Leila Sand and her contemporaries
Erica Jong builds up the professional ‘I’ of her protagonist by running still another parallel with two women artists who are Leila’s contemporaries. Both of them are given just a narrative corner as sidestory characters but their role is not at all insignificant. Cordelia Herald is an old art school classmate of Leila. Cordelia has moved to live in Venice and paints in a crumbling Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. Although Leila never used to understand why Cordelia sticks to Venice when Venice seems ‘so self-consciously out-of-this-world’ the enchantment of Venice is once again celebrated by the introduction of Cordelia’s story - p.295/XVIII.
Indeed a visit to Cordelia’s house, with her paintings, hung everywhere or propped against the walls, confronts Leila with a woman who is entirely happy with her detachment from the worldly world, who feels like a local character and cannot imagine a better life for a painter-or anyone. This self-confidence of Cordelia in a way incites Leila’s pursuit of her self-love. Moreover the novel finishes with the end of Leila’s stay in Venice. Could Leila Sand probably have got some of the message from Cordelia? Nevertheless there is an air of criticism or perhaps commonplace envy that prevails in Leila’s perceptions of Cordelia’s works: ‘monumental equine forms (sort of mad Rosa Bonheur gone abstract).’ The key epithet of ‘mad’ implies the popular social misunderstanding of the productive, creative infatuation of artists on the one hand and on the other it invokes the moment when birds of a feather flock together. The latter is gaining an upper hand with the increasing awareness of Leila that she is spiritually akin to Cordelia. This same air of competitive vigour and feeling of sisterhood is to be disclosed in the relationship between Leila Sand and Rivka Landesmann. Rivka is a classmate of Leila’s from high school. Erica Jong applies the flattering words ‘a talented painter’ to Rivka which is far from ‘the prodigious talent’ of Leila but the gap is there. Rivka is a someone who had a gallery before Leila did, someone Leila was once ‘envious of’ because
...she seemed to have it made, when I was still struggling for my first recognition as a painter. p.157/IX
The competitiveness, once attributed only to the male world, seems to be a rule rather than an exception in Leila’s strategy. Is it because once you are in you have to follow the set rules of the game? And whom are the rules set by? Men! Leila proves utterly confused by her own statements - she is the one who wouldn’t object in using her sex appeal to allure critics if it could boost her work but she grows envious and cynical when someone else used it. If that is Rivka, she will be called a ‘prodigy’, because she used to hang around with Andy Warhol, did movies with him, sold her work to important collectors, was written up everywhere - then ... ‘vanished’. Leila hadn’t heard from Rivka for years until she runs into her at an AA night Meeting in New York. At this very meeting Leila gains part of her sane mind as she tries to understand Rivka. This is almost as symptomatic as her visit to Cordelia’s, as if under the bad spell of New York, usually associated with garbage, death, and apocalypse, both women meet both of them drunk in the middle of the night. This is when Leila grows aware not only of Rivka’s post-success story but of her own potential for getting worse and worse. Leila meets another Rivka who has hit bottom, lost everything - her husband, her daughter, her hormones, but gained eighty pounds and self-pity. This new failed Rivka is so suicidal and manipulative as to accuse Leila of being more fortunate, of always being in the right place at the right time, and on the crest of the wave at the moment - p.157/IX. Leila immediately projects herself in this woman, seeing an example of a woman ‘squandering her life by playing the victim’. At this point ironically enough, although Leila is drunk she gets ‘enlightened’ and tries to convince Rivka or herself in a proper preacher’s speech about the gift of life and the right of the choice to affirm or deny it.
We really can choose to live or to die - but we can’t straddle the fence. And if we want to live we have no choice but to submit - not to our own will, to God’s, to Her. Or Him. It doesn’t even matter; it’s a sort of vanity to argue about the sex of God. We are talking about spirit here, the gift if life. p. 157/IX
As if to claim her and Rivka’s lives back from the dead, from Hades, Leila hugs Rivka, though she ‘couldn’t even get her arms around her but she hugged her’. The symbolic background for this scene couldn’t have been more appropriate - New York by night and a dying homeless bum in whose decaying flesh, Leila pretends to see her beautiful Dart. Leila is deadsure she needs to pull herself together, to get tough with herself. She is then free of her fear of competing. She feels free to realize that all her success has led her to pressures of a different sort from the ones Rivka has had, that there is no room for competition between them - p.157/IX.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998