The Loves of Isadora

Her more extravagant admirers, who tend to be women, consider Erica Jong a female Roth, Vonnegut and Mailer combined. Her first novel, Fear of Flying, had a brisk hardback sale after it was published late in 1973 and since its appearance in paperback last November, a rapid rise to No. 1 on the bestseller charts. At Houston's Rice University it is used in an English course and at Radcliffe, the Atlanta Y.W.C.A. Women's Center and elsewhere as the subject of discussion in consciousness-raising groups. It is also discussed in therapy, since psychiatrists and psychologists have found that the book encourages their women patients to reveal their sexual fantasies.

Jong's bestseller is the mock memoirs of a 29-year-old Jewish poet named Isadora Wing who accompanies her husband, a psychoanalyst, to a conference in Vienna. There Isadora links up with another analyst, a sardonic weasel of a man named Adrian Goodlove, and takes off with him on a raunchy, drunken odyssey across Europe. Along the way, Isadora manages to unburden to Adrian and the reader an abundant melange of sexual escapades and dreams, the most memorable of which is her hunger for anonymous sex with nameless men.

Lethal Success. Such desires, explains Jong, "were a fantasy of my 20s." Now 32, she has outgrown them. "The beautiful men on the street are probably very boring to talk to." Jong grew up in a Jewish household in Manhattan, attended Barnard College and earned a master's degree in English literature from Columbia. Both Jong and Isadora are poets; both had brief marriages to fellow students, then married American-born Chinese psychiatrists. Most of the novel, says Jong, is "an interweaving of fiction with reality."

A pretty, blonde woman with an expansive smile, Jong is giggly and ebullient, sprinkling her talk alternately with four-letter words and literary allusions. At times in her life, she has suffered from depressions, insomnia and other problems and, in fact, quit psychoanalysis last fall after eight years of therapy four times a week. She is happiest when left alone to write and complains that success can be lethal. "People always want to collect you for cocktail parties and take you to bed," she says. They have also inundated her with letters spelling out ultimate secrets. Notes Jong: "The whole thing makes me feel like Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West's novella." A self-styled feminist, she recalls the day a high school boy asked her if she wanted to "grow up and be a secretary." Actually she always wanted to be a writer. Deeply affected by the suicide of her friend Anne Sexton, Jong is determined to be a survivor: "It is vital that other women see that female authors do not all put their heads in the oven, like Sylvia Plath."

Many of Jong's problems as a successful novelist will be the subject of her next book (tentatively titled How to Save Your Own Life). She spent last fall commuting to Hollywood to write the screenplay of Flying, and is now packing up for a long stay in Nevada or California, where she will work on her new novel and some poetry as well. Last week Jong and her husband began separation proceedings. As Flying clearly implies and as Jong confirms, "there were problems in our marriage from the start--those of a very verbal person married to a very rigid, uptight one."

The success of her book has surprised no one more than Jong, who considered it too "literary" for wide appeal. But literary it is not. Poorly constructed, too prone to phrases like "our mouths melted like liquid," it has a shapeless, self-indulgent plot and weak characterizations, especially of the men. But Isadora obviously has wide appeal. Says her creator: "Fear of Flying is a litmus test for everybody's mishegoss [Yiddish for craziness]." Warren Farrell, a spokesman for the men's liberation movement, feels that Fear of Flying will help free both sexes. As women take more initiative and responsibility for their sex lives, he believes, "some of the pressure will be removed from men." Feminist Spokeswoman Betty Friedan hails the book for its humor and playfulness: "I'm sick of the bitter things that have come out of feminism."

Many feminists, however, find Isadora's obsession with men a confirmation of the worst stereotypes about women. Sandra Hochman, author of Walking Papers, admires Jong's frankness but complains that Isadora is "just another female loser, left in the end to choose between one creep and another." Becky Gould, newly elected president of the National Organization for Women in Los Angeles, objects to the fact that Jong's heroine "derives her identity through her relationships with men. She is prefeminist, confusing libidinal bluntness with liberation." Gould concedes, however, that Jong has helped make headway for women writers. Says she: "It has to be some kind of breakthrough for a woman to cash in on this kind of tripe; men have been doing it for so long."

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