Fear of Fifty (24 page)

With its band of limestone nautilus and scallop shells, its imposing limestone facade, Roy Cohn's limousine (RMC-NY) double-parked across the street, the Council on Foreign Relations, which published
Foreign Affairs,
was an awesome place. A nest of WASPs, a covey of Calvinists, a hutch of Harvard men, the Council emitted rumors of CIA manipulations. You could imagine James Bond being dispatched from there. And secret staircases, bookcases that revolved to reveal secret
oubliettes
for unnameably evil foreign agents, or man-eating sharks swimming in piss-warm pools sunk into the bedrock cellar floor.

I walked in boldly, concealing my timidity with my usual bullshit bravado. (More than afraid of
being
scared, I am afraid of
looking
scared—a legacy from my father.) I mounted the graceful curved stairs to Grace's office.

This office was a cave of books and flowers, of colorful prints and paintings. It was a pregnant sanctuary presided over by an incarnation of the great mother goddess: Grace. In those days, she was pudgy, with close-cropped pepper and salt hair and the flowing clothes fatties used to wear to disguise themselves from themselves.

I plopped myself down in the deep green leather chair next to her desk, crossed my legs under my red pleated miniskirt, adjusted my red linen vest and red flowered blouse. Crossing my legs in red platform sandals, I felt fashionable but powerless.

“How can I help you?” Grace asked, trying to make it easy. But it wasn't easy. I looked into Grace's soft brown eyes and could hardly speak.

“Mama says you write poetry,” Grace said gently.

“I guess so, but it's probably not any good,” I lied. I knew it was better than “not any good.” That was my protective spell to blind all the evil eyes lurking in the walls.

“May I see?” The black morocco binder was wet from my sweaty palms.

“Do you really want to?”

“Or I wouldn't ask.”

She took the book, flipped open to the title page, which by now read
Fruits & Vegetables,
opened to the first poem, and said quickly, “Poetry is so special; somebody's whole life framed in these wide white margins.”

Then, silently, she began to read.

I fretted.

She's hating them, I thought, being polite to get rid of me, doing Mama a useless mitzvah because Mama's dying.

For about twenty minutes, she read, engrossed, not looking up.

Then she declared, “You're going to be the most famous woman poet of your generation.”

It was as if an ocean wave had knocked me over. I was breathless. But I said, “Thank you very much.”

Then I dismissed her as a pushover.

“No—I mean it,” she said. “These are wonderful poems. They have their own voice, their own humor, their own imagery. I want to send them to a friend at Holt.”

“They're not ready. They have to be revised,” I said.

“You can revise forever as a way of not risking publication,” Grace said, knowing my games without even knowing me.

So I was pressed into leaving
Fruits
&
Vegetables
(already submitted to X, Y, and Z) with Gracela, Gracie, Grace. Unbeknown to me, she passed it on to Robin Little Kyriakis at Holt, who passed it on to Aaron Asher, the publisher.

Weeks went by. A book of poems always seems a rose petal fluttering down the Grand Canyon, but this seemed a daisy petal drifting into a time warp.

“They love me, they love me not,” I told myself, preparing for the bluw that would surely fall.

About two months later, I got a letter from X, offering publication, a letter from Y, offering publication, a letter from Z, saying I was first alternate. (Would I please submit again next year?)

The next day a letter from Holt arrived, unmistakably offering to publish
Fruits
&
Vegetables.

Was I happy? I was too terrified to be happy.

Sheer panic claimed me, then guilt, then shame. I had broken the rule—quadruple—submitted—and now I would be exposed as a fraud. I had lied to
publishers at august university presses!
I had not disclosed my evil plan. I was desolate. Certainly nobody could protect me now. In less than thirty seconds, I had turned success into failure.

“The poets will hate me,” I thought, tossing sleeplessly beside Allan. “I have done an immoral thing!”

How could I know that the poets would hate me
anyway
after
Fear of Flying
? And how could I know that I had absolutely no control over that?

I went to lunch with Aaron Asher and promptly fell in love with him. Blue eyes, wry humor, a fabled history of publishing Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. If he liked me, I
must
be good. The same spring
Fruits & Vegetables
came out, he published another unknown writer, called Toni Morrison. Her first novel,
The Bluest Eye,
had been turned down elsewhere because who would care about an ugly black kid called Pecola having her father's baby? In those days, black people were presumed not to read, and white people were presumed not to want to read about black people. Aaron had taste—and, perhaps more important, guts.

“Tell them you have to come to Holt because you also plan to write novels,” Aaron said, scheming for a novel with poetry as lure. (How antique this now seems!) “Tell them
I'm
your publisher for everything!”

Thrilled that my work provoked such possessiveness, I went on agonizing. I tried to write the “Thanks but no thanks” letters to those university presses, but I was blocked. A big-time poet with a New York publisher? Me? A potential (poetential) novelist?

“Go write a novel,” Aaron had said, “in the gutsy voice of those poems.”

I refused to believe he meant it. And I continued to flagellate myself for this first little burst of success. It was too big for my mother's failures, my grandfather's failures. After all my painstaking work to reach this first rung, I could think of nothing but to sabotage my climb and fall back into my neurotic family.

This pattern has followed me all my writing life. I have hesitated, rewriting and rewriting books I should have launched into the world. The source of my fear? My family's anger. Exposure to their mockery—as unforgiving as my own.

When I moved West after
Fear of Flying
hit, I bought an inexpensive car, a Pacer, rather than my fantasy Rolls-Royce Corniche. What was I thinking? That a cheap car would let me be loved? I wanted to be loved much more than I wanted a Rolls. Until I stopped worrying about this, I couldn't work in peace.

Whether you are loved or not depends more on others than on anything
you
do. Talent is not finite. There's more than enough of it to go around. Talented people know they can use your achievement as inspiration. But stingy souls think that by tearing you down and also tearing down your work, they will prosper. They are wrong, of course, but all of this is out of your hands. You can only do the work. “The rest,” as T. S. Eliot says in
Four Quartets,
“is not our business.”

I finally found the courage to inform those patient university presses that I was engaged, or at least pinned. Then I signed with Holt as I was meant to do. Having sold the book myself, I now hired an agent to take a piece of it. An agent conferred credibility. I liked saying “my agent” to my parents and friends. My advance on
Fruits & Vegetables
was munificent for poetry: $1,200. The agent received $120, my abject gratitude, and the option on a novel called
Fear of Flying.

Watch out, world. Another poet was about to vanish down the Grand Canyon.

But first I had to have a name.

I'd begun to publish under my maiden name, Erica Mann, which, after all, had always been my name. But when my Freudian husband said ominously, “The poet has no husband,” I was wracked with useless guilt.

Instead of lobbing back, “Of course not! Poets are married to their muses!” I let him browbeat me into using his name.

To be fair, he would have been satisfied with “Erica Mann Jong.” It was
I
who was fearful of being mocked as “a three-name lady poet.” I toyed with “E. M. Jong” (to disguise my second-class sex), then with “Erica Orlando,” after my favorite novel, then with “Erica Mann Jong,” after my father and husband. I finally settled on Erica Jong because it sounded enigmatic, punchy, and had four beats, like my maiden name.

The decision to drop my maiden name was a decision to defy sexist mockery, but I fell into a sexist trap all the same. In my twenties I didn't yet know that
anything
women do—use three names, drop their maiden names, persist in being “Lucy Stoners” (women who keep their maiden names on principle)—they will be in the wrong simply because their choices are not faced by men. Eventually they will be mocked—like Hillary Rodham Clinton: damned if she does and damned if she doesn't, but evoking a secret shout of joy in all our hearts.

What's in a name? My father's disappointment that my name does not shine directly on his; my daughter's bewilderment at bearing the name of someone she's never met. (We called her Molly Miranda Jong-Fast. Molly so she would bloom and Miranda so all tempests would blow her home, Jong for my
nom de plume
and Fast for her father and his family.)

But a name also confers a legend. If it is taken with resentment to undo patriarchal black magic, then the bearer forever resents her own name.

My name was a dodge, a dodge of Allan's disapproval, a dodge of sexist gibes at “three-name lady poets,” a dodge of Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's writing daughter, who inspired my name.

Fear is not a good reason for a name. A name should be taken as an act of liberation, of celebration, of intention. A name should be a magical invocation to the muse. A name should be a self-blessing.

Unfortunately “Erica Orlando” would have suggested Disney World and Florida to more people than it would have suggested Virginia Woolf to. And “Erica Porchia,” after a South American poet I loved, would have eventually been made into a joke about my weight. I thought of calling myself “E. M. J. Parra” after Nicanor Parra, another favorite poet of mine, but that would have proved baffling, eventually even to me. And the made-up names I temporarily craved all sounded silly in the sunlight: E. M. Brontë, E. M. Bloomsbury, Erick de Jong. Besides, they were dishonest names for someone whose whole struggle was to be honest.

If I was a woman and a poet, so be it. I went with Erica Jong and made it lucky by inhabiting it. Now I would like to Rodhamize, with thanks to Hillary, and maybe I shall.

But Erica Mann Jong is, alas, just as patriarchal as Erica Jong. When Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika, was alive, the confusion of names bothered me. My parents had met and admired Thomas Mann. They loved his daughter's name and wished creativity upon me.
Erica
means white flower in German, and queen in old Scandinavian, but to them, it meant
writer.

By now I am used to Jong, which rhymes with Viet Cong, dong, Ping-Pong, Hai Phong, song, tong, long, wrong, among, and young. I get mail from readers under “Dear Erika de Jong,” “Dear Erica Mann Jong,” “Dear Erica Mann Jong Fast Burrows,” “Dear Asian-American Writer,” and “Listen you kike commie porno bitch—Hitler should have finished the last of you!”

So what's in a name? Everything and nothing. Sometimes I just want to be Erica—as Colette (who first signed herself “Willy,” then “Colette Willy,” then “Colette Willy de Jouvenel”) eventually became Colette. But “Colette” was, after all, her father's surname. It served as both first and last name for someone who would have otherwise wound up as Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Willy de Jouvenel Goudeket.

In names for women, I believe in self-invention: a name that embodies desire. It should be taken when you commit yourself to your life's work. Nothing should part you from it.

Is it too late for me? My writing name has already curiously fused with my essence. Perhaps I'll restore my maiden name (which is only, after all, my father's
nom de théâtre:
Mann). For twenty-three years, I was defiantly a “Mann.” Then I submitted to Freudian marriage.

Perhaps when this book is finished, the author will appear.

 

Odd that it took me so long to find my name, because in Heidelberg I was lucky to have that rare sort of analysis that lays the groundwork for a writer's life.

My analysis could only have happened through the intervention of the angels of analysis. If the process works, it is usually because of them. They hover over consulting rooms on three continents, blowing analysands along like swollen-cheeked bearded winds on antique maps.

Stranded in Heidelberg with a husband I couldn't talk to, I found, through a shrink in New York, a certain Professor Herr Dr. Alexander Mitscherlich. He was said to speak English. He happened to practice in Heidelberg.

The referring doctor was one I had consulted about my marriage-panic—my fear that marriage would enslave me to household duties, that it would interfere with writing.

“Nonsense,” this analyst had said. “Men work at home too. They do the lawn, they fix things around the house, they take out the garbage. It's an equal responsibility, don't you think?”

I didn't. But I didn't have the feminist facts to prove it then. The problem still had no name. I thought
I
must be crazy.

Unlike the New York doctor who referred him, Dr. Mitscherlich was no sexist. Nor did he think in clichés. He'd fled Germany during twelve years of Nazi rule to live and practice in Switzerland and England. He had waited out the war. That didn't keep me—in my ignorance—from calling him a Nazi from the couch, which always made him deathly quiet.