Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [1]
—WILLIE DIXON
foreword
How I came to edit this curious manuscript—and how indeed Isadora Wing came to write it—are two of the many bizarre stories the ensuing pages have to tell. I hesitate to label the book either “fiction” or “autobiography”—for it was Isadora Wing’s unique genius to blur the boundaries between the two. But in editing Any Woman’s Blues, which was necessarily a partial and unpolished manuscript, there was another problem to contend with: namely that the author herself left, along with her unfinished book, her arguments with herself and her heroine in the margins of the working draft. These I have taken the liberty of inserting into the text—in italics—where I presume Isadora Wing wished them to go. Thus we have a unique record of an author arguing with, and indeed heckling, her creature—a creative dialogue that must go on in the heads of all novelists, but that, in most cases, we are not privileged to see.
When did Isadora Wing write Any Woman’s Blues?
Internal references in the manuscript make it probable that the novel was composed in the late eighties, at the tail end of the decade of greed and excess known as the Reagan years. This would in turn jibe with the known facts of Isadora Wing’s life—that she nearly always wrote her “novels” in response to disastrous events in her personal life and that in the latter years of the eighties she was attempting to break an obsession with a much younger man, one Berkeley Sproul III, a handsome young WASP heir, who had an unfortunate dependence on drugs and alcohol.
The first chapter of the “novel” seems to me one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing I have ever read. It is raw and vulnerable to a degree that seems to push literary counterphobia to the limit. Were Isadora Wing alive today, I wonder how she could tolerate the publication of this work—so exposed does it seem. She seems indeed to have known this, for a note to her research assistant and amanuensis, scrawled in the margins of the last page of Chapter One, reads:
Pls. do a computer search and see how many times the word “cock” is used in this chapter. I feel like I’m drowning in pubic hair—if he prongs her once more I’ll scream!
Perhaps a further word to the wise is necessary here before plunging willy-nilly, as it were, into the endometrial landscape of Any Woman’s Blues.
This so-called novel is not for the prudish or the faint of heart. It is throbbing and raw to a degree that will shock the most hardened libertine. Nevertheless, I think there is merit in publishing it—if only to demonstrate what a dead end the so-called sexual revolution had become, and how desperate so-called free women were in the last few years of our decadent epoch.
Any Woman’s Blues is a fable for our times: a story of a woman lost in excess and extremism—a sexaholic, an alcoholic, and a food addict. It is the “novel” Isadora Wing was in the midst of writing when her rented plane—a de Havilland Beaver (whose name she must have chuckled over)—was reported missing over the South Pacific in the vicinity of the Trobriand Islands. (Her last desperate stab at serenity—conquering her fear of flying and going to the South Pacific in search of utopia—seems like a mad attempt to play Gauguin when playing Emma Goldman had failed.) At the date of this prefactory study, the wreckage has not been found.
For several years, Ms. Wing had been taking flying lessons. She qualified as a pilot in 1987 and delighted in flying her own plane, a Bellanca, in the skies above her home state of Connecticut.
Her plane—a complex single-engine that “takes off fast and lands short,” according to Ms. Wing—was called Amazon I, a name that I believe she used ironically. Like all poets, she had a penchant for giving names to inanimate objects, and at one time in her life drove a Mercedes whose license plate read QUIM.1
During Ms. Wing’s final, tragic flight, she was accompanied by her fourth, and last, husband, the noted conductor and composer Sebastian Wanderlust, a friend of fifteen years whom she had just married. It is not known