Women artists as drink and drug addicts
In this novel, one of Leila’s biggest fights is with her own self rather than with men or society. The novel opens in the studio-silo where we are introduced to a drinking woman rather than to a working artist. This drinking woman artist is in a tangle of female fears: afraid to move, to paint and pick up the phone and call for help. Moreover right from outset of the novel we are to realize that Leila began working drunk. This is the very alarming state of Leila’s mind. One can get a clear sense of how intolerable it gets for Leila by the implicit opposition of work/drink:
For all my indulgence in drugs I have never mixed it with my work. My work was sacred.
For Leila her artists’ world of painting is certainly a sacred domain while her drug/drink addictions are discerned as profane and ridiculous. No wonder that most of the novel’s brief reviewers are ill at ease with this topic of E. Jong’s. Some of them go as far in their dislikes as to claim that Jong is manipulating her readership with the much-talked-about topic of battling alcoholism [Lodge 1989, Steinberg 1989, Pritchard 1990, Stanley 1990]. What remains obscure to the critics is the fact that Jong’s interpretation of the hot topic for contemporary American society is much more profound. There is virtually no place where Jong is interested merely by the sensational side of it. She is rather concerned with the inevitability of all the ruinous addictions - drinks, drugs and wrong men - and the liability of the artist, women artists in particular, to those modern diseases. Even the entry in Leila’s marbled notebook speaks of Jong’s singular perspective at a time when everybody writes about alcoholism and cocaine addiction but no one tells the truth about it. Leila is given the rare chance to beat away this myth, stirred up by the media. The very metaphoric use of a convert proves that any addiction borders with strong, religious-like devotion and thus is easily to be believed in as a myth.
It is fashionable to convert on the cover of People Magazine and make a sober comeback. Getting sober is far more complex; it is really about getting free. 282/XVIII
This is what Leila Sand is after - getting back her freedom. Therefore she is made to go through a painful period of self-reflections about her own commitment to drinks, drugs and men. It is certainly a long and difficult period which eventually takes a book of 20 chapters to be told. In a way this could be considered as the paramount issue for our culture that it is obsessed with obsessions. E. Jong typically doesn’t miss an opportunity to treat this issue through her usual humorous point of view. Here is Leila who keeps a lovely memory of a party. She remembers ‘a blur of’ other artists, art dealers, collectors, critics, ‘like ghosts in a Shakespearean tragedy’. The ingenious simile rouses some mixed feelings of jolly good fun and a danger that lingers in air. The simile is a bit further elaborated in an 'as...as' clause which uncovers the ghost-story. It seems that it is either because they were ‘as drunk and stoned as we (Leila and Dart) were or we were drunk and stoned enough for both’. Leila is convinced that ‘all the artists drank and used that way’. But immediately there comes the recurrent ironic understatement ‘Or so I thought’ which spoils her convenient belief.
Even the summoning of the Penelope myth doesn’t sound like the sole consolation for Leila. Penelope or Leila, Ulysses or Dart - after all it is the same old story of Penelope who knew this, loving Ulysses: years of waiting for a man to come home makes a woman mad. Suddenly Penelope who is the paragon of all the domestic virtues in the Homeric legend is converted by E. Jong to a mad woman, who instead of knitting her never-ending web, or painting her works, keeps waiting...
I wait. I wait. And as I wait, I try to paint. Unable to paint, I drink. And having drunk, I plunge into despair. p.71/III
The syncopated repetitive nature of the paragraph echoes the gloom and misery in Leila’s mind and heart. Leila is so desperate that she tries every drug - until she could feel nothing... nothing but the love ‘leaching through her fingertips onto the canvas’. Even through the metaphoric use of leach we could realize how strong the drink effect is - even Leila’s love for painting behaves like a drunk, leaching like a liquid does, perhaps like a booze. It seems that the strong alcoholic background of Leila is not to be blamed. There is only a single reference to the fact that she was born to an alcoholic mother and alcoholic father. But what is important for her is that she was born to a life of ‘living by her wits’, that she inherited her parents’ weird outlook and just happened to be an alcoholic for a while.
We could assume that Erica Jong picks up this transitional period in Leila’s life when she is struggling to rationalize and give up her addictions for at least two reasons. On the one hand Leila’s clinging to her addictions is a commonplace practice nowadays. Hence it is a nice firm setting for illuminating the contemporary myth of women artists. On the other hand we could possibly recognize how the new Leila, free of her addictions, appropriates the myth and re-claims new features for women artists.
There is hardly a point in time when Leila doubts her identity as an artist. What she doubts though is her being an alcoholic. Neither asking Emmie, nor herself could give her an answer. Leila’s alcoholism is a real conundrum to her. This unsolved mystery is perfectly caught by Erica Jong in the story by an incident at the wine cellar of Danny Doland from Dallas . It is qualified by Leila’s transitional mind as a wonder into which she wanders in like ‘Theseus in the labyrinth’. The consistent stress on the labyrinth-like puzzle that starts earlier with the conundrum simile is able to convince the reader how enigmatic yet alluring Leila grows once she gets under the influence. There is an outburst of ironic poeticisms when Leila is in the realm of the wine cellar. Photographed by Architectural Digest, as if further mythologized by the press-media, this cellar of a wonder ‘sits as the diamond as big as the Ritz sat beneath Scott Fitzgerald’s mythical mountain mansion.’ The cross-reference to the Scott Fitzgerald as a myth-maker is coupled with the implications of Leila as a Theseus.
I wander in, examine several bottles of rare Bordeaux and choose a Mouton’45 to get drunk on. Oh, I am not getting drunk on wine so much as on these lovely French names that roll off my tongue even more trippingly than the wine...
One could even suspect that there is something positive indeed in the drinking experience of Leila - it just emanates from the image of the wild, passionate and poetic woman artist in her. Yet ironically enough this is where Leila’s hegira (flight/departure) has taken her - to a wine cellar buried in a basement in the Berkshires, ‘drinking claret and getting murky’? Leila’s flight from her drinking self brings her to the congenial dark cellar. Even in the visual contrast of claret/murky we can detect some of the inner conflict of Leila’s transition - from the intensively gloomy state after something as bright and clear as claret she goes to her maenads and crystals, to her new series of paintings. Isn’t it quite expressive that when Leila first stopped drinking she was ‘given a great, great gift’ - a new series of paintings 230,1/XIV. Yet this is the time for her to realize that she still needs her intoxication - either a claret or a man. Danny Doland from Dallas fails to be the latter for Leila but his beautiful cellar seems to compensate. Drawing without Intoxication - that was the risk Leila ran marrying Danny. Unsurprisingly this marriage is literally and spiritually felt like ‘another sort of jail’ to her.
Alcoholism doesn’t stir only sweet-minded poeticisms but pictures of battered women from the newspapers with which Leila is likely to identify. Despite her awareness of being a ‘high-bottom’ drunk who never lost everything, but did allow herself to be beaten, to be raped financially, Leila couldn’t help but doing almost anything for love. It is done for love which in Leila’s terms means skinlessness and ecstasy, even if it bordered with self-annihilation - and sometimes it did.
I know that I spend money like a drunk, fuck like a drunk, seek abuse like a drunk.
In her clearest moments, Leila would get on her knees before the easel, open her palms, and invoke God, Goddess, her muse. But always there are days when she could not ...paint; and then she would try to ‘stroke the fires’ with pot, wine, coke - or with her real drug, her main drug: men. Once again E. Jong’s narrative claims that drug-abuse means much more - self-abuse. With her favourite ‘Or so I thought’ mode of ironic expression Jong debases the fact that Leila needed a man to power her art, to approve it, to give her permission, as if she needed that ‘flesh connection in order to blossom’. And so we can hear the voice of the self-sabotaging woman artist who felt she was daring the Gods by being so bold; who would rather go back to the safe old myth of the good girl. This is the eternal contradiction Leila is trying to live with thus going to the bottom of the well of her self-annihilation. Even the endlessly repetitive nature of the verbal pattern ‘So I would do’ is reminding us of the powerful mythical convention of the traditional creative woman. This is the woman artist who ‘would cling’ to a lover as if the force came through him, and then she ‘would come to believe’ that it was he, not she, who made the work come true. Then, inevitably, he ‘would start’ to abuse her. Or perhaps the woman-artist ‘would start’ to abuse herself. Leila ‘would give’ herself over to him and ‘would believe’ that he made the work possible... and finally, having given the work away, she ‘would not be able’ to do it unless he was there.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998