Out-of-Date, Incoherent Look at Envy

Jealousy by Nancy Friday (Perigord Press: $19.95)

What an accomplished woman, what a hard worker, what a diligent student, what a fundamentally morose sort of person Nancy Friday is! She’s one of the great pop-psychologists of our time, taking on fiery mother-daughter relationships in “My Mother/Myself,” and one of the great American titillaters, dealing in her other books with all sorts of male and female sexual fantasies.

Now, in this new volume, she mines one of the major sources of our anxiety--jealousy, which she says is a great deal like envy, but people keep calling it jealousy, except that any discerning mind should think of it as envy, and most people don’t worry about being thought of as jealous, except that when you try to stick them with envy, they’re not going to like it, and most jealousy is sexual in nature, naturally (or else why would she have written this book?), but envy--if I read correctly here--has to do with a loss of one’s self-esteem (assuming one ever had any in the first place), plus an urge to destroy that goes back to the time when each separate human universe was limited simply to an infant and its food supply: the breast.

The infant, for reasons of its own having to do with delays in its instant gratification, longs for revenge. According to Nancy Friday, who is borrowing freely here from Melanie Klein’s “Envy, Gratitude and Other Works,” the infant, in an infant-snit, is seized from time to time by an urge to bite the maternal breast, to smear excrement on it, or, Friday concludes lamely, to “bite the hand that feeds it!”

Commendable Intentions

This 524-page study, which is long, too long, way too long, wends its way hither and thither through books known and unknown. Friday quotes Lily Bess Campbell’s “Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes,” which is admirable, and a certain demonstration of Friday’s commendable intentions, but the reader looks in vain for any reference to Dostoevski, who, in his thought on “the imp of the perverse,” covered this material--that impulse in all of us that wants to spoil things even when, or especially when, everything is wonderful--in a far shorter, classier, easier way than Friday has done here.

But why in heaven’s name should anything be easy in this book? As late as Page 491, Friday is saying, in her own quoted dialogue, “The more I write about jealousy, the more I believe that envy is the heart of it. Envy feeds jealousy and makes it all the more bitter . . . .” She covered that material 400 pages back, and every 20 or so pages thereafter.

Four things characterize this essay on jealousy. (1) An incredible amount of outside reading, from Doris Lessing, to Melanie Klein, to great chunks of Freud, to something by Leslie Farber with the snappy title, “Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Sex, Suicide, Drugs and the Good Life.” All this, in a sense, can be called scholarship, or might be, if it were put to better use. (2) Incessant dumb questioning. “Are you jealous?” Nancy Friday asks everyone, people she meets at parties, her hairdresser, and a particularly infuriating “friend” of hers called Robertiello. (3) A “low” set of friends, or what one’s mother might label “bad companions,” typified by this same Robertiello (talking about his professional life as an analyst): “When one of my ex-wives walked in on me that time I was literally making it on that couch in the waiting room, she went for the woman. She tried to kill the other woman.” And also (talking about his fantasies) “. . . me being an African chief, she’s the missionary’s daughter and I . . . make her into my sexual slave. By devaluing her, I keep the power.” Robertiello, what a guy! And he’s Nancy Friday’s philosophical mentor here, who, she repeatedly assures us, is “wonderful.” (4) Physical complaint. By page 46, Friday’s having trouble with her back; by 187 she reports “red hot pain shoots down my leg as I try to walk, sending me screaming to the telephone,” and by the end we’re to understand that she’s developed a chronic limp from this endeavor, which is, after all, just supposed to be a book on jealousy!

One last, unkind cut: Nancy Friday’s own diligent work habits may have finally betrayed her. She may have worked so long on “Jealousy” that her book fails not from any of the above problems, but because her finger has slipped off the pulse of the nation: While she was working, the temper of the times may have changed. In Friday’s introduction, she recalls a man who jolted her rigid ideas about jealousy by introducing her to her own “shameful secret. It was lust,” and introduced her, as well, to huevos rancheros.

Sinister Specter

Well, huevos rancheros , OK, but no woman in the 1980s--when the rest of the nation is contemplating monogamy, children, “the new chastity” and the sinister specter of AIDS--can hope to establish authority and credibility with tales of picking up other women’s underwear and eating Mexican breakfasts. Friday here is well-intentioned, incoherent and 15 years behind the times.