Any Woman's Blues

Table of Contents

 

 

fiction

 

 

 

 

 

Serenissima: A Novel of Venice
(republished as
Shylock’s Daughter
)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

poetry

 

 

 

 

 

nonfiction

 

 

 

 

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 1990, 2006 by Erica Mann Jong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Pages 363-64 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jong, Erica.

Any woman’s blues : a novel of obsession / Erica Jong.—1st Jeremy P. Tarcher pbk. ed. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11778-1

1. Women—Fiction. 2. Relationship addiction—Fiction. 3. Self-esteem—Fiction.
4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS356.056A
813’.54—dc22

 

For the impossible he who lives inside me

—ARAB PROVERB

I intend to stake out my own
claim, a tiny one, but my own.
Lacking a name for it, I’ll call
it—
pro tem
—The Land of Fuck.

—HENRY MILLER

—ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
(The Big Book)

The blues ain’t nothing but the facts of life.

—WILLIE DIXON

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?

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.

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.

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

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.