Seducing the Demon

Table of Contents

 

 

 

ALSO BY ERICA JONG

POETRY

 

FICTION

Parachutes & Kisses
Serenissima: A Novel of Venice
(republished as
Shylock’s Daughter
)
Any Woman’s Blues
Inventing Memory
Sappho’s Leap

 

NONFICTION

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First trade paperback edition 2007

Copyright © 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

 

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

Jong, Erica.
Seducing the demon : writing for my life / by Erica Jong.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-04243-4

 

1. Jong, Erica. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3560.O56Z
808’.5409—dc22

 

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

Amos Oz passage:
Excerpt from
A Tale of Love and Darkness
by Amos Oz, copyright © 1993 by Amos Oz and Keter Publishing House Ltd., translation copyright © 2004 by Nicholas de Lange, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

 

 

The Journals of Sylvia Plath
passage:
From
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
by Ted Hughes (ed.), copyright © 1982 by Ted Hughes as Executor of the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

 

Carolyn Kizer, “Pro Femina”:
“Pro Femina” from
Cool, Calm & Collected.
Copper Canyon Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Carolyn Kizer. Used by permission of the author.

 

 

Fitzgerald passage:
Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. From
The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Copyright © 1980 by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.

 

 

Buddhist passage:
Copyright © 1997 Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight edition. Used with permission.

 

 

Ariel
—
The Restored Edition,
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”:
Eleven lines from “The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath, from
Ariel—The Restored Edition,
copyright © The Estate of Sylvia Plath, 2004. Reprinted by permission of Frieda Hughes.

 

 

Frieda Hughes,
Wooroloo:
Four lines from “Readers” by Frieda Hughes, from
Wooroloo,
copyright © Frieda Hughes, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Frieda Hughes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this book first appeared, in slightly different form, in
The New York Times Book Review
and
The Writer.

Deepest thanks to Ken Siman, who knows why.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book.
Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not
hard to kill either. But not books. However systematically you
try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will
survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner of an
out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid,
or Vancouver.

AMOS OZ

INTRODUCTION

I
started this as a book of advice to fledgling writers. Why? Probably because I was terrified of writing my next novel. I have been working on what I call, in my notebooks, “novel number nine” for more years than I want to admit. I start it, write two hundred or so pages and let myself be tempted into another project—a novel about Sappho in ancient Greece, a memoir about my life as a writer, anything that will distract me from the novel bubbling in my brain.

After many false starts, I finally know novel number nine has to be about Isadora Wing as a woman of a certain age. That fills me with fear of writing. Going back to my most famous heroine after the ravages of time have chastened us both cannot be a painless proposition. Isadora has baggage and so does her author. It may be Goyard or Vuitton baggage, but it’s baggage nonetheless. And despite what my loyal readers may think, I have never found it easy to reveal myself on the page.

I wrote my first novel,
Fear of Flying,
telling myself no one would ever read it. I wrote my other novels that way too—though the pretense was harder to achieve. My historical novels were the most pleasurable to write because I could retreat to eighteenth-century England or sixteenth-century Venice or ancient Greece. Wearing a mask is fun. Behind a mask, as Venetian revelers knew, you feel free.

When
Fear of Flying
sold an obscene number of copies and was read all over the world—thankfully, it continues to be read—I had to learn to draw back and find privacy for the next foray. Success can be as daunting as failure. I felt public—like a frog (with apologies to Emily Dickinson). Everyone judged me against a debut I made when I was young and green. Everyone constantly referred to “that book.”

It’s a universal fantasy to have a book that becomes a phenomenon and is read—or perhaps skimmed—even by people who don’t usually read. Some of them have strong opinions about the book without having ever cracked the spine. But beyond that early, unlikely coup, I wanted to have a shelf of books after my name. I didn’t want to be a flash in the pan. My poetry and my historical novels kept me challenging myself even if the rest of the world only wanted
Fear of Flying
over and over again. Besides, as a defrocked academic, I loved holing up in a library and doing research. It was certainly more soothing than trying to live up to Erica “Zipless Fuck” Jong.

I’m not disowning my first novel. I’m proud of it. I think it has guts and juice—two things I prize. But I wrote it when I was very young—more than three and half decades ago.

So I spent five years evading my next novel and found solace in a book of advice to young writers I had in my computer. I had also been making notes for it for fifteen years! (My books tend to gestate like baby elephants.) I kept a little blue Chinese silk notebook full of advice from the great and the near great—as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s 2000 Year Old Man would say. I published some of it on my web site, some in
The New York Times Book Review—
a long piece about how Sylvia Plath had influenced my generation of writers—and some in
The Writer.
Aspiring writers wrote to tell me my thoughts on writing were helpful. The first draft of the writing book contained such things as this list: