Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page A

stated—until it made us furious—was that the artists and intellectuals of the world carried the ‘dead weight’ along. We made life; they ate it up. We created light; they muddied it into darkness. I had a vision of my grandfather’s beautiful white cake of Ivory soap, turning to mud under the mingled paints from his brush. That was what the world did to artists; that was how they treated us.
    Isadora had vowed from earliest adolescence never to be bitter like her grandfather. She would risk everything with her work, show the world who she was. If they liked it—nne. And if not, at least she had committed herself. She would not die wondering.
    â€œPapa’s bitterness had, like all bitternesses, a personal foundation beneath the lofty generalization: he was unsung. Through no fault of the world‘s, really, but only his own.
    â€œTrue, he had had the ill luck to be born in the era that saw the birth of ‘Modern Art.’ True, he was painting figuratively when Cha- gall and Picasso were in the saddle. True, he emulated Rembrandt and Vandyke in a world that emulated only Picasso—but still, his very eccentricity might have been turned to advantage—had he not been so eager to stand in his own light. For he had an absolutely unerring knack for alienating anyone who might do him good. Art critics, collectors, gallery owners—he would alienate with a swift insult, like a knee to the groin! Art critics he pronounced blind, and gallery owners venal (with which many artists would heartily agree —but not to their faces). As if this weren’t enough, Papa steadfastly and resolutely concealed the very best of his work from public view. The stiff, formal portraits he exhibited; the dream sketches (as he called them), he hid away. These sketches—done in india ink and watercolor, fountain pen and pencil—are to me his best work. They are also astoundingly original and ‘modern’ in a timeless, untrendy way.”
    How awful, Isadora thought, to have to try to convince the world of the worth of Papa’s work. His work itself should convince the world—had he not deliberately hidden his fierce dreams away from the world’s scrutiny.
    â€œHe did them on bits of paper (for he sketched constantly, everywhere) and he had masses of them, in yellowing envelopes, in stacks in closets, fluttering up like moths when the door opened.
    â€œA few years ago, I gave him a small blank notebook and bid him fill it for me, as a gift of love. Whenever he had an idea, a dream, a vision, he would paint it in the book. His dreams must have been terrifying. The frontispiece of the little book is a staring demon such as might guard the gates of hell. (Or is it merely a Hassid staring at his would-be assailant on the streets of Brooklyn?) A lion falls on the neck of a terrorized horse and blood flows down the page. Two Jews in wash and india ink hold tablets heavenward. A man runs with (or from?) a pack of wild dogs. Bloody-fanged dogs howl through the forests of the book. His mother’s ghost floats through the pages-green-faced, black-wimpled. People dance to expel a dybbuk. Soldiers from his youth march to the Mongol border. A man slouches through the blue-black streets by moonlight. A dark sun explodes over two prisoners who flee in the blue-washed night. An old woman kneels, begging for bread. And again the mad dogs, the mad humans metamorphosing into dogs. And so on. The vision is bleak yet there is color in all the suffering, all the skies. He rejoiced with his pen and brush even while he spoke of gloom.”
    A felicitous phrase, Isadora thought. Wish I’d written it. (Isadora never could identify with her own writing, quite. It was as if some spirit wrote through her and even-especially-the happiest phrases seemed somehow not to be her own.)
    â€œBut he did not die then, when I began this memoir, despite the fact that it was a night of great agitation in