Fear of Fifty

A more important form of optimism concerns your attitude to your work.... Try to get away from that “succeed or fail” attitude... get absorbed in it, as you are in a window box or an interesting conversation or redecorating a room...

When did I first discover that sex and creativity were allied? It was 1969 and I was twenty-seven. I’d had three and a half years of analysis in Germany—an analysis that focused on my writing blocks and on my marriage. If it did not make me wholly free, at least it gave me a taste for freedom.

Nineteen sixty-nine was the year sex was discovered. (Philip Larkin says it was 1963.) It was the year of the moon shot, of male astronauts walking on the female moon and planting their spikes in what was called “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Womankind was not much thought of in all that phallic blasting, phallic thrusting. We were an afterthought, born out of rebel ribs, but the times they were a-changin’. With the Beatles romancing the radio, with astronauts seducing space, with civil rights marchers fucking the Old Confederacy, with campus protesters screwing the Vietnam War, it wouldn’t be long before feminism reared its Medusa’s head.

After a sojourn in my own Third Reich, I was primed for protest. On August 26, 1970, I marched through Central Park with my sisters, celebrating women’s rights, decrying women’s wrongs. Hope was rampant. We expected nothing less than to change the world. Instantly.

By the time my first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables, came out in 1971, the second wave of feminism was crashing on our shores. Women were in again—and sex was in again. But not for long.

I had come back from gray and rainy Germany to a brilliant world I hardly recognized. On the streets of New York: afros, bell-bottoms, dashikis, Nehru jackets, tie-dye, platform shoes, Zuñi jewelry, the scent of marijuana, headbands to hold in blitzed brains.... The world had gone wild while I was in Heidelberg learning to write. I wanted to go wild with it.

Sartorial madness was something I knew from my mother’s taste in clothes—clothes that could double as costumes for her portrait sitters. And wildness was incipient in my Music and Art days. I dressed like a beatnik then, but I had made the decision to turn preppy in college. Because my parents had been Provincetown bohemians in the thirties, my early rebellion was to be square. I had become a “good wife” (who cooked steamed rice for her Chinese-American husband). I had repressed my rebellion. Now I wanted more than anything to be bad!

There had been previews of my fin de sixties madness in Heidelberg. I’d smoked hashish at student parties and wished to God I weren’t married. I’d watched the students hurling cobblestones, mimicking their Parisian counterparts, as they chanted Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh (with German accents) down the Hauptstrasse. But it was not my culture, and by New York standards, Heidelberg was as provincial as Schenectady.

The German students of the sixties were protesting their Nazi parents; the American students were protesting their World War II daddies (who’d really believed that Vietnam was the same as the Land of the Rising Sun). A generational war was raging. It hardly mattered whether your parents had been Nazis or not; it was enough that they were parents. And parents had to be crushed.

We called their country Amerika. What was our country? Woodstock? Haight-Ashbury? Beatlemania? The Whole Earth Catalog? The Forest of Arden—with love beads? Marijuana was our weapon; so was long hair; so was sex. Had our parents settled down to have babies after their war? Well then, we would never settle down. We would have sex, sex, sex, and refuse to grow up! We followed our leaders—or at least our lead singers: All you need is love, love, love...

In 1969-70, I went back to Columbia, this time to the School of the Arts, to study poetry. I also taught at City College again, as a lowly instructor, then as a lowly assistant professor—sans health insurance, sans job security, sans everything. I grew to love my students. I was moved to lie down on the streets of the West Side with them to protest the Kent State massacre. Eyes to the sky, we stretched out on the blacktop of Amsterdam Avenue outside the Riverside Funeral Home. Corpses dying to get buried, and we were holding up the hearses. I will never forget the policemen circling and the street lights flashing green then red then green then red as we kept that silent vigil outside the funeral parlor. Even death stopped for us.

I had just encountered the brave new world of open enrollment at City College. Bright students whom no one had ever bothered to teach to read and write, not-so-bright students who proved ultimately ineducable, were thrown at us to rescue. Remedial teaching at the college level infuriated the tenured staff—which was odd because they didn’t have to do it. They had us for that.

Sometimes it was exhilarating; sometimes it was impossible. My best times were always with my older students: the housewives and office workers who’d come back to school at night. They got it when Othello killed Desdemona in a jealous rage, or when Lady Macbeth egged Macbeth on to bloody his hands. They’d seen plenty of Othellos and Lady Macbeths by this time. They could easily relate Shakespeare to life in the ghetto. These students were survivors. Learning turned them on.

At the Columbia School of the Arts, I promptly fell for both my poetry teachers—Stanley Kunitz (another literary grandfather) and Mark Strand (a beautiful bad boy, the only poet in America who is a dead ringer for Clint Eastwood). I used to stare at Mark in class—his perfect, chiseled profile, his chilly, cynical eyes, and begin poems to him that would turn out never to be about him.

If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body
His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks
I wrap myself around him like the darkness
I breathe into his mouth
& make him real

“The Man Under the Bed” (described in that stanza) became the universal bogeyman, vampire, night crawler every girl hears breathing under her bed, waiting to entrap her—she hopes. Mark was that fantasy man. He was also Gulliver striding through Lilliput, aloof to all us scurrying Lilliputians. We frantically threw tiny ropes around his huge legs.

I want to understand the steep thing
that climbs ladders in your throat
I can’t make sense of you.
Everywhere I look you’re there—
a vast landmark, a volcano
poking its head through the clouds
Gulliver sprawled across Lilliput.

Mark taught in a chilly, almost disdainful way—as if students were hardly worth bothering about. But he turned us on to Pablo Neruda and Rafael Alberti, and he freed me from compulsive rhyming, encouraged me to try prose poems and to jump into my images. He also excited me—which taught me more about poetry than anything. I would go home and write poems to the impossible he—the he of my dreams—Adonis, father, grandfather, with Clint Eastwood and the exhibitionist on the subway thrown in. What we fear we also desire, and what we desire we fear. Masculine menace was in those early poems, but also a real yearning for an unknown lover. Allan and I fucked, but we had long since ceased to be lovers—if a lover is defined as someone you yearn for. I was writing poetry and madly yearning. Those yearning poems went into Fruits & Vegetables and Half- Lives.

Is the yearning spiritual or sexual? Who’s to say the two are not the same? Rumi and Kabir and most of the Persian poets see them as aspects of the same force—but then, of course, the Persians invented love. Héloise and Abélard discovered how close the two were—to their infinite regret. Only Protestant puritanism has built a wall between physical yearning and the yearning for God.

In Mark’s class, I yearned for God in man, and in Stanley’s class for man in God. I was less terrified of Stanley than I was of Mark. Stanley was cuddly; Mark was aloof. At twenty-seven, I found aloof sexier. Even my then-husband was chilly and distant. I couldn’t imagine a lover who was not like my husband—a more frequent occurrence than we care to admit.

That first year, back from Germany, I worshipped weekly at the 92nd Street Y. The poetry flavor of the week had my undivided attention. I also haunted poetry festivals, poetry cafés, poetry bars.

When Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, came to New York, we read poetry together at Dr. Generosity’s, passed the hat, and collected $121—mostly in silver. We split it, both agreeing it was the best money either of us had ever earned. It still is.

Dr. Generosity’s was dark, beery, full of sawdust and peanut shells. Poets, wannabes, and sad sacks turned out. Also crazies. Poetry readings were always well-supplied with crazies. One such threatened to shoot me before one of my first readings in Philadelphia. He had written me a yearning letter that I had failed to answer. His blood boiled and he vowed revenge. It can’t have been fatal attraction: I’m still here.

It was a time of festivals for women poets. Carolyn Kizer and I met en route to one. We were seated right behind the driver. Carolyn began a wonderful monologue about her life as a woman poet. I was proud to be her confidante.

I met the dashing, sinister Ted Hughes after his reading at the 92nd Street Y. In my copy of Crow he wrote: “To a beautiful surprise, Erica Poetica.” Then he filled the half-title page with a phallic snake curling through a new poem about Crow.

I went to dinner with Ted (and his entourage) and we flashed eyes at each other all night. In those days, Ted Hughes had a reputation in feminist circles for being a lady-killer, or indeed the devil incarnate. This only made him more exciting. I grew wet, imagining the handsome hulking author of Crow in bed. Then I fled in a taxi—fighting my own fantasies. Sylvia Plath and Assia Gutmann floated before my eyes like Shakespearean ghosts, warning me. I knew I wanted to write and live, not write and die.

Why was it always the fate of women poets to die? Were we punishing ourselves for the presumption of the pen? Were we trying to undo our lives to undo that presumption? Had we internalized the punitive rules of the game? (For even then I did not believe that Sylvia Plath’s suicide was anyone’s choice, finally, but her own.) Still, I understood how hard it was to be a woman poet in a literary world in which the rules were made by men.

In Chicago for a celebration of Poetry magazine, I collided with a beautiful young Southern poet (whom I will not name in the unlikely event that he is still with his wife). This poet wrote about his search for himself, his thwarted hankering for love, the many frustrations of his interminable marriage, his endless and unappeasable yearning.

Yearning was my middle name. So we went back to the Lake Shore Drive apartment of one of the moneybags behind the poetry festival (the poets were all put up in maids’ rooms of these glorious mansions in the air), crept stealthily past the Jasper Johnses, the Motherwells, the Rothkos, the Frankenthalers, the Nevelsons, the Calders, the Rosenquists, the Dines, through the kitchen into the maid’s room, where we made tender love all night. At dawn, we woke (as if to an explosion) and walked along Lake Michigan. We had not really felt welcome with the rich folks anyway. And we were suddenly seized with guilt about our spouses.

At home, I wrote poems to him—or whomever he represented—and he wrote poems to me—or whomever I represented. We corresponded for a while. We still send each other sweetly autographed books.

These encounters somehow fueled my first two volumes of poems. They also led ineluctably to Fear of Flying. “The muse screws,” I used to joke. Flippant but true. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves says that true poetry springs from the relationship between the muse (the White Goddess) and the poet. It relies on the poet’s erotic knowledge of her, embodied in an earthly woman. Graves followed his own theory with increased desperation as he aged. Eventually, he became a parody of his younger self. Henry Miller did likewise—if only in the area of “love.” When he wasn’t being a sage, he was being an old goat—wisdom side by side with low burlesque. Many aging poets find they have to crank up poetry with “love.” What comes naturally in youth becomes the ultimate self-deception of age.

The muse, for a woman poet, has historically been a male adventurer: Adonis, Orpheus, Odysseus. Since a woman poet also discovers inspiration through her solar plexus, the prohibition against women’s sexuality has hurt us creatively as much as it has hurt our pleasures.

There were quite a lot of muses in those days. I usually kept them sacred by never “knowing” them in the flesh. And those I fucked, I quickly fled, turning them into pen pals.

I was seeking inspiration, not relationships—whatever they may be. All I could deal with were relation-dinghies or relation-surfboards. I had to get home fast and write it all down. That was, after all, the point. Besides, I didn’t want to be disappointed by a mortal man. I wanted a muse, who, by definition, only appears in moments of ecstasy and is never given the chance to disappoint. He is the prince who may revert to a frog if you take him in, the Odysseus who may revert to a pig. If you don’t linger, you’ll never know. And you’ll have the poem.

Every time I have set out to achieve something in my life, it has been total immersion. At that time, poetry was my element. It was bread and breath to me, husband, lover, child. Allan was just a shadowy companion, a crow sitting in a tree.

Poetry remains my solace still. I actually read other people’s poems. Poetry refills the well when I am empty. Poetry finds me when I am lost. The temporary trauma of a painful relationship, the career disappointments, the pains of motherhood, the deaths of friends, are healed by poetry. If I let myself surrender to poetry, eventually it will bring me to the next novel, predicting its themes.

Novices in the arts think you have to start with inspiration to write or paint or compose. In fact, you only have to start. Inspiration comes if you continue. Make the commitment to sit still in solitude several hours a day and inevitably your muse will visit. “I write fifty pages until I hear the fetal heartbeat,” Henry Miller used to say.

The very mechanical act of sitting down in privacy, turning off the phone, giving yourself the time to play and make mistakes, being non-judgmental with yourself, knocking the censors off your shoulders, is enough to get anyone going. It’s not etched in stone, I tell myself. You can always edit and rewrite later. You don’t even have to publish if you don’t want to. This is just for you.

I write as if for samizdat, not above-ground publication. All my writer friends from the Eastern Bloc tell me that samizdat gave a more intimate tone to books. They felt they were writing for friends, not enemies. They felt they were writing letters—letters to themselves.

The permission to fail, plus certain artificial goals—I will write ten handwritten pages, then stop—often works. It also defeats the habitual self-flagellation that accompanies the writer at work. If you dare to play, you can risk everything on the page.

Submitting poems for scrutiny was another matter. At first it was impossible for me. My anxiety was so great that I heard jeers of derision when I even thought about sliding a sheaf of poems into an envelope. I solved this pragmatically. In Heidelberg, I bought myself a three-by-five-inch plastic box and named it: POEMS SENT OUT. On each card was a date, a list of poems, the magazine sent to, and the date of acceptance or rejection. This was simply a way of fooling my fear. If I couldn’t lose the fear, at least I could contain it in a plastic box.

When the plastic box is full of rejections, the real poet will simply say: “If the second box is full, or the third, or the fourth ... ” but she will keep sending her poems out—if only to toughen her hide.

Was I a real writer or was I only a hound for approval? I became famous so young that I could hardly know. I only learned the truth later when the approval stopped and I went on writing anyway.

Sooner or later, every artist encounters rejection—even the most famous. If you persevere a lifetime with your work, it must go through periods of being out of sync with the politics or literary theories of your time. And you must work past that, even if it means rejection. Politics change. But the time to work can never be brought back. Nabokov would be astonished to see his work in print all over Russia. He predicted that would never come to pass.

Rejection from outside is always better than inwardly rejecting your writer-self. Your writer-self is all you have to deal with. If you deprive yourself of that, you will never come to know how ultimately unimportant outer rejection is. But if you ally yourself with the forces of rejection, you will have committed creative suicide. The bastards will not only have got you down, they will have killed you, with your own enthusiastic complicity.

My poetry mania led me annually to assemble collections and send them to contests that promised publication of a first book. Each year from 1967 to 1970, I collected what I thought were my best poems (some revised within an inch of their lives), arranged them by theme, gave them titles and half titles, and sent them off to University Press X, University Press Y, and University Press Z—each of which had a literary lottery. I had no notion of how to contact a commercial publisher, and anyhow a university press seemed more elegant to me, with my graduate school snobbery (or fear of rejection in disguise). Even then New York publishers were phasing out poetry, but it hadn’t quite reached the final solution stage yet.

The first collection I submitted was Near the Black Forest. Weighted with poems about my discovering my Jewishness in Germany, it contains things I still read with an occasional intake of breath, wondering how did this little pisher know that? The following collection, called The Tempter Under the Eyelid, contained the best of the Heidelberg poems, plus a sheaf of new ones about seducing the muse, marrying poetry, chasing after love in fruit and vegetable form. The third collection, Fruits & Vegetables, took this tendency even further. It was full of ironic poems about the poet in the kitchen, the poet as housewife, sex, love, feminism, and whiplash womanhood. Freer than the first two—in both form and content—the collection still (mostly) pleases me. I was peeling the onion of myself, and finding in that pungent vegetable my own endlessly shedding soul.

By the time I came to assemble Fruits & Vegetables, I was furiously impatient for publication. It seemed that only a published book of poems could give me what I lacked. Little magazines and poetry quarterlies no longer satisfied. I was hungry to be heard by my contemporaries. I believed a volume of poems would change my life. I was fretting to become one of the unacknowledged legislators of womankind, to reach the huge audience of poetry lovers I believed was out there, to lash the world with poetry and bring it to its senses.

How entirely mad these assumptions seem now! I lived for poetry, so I assumed the world did. By now my duo of poetry mentors had become a triumvirate. Louis Untermeyer, that defiant Old Red and indefatigable anthologist, had joined Mark Strand and Stanley Kunitz in my personal pantheon. Louis had seen one of my poems in a dismal quarterly and had written me a letter: “What are you doing in that mass of mediocrity?” It was the literary equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Soon after, he invited me to his Connecticut house for dinner, and we fell immediately in love—as only a poet of twentysomething can fall in love with an anthologist of eightysomething (and vice versa).

There followed many other literary dinners—dinners with Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Howard and Bette Fast, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Anderson and Teresa Wright, Arvin and Joyce Brown, Martha Clarke, and any number of other poets, playwrights, novelists, actors, dancers, directors, and Old Reds.

Because of Louis and his wife, Bryna, I believed that Connecticut was a low-key New England version of Mount Olympus. Because of Louis and Bryna, I met the Fasts, who introduced me to my daughter’s father. Because of Louis and Bryna, I revised the poetry book yet again.

So I sent the new collection to X, Y, and Z. Through a fluke of fate, which really turned out to be a major synchronistic miracle, I also sent it to Holt, in those days called Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

I had come home from Germany the summer before our “tour of duty” ended, to find my grandmother dying. She languished on her real linen sheets, gazing out her sunny West Side window. She was altering her clothes to make them smaller—“so I will have something to wear when I go out again.” But she never went out again. The pancreatic cancer killed her faster than AIDS killed my friend Russell. But we were both denying cancer. Neither of us mentioned the word.

She asked me weakly what I was doing. “Working on my poems,” I said tentatively. Not tentatively at all, she admonished me: “Go see Gracela, Gracie, Grace.” (My grandmother always tripled or quintupled names, often calling me “Erica, Claudia, Nana, Edichka, Kittinka.”)

“Gracela, Gracie, Grace” was the daughter of an old friend of my grandparents’, an indomitable Russian lady named Bessie Golding. Grace and I later discovered that Bessie had been my grandfather’s lover while my grandmother was waiting in London to be summoned to the Golden Land. This only took eight years.

When Mama arrived in New York, Papa immediately found a proper communist husband for Bessie. Ever after, he described her as “an anarchist, a follower of Emma Goldman, a believer in free love.” In short, the opposite of my proper grandmother, who believed in real pearls, creamy kid gloves with pearl buttons, real linen sheets, real linen tablecloths with monogrammed napkins, duvets with embroidered covers. She also believed in fresh-squeezed orange juice, cod liver oil, soft-boiled eggs with toast “soldiers” (strips to dunk), and English chesterfield coats with velvet collars for little girls. She also believed in leather leggings. But not free love. She definitely did not believe in that.

So off I went with my poems to Gracela, Gracie, Grace (the product of Bessie and the proper communist my grandfather had fixed her up with). I had my three consecutive manuscripts of poems in a tough black morocco spring binder.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.

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?)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

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.

It was October of our first year in Germany when I first took the trolley to his office. I entered the cobbled courtyard of a nineteenth-century clinic with high yellow walls. Tall, tilted windows winked down at me.

I climbed three steep flights. Dr. Mitscherlich lurked in his book-lined office. Oriental rugs were unfurled this way and that on the wooden floor. An old-fashioned analytic couch threatened me, and I refused to lie down.

He was wearing a white clinician’s coat, a purple woven woolen tie, crepe-soled shoes that squeaked faintly as he walked. His white coat seemed a sort of Engelhemd, or “angel shirt” (as Germans call hospital gowns). Indeed, it seemed to angelize him. When I talked, his eyes belonged entirely to me.

I was blocked in my writing, blocked in my marriage, homesick for New York, glad to be away from my family. I needed my husband. I hated my husband. I was bored with my husband. I wanted to write. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t send work out because I was forever revising it. I stood in my own way. I knew that I didn’t want to end up blocked and bitter.

I soon surrendered to the couch, from which I could scan the book titles in English, German, Hungarian, Czech, French, Italian, Spanish. I remembered my dreams and related them.

Meandering from dreams to memories, to my life in Heidelberg, I simply “taught the unhappy present to recite the past,” until sooner or later “it faltered at the line where/Long ago the accusations had begun”—as Auden describes the process in his poem about Freud. There the needle stuck in the groove, pricking my heart until I said what the pain was.

Analysis is surrender—and who wants to surrender? No one. We fight till we have no other option, till the pain is so great we must. The ego wants brute power—and health be damned. The ego prefers death to surrender. But life keeps trying to assert itself. We keep stumbling over the same blocks until one day, after some trivial unraveling, the floor seems clear enough for us to walk a little way without tripping.

So it goes—Monday after Monday, Tuesday after Tuesday, Wednesday after Wednesday, Thursday after Thursday, Friday after Friday. It gets easier for a while, then it gets harder. It gets boring, then bearable, then impossible again. We keep on as if inching along on a novel we have come to hate. Only the discipline of finishing carries us through. And somewhere toward the end, the light shines again, as if through a clerestory window.

Dr. Mitscherlich’s Heidelberg office had clerestory windows. Those remain my metaphor for the way analysis began to shed light on my pain. Gray days followed one another endlessly; it rained and rained, as it always does in Germany. One day, the rays of sun were pouring in.

At the end of my first year of analysis, Dr. Mitscherlich moved his office to Frankfurt. From my gloomy army apartment, it was a fifteen-minute car ride to the Heidelberg Bahnhof, a one-hour train ride to Frankfurt, a twenty-minute trolley ride to the Sigmund Freud Institute.

I had just stopped calling Dr. M. a Nazi—having learned that his silence concealed his reputation as an anti-Nazi, as an author, as a researcher into the conditions that had made Nazism thrive. The fatherless society was the term he coined. He had become famous for his theories of the underlying causes of Nazism. He was a star and I hadn’t even known it. More important, he always treated me like a star long before I was one. His belief in me made my whole creative life possible.

I’d leave the house at 7:20, arrive at the Heidelberg station at 7:35, park my old Volkswagen Beetle (or “Beatle” as I liked to call it), catch the 7:50 train to Frankfurt/Darmstadt, arrive at Frankfurt Bahnhof at 8:52, wait for the 9:07 trolley (in any weather), then walk several blocks to be in Dr. M.’s waiting room at the institute by 9:40. My hour began at ten o’clock sharp.

There was grocery shopping to do, three hours to write, dinner to cook. There were army shindigs at night that officers and their Frauen had to attend. The shlepping to Frankfurt never stopped seeming worthwhile. There were only two days when I sabotaged the schedule and missed the train. On both occasions I was standing on the platform and staring after it.

The train became my life. I read, wrote in my notebook, scribbled poems and stories. The rocking motion soothed me and erotic fantasies came. I scrawled them down, made fables of them, explored them with Dr. M.

Fear of Flying somehow emerged from those train rides. On trains you can dream that the man opposite you will take off his thick glasses, strip to his savage loincloth, and make passionate love to you in an endless tunnel, then disappear like a vampire into the sunlight. The train rocks you back and forth on your wettest dreams; it merges the moist divide between inner and outer. I have come on trains without touching myself. It is only a matter of concentration. The impossible he (or she) comes into me. The fantasy takes over. Time stops as the train rocks. Suddenly my lap is full of stars.

He had shown me how. He had taught me to find the courage to climb down into myself. The unconscious is full of darkness, Oedipal stand-ins, broken legends, half-told tales. A shaky ladder with rotten rungs descends into it. Another golden ladder may take you to the stars. But first you must find yourself in the dark. If you don’t know yourself, how can you find anything?

“How can I receive the seeds of freedom,” asks Thomas Merton, “if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? God cannot plant his liberty in me because I am a prisoner and I do not even desire to be free.”

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self”—Merton again. He was describing the search for the contemplative life. But writing also requires the contemplative life.

Psychoanalysis is dismissed today as elitist, sexist, and self-indulgent. I disagree. How can you love yourself as a woman if you are looking at yourself through a wall of knives? And how can you love your sister if you think those knives are made of steel rather than of your own fear? As women we need to know ourselves more than ever. We need the truths of the unconscious more than our mothers and grandmothers did. Cynicism and despair seduce us. We are afraid to let love in. We prefer “the rotten luxury of knowing [ourselves] to be lost,” as Thomas Merton calls it.

When I left Germany, I was writing fluently. I still flagellated myself, but not to the point of utter paralysis. I still trapped myself in despair, but at least I knew my despair was a flight from change.

At twenty-seven, I had decided to be a writer. I thought I was old compared to Neruda, who published at nineteen, old compared to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote “Renascence” at twenty, old compared to Margaret Mead, who was already world-famous at twenty-seven. So I gave myself until thirty to make it, believing that once a book of poems was published, I would be happy forever. Hope was my jet-propellant.

How could I know that a published writer is hardly the happiest creature alive? “Ingrown toenails” Henry Miller called us. We sit and stew for years, picking lint out of our navels, only to experience that anticlimax, publication—which often confirms our worst fears, putting into print things only our most bitter enemies would say about us.

Women writers are expected to be girl guides through the swamps of heterosexual love. We are allowed to be pop novelists (coddled by the money men who run the congloms), but dismissed by the lit crit crowd as trashmeisters. We are allowed to write fleshly fables to be used as anodynes by other women, bromides to content them with their horrid lot. When we don’t, but give vent instead to satire or the creation of perverse imaginary worlds, we are faulted not for our books but for our imperfect womanhood, since womanhood is, by definition, a fault.

But what would my life have been like had I been born a man? My husband tries to convince me that given my family, I would have been forced into servitude in the tchotchke business and would never have become a writer at all.

Perhaps he’s right, but I see another picture. I see myself having been given the automatic entitlement of the male creator: A man who writes is not automatically considered a usurper.

A male writer surely has to find his voice, but does he also have to first convince the world that he has the right to find his voice? A woman writer must not only invent the wheel, she must grow the tree and chop it down, whittle it round, and learn to make it roll. Then she must clear a path for herself (over the catcalls of the kibitzers).

Even today, when one woman’s book is reviewed for three men’s books, it is considered uncool to mention the percentages. It’s not ladylike to remember that, but for our obstinate uncoolness, we’d still be one out of twelve.

I always identified with the male heroes in the books of my bookish childhood, so eventually I tried to write picaresque novels for women. At first I did this unconsciously (Fear of Flying, How to Save Your Own Life). Later I did it deliberately, mocking the picaresque form itself in Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. Virginia Woolf’s question “What if Shakespeare had a sister?” had led me to wonder “What if Tom Jones had been a woman?” and to apply my love for the eighteenth century to my investigation of one eighteenth-century woman’s fate.

Women have been allowed few heroic stories. The archetypes of wolf or moon goddess have only recently been revived. Under patriarchy, women’s stories have invariably ended in marriage or death. All the other alternatives were deemed unfit for telling.

As a beginning writer in Heidelberg, I puzzled over these limitations and decided to write my first novel from a male point of view. I called the novel The Man Who Murdered Poets, and went as far with it as my imitation of Nabokov’s mirror worlds could take me. Not far enough. Since I could not know what a man felt in his physical being, I halted, leaving the book unfinished.

Today perhaps I could write from a man’s point of view. I have lived with enough men to know their feelings as if from the inside. But now I also know how much women need their own stories to be told.

Every writer, someone said, is either a man or a woman. But for a man, there is a mold to break or follow, for a woman, there is a beckoning void. Writers usually build on each other’s foundations. I think of Byblos, of Split, of Istanbul. One civilization’s rubble is remade into the architecture of another. Women writers have consistently hungered for this rich creative rubble. Doomed always to start from scratch, we have begun our civilization’s records by fits and starts. Our matriarchs have been invisibilized, our myths obliterated. It seems we’re always listening to famous male writers telling us what we’re not.

In the past few years, we have invented some new forms and unearthed some old traditions. But our permission to be creators is still so unaccustomed that we tend to be ungenerous with each other. We prefer to denounce each other rather than denounce the self-appointed gurus who set us up as rivals.

As feminists, we ask literature to do more than literature ever can: fight the revolution, bury the dead, erect statues to our favorite heroines. That is hardly the way to stimulate a literature that mirrors life. Life is messier than politics usually allow, and less predictably pat. Life is merely what happened next and to whom. In asking life to be so purposefully political, we thwart our need to dream, to play, to invent.

In the name of feminism, some of us have forbidden women to be playful creators. Our pioneers—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, George Sand, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing—would be horrified to see us banishing play and freedom from our art. Play is the ultimate source of freedom. If we become artists of agitprop, we might as well have been born in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, or in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Feminists above all must fight for freedom of expression, because otherwise we will be doomed to silence—with “decency” as the excuse.

My publisher made a party at a fancy fruit and vegetable stand, a place called Winter’s Market on Third Avenue. The bright bins of fruit stepped out onto the sidewalk. The lemons and oranges gleamed in the sunlight.

I wore purple lace hotpants and a matching shirt with pockets strategically placed over the nipples. With purple granny glasses and purple shoes, I hoped I looked properly improper—as was de rigueur in 1971.

I sat on a crate of oranges, reading a poem about an onion:

I am thinking of the onion again, with its two O mouths, like the gaping holes in nobody. Of the outer skin, pinkish brown, peeled to reveal a greenish sphere, bald as a dead planet, glib as glass, & an odor almost animal. I consider its ability to draw tears, its capacity for self-scrutiny, flaying itself away, layer on layer, in search of its heart which is simply another region of skin, but deeper & greener. I remember Peer Gynt. I consider its sometimes double heart ...

The party noises drowned out my peelings. Karen Mender, the pretty young publicist who had organized the party, had amazingly succeeded in getting an evening news team to come. (A slow day in Vietnam, I guess.)

The poems went out into the world anyway, bringing back their own news. I began getting letters, invitations, reviews, Polaroids of naked men, baskets of fruit, of onions, of eggplants. Readings were proposed, poetry awards proffered. Little magazines that had formerly snubbed me now invited me to submit. I was asked to teach poetry at my shrine, the 92nd Street Y.

My students and I met around my dining room table in the West Side apartment I shared with Allan Jong. Poems were begun, poems rewritten, love affairs blossomed, marriages died. My students taught me about poetry and life.

“Coming,” I swore. But I was still noodling over The Man Who Murdered Poets and I knew I couldn’t show him that. (Eventually he did me the great favor of rejecting it, encouraging me to write a novel in the voice my poems had discovered.)

In July of 1971, Allan and I took off for a congress of psychoanalysts in Vienna—the first time analysts had returned to Vienna since Freud had fled the Nazis in 1939. Anna Freud would be there; so would Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Alexander Mitscherlich.