Still Flying.(The Talk of the Town)(Erica Jong)

Erica Jong, the novelist, essayist, and poet, has long lamented that "Fear of Flying," which has sold more than eighteen million copies worldwide since it was published, in 1973, has overshadowed the remainder of her sizable oeuvre. "I used to worry that they would put zipless fuck on my tombstone," she wrote in an afterword to a new edition some years ago. Last year, however, after Columbia University acquired her literary papers, Jong agreed to the idea of holding a conference to celebrate the work as a feminist classic. The other day, Jong, in tangerine-colored jacket and with a mass of blond curls, was among the mostly female audience that filled a hall at the Union Theological Seminary to hear academics discuss the significance of what Michael Ryan, the head of Columbia's rare-books-and-manuscripts collection, referred to as "a seminal work."

"What Helen Gurley Brown had done for the great mass of women when she turned Cosmo into a household word, I told myself, Erica Jong had done for highbrow women," Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor of French and comparative literature at Harvard and a Barnard classmate of Jong, nee Mann, noted, as she recalled her first exposure to the work. "I came across an article that blew me away: Erica Mann, now Jong, has published an autobiographical novel that uses words like 'fuck' and 'cunt.' I couldn't even write a piece of academic prose, never mind 'fuck' or 'cunt,' " Suleiman said. Rabelais was invoked, and Walt Whitman. "The 'zipless fuck' may have gotten all the press," Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of English at Stanford, said. "But what excited me most about that book was that both Isadora and her author lived to tell the tale."

When questions from the audience were invited, however, it emerged that Jong's candor had not been universally appreciated. A woman bearing a striking resemblance to Jong--same blond curls, same profile--rose to the microphone. "I have the distinct honor of being Erica's sister," Suzanna Daou, nee Mann, said. "I love my sister very much, but 'Fear of Flying' has been a thorn in my flesh for thirty-five years." The book was, Daou said, "an expose of my life when I was living in Lebanon"--Isadora Wing has a sister, Randy, who lives in Beirut with her many children and her husband, a Lebanese Christian who makes a pass at his sister-in-law--and also betrayed, she said, an ugly and ill-befitting prejudice. (Jong's Beirut chapter is called "Arabs and Other Animals.") "The book speaks of ...