Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [127]
Whatever Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger, Ph.D., may or may not have told you about “me” or my “last” novel, I am not dead, but back—I, Isadora White Stollermann Wing, alias Leila Sand, Louise Zandberg, Candida Wong, La Tintoretta, Paola Uccello, und so weiter. As another author said on another occasion: reports of my death were an exaggeration.
Peace and quiet in the South Seas didn’t quite work out. “Sebastian Wanderlust”—alias “Julian Silver”—gave wonderful weekends and gondola trips down the Grand Canal, but he, too, being human, had a hidden agenda. When even paradise failed to cure him of civilization’s afflictions, he, like “Danny Doland,” blamed me for it. We couldn’t salvage our friendship or our marriage afterward.
Back from paradise, I decided to write only poetry, prayer, meditation, to eliminate “I,” to invent a new form that captures the timelessness of existence, that tries to reach beyond words to the infinite and unchanging realities that pre-dated our brutish appearance on the planet and shall long outlast us.
Thus, whether I am Leila, Isadora, Louise, Caryl, or even someone neither of us knows, is of the sheerest unimportance. All of these are merely masks that cling to my face for a while, then fall away, even as the flesh falls away beneath them. The masks are merely there to facilitate our understanding—since, from infancy onward, we learn best from a humanoid face. But masks they are, and all of wisdom is in knowing that.
Since all I plan to write henceforth is poetry and psalm, you, dear reader, may never read another one of my books—since the most valuable words, in our joke of a literate society, tend to be the least read.
Farewell, then. I have loved our moments together. I have loved making you laugh and making you cry. Often, while writing, I have laughed or cried myself. I truly love you. I truly want to save your lives. And mine.
I will henceforth write only poetry because it is only such that, being out of time, transcends time. If I could write in invisible ink, I would. For we all write in invisible ink anyway, our words flying up to heaven like so many cinders from hell flying toward the face of God, whose radiance vaporizes them.
As Leila, as Louise, even as Isadora, I take my leave of you, asking you to love each other as well as you can, be brave, commune with your God, and try to fight against mendacity wherever it appears—in yourself first of all.
The old fiction writer I was (and still partly am) cannot resist the tropism of finishing off the story for the reader’s satisfaction (and my own), so here goes—a tying up of the loose ends, as in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel. I am too much the good-little-girl novelist to be able to leave my characters dangling.
After “Isadora” ceased to publish (and after her longer and longer sojourns in a Trappist monastery), Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger, Ph.D., became—because nature abhors a vacuum—the “expert” and mouthpiece on her work. She gave seminars, wrote learned papers, sent letters to the Times Book Review, appeared at the MLA, and so forth, all in the service of creating an Isadora Wing whom she never knew and who never really existed.
“Sebastian,” or “Julian,” went back to L.A., divorced the present writer by mutual consent, married a sweet young thing, and, complaining that he really wanted to write operas about the vanity of human wishes and spiritual transcendence, went on composing electronic scores for Columbia, Fox, Universal, et alia. He even wrote, produced, and scored a hugely successful movie called Papua Castaway (directed, as you remember, by Leonard Nimoy), and thereafter his price per score went to one million. Trapped by his lifestyle and his new wife (who ordered license plates for their twin Ferraris that read: EARNS and SPENDS), he goes on toiling at his synthesizer to this day, an admirable craftsman, thoroughly dismayed by his life.
“Bean/Dart/Trick” also wound up in area code 213, married to an older actress, dreaming of “Leila/Louise/ Isadora,” his one