Erica Jong - Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones

THE TRUE HISTORY OF

THE ADVENTURES OF

Fanny Hackabout-Jones

IN THREE BOOKS

Comprising her Life at Lymeworth,

her Initiation as a Witch,

her Travels with the Merry Men,

her Life in the Brothel,

her London High Life, her Slaving Voyage,

her Life as a Female Pyrate,

her eventual Unravelling of her Destiny,

et cetera.

In which Fanny is introduced

It is raining at Merriman Park. The green is the green that exists nowhere but in England. Even the tree trunks are green, being kissed with moss. And the steps leading to the little Greek temple are slippery with the same green moss. Across the ha-ha, at the end of the avenue of rain-drenched chestnut trees, cows are grazing, heads down, oblivious of the rain. They are English cows.

A brown and white spaniel with muddy paws bounds into the house, races across the black and white marble floor of the main hall, wholly indifferent to the assemblage of gods and goddesses on the painted ceiling, the scenes from the Aeneid on the walls, the reclining marble figures of Poetry, Music, Geography, Astronomy, Geometry, and Sculpture on the pediments above the stately doors. The dog has been eating grass and she stops momentarily to vomit on the parquet floor of the library, then races up the great stairs to her mistress bedchamber, where she leaps (with muddy paws) upon her silk-dressing-gown-covered knees (marking the rose-pink watered silk with paw prints), vomits some more grass, and in short thoroughly distracts her from what she has been writing. Her mistress puts down her goose quill (now blunt anyway from so much writing) and rises from the walnut writing bureau to chastise the dog, whose name, we now learn, is Chloe.

But who is this lady and what has she been writing? She is too beautiful a lady for us not to inquire. Her hair is the color of autumn. Her eyes are as brown and liquid as her dogs eyes. Her face betrays no years but those required to make a girl into a woman. Perhaps she is thirty, perhaps forty, perhaps thirty-five forever. She is Fanny to her friends, Frances on official documents, and Fannikins to lovers besotted with her charms. There have been plenty of those. She has also been called poetic names like Lindamira, Indamora, Zephalinda, Lesbia, Flavia, Sappho, Candida, by many of her literary lovers (who wrote her into their poems and plays). But no matter. No woman of character ever reaches Fannys age (whatever it may be) without being ridiculed by some as irrationally as she is praised by others.

So, if she has been called a woman of the town, a tart, a bawd, a wanton, a bawdy-basket, a bird-of-the-game, a bit of stuff, a buttered bun, a cockatrice, a cock-chafer, a cow, a crack, a cunt, a daughter of Eve, a gay-girl, a gobble-prick, a high-flyer, a high-roller, a hussy, a hurry-whore, a jill, a jude, a judy, a jug, laced mutton, lift-skirts, light o love, merry legs, minx, moll, moonlighter, morsel, mutton-broker, mount, nestcock, night-bird, night-piece, night-walker, nymph of darkness, nymph of the pavement, petticoat, pick-up, piece, pillow-mate, pinch-prick, pole-climber, prancer, quail, quiet mouse, or even Queenit is not surprising. A woman of lively parts is as likely to be slandered as she is to be praised.

Chloelook what youve done to my gown, she says (not really angrily) to the slobbering spaniel; and the two of them leave the vicinity of the writing bureau, the walnut chair (with its ball-claw cabriole legs and its scallop-shell carvings), and proceed to the washstand where the dog will be dried and brushed as lovingly as if it were a child. This enables us to peek at what Fanny has been writing. We do so with only enough guilt to make it more piquant.

(In Order of Appearance)