Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [2]
Ms. Wing’s daughter being a minor, the executors of her estate quite properly sought a reputable feminist scholar to edit and prepare for the press Ms. Wing’s last literary works, her “literary remains,” so to speak. This sad but exhilarating task fell to me.
I had been very much taken with Ms. Wing’s first book of poems, Vaginal Flowers, which I instantly recognized as something new in women’s poetry, an antidote to the doom-ridden, deathward poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, a woman poet embracing and celebrating her own womanliness with verve and joie de vivre. Ms. Wing’s first novel, Candida Confesses, the succès de scandale that made her a household name, had not yet been published, and Ms. Wing herself was then a part-time professor of English at CCNY in New York. We met as colleagues, as feminists, as contemporaries, both committed to the struggle for women’s equality, both, if I may presume, Shakespeare’s sisters. I remember a warm and engaging blonde in her late twenties, with a savagely self-mocking wit, a sort of gallows humor of the underdog, and a tendency to pepper her speech with Yiddishisms, four-letter words, and literary references. I was drawn to her immediately. But I also remember a great sadness in her eyes and a vulnerability that troubled and surprised me.
I never had met anyone that vulnerable except for the poet Anne Sexton (another reader in our series and, in fact, our stellar attraction that year), and I could not quite make sense of the bravado of Ms. Wing’s writing and the vulnerability of her persona. It was as if the two halves of herself had not yet come together; and indeed it is still hard for me to associate the fragile young writer I met in 1973 with the woman of the world who piloted her own plane, had numerous lovers, and lived as hard as she wrote, taking the Hemingwayesque ideal of the novelist and appropriating it for the whole female sex.
Through the years, Ms. Wing and I met infrequently, but we continued to correspond sporadically. After Ms. Wing’s tragic disappearance, I was invited by her stepson Charles Wanderlust, himself an eminent scholar of English literature (pre-Romantic poetry), and her sister Chloe, a psychotherapist in New York City, to make sense of the mass of papers on Ms. Wing’s desk in Connecticut.
Ms. Wing’s family seemed not to have tampered with her literary legacy, although one of her ex-husbands was threatening to sue if any part of the new book dealt with him. Fortunately that never became an issue, since his name hardly occurs even in her notebooks. When Isadora Wing moved on, she moved on, and if any ghosts from the past preoccupied her, they were the ghost of her grandfather, Samuel Stoloff, the painter, the ghost of Colette, with whom she felt a great kinship, and the ghost of Amelia Earhart, whose destiny she was soon to share.
Knowing this author’s penchant for carrying all her manuscripts and notebooks with her on her endless travels, I feared to find nothing of value, feared in fact that the manuscripts and notebooks had gone down in the South Pacific with her. On the contrary, I found a rough and incomplete draft of her last “novel,” Any Woman’s Blues; a dozen or more marbled notebooks from Venice, going back to the late seventies, when she was writing Tintoretto’s Daughter; a spring binder of new, unpublished poems, tentatively entitled Lullaby for a Dybbuk; a pile of unpublished essays (many of which I had never seen); another binder, in which was a fragment of a manuscript entitled The Amazon Handbook, by Isadora Wing and Emily Quinn; various folders of literary correspondence to various authors around the world; love letters from a surprising variety of men and women; piles of art and anthropology books; clippings about women artists; and