Any Woman's Blues by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

11

Sobriety Blues

I’ve got the world in a jug,

The stopper’s in my hand.

—“Down Hearted Blues”

Listening to Bessie Smith and painting stone-cold sober. The locks are changed. Dart’s gone. I don’t expect to hear from him, and the twins aren’t coming back for another week.

I’m in the silo alone, looking out over the hills of Connecticut and painting. Good old Boner would bark to alert me if Dart’s motorcycle drove up. I am working on another version of the maenads and crystal. Sometimes in bliss, sometimes in despair. The loneliness of being an artist is something you cannot communicate to another living soul. Me, at my easel, overlooking the hills, smelling the primal turpentine smell, stoned on my own solitude and the woodsy aroma of the solvent, the hydrocarbon high of painting alone and the low of knowing I may be alone for the rest of my life.

If I’ve decided (and I seem to have decided) not to fall in bed with the Waynes of this world (who pick up other girls in bars when they’re with you), not to grovel to Dart and pay for his bimbo’s dinners, then what is there left for me but this endless solitude before the easel?

I love it and I hate it. I thank God for giving me a livelihood out of this solitary bliss, and I curse God for the gut-wrenching loneliness of it.

Elsewhere in the world people are making phone calls, faxing documents, circulating at cocktail parties. Whenever I think I’m missing something, I have only to drive into New York and see how little, in fact, I am missing.

At parties, I miss this blissful solitude. When I’m in my solitude, I think I’m missing “Life” by not going to the parties.

What is “Life” anyway?

My life, at its truest and purest, seems to consist of standing before an easel, smelling the turpentine smell and arranging the hues of white on a white canvass before green hills. I could stand here for all eternity. I seem, in fact, to have been standing here for all eternity. This is your life, Leila Sand, I think, the youness of you. How lucky to have found it, or to have come back to it before it was too late.

I call up the ghosts of female artists of the past—Marietta Robusti, “La Tintoretta,” Lavinia Fontana, Rosalba Carriera, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Adelaide Labille-Guiard, Angelika Kauffman, Anna Peale, Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Vanessa Bell, Georgia O’Keeffe—to protect me like ranks of guardian angels, painted in wet lime on some Venetian ceiling. All the technique, the love, the infinite capacity for taking pains, the courage, the guts, the heart of these women who drew and painted against all odds, comes into my aching fingers. Oh, the longing to make the difficult look easy! I want to be like those old fresco painters who had such talent, such craft, such knowledge of chemistry, even, that they could put down the color before the lime had time to

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