THE WAR between men and women, prefigured in the apocalyptical sketches of James Thurber, has, in addition to such dispatches as the painful Hite Report, its literary and critical fronts. One thing I was told rather dogmatically is that women’s fiction is for women, and men better get away, man. Men like myself, who want love, not war, are briefly listened to when they praise Charlotte Bronte’s Mr Rochester and Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse as exemplary creations. But to suggest that novelists are really hermaphrodites, that the whole of human life is their province, is to court howls and hits. And to say, as I frequently do, that I admire Erica Jong, both as a poet and a novelist, is taken as an arrogant claim to an impossible empathy. It is like saying that I know the joys and agonies of the American female from the inside.
Erica Jong is too fine a writer to care much about the accidental categories of the activists, categories that are the product of crippled imaginations. If Ms Jong wrote a novel with a male protagonist-narrator, I would pick it up with respect and in the expectation of entertainment and even enlightenment. If she said, in effect, ‘Men are like this,’ I would know her to be right: I trust her insight and imagination. So far, in Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, to say nothing of her poems, she has presented the pains and occasional elations of the Modern American Female. With the confidence in the exterior validity of introspection that marks the true poet (Keats for instance), she has extrapolated from her own life and her own fear an archetype that has had immense appeal, not only with the Modern American Female but also with the Modern European Woman.
In her new novel, Erica Jong has refused to capitalise on an outlook and an ambience that a less scrupulous writer could have exploited forever. She has gone to the British eighteenth century and contrived an authentic picaresque novel with a female protagonist. Her title Fanny, as well as the afterword, acknowledges a measure of indebtedness to John Cleland’s erotic masterpiece Fanny Hill, but the book is neither a pastiche nor a parody. It is, despite its allegiance to an antique genre, a genuinely original creation.
This brings me to an aspect of Ms Jong’s work rarely considered by her admirers or her detractors: its stylistic distinction. Style, indeed, must be regarded not as an aspect of a book but its totality. The intention, or pretension, to produce literature – as opposed to the book of a possible film – depends on verbal competence more than knowledge of ‘life’, whatever that is. Ms Jong’s first two books are highly literate: they show mastery of language; they depend for their effects on verbal exactitude and the disposition of rhythm. Subject matter apart, they are models of what orthodox, as opposed to experimental, fiction ought to be in this final phase of the century.
Erica Jong’s concern with language has led her to a genuine experiment: the composition of a full-length novel in a mode of English no longer in use, though still capable of expressing a modern sensibility. She has gone further than Joyce, who merely, in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter of Ulysses, played brief passages in ancient styles. Her eighteenth-century English is not a matter of restoring the second person singular, using tags like ‘prithee’, or slavishly following old orthography (‘musick’, ‘logick’, capital initials for nouns). It is a matter of vocabulary, and also of rhythm:
If these Pages oft’ tell of Debauchery and Vice, ’tis not in any Wise because their Author wishes to condone Wickedness, but rather because Trust, Stark Naked Truth, demands that she write with all possible Candour, so that the Inheritor of this Testament shall learn how to avoid Wickedness or indeed transform it into Goodness. All possible Care hath been taken to give no deliberate Offence to Modesty or Chastity; yet the Author avows that Truth is a sterner Goddess than Modesty, and where there hath been made necessary a Choyce betwixt the Former and the Latter, Truth hath, quite rightly, triumph’d.
So Fanny Hackabout-Jones begins the history of her adventures as a Testament for her only Daughter, Belinda. The disingenuous tone has the right period ring. We know we are in for hair-raising sexual revelations, all in the service of an alleg’d Verity. The pitch is that of Moll Flanders, a prototype somewhat too early, and the revelations, when they come, go beyond anything the stationery licensors of Queen Anne or the Georges would have permitted. There is, of course, seduction, but there is also rape, maritime sodomy, obstetrical revelations, and well-researched attacks on such barbarities as swaddling-bands and filthy midwifery. There is, however, no whiff of affronted historical hindsight: Fanny is not a woman of our age riding a time-machine; the impersonation is pretty exact. It is so exact, indeed, that, in the manner of the age of Enlightenment, acerbities take on a curious sweetness:
Was not my authentic History as stirring as Fanny Hill’s, or Pamela’s, or e’en that of Tom Jones? Orphan, Whore, Adventuress, Kept Woman, Slaver, Amanuensis, Witch, e’en a pardon’d Pyrate! By the Goddes, ’twas my own Life History that made a better History than any fancied History. And by the Goddes, ’twas the time to tell it all!
The reader will know what to expect from the narrative without any further detailing it. There is no joy in summary when there is so much joy in the language through which the events are presented. Take it that this is the situation of woman in a male-dominated society even more piggish than our own. Woman is a lust-object, even to rarefied poets like Alexander Pope (whose thalamic performance is as inept as one might expect). Her virginity once lost, she must take her shame to a brothel and become a professional lust-object. She may find sodality among witches, who are inevitably caught, ravished and killed by gross males, or among rogues who, turning against society, turn also against its sexual ethics and see woman as a wrong’d Creature. She has no trade except prostitution; she can be fulfilled, as Fanny is, through motherhood is she survives the obstetrics of the time. With luck, as here, she can end as the matriarch of a great estate. She can also become the writer of her own wrongs, and then she is committed, by the nature of the narrative idiom that is the air she breathes, to a glorification of life rather than a self-pitying jeremiad.
Hence this account of the trials of a high-spirited woman, who in our own age would be running an advertising agency or sitting on the High Court bench and taking pills and analysis in her spare time, is heartening and always enjoyable even when the crimson glans or the bloody axe is ready to strike. And the imaginative, and always convincing, reconstruction of eighteenth-century England shows, through that same positive prose, the lineaments of a civilisation better than ours. It was not an age for a women’s liberation movement, with all its philosophical distortions, but one in which able women could prevail if they tried hard enough. Ms Jong’s Fanny may suffer, but she is at home in the age.
A few critics will condemn what she has done because the writing of eighteenth-century literature is the task of eighteenth-century men and possibly women, and there is nothing to add to what, by its nature, has already been completed. There are answers to that. The romantic movement began with a pastiche of the past – the Rowley and Macpherson fabrications – but also with ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which used the vocabulary and metric of the old ballads. Most of our best-selling novelists write, because they know no better, in a calcified Victorian style. But Bernard Malamud, with The Fixer, wrote a 19th-century Russian novel that literature needed; and Erica Jong may be said to have filled a gap in the great tradition of the picaresque novel. Fanny: Being The True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones had to be written, and Erica Jong was the right hermaphrodite to write or indite it. I am delighted to belong to her sex.
Saturday Review, August 1980
Review of Fanny: Being The True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones by Erica Jong
(London: Granada, 1980)