Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [3]
For some time now I have wanted to write a novel that includes within it the materials of the creative hegira and that illustrates within its very form or formlessness the process of writing the book—particularly the arguments with one’s self or one’s heroine in the margins of the manuscript. What I want to convey is the creative flux itself, the feel of life battling art and art battling life—the chaos and clutter of dredging a novel up out of the self.
I have always been struck by Proust’s motto (which Colette appropriated): “Ce ‘je’ qui est moi et qui n’est peut-être pas moi” (“This ‘I’ which is myself and yet perhaps not myself”). Every novelist wrestles with this paradox, for we know that not only our protagonist but every character in every book is a part of that mysterious mosaic we call our “self.”
It is in response to this declaration and other internal evidence in the diaries and letters (including scrawled notes to herself on the rough incomplete draft, indicating where she wished bits of marginal material to be inserted) that I have taken the liberty of reconstructing Ms. Wing’s last manuscript as she doubtless wished it to appear.
Thus Any Woman’s Blues, a conventional roman à clef about an artist called Leila Sand (who, at the outset of the book, is at once battling alcoholism and a sadomasochistic obsession with a much younger man), is punctuated passim with the interruptions of Isadora Wing arguing with Leila Sand (the author arguing with her protagonist—with herself, in short), which suggest the life that flowed alongside the novel.
Ms. Wing, like many contemporary women, apparently believed that the secret of happiness was not to be found in the illusion of “the perfect man” but rather in finding strength within one’s self. That strength once found, one could be happy with or without a partner. This search for inner happiness constitutes the fable of Any Woman’s Blues. It has as its theme a woman’s search for a way out of addictive love and toward real self-love, which is not to be confused with narcissism. It should not surprise us that this is so, for inevitably in a writer’s life, “one tends to subsume in a book one is writing all the conflicts one is trying to resolve at that particular time” (Isadora Wing, Interview, 1987).
I trust that my foreword has made clear my deep interest in feminist literary history, my admiration for the late Ms. Wing, and my arduous preparation for the awesome task of editor, official biographer, and literary executor to so feminal—if I may use a Wingian locution—a writer of our time.
I have taken it upon myself to correct obvious solecisms, engage in minor copyediting, and change names and descriptions of characters to the satisfaction of both the publisher’s lawyers and the lawyers for the Estate of Isadora Wing.
If, despite all my efforts to serve propriety without emasculating (effeminating?) literature, Ms. Wing’s work still seems a bit too Rabelaisian for the faint of heart, I think we must understand that a total lustiness of body and mind was not only her chosen way of living but also her message to the world. She believed in the integration of body and mind, and it would probably be comforting to her to know that she lost both together. Fly on, Isadora Wing, wherever you are! Fly on!
CARYL FLEISHMANN-STANGER, PH.D.
Chair, Department of English
Sophia College
Paugussett, Connecticut
1
Sugar in My Bowl
I need a little sugar in my bowl,
I need a little hot-dog between my roll.
—J. C. Johnson
I am a woman in the grip of an obsession. I sit here by the phone (which may in fact be out of order) and wait for his call. I listen for the sound of his motorcycle spraying pebbles on the curving driveway path. I imagine his body, his mocking mouth on mine, his curving cock, and I am a ruin of desire and the fight against desire. I don’t know which