Leavetaking
(click here)

First, to explain the resurrection of long buried pages:

They began with an escape act -- when at forty I took leave of a husband and four children for seven weeks of vagabonding through rural France. I took a small pack. A dulcimer (which proved, just once, indispensable, though most of the time it was a damn nuisance). A few clothes -- very few, mostly for change of weather, as I had no desire to lug around a lot of dirty laundry. And some half dozen (easily stuffed) little blue "exam books."

The notes I scrawled on the road -- my pretext for lingering in roadside cafes -- underwent a series of rewrites back home. My grown-up youngest daughter now says I might have worked harder to rewrite the marriage, and I tried, I really did try to translate revived desire into revived marital relations. Sex and safe harbor. I hungered for both and even checked The Joy of Sex out of the library to see if perhaps I was missing something. (I concluded that they were).

The journal notes were a more hopeful enterprise. They didn't cut me down as I later realized my husband did almost reflexively, because (as he once said) I had "the whip hand"? -- because he knew from the start that I wanted the baby, new life to replace a drowned brother, more than I wanted him? It was hard to fault Alex, or fight him either, for knowing (and resenting) what I never said and didn't have to say, but my little sister, observing us side by side on the family sofa, picked up right away on my puzzling body language. "It was always 'come closer, go away,'" she says. Always an escape act?

Still, I did have those notes to work on now. They were fragmentary, to be sure, mere pegs for holding -- or jogging -- quicksilver memory (Sir Walter Scott cut notches on a stick of wood for much the same purpose!) And I was encouraged with a sense of audience, if only at first from a gushy female friend who said that my trip was the "fantasy of every woman past the first bloom," and "of course you're going to do something with all this, aren't you?"

Yes indeed, I told my mother when she asked the same question. And yes, I'd send pages on to her . . . though I had second thoughts after finding a publisher (hooray!) who pushed me to expand (oh no!) those embarrassing bedroom or bracken scenes where I'd already perfected a mid-Victorian substitution of three dots for the stuff that Erica Jong apparently reveled in. Remember the "zipless fuck"? I hadn't read her book yet ("wait till you've finished yours," counseled the friend who said I was writing "another Fear of Flying"); I only knew that my book-loving mother had read the book and promptly burned it.

So what a surprise to read Jong for myself and discover that on her scandalous trip through France, she had no sexual encounters at all -- she just talked, as my editor would have liked me to talk? I had to agree with him, though, when my own sister asked, "Jeanie, did you have sex in the park there, or not?" that perhaps I was being a bit too allusive.

I was also "incredibly" unequipped for contraception, said the New York professional reader whose 12-page critique provoked another rewrite (while my publisher, running out of money, retreated to the safe haven of cookbooks). Unbelievably naive about sex and unbelievably savvy about hitchhiking ("where does a 40-year-old woman learn . . .?), not to mention "smug, cold, glib and not very likeable." Perhaps there wasn't much to be done about this last, but at least I could let readers peek under the curtain and learn where all that "blytheness" (to use a nicer epithet) was coming from. I could expand my story again to include family tragedy.

So that's in there too. In bits and pieces it all came out once the floodgates were opened, a memory held close for twenty years let go -- and today, I hope, let go for good. Fifty years is long enough.

A caution to readers from my later "re-enchantment" website: while mining this earlier manuscript for relevant material I did not always remember the fictive names I'd used here. I trust it's still obvious who's who. In any case, click here on "Overture" for my original start to Leavetaking.