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Erica Jong and the Pleasure of Being Inconvenient
There is a sort of man who says he loves independent women. He may even say it with considerable charm. Ask him whether he likes being contradicted at dinner and the evening becomes more educational.
This is one of the many reasons I love Erica Jong.
Fear of Flying appeared in 1973, and its sexual candour made it famous enough that people could develop strong opinions without reading it. I suspect that remains an attractive arrangement. The novel is funny in ways that embarrass the reader who came prepared to admire its courage solemnly. Isadora Wing wants pleasure. She also wants reassurance, adoration, freedom, a convincing explanation for her own behavior and, on difficult days, someone else to be responsible for the consequences. She is a great deal of trouble. So are most interesting people.
Jong understands the comic inconvenience of a woman whose mind keeps working after her clothes come off. She notices the vanity that attaches itself to theories of sexual freedom, especially when two people want quite different freedoms and have managed to use the same attractive word. Intellectual sophistication has never prevented anyone from behaving like a fool in a hotel room.
I admire women who can keep several incompatible truths alive without immediately appointing one of them their official position. A marriage can be affectionate and stifling. An affair can be exhilarating and remarkably tedious by breakfast. A woman can make a sensible decision about her career while entertaining a deeply foolish one about the person sitting across from her. Sometimes she is aware of the contradiction. Sometimes she is enjoying it too much to care.
The easiest way to write a woman with a serious job is to make her flawlessly competent until the plot requires an indiscretion. But real competence doesn't switch off longing, boredom, rivalry or appetite. It can make those things harder to confess. The woman who can read an entire boardroom before lunch may still misread one person's hand resting too long on the back of her chair.
And before somebody objects, yes, men can be just as foolish. Men have been given several centuries of great literature in which to demonstrate it, usually with the flattering possibility that their folly represents the human condition. A woman gets the same privilege, and half the room begins discussing her moral example.
What I appreciate in Jong is permission to find this funny without making it harmless. Isadora's mistakes have weight. Desire can rearrange a life, and the people whose lives are moved around may have objections. Nobody is owed a prize for being honest about wanting something. Honesty is where the awkward conversation begins.
I think a great deal about people who have made good lives by being reliable. They understand how to be useful. Their names open doors. Others ask their advice and trust their signatures. Then desire arrives in a form that cannot be filed under a sensible heading. It may be genuinely thrilling to feel wanted by somebody who remembers an earlier version of you. It can also expose exactly how much of your present life depends on other people believing they know you.
That pressure belongs to the world of The Clearance, although its characters live under different professional rules and expectations. It is enough to watch what happens when private choices and public credibility begin to share a corridor.
The most seductive quality in a woman, to my mind, is not fearlessness. Fearless people can be exhausting. I prefer the woman who knows perfectly well what a choice might cost and is still capable of being amused by her own desire. She may behave. She may not. In either event, I hope she gets the better dialogue.