THE LETTERS THAT FOLLOW were mostly written during the spring and summer of 1974, when I was undergoing a transformation I didn’t even recognize from “promising younger writer” to public figure. My first novel, Fear of Flying, had been out in hardcover for about six months. Initially, the book received lukewarm reviews but passionate word-of-mouth. By the time John Updike discovered it in The New Yorker, the novel was nearly unobtainable and constantly out of stock. It had been underprinted for the success it was to become, and for six months I had gnashed my teeth over the poor distribution of the book, feeling powerless to affect its fate (which I now understand is every author’s karma). When Henry’s long, enthusiastic welcome came in the spring of 1974, I was grateful.
Looking back, I see how neurotic I was about the publication of Fear of Flying—perhaps because it was such a break with the good girl inside me, the part of me that really wanted to write nice things and not embarrass the family. When the novel began to be ferociously talked about, galleys stolen from the publisher’s desk, paperback and movie rights sold, I felt guilty: I was winning fame and money for being a bad girl: When critics trashed the book, something inside me felt I deserved to be trashed; when there were raves, I was at once thrilled and guilty. This was because I knew I was breaking old rules of female silence and female submission. I would shout out my rebellion only to become frightened of my own echo.
Henry was in a unique position to understand this fate. And his letters show it. They also reflect his generosity, his taste in reading, his views on sex, literature, anti-Semitism, and women’s freedom.
It is especially important that the letters referring to anti-Semitism, Jewishness, and feminism be made available, because Henry has often been accused of anti-Semitism and woman-hating. I have addressed the charge of woman-hating throughout this book, but the anti-Semitism issue deserves some more space here. It followed Miller throughout his life and it has recently been vigorously renewed by Mary Dearborn in her biography of Miller.
Even to my paranoid Jewish mind, Miller was not an anti-Semite. He merely reserved the right, typically claimed by Jews but denied to gentiles, to make fun of us. Most fair-minded Jews will acknowledge that we are the toughest self-critics and the most barbed satirists of all things Jewish, but most of us bristle when a gentile claims the same prerogative. Certainly I do—though I reserve the right of the typical diaspora Jew to direct self-mockery, cynicism, and gallows humor at my own people and their foibles.
Henry saw this hypocrisy and called us on it. If Jews could criticize Jews, why couldn’t he? The great fabulist of the Jews, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was Henry’s favorite twentieth-century writer (and mine) and yet another of his correspondents, was allowed to show Jewish thieves, Jewish fools, Jewish knaves, as well as Jewish saints—so why was Miller, a gentile, not allowed? Why should the Jews alone be permitted to tell the truth about Jews?
We know very well why. It is the same reason we alone are allowed to criticize our parents and children, but bristle when others do so. The horrors of twentieth-century Jewish history have given us every reason to be sensitive to the anti-Semitic slur, however subtle.
But let me remind the reader who would like to like Miller, but fears he is an anti-Semite, that for every supposed slur on Jews in Miller, there are startlingly vivid examples of valiant attempts to squelch the banal anti-Semitism of his time. There is the incident related by Alfred Perlès, in which Henry nearly throttles the saloonkeeper who refers to his place as the “Judenfrei café.” And there are repeated examples of Miller’s wish to be Jewish—if only to justify his differentness, his bookishness, his sense of being an outcast and an eternal vagabond. Note also his admiration for people and things Jewish—from June to Singer to the author of this book.
Miller’s feelings toward Jews were complicated. Jews represented New York and home to Miller, and Miller hated New York. Jews represented the admiration of bookishness in men—something Henry yearned for from his mother, and could not have. (Anaïs would give it to him; Louise never would.) No wonder that so many of the pivotal figures in Henry’s life—from June to Michael Fraenkel to Abe Rattner—were Jewish. Jews effortlessly had so much Henry coveted: respect for the man who chose to live in a world of books, respect for the man who shunned the practical world for the world of ideas, metaphysics, and religion, respect for the man whose main talents were Torah and procreation. Henry envied Jews. He wanted to be a yeshiva bucher himself! That, by the way, was his wistful term for my former husband, Jonathan Fast. “Jonathan, you’re a real yeshiva bucher,” he liked to say. The yeshiva scholar, like the ancient sage, was one of Henry’s ideals of manhood.
Inevitably, Henry and I were asked to comment on each other publicly. It was such a promotable combination—dirty old sage and young Wife of Bath—that television producers and print-media editors found us irresistible. So there was a wonderful 60 Minutesdocumentary with Mike Wallace, and side-by-side op-ed pieces in The New York Times (September 7, 1974). I reprint two of these “boosts” among the letters because they are a continuation of them and share their spirit.
I have kept Henry’s spelling idiosyncracies intact and have refrained from editing my own youthful enthusiasm (silly as it often is) out of my letters. You have the exchange just as it occurred.