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a spring binder of new, unpublished poems, tentatively entitled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a pile of unpublished essays (many of which I had never seen); another binder, in which was a fragment of a manuscript entitled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 the like. Of particular interest is the following excerpt from one of her notebooks, dated October 1987, which makes it contemporaneous with parts of the rough draft of
Any Woman’s Blues:
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.
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 is worse—the desire or the antidesire. Both undo me; both burn me and reduce me to ash. The Nazis could not have invented a more cunning crematorium. This is my auto-da-fé, my obsession, my addiction.
Friends come to me and urge me to give him up, fill me with reasons, all of which I agree with. They do no good. What I feel is something that does not respond to reason. Older than Pan and the dark gods and goddesses lurking in the shadows behind him, this burning I feel is in fact the primordial force of the universe. Who can explain that I have chosen to attach it to a blond boy-man who pours his lies in my ear as he pours his seed in that other place? Who would believe the addiction, the obsession, the degradation, or even the love? Only one who has felt its fire. Only one who has also been burned in that fire and whose skin has crackled like the skin of medieval martyrs.
But most women do not have the luxury to feel that fire. Nor, in fact, do I. In my waking life, I am a successful woman (does it matter for the moment what I do?), known as a tough deal-maker, an eagle-eyed reader of contracts, a good negotiator. All that I know of life from the other sphere does me no good whatsoever here. You might even say that it makes me more vulnerable. For the tougher I am in the lawyer’s office, the more I desire to be tender here where the thought of his cock reduces me to ash.
Let me tell you about his cock. It is clawlike and demonic, a true prong. It has a curve where it should be straight, and in repose it lists to one side, the left. His politics, if he had any, would be the opposite. For he is the fascist, the boot in the face, the brute. All men worth having in bed are partly beasts. Every myth we have tells us this: Pan with his animal legs and human mouth; the beast that Beauty left her father for; the devil himself, with the wild witches—the bacchantes of Salem—cavorting about his puckered anus. And kissing it. Part of the lure is the degradation, the fact that we are creatures born between piss and shit, and in our darkest moments we obsessively recall that dilemma.
If twenty men were lined up before me with full erections and sacks put over their heads and torsos, I could identify my love (may I call him that?) by the curve of his cock. Angry and red in erection, circumcised (not because of his religion but because of the age in which he was born), curving like a boomerang which always returns to its owner, is it beautiful only because it leaves me? Is it just because I can possess it merely for brief interludes that it holds me in such thrall? Would I love it less if it were there all the time?
No danger of that. For I love a runner. No sooner does he call me his witch, his bacchante, his lady, his love, than he has to flee.
Oh, I think there is some of this in all men—however they express it. The longing to return to the womb, to be engulfed, to be totally passive between the huge breasts of the mother goddess, is so strong that no sooner do they feel themselves yielding to our primordial power than they have to run. Hence the battle between the sexes: she wants him safe between her legs forever; he, being afraid he wants to stay there, flees.
Where
he flees is immaterial. War. The Office. Golf. The salt mines. Tennis. Outer space. Deep-sea diving. Basketball. Las Vegas. Another woman. It’s all the same flight.
The man I love has constructed a museum to macho in my garage. Power saw. Punching bag. Motorcycle. Barbells. I love him in part because I cannot tame the wild creature that dwells inside him. For this is another paradox of the sexes: whatever we love in the other we seek to kill.
My love is a con man, a hustler, a cowboy, a cocksman, an addict, an artist, a fancy dancer, a dandy. He has no fixed address. Sometimes he’ll give a P.O. box, sometimes an answering service, sometimes a number that no one answers, sometimes an address he’s just made up. I once heard him tell his mother she could write him in Paris at the Charles de Gaulle Hotel.
“But you
know
there is no Charles de Gaulle Hotel,” I said. “It’s an
air
port. How can you do that to your own mother?”
“If you knew my mother as I do, you’d know it was only in self-defense. I had no choice.”
If you knew my mother as I do
and
self-defense.
These are the operative words. For he is sure (as only a very little boy can be sure) that wherever we are in the world, as we madly begin to fuck, his mother will find us and walk right through the wall of our boudoir like a vampire in a 1940s movie. So I know it is his mother he flees when he flees me—my vagabond, my warlock, my cocksman, my con man, my cowboy, my hustler, my lying love. Yet I also know that when he comes back he is as loyal, as faithful, as forthright, as sturdy and true, as that little boy scout who also dwells inside him. He’d lay down his life for me and my twins. He’d walk through fire and swim through ice. He’d hack the jungle with his bare hands, bite the heads off poisonous snakes, strip the skin from armadillos or porcupines. In short, he is my man, and I am addicted to the nectar he brews in his balls.
Since he cannot be good, it would be easier if he were entirely bad so at least I could hate him. But how can I hate him when the very badness in him makes him so very good where it counts—in bed?
He arrives, helmeted like Darth Vader, wearing black leather jeans and black leather jacket and black ostrich-leather boots with needle toes. Real spurs are on his heels. Silver spurs. They twinkle. He scoops me in his arms, holds me for a moment, my warm body against the wind-chilled smoothness of his black leather. From the moment I hear the spray of pebbles on the driveway and the racing motor of his bike, my motor begins to race as well. The pounding begins in my heart, spreads through my body like a jungle tattoo, sets up a resounding echo in that other heart between my thighs, eventually moistening the red silk knickers I have worn for this occasion. (They really
are
knickers and not their meeker American cousin, “panties,” for I have bought them in London, where the “dirty weekend” is still good and dirty, and the accoutrements produced for same are, accordingly, more risqué.)
Who can describe lust when it is this hot, this succulent, this compelling? Words cannot touch it. Perhaps only music can echo the swell and heft of it, the heat, the vibration. I once painted a picture of lust (all right: the secret is out: you know what I do). It was a round canvas with a burning center of orange and waves of red and lavender vibrating toward it. (That was in my so-called abstract period, which followed my so-called figurative period and preceded my so-called postmodernist film-still period.) These waves of red and lavender—a futurist contusion—are with me now, inside me, as he runs his hands down my buttocks, slides between my thighs, and finds the silky place where the red knickers part and I become pure liquid.
What happens next you know. I almost know it too, except that I am out of my mind with desire. We fall to the floor of the foyer (wide oaken planks, a hooked rug, a few dustballs chasing each other around as if they were tumbleweeds in the wake of our stampeding horses), and right there on the floorboards we make the beast with two backs in a tangle of black leather and silk, our clothes pulled away only enough to expose the parts that have the power to join.
Like this—dressed, helmeted, leathered by the goat under whose sign we couple—we come the first tumultuous time. It only seems to heat our blood for the next, and now we begin to strip off barriers of silk and skin and metal (my knickers, his black leather, his helmet), so that soon we are naked on the wide planks of the seventeenth-century floor, with a chaos of clothes flung about us everywhere—our witnesses.
“My witch,” he whispers.
“My devil, my warlock, my love . . .”
He is inside me again, hard again, the curved shaft of his cock corresponding to the bent desire that drives me, the tip of his glans hitting the spot deep within me that squirts pure liquid, the witches’ potion of the universe.
Shall I go on? How can two make love like this, then part? They should be joined forever, made one under the mocking moon that illuminates their bluish bodies, sky-clad. But it is one of the ironies of this sort of sex that it thrives on distance, and lovers who love like this either cannot live together, or when they do, then some magic goes out of their coupling; only that way can they live together long enough to make porridge, paint a house, plant a garden—or a baby.