by Erica Jong
Perhaps sex accounted for my fury. Perhaps sex was the real Pandora’s box. My mother believed in free love, in dancing naked in the Bois de Boulogne, in dancing in the Greek Isles, in performing the Rites of Spring. Yet of course, she did not, or why did she say that boys wouldn’t respect me unless I “played hard to get”? That boys wouldn’t chase me if I “wore my heart on my sleeve,” that boys wouldn’t call me if I “made myself cheap”?
Sex. I was terrified of the tremendous power it had over me. The energy, the excitement, the power to make me feel totally crazy! What about that? How do you make that jibe with “playing hard to get”?
I never had the courage to ask my mother directly. I sensed, despite her bohemian talk, that she disapproved of sex, that it was basically unmentionable. So I turned to D. H. Lawrence, and to Love Without Fear, and to Coming of Age in Samoa. Margaret Mead wasn’t much help. What did I have in common with all those savages? (Plenty, of course, but at the time I didn’t realize it.) Eustace Chesser, M.D., was good on all the fascinating details (“How to Manage the Sex Act,” penetration, foreplay, afterglow), but he didn’t seem to have much to say about my moral dilemmas: how “far” to go? inside the bra or outside? inside the pants or outside? inside the mouth or outside? when to swallow, if ever. It was all so complicated. And it seemed so much more complicated for women. Basically, I think, I was furious with my mother for not teaching me how to be a woman, for not teaching me how to make peace between the raging hunger in my cunt and the hunger in my head.
So I learned about women from men. I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn’t think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely.
Naturally I trusted everything they said, even when it implied my own inferiority. I learned what an orgasm was from D. H. Lawrence, disguised as Lady Chatterley. I learned from him that all women worship “the Phallos”-as he so quaintly spelled it. I learned from Shaw that women never can be artists; I learned from Dostoyevsky that they have no religious feeling; I learned from Swift and Pope that they have too much religious feeling (and therefore can never be quite rational); I learned from Faulkner that they are earth mothers and at one with the moon and the tides and the crops; I learned from Freud that they have deficient superegos and are ever “incomplete” because they lack the one thing in this world worth having: a penis.
But what did all this have to do with me-who went to school and got better marks than the boys and painted and wrote and spent Saturdays doing still lifes at the Art Students League and my weekday afternoons editing the high-school paper (Features Editor; the Editor-in-Chief had never been a girl-though it also never occurred to us then to question it)? What did the moon and tides and earth-mothering and the worship of the Lawrentian “phallos” have to do with me or with my life?
I met my first “phallos” at thirteen years and ten months on my parents’ avocado-green silk living-room couch, in the shade of an avocado-green avocado tree, grown by my avocado green-thumbed mother from an avocado pit. The “phallos” belonged to Steve Applebaum, a junior and art major when I was a freshman and art major, and it had a most memorable abstract design of blue veins on its Kandinsky-purple underside. In retrospect, it was a remarkable specimen: circumcised, of course, and huge (what is huge when you have no frame of reference?), and with an impressive life of its own. As soon as it began to make its drumlinlike presence known under the tight zipper of Steve’s chinos (we were necking and “petting-below-the-waist” as one said then), he would slowly unzip (so as not to snag it?) and with one hand (the other was under my skirt and up my cunt) extract the huge purple thing from between the layers of his shorts, his blue Brooks-Brothers shirttails, and his cold, glittering, metal-zippered fly. Then I would dip one hand into the vase of roses my flower-loving mother always kept on the coffee table, and with a right hand moistened with water and the slime from their stems, I would proceed with my rhythmic jerking off of Steve. How exactly did I do it? Three fingers? Or the whole palm? I suppose I must have been rough at first (though later I became an expert). He would throw his head back in ecstasy (but controlled ecstasy: my father was watching TV in the dining room) and would come into his Brooks-Brothers shirttails or into a handkerchief quickly produced for this purpose. The technique I have forgotten, but the feeling remains. Partly, it was reciprocity (tit for tat, or clit for tat), but it was also power. I knew that what I was doing gave me a special kind of power over him-one that painting or writing couldn’t approach. And then I was coming too-maybe not like Lady Chatterley, but it was something.
Toward the end of our idyll, Steve (who was then seventeen and I fourteen) wanted me to take “it” in my mouth. “Do people really do that?”
“Sure,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He went to my parents’ bookshelf in search of Van de Velde (carefully hidden behind Art Treasures of the Renaissance). But it was too much for me. I couldn’t even pronounce it. And would it make me pregnant? Or maybe my refusal had something to do with the continuing social education which my mother was instilling in me along with Art History. Steve lived in the Bronx. I lived in a duplex on Central Park West. If I was going to worship a “phallos” it was not going to be a Bronx phallos. Perhaps one from Sutton Place?
Ultimately, I said goodbye to Steve and took up masturbation, fasting, and poetry. I kept telling myself that masturbation at least kept me pure.
Steve continued to woo me with bottles of Chanel No. 5, Frank Sinatra records, and beautifully lettered quotations from the poems of Yeats. He called me whenever he got drunk and on every one of my birthdays for the next five years. (Was it just jerking him off which inspired such loyalty?)
But meanwhile I repented for my self-indulgence by undergoing a sort of religious conversion which included starvation (I denied myself even water), studying Siddhartha, and losing twenty pounds (and with them, my periods). I also got a Joblike rash of boils and was sent to my first dermatologist-a German lady refugee who said, memorably, “Za skeen is za meeroar of za zoul” and who referred me to the first of my many psychiatrists, a short doctor whose name was Schrift.
Dr. Schrift (the very same Dr. Schrift who had flown to Vienna with us) was a follower of Wilhelm Stekel and he tucked his shoelaces under the toes of his shoes. (I am not sure whether or not this was part of the Stekelian method.) His apartment building on Madison Avenue had very dark and narrow halls whose walls were covered with gold, sea-shell-spotted wallpaper, such as you might find in the bathroom of an old house in Larchmont. Waiting for the elevator, I used to stare at the wallpaper and wonder if the landlord had gotten a good deal on a bathroom wallpaper close-out. Why else paper a lobby with gold seashells and tiny pink fishes?
Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn’t realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at the foot and a hard wedge-shaped pillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head.
He insisted that the horse I was dreaming about was my father. I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ avocado-green silk couch. He insisted that the coffin I was dreaming about was my mother. What could be the reason my periods had stopped? A mystery.
“Because I don’t want to be a woman. Because if s too confusing. Because Shaw says you can’t be a woman and an artist. Having babies uses you up, he says. And I want to be an artist. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Because I wouldn’t have known how to say it then, but Steve’s finger in my cunt felt good. At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. “You have to choose,” I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated. “I am keeping myself free of the
power of men,” I thought, sticking two fingers deep inside each night.
Dr. Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman.
I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.
Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves.
“Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.”
10 Freud’s House
It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men. If, for instance, I imagined my sweet, gentle girl as a competitor, it would only end in my telling her, as I did seventeen months ago, that I am fond of her and that I implore her to withdraw from the strife into the calm uncompetitive activity of my home.
– Sigmund Freud
Adrian dropped us off at the hotel without a word and roared off in the Triumph to get lost. We went upstairs to wash away the sins of the night before. Since there was no meeting Bennett wanted to attend that afternoon, we decided to take a walk together in the direction of Freud’s house. Before Adrian had appeared on the scene we’d planned that excursion, but somehow it had got lost in the shuffle.
Vienna was beautiful that morning. Not hot yet, but sunny and blue-skied and full of official-looking people hurrying to work with their briefcases (in which they probably had nothing more official than newspapers and their lunch). We strolled through the Volksgarten and admired the tidy rose trees, the beds of manicured flowers. We commented on the inevitable desecration of these flowerbeds if they were in New York. We tsk-tsked to each other concerning the vandalism of New York versus the law-abiding virtues of Germanic cities. We had our old familiar conversation about civilization and repression versus impulse and acting out. For a short while there was that comfortable solidarity between us which Adrian had called our “marital boredom.” He was wrong about that. Since he was a lone wolf, he didn’t understand pairing and could only see marriage as boredom. What he missed was that special coupling instinct which causes two people to come together, fill in the chinks in each other’s souls, and feel stronger for it. Coupling doesn’t always have to do with sex; you see it among friends who live together, or old married homosexuals who rarely even screw each other anymore, and you see it in some marriages. Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
Bennett and I linked arms and walked to Freud’s house. It was our unspoken agreement that we would not mention the night before. The night before might as well have been a dream, and now that we were together again in the sunlight, the dream was being burned away like early morning fog.
We walked up the stairs to Freud’s consulting room like two patients going for marital therapy.
I have always been devoted to cultural shrines: the house where Keats died in Rome, the house where he lived in Hampstead, Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, Alexander Pope’s Grotto, Rembrandt’s house in the Amsterdam ghetto, Wagner’s villa on Lake Lucerne, Beethoven’s meager two-room fiat in Vienna… Any place where some genius had been born, lived, worked, ate, farted, spilled his seed, loved, or died-was sacred to me. As sacred as Delphi or the Parthenon. More sacred, in fact, because the wonder of everyday life fascinates me even more than the wonder of great shrines and temples. That Beethoven could write such music while living in two shabby rooms in Vienna-this was the miracle. I had stared with awe at all his mundane artifacts-and the more mundane the better: his tarnished salt box, his cheap clock, his battered ledger book. The very ordinariness of his needs comforted me and made me feel hopeful. I would sniff around the houses of the great like a bloodhound, trying to catch the scent of genius. Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights. She does not usually appeal where your banal Hollywood notions have led you to most expect her: in a gorgeous sunset over Ischia, in the pounding surf of Big Sur, on a mountain top in Delphi (right between the navel of the earth and the place where Oedipus killed his papa)-but she wings in while you are peeling onions or eating eggplant or lining the garbage can with the book-review section of The New York Times. The most interesting modern writers know this. Leopold Bloom fries kidneys, takes a crap, and considers the universe. Ponge sees the soul of man in an oyster (as Blake saw it in a wild flower). Plath cuts her finger and experiences revelation. But Hollywood insists on imagining the artist as a dreamy-eyed matinee idol with a flowing bow tie, Dmitri Tiomkin’s music in the background, and a violent orange sunset above his head-and, to some extent, all of us (even those of us who should know better) try to live up to this image. I was still, in short, tempted to take off with Adrian. And Bennett, sensing this, trundled me off to Freud’s house at Berggasse, 19, to try (once more) to bring me back to my senses.
I agreed with Bennett that Freud was an intuitive genius, but I did not agree with the psychoanalytic doctrine of His Infallibility: geniuses are always fallible; otherwise they’d be gods. And who wants perfection, anyway? Or consistency? After you outgrow adolescence, Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and the belief in your parents’ transcendent evil-you shouldn’t even want consistency. But alas, so many of us do. And are ready to tear our lives apart just for the lack of it. Like me.
So we walked through the Freud house in search of revelation. I think we half expected to see Montgomery Clift dressed and bearded like Freud and exploring the caves of his own dank unconscious. What we saw, in fact, was disappointing. Most of the furniture had gone to Hampstead with Freud and now belonged to his daughter. The Vienna Freud Museum had to make do with photographs and largely empty rooms. Freud had lived here for nearly half a century, but there was no scent of him left-just photographs and a waiting room reconstituted with overstuffed furniture of the period.
There was a photograph of the famous consulting room with its Oriental carpet-covered analytic couch, its Egyptian and Chinese figurines, and its fragments of ancient sculpture, but the consulting room itself had vanished, along with a whole era, in 1938. How strange, somehow, to pretend that Freud had never been driven out, or that with the help of a few yellowing photos, a world could be recreated. It reminded me of my trip to Dachau: the crematoria torn down and tow-headed German children running and laughing and picnicking on the newly seeded grass. “You can’t judge a country by just twelve years,” they used to tell me in Heidelberg.
So we peered at the curiously sterile rooms, the left-over paraphernalia of Freud’s life: his medical diploma, his military record, his application for assistant professorship, a contract with one of his publishers, his list of publications attached to an application for promotion. And then we inspected the photographs: Freud, cigar in hand, with the first psychoanalytic circle, Freud with a grandson, Freud
with
Anna Freud, Freud before death leaning on his wife’s arm in London, young Ernest Jones striking a glamour-boy profile, Sandor Ferenczi peering imperiously at the world, circa 1913, mild-mannered Karl Abraham looking mild-mannered, Hanns Sachs looking like Robert Morley, und so weiter. The artifacts were present, but the spirit of the enterprise was lacking. We trooped obediently from one display to the next wondering about our own sticky history, still in the writing.
We had a quiet lunch together and again tried to repair the damages of the previous evening. I vowed to myself I would never see Adrian again. Bennett and I treated each other with utmost consideration. We were careful not to discuss anything of consequence. Instead we spoke anecdotally of Freud. According to Ernest Jones, he was a poor judge of character, a poor Menschenkenner. Often this trait-a certain naiveté about people-went with genius. Freud could penetrate the secrets of dreams, but he could also fall dupe to an ordinary con man. He could invent psychoanalysis, but he would inevitably put his faith in people who betrayed him. Also he was very indiscreet. He often gave away confidences which had been entrusted to him on the sole condition that he keep quiet about them.
Suddenly we realized that we were talking about ourselves again. There was no topic neutral enough for conversation that afternoon. Everything came back to us.
After lunch we went to the Hofburg once more to hear a paper on the psychology of artists. This paper posthumously analyzed Leonardo, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne, Virginia Woolf, and an unknown, unnamed woman artist who had been treated by the analyst. All his evidence proved overwhelmingly that artists were, as a group, weak, dependent, childlike, naive, masochistic, narcissistic, poor judges of character, and hopelessly immersed in Oedipal conflicts. Due to their extreme sensitivity as children and their greater-than-average need for mothering, they always felt deprived no matter how much mothering they in fact got. In adult life, they were doomed to look for mothers everywhere, and not finding them (ever, ever) they sought to invent their own ideal mothers through the artifice of their work. They sought to remake their own histories in an idealized image-even when this idealization came out seeming more like a brutalization than an idealization. Nobody’s family, in short, was as transcendentally evil as the modern autobiographical novelist (or poet) imagined his family to be. To excoriate one’s family was ultimately the same thing as to idealize. It showed how fettered one still was to the past.
