Interview with Erica Jong

Paleface into redskin

Paul Ableman

'If you're lucky', observed the secretary after meeting my wife and me at the sta tion in her venerable sedan for the twelve mile drive to visit Erica Jong at her home in Connecticut, 'you'll be brought back in the Mercedes otherwise the Jeep.'

We were clearly entering the world of literary quccess. The first sight of the house confirmed it; two-storey, stone and timber, large and isolated at the end of a long drive. We were ushered into an open-plan living-room, part-walled from a dining-room adjoining a kitchen equipped with an ice-cube machine which, to cool the gins and lemonade we were offered, belched out ice-cubes with such ferocity that the kitchen floor became a miniature polar landscape.

Returned to the living-room by the secretary, who then vanished, we waited, admiring the view of wooded valley through the rear glass partitions, for some ten minutes until Erica Jong, author of several volumes of lush poems, the bestselling novel Fear of Flying and its sequel How to Save Your Own Life arrived, clad in a becoming negligee. She proved to be an attractive young woman who, with her fluffy, blonde hair, the enhanced of recent pregnancy and winsome sirri.by seemed visually more distinguisheo dis, bounce than brains but was soon t° fet. play an impressive range of literarY re 10, ences matched by great clarity of thong She smiled a trifle warily and asked: we 'You're Paul Ableman? You say met?' I reminded her of the occasion .T"' before, and before she had becorae international best-seller, when visetic chatted briefly at a London partY. nodded. Later she explained her 41' reserve. 'They're such bastards! Not all some of them.' „cal She meant interviewers on American radio and television stations', 'I agreed to go on the road aPo licise the book [How to Save Your to Life]. But I found they just vvall'‘,00 humiliate you. One asked me: d0 ,,,;(1 if admit you're a Lesbian? Anotheriy.' my real aim wasn't to destroy the falalloo A squat, bespectacled nurse Pad down the slatted staircase.

'Is she all right?' Erica called. The nurse smiled and nodcless relaxed and sat down. I knew she 11 recently back from hospital after, at the age of thirty-six, having had her first baby. I knew it was a girl and asked what She'd called it.

I like Molly but John likes Miranda. Perhaps we'll compromise and call her both.' We settled down opposite each other cri comfortable modern furniture. I asked her: ,,_11.1ow does it affect you, as a writer, ueing a woman?' It makes it hard to be judged as a writer, A man who writes becomes a writer but a woman is always judged as a sexual cr. eature. There's been little real change In attitude since Charlotte Bronte's time.' I asked her if she thought women writers were as good as men. , Better because the concept of sexism In our culture robs men of true feeling. When You think of the enormous odds there have always been against women becoming writers, Women number who have made it is staggering. women have also had to contend with biased 'hale criticism. Defoe's prose is frequently Poor bu t excuses are made for his defects. Eliza Hayward and Aphra Behn are simply written off as being incompetent women.' (Are you a feminist?' kind No, at least insofar as that implies a of party allegiance. I don't think any artist can toe a political line and I must saY that I resent criticism from the nitien's movement about being too ice▪ lninine. But I do think that modern ientinism generated courage in women and courage is necessary to chronicle Wb.ornen's lives. True, Jane Austen and the 13rontes did it but I consider them the eXe:eption that proves the rule.' Can one conceive of a woman TolRoy?, Yes, I think so. Doris Lessing gets il▪ ose to it. But one can never judge contemporaries fairly. fairly. Even with the advances women have made, there's still a kind of bedrock sexism which insists on s tereotYpes of the masculine and feminine rid. It's far too early in history to say finitely but I suspect there's little ,.essential difference. I look forward to a s` s°clety in which women's biology is not ee as a regrettable limitation but as a 64)rY and a tilessirig — an enriching factor'. While scribbling furiously to keep up, I heard the front door behind me open. A moment later, there was a crash. Erica to se with a gasp and I turned. Stretched 0 ihtit on the hard parquet immediately lde the open door lay an old negress v11i clutching an enormous bag of promisicMs. A moment later, a bearded young with a domed brow had dumped his car.vvil Parcel and was helping the stricken fr: 4' as she proved to be, first to her 1:t and then to a chair. A few minutes t'er, when the black lady, clucking proests at the notion that she had been sen o t:1181Y damaged, had started cleaning up the smashed eggs and scattered groceries, e Young man joined us. He was Jonathan Fast, Erica's third husband, and author of two science-fiction novels, the second of which, although in his opinion it had been 'invisibly published' I began to read with pleasure later that night on the train back to Manhattan. A little later when poor Estelle, the cook, was preparing the evening meal in the kitchen, Erica broke out indignantly, her eyes literally filling with tears: 'It's awful — American — the kind of thing that's always happening in this damned country. We don't normally have a cook. We both love cooking but with me supposed to rest — yesterday we asked an agency — and to-day they sent us Estelle. They said she was in her late forties! It's ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't eighty! But she has to keep working. Otherwise she'll starve. I don't know what to do about it. I just feel like taking her in and looking after her for the rest of her life.'

The world of success, like the world of failure, generates its distinctive problems. The old negress clattered about the• kitchen, chuckling and muttering incomprehensibly as she started to slice squash and clean fish. Jonathan Fast smiled ruefully.

'We don't even know if she can cook — but would you like to stay to dinner?'

We accepted warmly. Jonathan, tense from being cooped up in the house too much, went off to run. The interview continued. I asked Erica if she considered herself to be specifically an American writer.

'Philip Rahv said there were two kinds of American writers: palefaces and redskins. Henry James and Edith Wharton are palefaces but I think the really great contribution to American literature has been made by wild and woolly redskins like Whitman and Melville. My early poetry was pretty paleface but I think Fear of Flying is redskin. I didn't have any idea what were the rules of writing a novel. Did it have to have a certain sequence, order of characters, method of presentation? I hardly dared to start for fear of making a mistake! Then I read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and I found its anarchic quality a revelation. I realised there were no rules or at least that the rules were not rigid, formal ones. And so I wrote Fear of Flying. But my new novel is maybe not so redskin. It's very ambitious, set in a kind of poet's eighteenthcentury England about a young woman's education and self-education. It has about a Ibundred major and minor characters and spans three decades. It's not conventional, has really more in common with Virginia Woolfs Orlando than with most historical novels.'

There was a break for breast-feeding, initially in the privacy of the new nursery but later, when Jonathan had returned glistening and unwound from his run, publicly on the wooden balcony. The baby like an ikon, was handed to his father to be held briefly before being returned to the breast. Erica asked anxiously: 'Do you think it's too much? All these people to look after one tiny baby? But Jonathan and I both work. I don't drink like most writers so I work all the time. Isn't she something?' She looked ador ingly at Molly-Miranda. 'It's good to have your first one late. Then you know what you're doing and you're in a position to look after it.' And then to Jonathan. 'Did you have a good run?'

Jonathan said he had although slightly embarrassed by the tail of dogs and children his infrequent runs through the neighbourhood generated. He then talked of his devotion to Yoga. The baby, satiated, was restored to the nurse. We resumed the interview outdoors in the early gloaming but soon gathering clouds of mosquitoes drove us indoors again.

'I have a tribal sense of being Jewish but not much time for the religion. I've never met a rabbi who had much spirituality. My family was left-wing, atheist and so was I until recently. But I find, as I get older, that I believe in God and in mystical ways of seeking. I still loathe the God of the Old Testament, full of wrath and jealousy, and anyhow feminism and orthodox Judaism are irreconcilable — as some Israeli women are discovering. The curse that Freud, Marx and Darwin bequeathed us was to analyse the world in materialist terms. This was an aftermath of the seventeenth-century religious wars which left people hungry for rationalism but that spirit has run its course. We've overestimated science and made technology into a. God. And now we're left with no way of making sense of human tragedies. My new poems deal more with mystical-religious experiences than anything I've done to date. Incidentally, the poets down in the Village won't talk to me any more. They think I've sold out because I'm successful.'

As interview melted into chat, appeals to the shuffling presence in the kitchen for nourishment became more fervent. But Estelle took her time and it was night before she tottered out with the food. Could she cook? Could she cook! The salmon and sole dish was lyrical, the deep South vegetable gumbo a symphony. Unhappily the superb meal had to be hurried because last train time drew near.

Soon Jonathan led us out through the kitchen door. We felt our way under the obscuring pines to the garage where, with a coat thrown over her negligee. Erica unexpectedly joined us.

'I want to come too.'

Jonathan unlocked the garage door and pressed the light switch disclosing, as the secretary had promised, an immaculate Mercedes sedan and an equally-gleaming Jeep. Luck was with us. It was in the smooth, purring Mercedes that we glided through the Connecticut lanes to the station.