The "Sex Woman"

Erica Jong talks about being married to a schizophrenic, the invention of naked women, Henry Miller's erotic fantasies, what's wrong with Bush and -- of course -- the zipless you-know-what.

By David Bowman

Jun 14, 2003 | My meeting with Erica Jong was over and I was still out of breath. The elevator slowly slid down the belly of Jong's ritzy Upper East Side highrise while a short guy in a tired uniform worked the Up and Down buttons. I tried making small talk, but he didn't answer me. I wanted to ask if he'd ever had one of those legendary "zipless fucks." That was the term Jong coined 30 years ago when her first novel, "Fear of Flying," was published. Jong was 31 years old. By the time it came out in paperback, every heterosexual woman who was single had read it.

Eighty-three-year-old Henry Miller read "Fear of Flying" as well. He believed a woman had finally written the female equivalent of "Tropic of Cancer." A number of men younger than Miller also read Jong's novel, many figuring that it would provide a crackerjack method of getting laid. Apparently chicks wanted a "zipless fuck" -- or as Jong explained: "Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well."

I heard that back in those days, certain louts would loiter on the corner purring at secretaries as they headed to lunch, "Hey, baby wanna go get a zipless fuck!" The late poet Anne Sexton (Jong's friend) suggested the classic retort should be, "Zip up your fuck, bub, until I ask for it." Soon the term took on its own life. When I first heard the phrase in the late 1970s, I assumed it meant you should take your time, not just "zip" in and out like a rabbit. Many years later, when I found out I would finally get a moment alone with Jong, I figured it would be a struggle not to shout out, "Zipless fuck! Zipless fuck!" as if I had Tourette syndrome. Thankfully, I held my tongue with Jong. Even when her daughter Molly joined us and shouted, "Let's give him a present!" I held my tongue.

The first question was hers:

Jong: Is this interview for the Sex department or the fiction department?

Salon: Sex.

Jong: All right. I read Salon. It's one of my bookmarked sites.

How long had you worked on "Fear of Flying"?

I worked on it throughout my 20s. Like a lot of first novels, it transmogrified in different ways. For a while it had the POV of a madman. I started an autobiographical novel from the point of view of a madman, probably because I didn't think a woman's point of view would be literature. That's the generation that I am. We went to Barnard, and we studied Ezra Pound and Ted Roethke and T.S. Eliot. We didn't read women writers.

Not to go into this if it is too painful, but the "madman" stuff was based on your first marriage?

When I was 22 I went through what we call an "experience." I was married to a schizophrenic and I didn't know it. My husband really tried to walk on the water in Central Park. He was hospitalized. It was before the great antipsychotic drugs that they have now. They gave him thousands of milligrams of Thorazine and he became zombified. Before he was hospitalized he very nearly killed me. When I think about what I went through at 22, and I have a daughter who is 24, I can't believe I got through it. I do think a lot of my life after that was a reaction. I think one of the reasons I married a psychiatrist [her second husband, Allan Jong] was I thought that would protect me against mental illness.

At least this happened in the Upper West Side of New York where they had a vocabulary for madness. If it had happened in suburbia, no one would know what to do.

There was a vocabulary. Both of my parents were very intellectual and bohemian, and they both were in therapy, or analysis. They were very left-wing. There wasn't a shame to go to an analyst. It was quite the vocabulary of the area I lived in. But I didn't know anyone who graduated from Barnard in 1963 who had a first husband who tried to walk on the water in Central Park, and tried to fly out the window with her. That was a pretty traumatic experience for a young woman to have. It's funny I haven't even assessed it until quite recently. I think I was always attracted to people with wild imaginations. He had this wild imagination. He was also very brilliant. He was brilliant brilliant. His brilliance was a turn-on for me. He was my first boyfriend. My first lover. My soul mate. So when he flipped out it was devastating.

Where is he now?

I really don't know. I believe he's in California. He hasn't contacted me in 25 years.

Just in terms of literature, it's women who go mad, who walk naked into the water and drown.

You mean Kate Chopin. "The Awakening." "Tender is the Night."

The romance is of women who go crazy ...

You're right in literary tradition, but statistics say schizophrenia is much more likely to happen to a man between his 20s and 30s. [Pause.] I got out of Barnard in '63 and all the writers I admired were men and they wrote about men. So I was dithering with that novel [she first named it "The Man Who Murdered Poets"] for a long, long time while I was writing poetry, and trying to find the voice for the book. I'm sure I worked on it for 10 years at least. Then my first book of poems, "Fruits and Vegetables," got published by Holt Rhinehart and Winston. My editor there was Aaron Asher. He was Saul Bellow's editor, and Philip Roth's editor, and was the real literary clever man.

They don't have guys like him at publishing houses anymore, they're all number crunchers. [When] Asher agreed to publish my second book of poems -- which even then was unheard of -- he said, "Where is the novel that I'm waiting for?"

I said, "Well, I'm working on a novel, but I'm not sure the voice is right, blah blah blah."

"Well, let me see it."

If I had not been so naive I would have realized a man who published two books of poetry was a very patient man. I brought in "The Man Who Murdered Poets." He was sort of the madman from "Fear of Flying," but he was married. It was not a realistic book. There was a lot of magic realism material. Aaron read it and said, "This is publishable, this is pretty good, but I'm not going to publish it, and some day you'll thank me." He said, "This is not your voice. Why don't you write the novel in the voice of those poems, which are totally fresh. Totally from a woman's point of view. Why are you dithering --" (he didn't say dithering) "-- What are you fooling with this for? You could take it down the street and Morrow would publish it. But I won't. And someday you'll thank me."

It was one of those moments -- sometimes you get a punch in the gut when somebody says something and you just say, "Wooooooh. Thank God I don't have to play with this anymore. This thing is not going anywhere." Sometimes someone can do you a big favor that way. I went home and I started the novel in the voice of Isadora -- not at a convention of psychoanalysts, that came later -- I started it with Isadora at 16, an adolescent girl growing up in the '50s.

Just to tell you: There is a convention being held down your hallway.

A convention?

Someone is having some sort of get together.

In my building? My neighbor on the other side is a jazz promoter who founded the Newport Jazz Festival. If there are a lot of hip looking black guys ...

I thought maybe it was a festival of psychiatrists.

No, no, no. Anyway, around 1970 or 1971, I went to a convention of psychoanalysts. I was meant to cover it for a new magazine that folded. A magazine called Audience. I thought, "Oh my God this is the beginning of the book." Once I got the beginning, then I was off and running. That's been my experience with every book since. They come in little pieces. For each one I keep a notebook. I try to track how it comes. There is a moment when the shape of the book becomes clear. With "Sappho's Leap" [her new book], it was the same process. I fell in love with [Sappho's poetry] fragments in school. I then read them again when I was a mid-career writer, and thought, "This is amazing. This is the work of a woman from twenty-six hundred years ago. It's so modern. I began reading everything I could about ancient Greece, and about Sappho, and reading every translation I could find. I started to study Greek civilization. I found a scholar to coach me in Archaic Greek.

But I always knew that the book would start with Sappho on the cliff. Maybe she'd jump and maybe she wouldn't. I thought it was a wild slander that she jumped. I was sure that was something that had been made up by later Roman male poets and playwrights to mock her. She was too wise. She wouldn't have committed suicide by leaping off the cliff. She had an affair with this young man, this great philosopher and bisexual -- she wouldn't have jumped off the cliff. He probably would have jumped off the cliff. She was too wise. She wouldn't have ended her life and career for a mere man. Anyway, she was bisexual so it didn't make any sense.

But I knew where the beginning of the book was. It's like Doctorow said, "You can only see as much as your headlight illuminates, but that's enough when you're writing a novel."

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