(1974)
Erica Jong’s first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables, was one of those things rare in poetry: a new experience. I read these poems the way you watch a trapeze act, with held breath, marvelling at the agility, the lightness of touch, the brilliant demonstration of the difficult made to look easy. The poems were brief, swift, sure of themselves; they combined a cool eighteenth-century detached wit and a talent for epigram with a virtuoso handling of that favourite seventeenth-century figure of speech, the conceit, with body as fruit as body, poem as food as poem, man as Muse, Muse as man. They did not pose as straight-from-the-soul confessions; rather they posed as artefacts, beautifully made: china figurines which were really Iron Maidens, the spikes hidden beneath the painted foliage. They were literate without being literary. They toyed with the reader, refusing to reveal the extent of their seriousness, whether they meant it. Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game. The “tongue… stubbornly stuck in [the] cheek” may become in fact one of the “various subtle forms of lockjaw,” to quote Jong.
In Half-Lives the tongue is out of the cheek, at least part of the time. This book’s cover is not lush pink but stark black. The wit is still there, but it’s less like a flirtation than a duel. There’s less fun, more pain. That Lizzie Borden axe, disguised in Fruits & Vegetables as a pair of embroidery scissors, is out in the open and active. The difference in tone may be felt by comparing poems with similar themes. Try “Bitter Pills for the Dark Ladies” from Fruits & Vegetables, which treats male contempt for female poets as a burlesque of white attitudes toward blacks:
Words bein’ slippery & poetry bein’
mos’ly a matter of balls
men what gives in to the lilt and lift of words
(o love o death o organ tones o Dickey!)
is “Cosmic.” You is “Sentimental.”
So dance in your Master’s bed (or thesis) & shut
yo’ mouth. Ain’t you happiest there?
Then read “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit” from Half-lives, which begins:
The best slave
does not need to be beaten
She beats herself
she ends,
If she’s an artist
and comes close to genius,
the very fact of her gift
should cause her such pain
that she will take her own life
rather than best us.
& after she dies we will cry
& make her a saint.
A mockery of contempt, itself contemptuous, has become a straight examination of self-contempt and its effects, the model that most self-sacrificing of wives, Alcestis, praised for dying to save her man. Or place the cool, musing “In Sylvia Plath Country” from the earlier book beside “The Critics” and “In the Skull.” Neither of the later poems is as fully realized, but both are more engaged, and both offer a version of the poet as suicide which is more complex than the lyrical drowning Ophelia of the first poem, and in the later vision the poet is less imposed upon than imposing:
Living in a death’s head,
peering at life through its eyeholes,
she wondered why she could see only death…
Or compare the very funny third section of “Arse Poetica” with the two equally funny but more scathing poems in Half-Lives, “Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem” and “Men.” The poet is no longer jus’ funnin’, or pretending to.
The shift in tone corresponds with a shift in subject-matter, or rather a shift of emphasis: certain themes which were peripheral to the first book are central to the second. The games with fruits and vegetables which provided so much joy and whimsy in the first book are echoed, it is true, in the second (“The Eggplant Epithalamion,” “The Woman Who Loved to Cook,” “Chinese Food”), but the poet is no longer preoccupied with playing with her food. She has turned her attention instead to the Boneman, that Sexual Gothic figure who first appears in Fruits & Vegetables, materializing most fully in “The Man Under The Bed:”
The man under the bed
The man who has been there for years waiting
The man who waits for my floating bare foot
…
The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone
The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver
The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs
The man at the end of the end of the line….
He is Death, sinister and frightening, but he is also a lover and attractive; he is the lure of suicide, and he is thus created by the poet herself:
I wrap myself around him in the darkness
I breathe into his mouth
& make him real.
The Boneman makes only brief or indirect appearances in the first book, but he is everywhere in the second. There is a fascination with death, one’s own specifically, which moves beyond the effective but two-dimensional horror-movie images of “The Man Under the Bed” to an exploration of the rationale of self-destruction. In the earlier part of the book the Death figure is dual. Half of the Boneman is a punitive, devouring, powerful male, as in “The Wives of Mafiosi,” where the man is:
… the power
of a dark suit lined with lead
of a man with a platinum mouth and knuckles of brass
of a bullet the colour of a Ferrari…
or a kind of vampire, as in “Anniversary:”
Every night for five years
he chewed on her
until her fingers were red & ragged
until blue veins hung out of her legs…
or a necrophiliac ghoul, as in “The Man Who Can Only Paint Death” and “The Widower;” or just a destructive impossible shit, as in “Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem” and “Men.” The other half of the Boneman is the Maiden, cast as “I” in “The Man Under the Bed.” She is masochistic, interested in her own pain, as in “Paper Cuts,” “Loving the way she hates herself / much too much / to stop,” as in “The Send-Off,” wallowing in “a dream of rejection,” as in “The Orphan.”
The Boneman poems sometimes skirt the edges of Sitting-duck Poetry, in which the object of verbal attack is held to be totally guilty and allowed no way out, while the attacker goes scot-free; and the Maiden poems run the risk of turning into miniature soap-operas, in which the only activities possible are the wringing of hands and the shedding of tears. (Is suffering really a function simply of being female?) What rescues the poems from these potential pitfalls is Jong’s seemingly inexhaustible verbal dexterity, plus her capacity for mockery, of self and other. Jong may be a romantic, but she’s a romantic well aware of the absurdity of romantic excesses.
By the end of the book, though, both Boneman and Maiden are seen as what the poet has always suspected they were: incarnations of the poetic “I,” the Boneman a dramatization of the fear of death, the Maiden of the desire for it. In “The Prisoner” the poet plays all the roles, including Hangman; and it is at this point, the point at which the prison is revealed as self-constructed, that the poems can transform themselves from poems about death and suicide to poems against them. In “The Lure of the Open Window,” death is not a lover, but plain emptiness:
At the bottom of the pit
are alley cats and glass
not truth.
The death of the timorous couple in “Thirteen Lines for a Childless Couple” is not romantic. “Waiting” begins, “It is boring, this waiting for death,” and ends, “Where is the life you are so afraid to lose?” An obsession with death can be a refusal to live, and this is the final conclusion to the long and complicated dialogue with death.
The dance of Death and the Maiden has as its obverse, “the dance against death” (“The Send-Off”), which consists for Jong primarily of two pursuits: sex and writing. Both are active, as opposed to the passive suffering of the Maiden; both are conducted with a certain defiance, and are greeted, it appears, with a certain contempt. Jong’s images habitually spill over into each other or reverse places, so these two activities become entwined in her poems, sometimes with semi-hilarious results: “Castration of the Pen,” for instance, or “The Book with Four Backs.” Other poems play with images of body-as-page, poet-turning-to-poem, love-as-writing (“I am binding up your legs with carbon ribbon. / I tie you to the bed with paper chains.”)
A number of poems circle the problem—which Jong strives hard not to find a paradox—of the woman who is a writer who is also a woman, with the Siamese twins pulling uneasily against each other, the writer feeling suffocated by the woman, the woman rendered sterile by the writer, as in “The Send-Off:”
I want to write about something other than women!
I want to write about something other than men!
I want stars in my open hand
& a house round as a pumpkin
& children’s faces forming at the roots of trees.
The act of speaking can be a great release, though Jong also perceives it as a potentially dead end:
I am fixed in my longing for speech,
I am buried in the snowbank of my poems,
I am here where you find me
dead
on the other side of the page.
The texture of the poetry itself has something of the still-life about it. It is a curiously urban poetry, not because it’s filled with images of transit systems, factories and tall buildings—it isn’t—but because nothing in it ever grows or changes, except surreally. Fruits and vegetables are spotted only after they’ve been picked and are lying on a table; an apple may magically transmute itself into a woman, but it never changes from a green apple on a tree to a ripe apple. Objects outnumber processes, and everything, including the “I” and her lovers, is a kind of hard-edged Dali visual metaphor, clear, incredible, paralyzed, moving if at all in frightening leaps and free-falls, like the flying chamber-pots and the predatory giant feet in The Monty Python Show. It is a world created from words. As usual, Jong is aware of the difficulty: she has wanted writing to be more organic, “a tree with a voice,” but has found instead
… this emptiness.
The hollow of the book resounding
like an old well
in a ruined city.
Or, stated another way,
Sometimes the sentimentalist
says to hell with words
& longs to dig ditches,
She writes of this longing, of course…
Sex, “the dance / against death,” is an antidote but no final answer. The dialogue between the two halves, woman-writer and writer-woman, is an argument about which will contain and define the other, and at the end of the long prose-poem “From The Country of Regrets” it is the writer who wins, albeit with irony:
And there in the corner, writing about
everyone, trying to separate herself out of the
scene, or be above it, or control it, or pretend
she dreamed it—am I. I am the one with the open
notebook, the one who lost her pornographic postcards,
the one with thousands of mosquito bites behind
each knee. Nothing bad can happen to me, I am
only collecting material. I am making notes:
on hell, on heaven.
There are two images which bracket the “writer” persona in Half-Lives: one in the first poem and one in the last. Both have to do with the writer’s relationship to the reader. In “The Evidence,” the writer is a fool, but a fool who talks:
My business is to always feel
a little like a fool
& speak of it.
In “To the Reader,” the writer is a magician, pulling something out of nothing:
… that is where I begin,
where I open my hand
to the reader
& shake out my cuffs,
where I show my magician’s hat
& swear on my life
it is empty.
Both images are double-bladed. A professional fool, or so tradition has it, included in his act not only jokes made at his own expense but jests against his audience, the straight-men of the court. The reader may be invited by Jong to laugh at her, but he can’t get away without a wry look at his own reflection in the funhouse mirror. A magician, on the other hand, is a trickster rather than a jester; his business to fool the audience in a different way, to make us believe he can create and transmute. Jong’s poetry is sometimes tricky, like a well-performed conjuring trick; the props show only occasionally. But a good magician’s best trick is to leave some doubt in the minds of the audience: perhaps the magic is real, perhaps the magic power is real. And in Jong’s best poems, it is real. We may find the fool more entertaining, but the magician is, finally, more impressive.