Free How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong Page A

or on her person for fear she would give it to you. Anything at all: a painting, a first edition, a piece of jewelry. She gave and gave and gave. Things fell out of her pockets. And everything eventually came back. Doubled, usually. Or tripled.
    Hope and I became really close friends during the summer of 1968, when I came back to New York from Heidelberg for a week to watch my grandmother die of cancer. I walked into her office and felt I had come home. It was a sunny room with thick gold carpeting and a large desk covered with trinkets, photographs, flowers. People were always sending Hope flowers.
    â€œLet me look at you,” Hope said. I looked at her while she looked at me, and it was love at first sight. Hope was plump, gray-haired, and gave off warmth like an open fireplace. Her presence had a way of smoothing out all one’s lumps and bumps, of making one feel mellow. My mother always made me feel nervous; Hope made me feel calm.
    She sat there reading my unpublished poems while I looked around the room, mostly for something to do. I was terrified whenever anyone read my poems, convinced they were dreadful, convinced I was going to be revealed as a fraud. At the time, I had an unpublished book of poems about living in Europe, Germany, Nazis, and the silences in my marriage. Hope read. I pretended not to be terrified. After a page or two, she looked up and said: “Poetry manuscripts always knock me out. Such simple white pages—and someone’s entire soul behind them.” Then she went back to reading.
    Well, I could always go back to graduate school. That path was open to me. Or I could find a job in a publishing house. It was not such an awful thing to have tried to be a poet and failed. It was worse never to have tried at all. Wasn’t it? But then I thought of all those pompous bores who thought themselves poets and weren’t. The hopeful boobs who mailed off their sentimental effusions to Writer’s Digest, who signed up for correspondence courses at the Famous Writers’ School, who went hopefully to vanity presses with eight-hundred-page poetry manuscripts in hand and the firm conviction that somehow their vanity-press books would “catch on,” would become word-of-mouth best sellers. What if I were one of those? It was one thing to be a mediocre prose-writer. Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn’t good, it wasn’t poetry. It was as simple as that.
    I thought of my grandmother, from whose house I had just come. She was jaundiced, cadaverous, eaten away by cancer of the pancreas and beaten down by the side effects of the chemotherapy she was being given. For as long as I could remember, she had had a cancer phobia, but now that she actually had cancer she never breathed the word. She sat in a chair by the window, sewing, taking in her clothes. “They’re all too big,” she said, “and I want to have something to wear when they let me go out again.” Of course, they never did let her go out again. She was dead two months later. But before she died she sent me to Hope. It was she who was responsible for my going over there, poems in hand. I never would have done it without her prodding and without wanting to please a dying old lady. In those days I was afraid to show my poems to anyone. Especially an editor. Editors were deities to me. They knew.
    â€œYou’re going to be the most famous woman writer of your generation,” Hope said to me, looking up.
    The woman is mad, I thought; gushy, overenthusiastic, wholly lacking in any critical judgment. She is just being nice to an old family friend.
    â€œYou don’t really mean it,” I said.
    â€œI never say anything I don’t mean,” Hope said. “I may seem gushy to you—”
    I lie: “Never.”
    â€œBut I care too much about poetry to