Authors: Erica Jong
Beethoven’s plaster death mask hangs on the wall. His domed lids are shut. She climbs up on a chair and runs her fingers across them. The black soot streaks the plaster. Now she has left her fingerprints on Beethoven’s eyes. Something dreadful will surely happen.
On the table is a skull. Beside it is a candlestick. This is a still life her grandfather has set up. Are there such things as still lives?
On the easel is a half-finished painting of the skull and candlestick. Which is more still? The skull? Or the still life of the skull? Which stillness will last longer?
In the corner of the room is a closet. Her husband’s green army jacket hangs there, empty. The sleeves flap in the wind. Is he dead? She is terribly frightened. She runs through the studio trap door and down the steps. Suddenly she falls, knowing she is going to die when she hits bottom. She struggles to scream and in the struggle wakes herself up. She is surprised to find herself in Paris rather than her parents’ house. He still lies beside her as if dead. She looks at his sleeping face, the long mouth with its curled-up corners, the sketchy eyebrows like Chinese calligraphy, and she thinks that next year this time they will not be together or else they will have a baby who does not look like her.
“Merry Christmas,” he says, opening his eyes.
They make love hopefully.
It is freezing and last night’s rain has made the streets glassy. They dress and go out for a walk. He holds her tightly, but anyway she keeps slipping. He admonishes her to “take small steps.”
“As if my feet were bound,” she says.
He doesn’t laugh.
They walk along the Île St. Louis and admire the architecture. They point out quaint stone carvings on the second stories of townhouses. They stop to watch three old men who are catching little wriggling fishes in the gray and swollen Seine. They eat two dozen oysters in an Alsatian restaurant and then have onion tarts and get drunk on wine. They walk the glassy streets again, holding on to each other for dear life. She wonders where she could go if she left him. The home she dreamed of last night comes back to her in snatches. She knows she can’t go there. She has nowhere to go. Nowhere. She holds him tightly. “I love you,” she says.
When it gets darker they stop for
bûche de Noël
and coffee in a little restaurant facing Notre Dame from the Left Bank. Is he thinking of leaving her? She never knows what he’s thinking. They pretend it was a happy, carefree day. He never fails to hold her tightly around the waist as they cross the icy streets together.
“Take small steps,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to break your neck and take me along with you.”
“What would I
do
without you?” she says.
He clears his throat nervously, but says nothing.
The film would end there, on the note of his cough, perhaps. But I remember the events that followed: the car breaking down, and having to take the train back to Heidelberg; the four French soldiers who shared our second-class couchette compartment and belched and farted all the way back to Germany, almost as if they were powering the train;
the precipitous drop from the highest couchette (which I occupied) to the floor. A sudden bout of diarrhea caused me to negotiate this drop no less than six times that night (and once I stepped right into the groin of the French soldier in the bottom couchette, who was extremely gracious about it, considering).
And then the return to Heidelberg with Christmas over and having to face being in the army all over again. (On vacations we tried to pretend we were just an American couple living in Europe for the hell of it.)
And then on New Year’s Day, there was the telegram— garbled as such messages often are, and coming on that dismal gray Saturday afternoon when the entire male population of
Klein Amerika
was engrossed in polishing the family car and the entire female population was walking around in hair rollers and the Germans on the other side of Goethestrasse were already breaking out the first bottle of
Schnaps
in preparation for the new year. …
GRANDPA DIED SIX FIFTEEN TUESDAY STOP
REVIVED BY MASSAGE STOP HEART FAILURE
STOP RECTAL HEMMORAGE STOP NOTHING COULD
BE DONE STOP FUNERAL JANUARY
4
STOP
LOVE MOTHER
I read the telegram first, then gave it to Bennett. I had that sick feeling I always have when I know something awful is going to be blamed on me. I knew that Bennett would somehow find a way to blame me for his grandfather’s death. My mother’s parents were still alive.
I put my arms around Bennett and he drew away. I remember thinking I was not so sad that his grandfather had died, but that I was going to have to die a little bit more for it in penance. Bennett sat on the living-room couch with the telegram in his hands. I sat next to him and reread it over his shoulder. “The moving finger writes and it misspells words,” I thought I hardly knew Bennett’s grandfather (an ancient Chinese man who was either 99 or 100, looked like a yellowed ivory statue, and spoke barely any English at all). I pretended it was my own grandfather who had died and began to cry. I was really crying for myself, dying slowly at the age of twenty-five.
Bennett was marked by death, up to his neck in it. He carried his sadness on his shoulders like an invisible knapsack. If he had turned to me, if he had let me comfort him, I might have borne it with him. But he blamed me for it. And his blame drove me away. But I was afraid to go away. I stayed and grew more secret. I turned more and more to my fantasies and to my writing. And that was how I began to discover myself. He retreated into his sadness, barricaded himself in it, and I retreated into my room to write. All that long winter, he mourned his grandfather, his father, his sister who had died at sixteen, his brother who had been born retarded and died at eighteen, his friend who had died of polio at fourteen, his poverty, his silence. He mourned the army, the life he’d left in New York. He mourned the dead and his own preoccupation with death. He mourned his mourning. The rigid expression he wore on his face was a kind of death mask. So many people he had loved (but also hated) had died, and he wore this mask in penance. Why should he be alive when they were dead? So he made his life resemble death. And his death was my death too. I learned to keep myself alive by writing.
That was the winter I began to write in earnest. I began to write as if it were my only hope for survival, for escape. I had always written, after a fashion. I had always worshipped authors. I used to kiss their pictures on the backs of books when I finished reading. I regarded anything printed as a holy relic and authors as creatures of superhuman knowledge and wit. Pearl Buck, Tolstoy, or Carolyn Keene, the author of
Nancy Drew.
I made none of the snotty divisions you learn to make later. I could happily go from
Through the Looking Glass
to a horror comic, from
Great Expectations
or
The Secret Garden
to
Mad
Magazine.
Growing up in my chaotic household, I quickly learned that a book carefully arranged before your face was a bulletproof shield, an asbestos wall, a cloak of invisibility. I learned to take refuge behind books, to become, as my mother and father called me, “the absentminded professor.” They screamed at me, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe.
Bennett’s grandfather—that courageous old man who came from China at the age of twenty, who was converted to Christianity by a missionary who promised to teach him English (and never did), who preached the gospel to Chinese laborers in mining camps of the Northwest, who finally ended his days keeping a gift shop on Pell Street—and never in all his 99 or 100 years learned to speak more than a few words of intelligible English, much less write it—launched me on my career as a writer by dying. Sometimes death is the beginning of things.
While Bennett mourned in silence through the long winter, I wrote. I threw out all my college poems, even the ones that had been published. I threw out all my false starts at stories and novels. I wanted to make myself anew, to make a new life for myself by writing.
I immersed myself in the work of other writers. I used to send for books from Foyle’s in London or ask my friends or parents to send them from New York. I would study one contemporary poet or novelist at a time, reading and rereading their books, studying how they had changed from book to book, imitating a different author’s style every few months. The whole time I was terrified and regarded myself as a failure. Once, when I was eighteen or so and thought of thirty as old age, I had promised to kill myself if I hadn’t published my first book by the age of twenty-five. And here I was already twenty-five! And just beginning.
Sending work to magazines was entirely out of the question. Though I had been class poet in college and had won the usual prizes, I was now convinced that nothing I was writing was good enough to send anywhere. I viewed editors of quarterlies as godlike creatures who would not even deign to read anything short of masterpieces. And I believed this despite the fact that I subscribed to quarterlies and religiously read the work in them. The work was often not good, I had to admit, but still, I was sure my own must be much, much worse.
I lived in a world peopled by phantoms. I would have imaginary love affairs with poets whose work I regularly read in quarterlies. Certain names came to seem almost alive to me. I would read the biographical sketches of the writers and feel I knew them. It’s odd how intimate a relationship you can have with someone you’ve never met—and how erroneous your impressions can be. Later, when I came back to New York and began publishing poems, I met some of these magical names. They were usually entirely different from what I’d imagined. Wits in print might turn out to be halfwits in person. Authors of gloomy poems about death might turn out to be warm and funny. Charming writers could turn out to be most uncharming people. Generous, open-hearted, altruistic writers might turn out to be niggardly, hard-driving, and jealous. … Not that there were any absolute rules about it, but usually there were some surprises in store. It was a most dangerous business to judge a writer’s character by what he wrote. But all that reality came later. In my Heidelberg days, I was immersed in an imaginary literary world which was pleasantly out of touch with the grubby reality. One aspect of this was my curious relationship with
The New Yorker.
At the time of which I’m writing,
The New Yorker
(and all other third-class matter) used to sail across the Atlantic. Maybe this was the reason that three or four
New Yorkers
(none of them less than three weeks old) always arrived together in a heavy heap. I used to tear off the wrappers like someone in a trance. I had a ritual for attacking this ritualistic magazine. It had no table of contents then either—just the reverse snobbery of those little by-lines preceded by diffident dashes—and I would plunge in backward, scanning first for the names under the long articles, canvassing the short-story credits, and breathlessly surveying the poems.
I did all this in a cold sweat to the thumping accompaniment of my heart. What terrified me was the possibility of finding a poem or story or article by someone I
knew.
Someone who had been an idiot in college, or a known nose-picker, or who (in combination with one or both of these things) was
younger
than me. Even by one or two months.
It was not that I merely read
The New Yorker;
I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a
New Yorker
world (located somewhere east of Westport and west of the Cotswolds) where Peter de Vries (punning softly) was forever lifting a glass of Piesporter, where Niccolo Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master’s Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly (repeating all the while that Nabokov was the best writer of English currently holding American citizenship). Meanwhile, the Indian writers clustered in a corner punjabbering away in Sellerian accents (and giving off a pervasive odor of curry) and the Irish memorists (in fishermen’s sweaters and whiskey breath) were busy snubbing the prissily tweedy English memorists.
Oh, I had mythicized other magazines and literary quarterlies, too, but
The New Yorker
had been my shrine since childhood. (
Commentary,
for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites—all of whom were named Irving—worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirees amused me, but it was for
The New Yorker
that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages.
I had, anyway, an altogether exalted notion of what it meant to be
an author.
I imagined them as a mysterious fraternity of mortals who walked around more nimbly and lightly than other people—as if they somehow had invisible wings on their shoulders. They smiled wryly, recognizing each other by means of a certain something—maybe like the radar bats are said to possess. Certainly nothing so crude as a secret handshake.
Bennett was indirectly involved with my writing too, though he seldom read a word I wrote. I did not really need anyone to read my work at that point (because the work was mostly a preparation for the work to come) but I very much needed someone to approve of the
act
of writing. He did that. At times it was not clear whether he approved of my writing just so that I would not bother him in his depression or whether he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. But the fact was that he believed in me long before I believed in myself. It was as if during that long bad time in our marriage we reached each other indirectly through my writing. Though we did not read it together, we were united by it in our retreat from the world.