Fear of flying...

I also considered "Another reason to live..." as a title for this post. It's my way of announcing unusually disheartening news to my husband: as in, "Another reason to live, sweetheart, John McCain is considering Condoleeza Rice as his running mate." But "Fear of flying..." as a title is more likely to keep me on topic.

Celebrating Fear of Flying as something or other, Columbia has acquired Erica Jong's papers. During her lecture on the 35th anniversary of F of F, a woman who looked quite a lot like Erica Jong, stood up in the middle of the proceedings to announce, "Fear of Flying has been a thorn in my side for 35 years..." Turns out she was Erica's sister and brimming with resentment over Erica's libelous use of certain family facts. Later, Erica calmly pronounced her sis "...insane". You can read all about it in the current issue of the The New Yorker.

For my part, I'm down with sis here. Fear of Flying has been a thorn in my side too, but not for Jong's-sister-type reasons. I hate it because it's a dirty, calculating, and unforgiveably dull book. Even worse, it familiarized some readers with Erica Jong's unspeakable poetry. I remember when it was first published and how it quickly collected a bunch of overblown quotations, some by reviewers dumb enough to think F of F was a feminist tract. A factual note to those reviewers and to Columbia University: it wasn't.

I remember I tried and tried and tried to read it and like it, but the job was beyond me. There weren't that many successful female authors around, the second-wave feminist movement was just getting cranked up, and hell, I wanted to read something terrific by a woman who wasn't Mary McCarthy. I hoped against hope it was misjudged the way Portnoy's Complaint had been (that is, considered to be a Filthy Book, but wuddya know, it was A Serious Book). Sadly, Fear of Flying was all old news: a woman who had lots of irresponsible sex and liked it, then doubled back and ruminated in angsty-fashion on what it all meant.

Those of us who had dipped into Jack Kerouac already knew there were women like that--had been for quite a while--and without all the ruminating. I think Erica Jong was well aware of certain cultural currents (feminism, the sexual revolution, the lifting of censorship laws) and took full advantage of them. She wrote a book full of cardboard characters who participated in cardboardy events, emerging no-wiser than before. And what's wrong with that? Jong says Fear of Flying freed a lot of women, and made them happier.

There's nothing wrong with getting happier. There are woman made vastly jollier by comic books and Harlequin Romances. Whatever blows your dress up, I say as long as real history doesn't get tied in double knots. By Columbia's acknowledging Jong's elderly best-seller as a A Serious Thing, still another layer of opacity is laid over that very misunderstood period.

Did F of F free women in any way? I doubt it--women were up against some cast-iron biases, for one thing. This was a period when women were asked what birth control they used during job interviews. It was a period when, in many states, women could not sell their own land without their husband's permission. It was a period when Maine allowed women to be beaten with impunity under the guise of "home correction". This was a period when women had to be married or engaged to get birth control information. In short, it was a time when there were serious obstacles ahead if you happened to be female.

And, during that period, having experienced a bit of that crap, I was looking for anything to help me know what to do, how to live, and how to get free of the cultural strangleholds pinning me down. In that regard, Female Eunich proved to be a godsend.

Fear of Flying was a waste of my time when I didn't have it to waste. Looking back, I bet I wasn't the only one.