searching for freedom - on reading fear of flying

Would you judge this book by its cover?

When a librarian suggested Fear of Flying by Erica Jong for our Classic Book Discussion group, I was curious to read it again, but also, to be honest,  I was skeptical.  Sure, it sold millions of copies, and was shocking and groundbreaking when it came out in 1973.  But did that make it a classic?   I remembered that Erica Jong used the word cunt a lot in her novel, and admitted to finding it difficult to square her hunger for a male body with feminism.   I also remembered a colleague at the New Yorker, (where I was working when I finally read Fear of Flying in the mid 1980s) saying "Poor Dr. Jong!"  That's because Dr Wing in Fear of Flying was based on Erica Jong's husband.   Do you remember that she coined the term "zipless fuck" which is referenced - surely more for a male audience than for a female one - in the cover picture above? I guess I have thought of Erica Jong as writing for her times.  She says in the novel that we do that to all women writers - we "confine them to the ghetto of popular culture."

But now I've read it again, after many decades, and I didn't remember how good it is!   Could that really have to do with the cover?  Maybe it's because it was such a huge bestseller.  Also the patriarchy spoke up so loudly in its defense that it drowned out female voices I would have liked to hear from more.  Henry Miller just loved Fear of Flying.  As did John Updike.  Having those two behind her, was almost enough to put me off for good.

 But to be fair, Erica Jong had nothing to do with the (admittedly hugely successful) marketing efforts behind this book.  In fact, the book was rebranded after coming out to very little fanfare as literary fiction, with this - for my taste - more interesting cover:

 I've discovered I'm not alone in my perceptions.  I mentioned Fear of Flying to several colleagues at the bookstore - serious readers like me -  who all expressed surprise that I found it to be as much about writing and literature as it is about sex;  more about freedom than sex, per se;  that it's funny, exhilarating, intelligent and insightful and most significantly, stands the test of time.  In Isadora Wing,  women will find a character more easy to identify with than, say, the women in Lisa Taddeo's much touted new book Three Women.*

 The narrator of Fear of Flying, Isadora Wing, is a poet married to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing.  Bennett is a good lover, he has all the mechanics down, but he's totally devoid of emotion.  Isadora feels alone with him. Each orgasm she has with him  "seemed to be made of ice".  Then, at a conference in Vienna which she attends with Bennett, meaning to write an article about it, Isadora falls for Adrian, another psychoanalyst who talks to her, engages her and most importantly, makes her laugh. Even though he can't always get it up, she doesn't care because she's fallen madly in love with him.  Meanwhile, he of course, refuses to say that he loves her.  "How hypocritical to go upstairs with a man you don't want to fuck, leave the one you do sitting there alone, and then, in a state of great excitement fuck the one you don't want to fuck while pretending he's the one you do. That's called fidelity.  That's called civilization and its discontents," Jong writes. 

So Isadora and Adrian drive around Vienna together, getting lost, finding places where they can have sex, laughing at (and with) each other, while Adrian psychoanalyzes her.  He tells her that doctors  like poets, are terrified of death. Doctors hate death, which is why they go into medicine. They also talk about their past relationships. Of one of his lovers Adrian says "she made me feel good - so of course I mistrusted her.  And my wife made me feel guilty so of course I married her.  I was like you.  I didn't trust pleasure or my own impulses.  It frightened the hell out of me to be happy and when I got scared, I got married.  Just like you, love."

Isadora recounts her joyless sexual promiscuity as a student in Italy, and her friendship with another girl there who she needed as a sounding board, in order to enjoy and discuss together their sexual encounters.  She writes about her adolescent fantasies, and her first husband, whose eccentricity and strangeness was precisely what attracted her to him - until he went completely crazy, that is.

 She writes about her early marriage to Bennett, and their move to Heidelberg where he was working as a doctor on the army base, and she was learning to write. She writes about her Jewish background and how  "Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about.  Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed."

She writes about her relationship with her mother and about "the women writers, the women painters - most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art.  Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers ... Flannery O'Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O'Keeffe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group!"

She writes about her publication experience.  Once published, "I had to learn to cope with my own fear of success for one thing and that was almost harder to live with than the fear of failure."

Isadora is looking for freedom: Artistic, emotional, sexual and psychological freedom.  She wonders why freedom looks like desperation.  Finally and most poignantly, she writes about becoming strong - and how it drives the men in her life away.

She writes about the hunters and the exhibitionists who she's afraid will feel insulted if she rebuffs them - and the men who look at her as if they know what she wants until "it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps 90 percent of the men who displayed [this attitude]were really concealing impotence."

Finally she gets to the crux of it all - that is, what happens to women who are truly strong and know what they want. "Suddenly I knew what I had done wrong with Adrian - and why he had left me.  I had broken the basic rule.  I had pursued him...  For the first time in my life I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a waterlogged noodle and refuses me.  ...They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild.  Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild and what happened? The men wilted!"

I wish this didn't ring true.  But it does.  Never mind trying to square your need for a male body with your feminism.  Try squaring how strong and fulfilled you feel as a woman with correlative male rejection.   In the end, Isadora finds herself alone, and when she is alone, I felt like I was her.  Yes, she winds up going to Bennett's hotel room and running herself a bath in his absence.  You wonder if she'll stay with him or if she'll leave for good.  But it's Isadora alone that you find yourself wanting to be.  She's intelligent and funny, real and brave and even after decades, she's super empowering.

Getting back to  Erica Jong's liberal use of the word cunt.  Quite independently from reading this book - at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, two friends  were talking about the words cunt and pussy.  One said that for women of her generation (women of Erica Jong's generation, in fact) the word pussy made her uncomfortable.  Cunt, she said, was fine - because it was strong.  Maybe I feel differently. I think I hold the vagina in more esteem than the word cunt suggests.  But there again, perhaps being a free and fully realized woman isn't for pussies at all.  Maybe it's actually for cunts.

* Could be generational, of course, but I read Three Women at the suggestion of a fellow (much younger) bookseller. And felt  in reading it, like I came from another planet.  My  young colleague evidently devoured the book and zipped right through it.  But I found it mildly depressing.  What these women want from intimacy seems so different from what I want.  And what I want always includes a mental, if not intellectual connection, in addition of course, to a sexual/emotional connection.