Her banner yet waves

The high priestess of the sexual revolution is basking in the warm spring air wrapped around the Chateau Marmont. Erica Jong may not be the sort of person who’s spent much of her adult life sleeping alone, but she’s talking about how she definitely wasn’t expecting company in her hotel room the night before.

“At 4 in the morning, the standing lamp in my room started to flicker, and it went on and off and on and off,” she says as she sips iced tea on the hotel lawn. “Suddenly, it went on and I looked around and thought, ‘This place is haunted. Who is visiting me?’ ” Jong laughs heartily.

The Chateau’s anonymous interloper of yore isn’t the only ghost visiting Jong these days. Isadora Wing, her lascivious fictional counterpart who made “zipless” an adjective for an activity that still can’t be repeated here three decades later, is also back in town. Wing’s bawdy romps in the groundbreaking “Fear of Flying” spurred sales of 12.5 million copies worldwide and asserted women’s right to be sexual beings. Now, in honor of its 30th anniversary, the novel is being reissued by New American Library. (Norton is also reissuing paperback editions of Jong’s novels “Fanny” [1980] and “Shylock’s Daughter” [1987], with reading group guides.)

Of course, three decades is quite a chunk of time, longer than the fresh-faced young waitress delivering coffee to Jong’s table has even been on the planet. In all likelihood, the Generation Y-er is a beneficiary of the shake-up in sexual mores accomplished by people her parents’ age. But when she’s asked if she recognizes Jong’s name, she politely demurs. Jong, a radiant 61, simply smiles. “Fame is fleeting,” she says wryly.

Fame may be fleeting, but maturity isn’t, and Jong’s latest heroine, Sappho, is heir to the author’s hard-won wisdom. “Sappho’s Leap” (W.W. Norton & Co.), her eighth novel, may still be animated by a heroine who considers sex to be her due, but the 50-ish Sappho is far from the miniskirted Wing who bounced from bed to bed in her nubile 20s.

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Greek poet re-imagined

The book opens with the archaic Greek lyric poet poised at a cliff, contemplating a leap that, legend holds, she made in her grief over being spurned by the handsome ferryman Phaon. In Jong’s hands, Sappho has better things to do than kill herself over a cute guy.

After rereading Sappho’s work, the author decided to re-imagine the poet’s life. Jong was in her 50s and finally understood why Sappho’s songs went on to inspire lovers and poets for the next 2,600 years. “Sappho is a mother. She’s a grandmother by the end of the book, and she has a long view of the world. I have a long view of the world, and one of the reasons I wanted to write a novel set in ancient Greece was because I think that at times of trouble and conflict in the world, you go back to the ancients and say, ‘What is enduring? What is eternal? What doesn’t change about women?’ ”

Jong’s ripened Sappho is finding little favor among critics except as a breezy read. Stanford classics professor Joy Connolly wrote in the New York Times, “Think swoons and sun-kissed skin, ripe flesh, ecstasy and anguish, and you’re halfway to catching the drift of the novel.” She later added, though, that “it’s gratifying to encounter a Sappho whose sex drive is based in pleasure instead of neurosis, and who is interested in politics as well as pillow talk.”

Connolly is referring to Isadora, Jong’s masterwork of jumbled neuroses. Even Jong finds Isadora annoying at this point. “When I try to reread ‘Fear of Flying,’ which is very hard for me to do even now, I feel like this girl in her 20s.... Why is she so frantic? Can’t she just relax? She’s so fartutst,” Yiddish for frantic, confused. “She’s always falling into bed with the wrong man.”

Jong laughs easily when she contemplates her life’s surprising turns. “Fear of Flying” may have trapped the sexual revolution in amber, but for someone identified with the post-Pill, free-love era, Jong likes marriage so much she’s done it four times (and happily figures she’s on her last one, to lawyer Ken Burrows). For many years after the book was published, she labored under the unexpected epilogue to monster-hit first novels -- the pressure for an encore.

In the new afterword to “Fear of Flying,” which is taught in women’s lit courses around the country, she writes: “I used to worry that ‘Fear of Flying’ was so much more famous than my 20 or so other books that it dwarfed my life’s work.... Such worries are behind me. It is rare for an object of paper and ink to become an event in people’s lives.”

Jong chalks up her newfound serenity to impending senior citizenship. “The terrible, terrible truth is that maturity is a great thing,” she says with a laugh. “Yes, there’s a lot of ageism. People want to put you on the shelf and all that, but actually what it does for you as a person is great.”

Jong certainly doesn’t look like an elder stateswoman of feminist fiction. Her wavy blond mane still tumbles around her shoulders much as it did in her early author photos. She’s casually dressed in an apricot-colored jean jacket and pants, and an aquamarine necklace made by a friend of her novelist-daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, brings out the penetrating blue of her eyes. The blond-blue combination was irresistible to pinch-happy Italian men in the travels of her youth, and Jong says she doesn’t get that kind of attention anymore, but not because age knocks her off the playing field.

“I’m not saying I feel like I’m unattractive,” she says. “I’m not looking for that the way I once did. I guess that if, God forbid, my husband died, at some point I would find a companion. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t, but if I didn’t I’d be OK, and that’s a kind of freedom. The neediness goes, and that’s great. There’s a wonderful quote from Colette, and she says, ‘When love is through with you, you’ll find life is full and rich and there is plenty of it.’ That’s kind of an ironic thing for Colette to have said, because love was never through with her.”

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Sappho’s adventures

Fortunately for her readers, love isn’t through with her heroines either. Sappho’s life was full of sexual adventures, and not just with women, as is commonly believed. Jong pairs Sappho with her actual contemporaries, the storyteller Aesop and the warrior-poet Alcaeus, whom she depicts as the love of Sappho’s life.

Indeed, Jong is still breaking ground as a chronicler of women’s sexuality. If it was front-page news 30 years ago that women could be as lustful as men, it’s still unusual to find literary heroines who remain sexually active after menopause.

“How far have we come?” she muses. “The idea that we can celebrate and be alive and be sexy and bright and creative and productive in our work and not die is still revolutionary. Women are having relationships older and meeting men on the Internet, like my sister did when she was 65, and forming tender relationships with other women, some of them. I have so many friends who thought they were heterosexual and fell in love with other women when they were 50.

“So we have all these things that we can write about, and it’s terra incognita. I think one has to write about that, and if I’m not going to do it, who will?”