Dated, Demented, Dead: what became of my literary heroes

As usual, I was looking for something else. 

I like to go on Amazon  and order books by the pound (a nice thickie for bedtime reading – unlike so many people who  claim to fall asleep to dull documentaries on YouTube, I still read for the same reason). But it can’t just be any book. I like biographies because they’re generally over 500 pages, and generally not too traumatic. 

There are exceptions. I just trudged through two extremely thick books on my latest "furia", Toulouse-Lautrec: an excruciatingly-detailed bio by Julia Frey, and a novel “based on” his life (but only just) which stretched the Lautrec myth past the snapping point. The novel spent 50 pages dragging out Henri’s horrible death from alcohol and syphilis, and the Frey bio did the opposite and just chopped it all off when he took his last breath. Reeling, I came out the other side of these two (both of them, ultimately, hard to get through), looking for another thickie, and maybe an easier-to-digest one.  

I ended up ordering a new-ish memoir by Barbra Streisand called, of course, My Name is Barbra. It clocks in at nearly a thousand pages, so I just had to have it. But in that labyrinthine way one thing leads to another, I ended up in a totally different place.

For some reason, I got thinking about the authors I used to enjoy eons ago, back in the ‘70s when I wasn’t so interested in bulk. Then I had the thought: what ever happened to Erica Jong? You know, THAT Erica Jong, the one who wrote deliciously dirty books that sold a zillion copies. I did read most of them and found them quite trashy, but “in a good way” (as they say). I liked how she liked men: she loved their bodies in an unabashed, sybaritic way, no holds barred. So I Wikipedia’d her, and discovered she is now 83 years old, suffering from dementia, and living in a nursing home. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast recently published a Mommie Dearest-style expose called How to Lose your Mother. 

Harsh. 

But oh. 83, dementia, nursing home? The last time I saw an interview with Jong, she was in a state of faded glory, her low-cut gown displaying a very wrinkled cleavage. Still playing the bestselling sexpot author at 65. The fame and glamour and all the rest of it did NOT protect her, not from the indignities of age or the acid vitriol of a memoir written by a bitter, disgruntled daughter.

I won’t read the Jong-Fast memoir, because I won't do that to myself before bed -  but while nosing around on Amazon I discovered something pretty hilarious. There it was, a 50^th Anniversary Edition of Jong’s so-called groundbreaking sex-fest, Fear of Flying. The original novel was published and made a huge splash in 1973. But this 50^th Anniversary Edition was published in. . . 2003. I had to look twice, then three times, but I was right the  first time. 30 years had somehow magically been transformed into 50. 

I thought I MUST have read it wrong, but no, all the reviews were from the same time  period. So somehow poor Erica’s masterpiece turned 50 when it was actually barely 30. Did they want to get all those accolades in before Jong was too old to enjoy it (or even be aware of it)? Or before the public completely forgot about her?

I don’t know how I got onto the next one, maybe a “whatever happened to” thing, but I started thinking about the male equivalent to Jong, Tom Robbins. Like Jong, his books were full of sex and whimsy. I remember reading his first, pre-famous novel,   Another Roadside Attraction (in which a hippie couple somehow attain the body of Christ from the basement of the Vatican, and make it the star attraction of their roadside zoo) and his first big bestseller, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. From what I remember, Cowgirls was pretty excruciating even then – the main character being Sissy Hankshaw, a tall, lovely young girl with the perfectly sterile looks of a fashion model, and (inexplicably) thumbs the size of a standard rural mailbox. It has been a long time since I read it, but I do remember there was a spiritual guru living on the hill, a Chinese guy they called – the Chink. And there’s a hideously stereotyped gay interior decorator called Davy who swishes around for hundreds of pages. And those cowgirls, my goodness – aren’t they hot to trot? They only have one thing on their minds, and it sure ain’t the cows!

The movie version of Cowgirls was even worse: just an excruciating ordeal, with Uma Thurman trying to act with massive prosthetic thumbs strapped to her hands. The creakily dated novel was made into an embarrassingly dated film, fortunately soon forgotten.  By that time Robbins was basically writing the same story over and over again, sexy, whimsical, but kind of dumb. He did attempt a memoir which I could not get through at all. It was whimsical in a forced kind of way, and ultimately, simply dull. 

So what ever happened to - ? I looked it up, and discovered that he died on my last birthday at the age of 92. 

That means he was too old to be a hippie, or even a post-war baby. He was a Depression-era baby, like William Shatner, and immensely old. Then – dead.

That’s what happens next. 

But these two wildly-popular authors, no matter how celebrated in their day, just got old along with the rest of us, went crazy, lost their clever literary brains (or their relevance), then expired, or at least left the known world. Kind of sad, but what does it say about me? I don’t want to live to be 92, and at this point I don’t even want to make it to 83, not if I’m holed up in a sanatorium with the rest of the dementia patients. Given the state of my health right now, I am haunted by the feeling I won’t even make it to my next birthday. And that day (February 9) would be the first anniversary of the death of Tom Robbins.  Appropriate? Or, like all these novels that made such a splash and were seen as so daring - just irrelevant and kind of dumb? 

POSTSCRIPT. But there’s this! I am slavishly devoted to anything to do with the Beatles, and every time I see clips on YouTube of their early performances, they show them in their first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My tenth birthday! Like a brilliant flashbulb, the performance left an indelible and radiant impression on my ten-year-old  brain, and it's still glowing even as we speak. 

A good day to be born! But, I suppose, just as good a day to die.