SEDUCING THE DEMON, BY ERICA JONG

Source: Speak Up

Language Level: Advanced

Standard: British

Seducing the Demon by Erica Jong

    Isaac Bashevis Single wrote a wonderful story called “Taibele and Her Demon”. In it, a man pretending to be a demon visits by night a pretty young woman whose children have died and whose husband has walked out in utter despair.

    At first the demon terrifies her with his ugliness, but then she falls in love with him – as much for his vivid stories of hell and heaven as for his demonic lovemaking. She completely forgets that he’s ugly and becomes more and more attached to him - even though after a while she can see his human failings. Yet this demon “perspired, sneezed, hiccupped, yawned.” Yes, “sometimes his breath smelled of onion, sometimes of garlic… His body felt like the body of her husband, bony and hairy, with an Adam’s apple and a navel… His feet, were not goose feet but human with nails and frost blisters.

    “Once Taibele asked him the meaning of these things, and Humirzah [the demon’s assumed name] explained: ‘When one of us consorts with a human female, he assumes the shape of a man. Otherwise she would die of fright’.

    “Yes, Taibele got used to him and loved him. She was no longer terrified of him and his impish antic”. Perhaps she suspected he was really a man, but not wanting to know it, she refused to. Singer’s story is a kind of reverse Schehezade: the woman falls in love with the teller of tales and welcomes his lovemaking no matter what his looks. But it is more than that. It’s a fable of disguise between a woman and a man, who both need the disguise to give each other permission to love each other. She needs to believe he is a demon so that she thinks she has no choice but to submit to him. He needs to be convinced that she believes him in order to keep up the elaborate fantasy that turns her on. Many marriages are based on less. The story of Taibele has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for my life as a writer. The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories. Often you go to bed with a man who claims to be a demon and later you find out he’s just an everybody slob. By then he may have inspired a novel. The novel remains though the demon has departed.

    I wrote to my friend Ken Follet about this metaphorical resonance I found in the Singer story. He read the story. Then, he asked me in an e-mail: “Do you really see yourself as a woman who slept with someone who claimed to be Devil, but then turned out to be an ordinary slob?

    He answered his own question:

    Let me guess. You’re going to reply:

    Yes – every damn time.

    But once, the demon was not unmasked.

    When was that? My friend asked.

    I will tell you by and by. Taibele doesn’t want to acknowledge that her lover is merely human. She needs the belief in demons to complete her sexual life. She needs to believe in demons because otherwise she’d betraying her wandering husband. And she is not that kind of girl. The best stories don’t have one metaphor but are layered with man. Isaac Bahsevis Singer was too thoughtful a writer to give us a single metaphor. He gives so many that the tale resonates endlessly – the definition of a great story. So, he is my demon? He is a wild, uncivilized and live entirely in the moment. He makes up stories and acts them out. He is never polite. He didn’t go to college and certainly did not get an MFA at Iowa. He doesn’t know which fork to use. He never heard about the Ten Commandments – and certainly not the one about adultery. He has hairy feet and very likely a tail.

    Let’s see if you can tell when the demon appears. It shouldn’t be hard. He casts a jagged shadow. And he leaves a wet spot on the sheet. Of course, for male writers he is a she. She becomes whatever physical type the write favors, since men care so much more about appearance than women do.

    Does he like big tits with rose nipples? She has them. Does she like steatopygous asses? She has one that resembles twin planets. Does he like blue eyes? She has them. Brown? They’ve just changed colour. Is he a chubby chaser? She’s chubby too. Is hea modelizer? (Ugh – what a stupid word) – then she’s skinny. At six-foot-four with slanty Slavic cheekbones, green eyes with neon yellow pupils, she weighs in at ninety-nine pounds. In life, she reminds you of Auschwitz, in bed, she feels like a bicycle. But in photos she looks like a goddess.

    For a gay writer, he’s the perfect boy. He has idealized muscles like Michelangelo’s David. He may even be a lovely Bacchus or a Hermes with winged sandals.

He’s Greek, of course. The Greek’s had the beautiful boys.