers. A feminist since birth (she says), radicalized at the age of thirteen “on the I.R.T. 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:

Her account of her travails among these silken creatures, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations.

The second of four daughters of a would-be paintress and a father who designed “ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets,” Isadora grew up in a fourteen-room apartment on Central Park West. She heavy-pets (let’s call it) at thirteen, remorsefully tries to starve herself at fourteen, embarks upon a series of psychiatrists (the first is Dr. Schrift; he’s short, of course, and tells her, “Ackzept being a vohman”), enters Barnard at seventeen, meets the brilliant Brian Stollerman when she is a freshman, seduces him and puts her virginity out of its misery, marries Brian after graduation, endures his swelling madness while she attends graduate school, commits and divorces him at twenty-two, takes up with an unwashed, musical loser called Charlie Fielding, is betrayed by him, embarks upon a swinging tour of Europe with a girl friend at the age of twenty-three, returns to New York, meets a silent thirty-one-year-old Chinese Freudian named Bennett Wing, marries him, and now, five years later, at the age of twenty-nine in 1971, attends with her husband an international congress of psychoanalysts in Vienna, where she meets, loves at first sight, and runs away with an
English Laingian psychiatrist called (yes) Adrian Goodlove. This life history is scattered carefreely backward and forward throughout three hundred and forty pages that should be read, one sometimes suspects, in fifty-minute sessions. A pattern and a person emerge, amid the wisecracks, postcards (“Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed”), and reflections upon the hard and curious lot of Woman. Intellectual condescension, physical intimidation, deodorant-selling insinuation—women suffer them all. The case for marriage is nailed in a sentence: “Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that
anything
had to be better.” Motherhood is another distrusted institution: “Basically, I think, I was furious with my mother for not teaching me how to be a woman, for not teaching me how to make peace between the raging hunger in my cunt and the hunger in my head.” Her mother, a frustrated artist, is full of “misplaced artistic aggression,” and Isadora thinks sadly of young wives “making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why.” The smaller discomforts of femininity are vividly, comically detailed, from the presence of a heavy suitcase to the absence of a needed Tampax; females, we are told, are even at a disadvantage making water by the roadside, tending to piss in their shoes. The one female complaint not registered, surprisingly, is the one most conspicuous in seriously sexy male fiction, such as Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time.” However adverse her circumstances, Isadora Wing seems to have no trouble attaining orgasm. And maybe this is what makes her saga so uncranky, for all its intelligent pain, and lends its prose a spun-sugar halo of wonder and fun, and gives its conclusion the smug snap of a shopping expedition satisfactorily completed:

The male reviewer, grateful to be served this lovable, delicious novel (each chapter garnished with epigraphs), embarrasses himself with digestive rumblings. While intimacy with Isadora Wing is maintained, the reader accepts the value she puts on her own story: a reconciliation of
the hunger at the poles of her being, a triumph, if precarious, over aerophobia and the socially conditioned guilt and slavishness that lie beneath it. At a little remove, however, the story can be viewed as that of a spoiled young woman who after some adventures firmly resolves to keep on spoiling herself. She bounces about on a ubiquitous padding of money: her parents were well-to-do; her first husband’s parents were able to pay for private treatment of his madness “fees [of] about $2,000 a month,” Charlie Fielding lived on a trust fund, both her present lover and husband are psychiatrists, with the subliminal affluence of that priestly profession. To be sure, the middle class has problems, too, and most novels are written about them, but as an instance of sexist oppression Isadora Wing should be recognized as a privileged case, with no substantial economic barriers between her and liberation, and—by her own choice—no children, either. Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s elegiac novel of female revolt,
The Awakening
, was a mother as well as a wife, and drowned herself to escape the impasse between her personal, artistic identity and her maternal obligations. Childless, with an American Express card as escort on her pilgrimage, and with a professional forgiver as a husband, Isadora Wing, for all her terrors, is the heroine of a comedy.

On the back jacket flap, Mrs. Jong, with perfect teeth and cascading blond hair, is magnificently laughing, in contrast to the sombre portrait that adorns her two collections of poetry. Rather disconcertingly, not only does Isadora Wing, like Erica Jong, write poetry but she writes Mrs. Jong’s poetry, two samples of which are included in this book. And the reader of
Fruits & Vegetables
(1971) and
Half-Lives
(1973) has already encountered Isadora Wing’s fractured leg and her burgeoning crow’s-feet, her multi-colored notes to herself and the trail of sequins one of her gowns leaves, her mother’s avocado tree behind her mother’s avocado-colored couch, her mad first husband and her fondness for likening human cheeks to willow tips for softness, her irritated observation of Braque and Utrillo prints in psychiatrists’ offices, and her quotation of Sylvia Plath’s question “Is there no way out of the mind?” In some of the poems of
Half-Lives
, the husband and the lover of
Fear of Flying
are distinctly silhouetted, and in the earlier collection the sequence entitled “Flying You Home” presents the removal of “Brian Stollerman” to a California hospital in a slightly different light—more moving and ominous
than what we find in the corresponding chapter of the novel, where the incident seems one more of the long string of zany mishaps that comprise Isadora Wing’s amorous education.
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 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 verges on nervous patter. As a creator of scenes and characters, Mrs. 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, Mrs. Jong has arrived nonstop at the point of being a literary personality; may she now travel on, toward Canterbury.

OLDER AMERICANS

M
ORNING
N
OON AND
N
IGHT
, by James Gould Cozzens. 408 pp. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

Beginning, forty years ago, with a style of sober purity, James Gould Cozzens has purposefully evolved a prose unique in its mannered ugliness, a monstrous mix of Sir Thomas Browne, legalese, and Best-Remembered Quotations. The opening chapter of his new novel,
Morning Noon and Night
, cloudy as a polluted pond, swarms with verbal organisms of his strange engendering. As Cozzensologists before me have discovered, there is no substitute for the tabulated list. We have the Unresisted Cliché: