ERICA JONG, STILL FLYING FEARLESSLY

Time does soar along. It’s been 14 years since Erica Jong’s controversially candid “Fear of Flying” was published, but it is still selling. Six million copies in the United States, the author said during a stop in Los Angeles this week, a total approaching 10 million worldwide in 22 languages, including Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. It is read in the Soviet Union and China, whence no royalties emerge.

Columbia bought the film rights and still owns them. Jong lost a suit in 1976 to regain the rights, but the picture, which was to have been directed by Julia Phillips, was never made. Now, Jong thinks, it should be.

“Let it be a retro movie of the ‘70s. There are young people who don’t know what it was like in those years,” Jong said at lunch. “And I know exactly who should direct it and who should star in it. Susan Seidelman (who did “Desperately Seeking Susan” and the recent “Making Mr. Right”) should direct, and Rosanna Arquette (from “Desperately Seeking Susan”) should star.” David Puttnam & Co. are hereby alerted.

Jong has been on a series of three- and four-day excursions to publicize her new novel, “Serenissima” (Houghton, Mifflin). She goes home to Connecticut for long weekends with her daughter, Molly, now 8.

The novel is set in Venice, where a 20th-Century American actress on hand for the film festival finds herself back in late 16th-Century times, having orgiastic sport and other adventures with two English visitors, William Shakespeare (who speaks entirely in quotes from his own work) and his homosexual patron, the Earl of Southampton.

There are strong trace elements of Jong in her Jessica Pruitt, as there were in Isadora Wing, the fiercely emergent feminist of “Fear of Flying.” Jong did serve on the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1984, although she was not seduced by a Soviet film maker as Jessica was, and did not meet Shakespeare, although she wishes she had.

No evidence survives that Shakespeare ever got beyond London and Stratford, although sympathetic admirers of the man from Stratford have sought to place him in both Italy and Denmark, where he could have studied the layout of Elsinore Castle.

Jong goes along with A. L. Rowse and other loyalists, firmly convinced that the Bard was the Stratford Bard and not some person or persons still unidentified, and a little sightseeing in Italy would certainly explain a lot of knowledgeable references in the Shakespeare plays and poems.

At Barnard College, Jong majored in American literature and minored in Italian literature and first went to Italy in her junior year, “with Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ in one hand and a spiral notebook in the other,” she says. She has gone back almost annually since, and lived in an ancient house in Venice for periods of several months over the three years she was writing “Serenissima.”

Whether the reader, or the critics, can accept the time travel, or the dream, or the fevered fantasy of the actress-Bard confrontation, the author’s love of Venice and Italy is inescapable, as is her love of poetry.

Jong is still feisty and outspoken about the secondary roles to which she feels women are consigned as authors. “We remain, at some level, invisible,” she shouted at a PEN convention in New York a year ago. Norman Mailer, presiding, shot back that “Erica Jong is the last woman in the world who could claim invisibility.”

True, she admitted at lunch this week, but it doesn’t weaken her argument that women have trouble gaining the recognition they deserve. “When it’s time for men to tote up the lists of the best books of 1987, or ’86 or ’85 or ‘84, relentlessly the names are the names of men. It’s still twice as hard for a woman to be acknowledged as an artist in this society. The double standard still exists.

“Compare my work as reviewed with (Philip) Roth or (John) Updike. There’s much more personalizing, much more criticizing of my life. Roth didn’t have an easy time of it when he told the truth about male sexuality in ‘Portnoy’s,’ all those dark secrets. But for women it’s been even harsher.

“ ‘Fear of Flying’ let in some air, I think with terrific honesty, and I still get flack for it. Women have sexual fantasies? You’re still not supposed to say that. The curse of women is that they’re still supposed to play their grandmother’s roles: ‘Be nice, keep the family together, don’t tell tales out of school. Uncle Irving’s coming for Thanksgiving dinner; let’s not mention he’s a child molester. For God’s sake, don’t tell the truth.’

“Well, I wrote a coming-of-age novel, a Bildungsroman, in the old tradition, except that the protagonist happened to be female, Jewish and a New Yorker.”

She does see progress. The older hypocrisies are not so easily accepted. Other women are writing candidly about female sexuality. It is possible to have an older woman as protagonist (Jessica is 40ish; it is one of her anxieties). It is seen as possible to combine motherhood and career. “Doors have been opened, or pushed ajar,” Jong says. “We may defeat the double standard yet.”

The present tour has pleased her, she says, because several interviewers have discussed all her work, including the poetry with which she launched her career, and not talked to her simply as the writer of a notorious novel. (The late Robert Kirsch called the poetry “moving, honest, insightful, wide-ranging, ironic, witty, tough, magical.”)

“I have the European idea of being a writer,” Jong says. “Whether you turn out hits or flops, you keep going on telling the truth until you can’t hold a pen any longer. There’s no point to being a writer unless you tell the truth. You should be unco-optable either by success or failure. And at your death there’s a shelf of books, a body of work.

“I’m still going on toward Canterbury.”