Chapter 1
WHEN OBSCENITY CROPS OUT in art, in literature more particularly, it usually functions as a technical device … its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality. In a sense, its use by the artist may be compared to the use of the miraculous by the Masters … the real nature of the obscene lies in the lust to convert.
— HENRY MILLER, REMEMBER TO REMEMBER
HENRY MILLER AND I met in a way that was most Millerish: by letter. A few days after Easter 1974, this letter appeared in a stack at my door:
Easter—April 14, 1974
Dear Erica Jong,
I have just written your publishers congratulating them for having published your Fear of Flying….
I don’t know when I’ve read a book by a woman which has made such an impact upon me. I started it against the grain, then found it impossible to put down until I had read about a hundred pages.
Though I enjoyed the gay, witty, thoroughly uninhibited way in which the book was written, I was also very much taken by its serious side. So much suffering! Jewish suffering. It reminded me of certain passages in Celine’s works in which the saddest events call forth laughter. But men have so much to learn from your book, as well as women. It is a text book as well as a novel or autobiography.
I could not help but feel drawn to Adrian, hypocritical bastard though he was—because for all his foul play he did the most for Zelda of all her lovers. He put her face to face with reality and herself.
I hope you will give us more books!
Sincerely
Henry Miller
Enclosed was another wildly effusive letter, which Henry, with characteristic openhandedness, had already sent to my publisher.
April 14, 1974
To Editor
Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Dear Sir:—
Allow me to congratulate you on publishing Erica Jong’s most delightful book, Fear of Flying. I notice that you call it a novel, but is it? Isn’t it more of an autobiographical piece of writing? At any rate, it is rare these days to come upon a book written by a woman which is so refreshing, so gay and sad at the same time, and so full of wisdom about the eternal man-woman problem. One can learn more on the subject from this “novel” than from the huge, dull tomes authored by analysts, psychologists, medical authorities and such like. The book strikes one as utterly true and sincere. In spite of the wit and humor which the author narrates, one realizes that she is in dead earnest and aware that she is making a major contribution.
Could you tell me, please, if you or any other publisher are contemplating publishing another book of hers? Also, who published the two volumes of poetry she has written: You are at liberty to quote any part of this letter, if it will serve your purpose.
Sincerely,
Henry Miller
What did I know about Henry Miller at the time these two missives, scrawled in black felt pen on yellow legal sheets, appeared on my doorstep? Not much. My image of Miller was probably almost as distorted as the banal image of the dirty-old-man writer that haunts Miller’s name in the public prints. Though I’d read bits of Tropic of Cancer, Remember to Remember, The Henry Miller Reader, and Henry Miller on Writing, I did not have a clear picture of Henry Miller either as a writer or a person. I vaguely remembered seeing pictures in news magazines of an old Miller and his young Japanese wife. And I remembered reading about a notorious obscenity case involving Miller. But I had no idea that the awesome sea change that occurred in publishing in the sixties was to be traced almost directly to Miller.
I myself had experienced this metamorphosis of publishing in my most vulnerable years. I was a high school student at Music & Art in New York City when suddenly Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and Lolita were published by “mainstream” New York houses and each caused a sensation. As a junior in high school, I ran out to buy Lady Chatterley’s Lover in paperback, and read it with the excitement which comes only from the conjunction of eros and revolution (which are anyway the main themes of adolescence). It was not until my junior year in college that Tropic of Cancer finally appeared in the United States. I realize now that I did not know even a fraction of the Miller canon when he first wrote me and in this I was probably typical of most readers. The last thing I remembered about Miller was the feminist fracas Kate Millett had created in 1970 when she published Sexual Politics.
It was Millett’s thesis—as everyone remembers—that Miller’s entire apprehension of sex was misogynistic. In this she was not wrong, but her attack had the effect of proscribing once again a writer who had been largely unobtainable in his own country for almost four decades.
It is not without irony that Miller was first unread because of official puritanical censorship and later unread because of unofficial feminist censorship. And it is also not without irony that certain recent American feminists (forgetting the genesis of our movement with such free spirits as Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, and Victoria Wood-hull) seem to have joined the anti-sex league. Still, Sexual Politics set the terms of the debate about Miller all through the latter part of his life. Was he or was he not a “sexist pig”? Everyone today has to deal with that question in addressing Henry Miller—irrelevant as it is to the books he most wanted to be known by: The Colossus of Maroussi and The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.
Miller was faintly disreputable—that much I knew. He was associated with Paris in the thirties, Big Sur in the fifties, banned books, young Oriental women, sex. But I also remembered that when I was searching for the freedom to write Fear of Flying, I picked up Tropic of Cancer and the sheer exuberance of the prose unlocked something in me. And I also remembered reading an essay of Miller’s which had hit me right between the eyes. The modern writer uses obscenity as the ancient writer used the sacred, Miller alleged, in “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection.” The modern writer, in using obscenity, is trying to rekindle the awe, the shock, the wonder that the ancients found at Delphi or Eleusis. Something about that perception struck me as absolutely right.
Interestingly enough, Tennessee Williams (as quoted by Gore Vidal in Two Sisters), said something quite similar about the uses of sex in literature. He used sex, Williams told Vidal, to “raise the temperature of the audience. You key them up. Then you can tell them anything.”
I had not studied Miller in Modern American Literature class at Barnard. Or in the Ph.D. program at Columbia. He was not taught. Bookworm and passionate scribbler that I was, Miller had largely eluded me. In part, this was because his most famous books were banned, and the others were poorly distributed or out of print.
If I could have obtained Miller’s books easily, I would have gobbled them up. Friends who are five or ten years older report the tonic effect on their literary lives of smuggled copies of Tropic of Cancer brought home from Paris.
Discovering literature at a time when publishing was undergoing a revolution led to abrupt changes in my freedom to read. I have a recollection of having had to track down Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from a locked case in the rare-book room at Butler Library, but this recollection must go back to high school days because, by the time I was in graduate school, she was available in paperback almost everywhere.
In the sixties, after the freeing of Tropic of Cancer, younger American writers began to respond to this new freedom with books that could never have been written, let alone published, before. After John Updike’s Couples in 1968 and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, American fiction dared to open the bedroom door. I think we conveniently tend to forget how recently all this occurred. And Miller was at the root of this change though he was never given official credit.
Fear of Flying was a dare to myself to write from the female point of view with as much verve (and nerve) as Roth and Updike had written from the male. Fear of Flying traveled a road less rocky than Tropic of Cancer’s, but rocky nonetheless. The first printer refused to set type. TV networks would not take ads. And I remember my own astonishment at the sheer violence of some of the critical responses to the book. Cloistered in the Ph.D. program at Columbia, I had imagined that everyone knew Chaucer, Rabelais, Lawrence, and Joyce were full of sex—so why all the fuss? I had not bargained on book-chat sexophobia—of both the feminist and male chauvinist variety. It was as if I were advocating the barbecuing of infants!
Nor was the book calculated to win easy acceptance in the hotly politicized climate of 1973. Separatist feminists attacked it as “soft on men” (because my heroine was heterosexual—something considered counterrevolutionary by some politically correct feminists of that era), and certain literary male chauvinists pronounced the liberated female voice trash. Had John Updike not rescued the book in The New Yorker, it might not have stayed in print long enough for Henry Miller to read it. So Miller’s first letter came as a planche de salut—a life raft—to a young author who had been hurled into a political maelstrom by the experience of publishing a book. I had been called a “mammoth pudenda” in The New Statesman by none other than Paul Theroux, so I had every reason to be grateful to Miller and Updike.
I remember sending my two books of poems (Fruits & Vegetables and Half-Lives) to Miller in a hurry, but agonizing over what I termed “a real letter.” As I was mulling and brooding about how to respond to a living legend (and reading more of his books to make myself worthy) still another Miller letter arrived.
April 30, 1974
Dear Erica Jong—
I’m not very strong on poetry and so I didn’t expect to care for yours. (I do like some poets!) But I was surprised—I like your poems very much indeed. You are like a firecracker going off continually and interesting even when sputtering. You are so bright, so intelligent, so perceptive. You must have had straight A’s all through school, non?
It was good of you to send me these two books of poems, with your charming dédicaces. I just finished reading the first one. I liked especially “If a woman wants to be a poet.” You mention several times Sylvia Plath. I ought to look up her work—unknown to me. I notice all the good writers you quote or recommend—excellent taste. The French poet “Ponge” was a surprise. I see you are going to write me a letter. I look forward to it eagerly.
Jong is Chinese, isn’t it? At first I thought it was a variation of the Swiss “Jung.”
Somehow somewhere I got the impression that Hermann Hesse was a writer who belonged to your youth—and not to be taken too seriously. I am probably wrong. But I hope (why, I don’t know) that you regard him as first-rate writer. For me, in some ways, he is a master. I would love to be able to write a book like “Siddhartha” or “Narcissus and Goldmund.”
Enough! I wait to hear from you.
Cheers!
Henry Miller
This missive was written on Henry Miller’s black-and-white printed stationery, which bore the address 444 Ocampo Drive, Pacific Palisades, California. At the very bottom of the page, in tiny type, was the Portuguese motto cuando merda tiver valor pobre nasce sem cu (“when shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes).” Enclosed was a tattered fortune out of a fortune cookie that said: “Your name will be famous in the future.”
Imagine a young writer receiving this fortune one day and attacks the next. It was dizzying and disorienting.
Eventually, I summoned the courage to write back, making it appear that I had read more of his writing than I had:
May 4, 1974
Dear Henry Miller,
Thanks so much for your delightful and generous letters to me and my publisher. I was absolutely knocked out by them. I love your writing—love its wonderful energy and life and I’ve always felt a deep kinship with it. Also, some of your observations on writing, sexuality, obscenity and literature have taken me through very dark times and have given me courage. All your books attest to the fact that a writer needs great courage as well as great talent and they give courage to readers, too. I thank you for your letters to me and for all your splendid books.
At one time, Fear of Flying was to have an epigraph from you—about the impossibility of ever telling the truth about one’s life, the impossibility of literal autobiography—but, ultimately, I didn’t want to tip my hand that way. The book is spiritual—if not literal—autobiography. Events and characters are sometimes invented, sometimes not. Everyone takes it for literal memoir—and in a way I find that a compliment. The book is coming out in paperback in the U.S. in November—and it is just now being published in England where some of the reviews read as if they were written by Mrs. Grundy herself. The New Statesman says I am “a mammoth pudenda” and my book “crappy,” “loathsome,” “horrible and embarrassing.” Fortunately your first two letters arrived with the British reviews and softened them considerably. All those little well-bred boys who think sex is “horrible and embarrassing!” Amazing to find the world still so full of them.
I mailed the two books of poems to you in a post box that frequently disappears from the corner, so I was really delighted that you received them and that you responded so generously. Some characters in this neighborhood are running an ingenious hustle in which they remove the mailbox from the sidewalk, take it to a nearby basement where they break it open and remove any checks. I never know when I’m going to find the corner bereft of mailbox (with those four tell-tale holes in the street where the bolts were). Somehow it seemed more exciting to mail the books in that mailbox!
I was delighted with your most recent letter and the enclosed fortune. Yes, my name is Chinese and so is my husband—who is not nearly as inscrutable as he was a few years ago when I used him as a model for Bennett Wing. The book has changed him much for the better. Life follows literature, doesn’t it? Have you often found that people you’ve written about are much improved by the experience—humanized, so to speak? I’d really be curious to know!
I haven’t read Hermann Hesse since I was 15 and mooning over Siddhartha. I must read him again, now that I know a little more about writing and people. He will probably seem like a totally different writer.
I wonder whether you would like Sylvia Plath’s poetry. She is a splendid poet (much less good as a novelist), but her work is so life-denying and obsessed with suicide that I think you would be put off. She learned a great deal from Theodore Roethke and has the same kinds of very condensed, laconic and intense images, but all her brilliance is in the service of her death obsession—she did finally take her own life at the age of 31. A terrible waste, really. I know many of the details of her life and know that she was always a rather disturbed woman—but I persist in believing that her suicide was hastened by the fact that she had to live in England with all those goddamned Englishmen! Her husband, Ted Hughes, is a hulking Yorkshireman who always seemed like a warlock to me, and the literary gents in London never seemed to have much use for women themselves. They mostly like each other, and thrive on literary infighting. Healthy sexuality is so unknown to them that when they come upon it, they shriek with horror. My character Adrian was something of a secret pervert himself. His trip was not sex, but mind-manipulation. Nevertheless, it was true that the intensity of that experience brought Isadora to her senses….
I wish I could convey to you how much joy and courage I have gotten from your writing in the past. Just last week I was reading and rereading your remarks on obscenity and literature in Remember to Remember. They seem brilliant to me. I think it’s true that the modern artist uses “obscenity” as the ancient artist used the miraculous—to jolt the reader and create an epiphany. I could go on and on about your work and the things it’s done for me at different times in my life, but I’ll stop in the interest of getting this letter to California (via my floating mailbox).
Love and thanks
Erica Jong
Henry responded almost instantaneously.
From bed—May 6, 1974
(Can’t always see clearly, lost one eye during recent operation.)
Dear Erica Jong—I hope you don’t think I’m a nut! I am only your devoted fan, and more than ever “just a Brooklyn boy.” I write you with a smile on my lips because everyone is Talking about you. You are the sensation of the year! I am going to order copies of your books so I can give them to those who can’t afford to buy them. It seems to me my best readers—in the beginning—could not afford to buy my books. What a struggle I had to sell Tropic of Cancer to the public. If it had not been for the hundreds of letters I wrote (praising the shit out of my work) together with the enthusiasm and devotion of a poor Jewish lesbian who peddled my books from cafe to cafe, the book might never have been known. Your triumph seems so easy—and natural. You are admired by high and low. Even that filthy sheet “Screw” gave you a serious write-up a couple of weeks ago.
(Incidentally, I wonder what Germaine Greer and Anaïs Nin think of it! or Kate Millet.)
I lent the novel to my daughter, Val, and she was thrilled—found a resemblance, in some ways, between herself and you (which I don’t see). She may write you too.
I am going to send copies to Lawrence Durrell and my boon companion of Paris days, Alfred Perlès, who now lives in Cyprus. (I know his bloody Scottish wife will hate it.)
I am always delighted to run across names of poets and other writers you mention in all your books. What excellent taste, as I remarked before. A bit omnivorous, dare I say—or, as the French say, “boulimique” (what a word!) (How about our English word—aboulia?) One poet whose name I expected to encounter but did not is St. John Perse. Who haven’t you read? (You don’t mention Céline or Blaise Cendrars either but I suspect you have read them.) They are my two favorites as you probably know.
My daughter-in-law, Diane Miller, who tries to write poetry, says she found it hard to understand you sometimes. (The poems.) I tried to explain to her that we don’t have to understand everything. Are we stirred, tickled, delighted, angry? Quite enough, don’t you think? I don’t understand everything—or even want to. (Though it’s not quite apropos I must say I love St. Thomas Aquinas’ last words, on his death bed—“All that have written now seems to me like so much straw.” (Compared with his illumination)
I shall be very curious to see and read your second novel. The second book is usually very different from the first one—like a “revolt in the desert.” I imagine your first book left you feeling sick of yourself, if I dare say it. Everything you say about writing (as a refuge, a support, etc.) is so trenchant. Like Celine, curiously enough, you make me laugh when you tell of your suffering. And you, very fortunately, most fortunately, can laugh at yourself. Hurrah! So damned few women who can do that! I don’t know anything more frustrating and depressing than a sorrowful looking woman!
Enough! Good luck and cheers!
Henry Miller
By then, my first novel was gathering steam. Letters were pouring in, and many of them were the most vulnerable letters I’d ever received. My correspondents were seeking salvation and appointing me their guru. This was my first taste of public life in America and I was amazed. I wrote a piece for New York magazine called “The Writer as Sexual Guru.” In it I wondered why writers were seen as gurus when all they were advertising was their own confusion. It elicited a passionate response from my new pen pal:
6/21/74
Dear Erica—
Bradley [Bradley Smith, publisher and author] gave me your piece in the New York magazine about the Writer as sexual guru. I have often wanted to write about my correspondents. You said it all—except maybe for one group I find most interesting—the nuts. The really crazy ones. They usually write fantastic letters, and as you know, can draw and paint most interestingly. When I married my third wife I asked her to help me read & file my c/s. To my dismay, she took it upon herself to destroy all the nutty letters! I was furious. She thought the letters from professors and serious high-brows were the ones to preserve. I told her it was just the contrary.
I am enclosing a postscript in red ink from a recent fan…. She sent this after reading that line in Time mag. not long ago wherein I praise Oriental women. (She knew I was married to a Japanese and now in love with a Chinese.) Don’t you think she’s off her trolley? And how come these statistics? I never found the “vaginal passages” too short in any woman. As for the business of a big prick, it’s all a myth, don’t you think?
Last night I made Irene Tsu, the Chinese actress (I’m not in love with her) promise to read your book. Every day I make new converts to it. You have started a new religion, it seems.
How is the second book coming? More difficult to write, I suppose, than the first. But don’t let that bother you.
Incidentally, does the New York mag. pay for articles?
I look forward to seeing you here soon. Cheers! And love and kisses.
Henry
The correspondence with Miller galloped on into the summer of 1974. Sometimes Henry would write two or three letters a day and I would struggle to keep up with him.
Meanwhile I was undergoing a public metamorphosis from graduate student and “younger poet” to somebody whose name—and even face—at times brought knowing nods. Buffeted by the contradictory reviews of my first novel, I looked forward to the balm of Henry’s letters. My book had struck a nerve, and people detested or adored it. It became an event in their lives and they tended to hold the author responsible for the consequences. Henry Miller understood, perhaps better than anyone, what I was living through. His understanding kept me going.
Henry knew that however much one may be grateful for sudden recognition, it is also a cataclysm. When Fear of Flying was published I still half-expected to go back to graduate school at Columbia, to finish my Ph.D., publish poetry and criticism, and teach at a university. Serious writers, I believed, could not reach a wide audience. (I had all the academic prejudices and snobbery typical of my epoch at Columbia.) The scholar in me—which Henry always twitted me about—was quite horrified by the idea of popular success, however much the narcissist in me may have welcomed it.
Fear of Flying was not a predictable bestseller. For the first year of its life, its hardcover publisher never quite believed in its commercial potential. There were never enough copies printed and whenever it hit the bestseller list, it would promptly go out of stock. Foreign publishers were initially also wary.
“Frenchwomen don’t need psychoanalysis,” I was told by one French editor. “I’ll publish it if I can edit out all the anti-German parts,” I was told by a German editor. Male editors, who were threatened by the female boisterousness of the book, found all sorts of other reasons to reject it. Henry, ever the defender of the underdog, took up Fear of Flying’s cause, sending it around the world to publishers and editors he trusted. Many of the friends he made for me as a writer have lasted to this day.
Irritated by the stupidity and male chauvinism of the responses to Fear of Flying, Henry wrote an essay for the op-ed page of The New York Times (see p. 259). In it he shows more charity toward women’s writing than some feminist zealots, who judge every book against an imaginary yardstick of political correctness and care for neither irony nor imagination. Henry was neither a zealot nor an ideologue, and he proved more open to a woman’s writing than many women. He called Fear of Flying the female counterpart to his own Tropic of Cancer—a description that delighted me. In his assessment of the book, there was no trace of the spite and competitiveness one usually finds lurking in reviews. I had every reason to be grateful to Henry Miller when in October I finally went to Los Angeles with his private phone number in my pocket.
I drove my rented Buick down Sunset Boulevard—the only road I knew—to the Palisades. With some difficulty, I found Henry’s house, an unremarkable white raised ranch house at 444 Ocampo Drive, which seemed awfully bourgeois to be the home of an old bohemian.
On the door, which was unlocked, was a quote from Meng-tse, an ancient sage invented by Herman Hesse as a pseudonym:
When a man has reached old age and has fulfilled his mission, he has a right to confront the idea of death in peace. He has no need of other men, he knows them already and has seen enough of them. What he needs is peace. It is not seemly to seek out such a man, plague him with chatter, and make him suffer banalities. One should pass by the door of his house as if no one lived there.
This was obviously placed to deter unwelcome literary groupies. But Henry was charmingly ambivalent about groupies. He was one of the most gregarious people on earth and was apt to blast his own concentration by inviting in the very visitors the sign on the door seemed meant to discourage.
I opened the unlocked door. Twinka Thiebaud, a beautiful redhead who was Henry’s cook and caretaker in those days, came out to greet me.
I was invited into a hallway with a staircase, and followed Twinka into a room dominated by a Ping-Pong table, a piano, and Miller’s watercolors. In the small patio outside, a pool glimmered in the golden October sunlight. Pleased to have found the house without mishap, I was tingly with anticipation at meeting my literary benefactor.
A thud of rubber in the adjacent hallway. Henry arrived, hunched over an aluminum walker, which he wielded like a shield.
“Hello!” he said in his gravelly voice, redolent of Brooklyn. He wore pajamas and carpet slippers, an old bathrobe, and a hearing aid. He was an old man but his eyes were young.
We sat at the dining table and our talk ignited. Twinka served tea and chimed in from time to time. I have not the faintest recollection of what we talked about, except that it was an extension of our letters—and that Henry was warm and free. Henry’s conversational vitality made him seem my contemporary. In the pictures taken at that time, he was clearly an old man. But my distinct sense was that he was spiritually younger than me. His exuberance was like a shot of the life force.
Proust said in his essay “Contre St. Beuve,” “A book is a product of a different self than we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices.” This is true. The inner self of a writer, the self destined to live beyond the flesh, is not always visible in the writer’s daily life. But the writer’s true voice, once discovered, is congruent with the writer’s soul. This voice is what all writers seek, and a very few find—to raise a cry that is integral with one’s soul.
Here is the paradox of writing. You can’t hide behind words. What and who you are shines forth on every page—whether you pretend objectivity or not. You strip down to the essential self. That is why the misunderstanding of one’s writing is so painful. It is the misunderstanding of the essence of one’s self.
What Henry had that others so resented was wholeness. Though his daily life and his writing life were not necessarily one and the same, his exuberance, the happiness that comes across in his work, was visible in him even when he was old and ill. The voice he found expressed the abundance of the man. It was not the sex the puritans hated and feared. It was the abundance. It was not the four-letter words; it was the five-star soul.
We talked and talked all that afternoon and our talks went on intermittently until he died. They were concentrated in the years I lived in Malibu (1974–76). Sometimes Twinka was present, sometimes Val and Tony Miller, Henry’s daughter and son, sometimes Jonathan Fast, my lover, later my husband, sometimes Tom Schiller, a young comedy writer, sometimes Mike Wallace, the interviewer who recorded our conversations for 60 Minutes in 1974.
We ranged over dozens of subjects: Paris in the thirties, literature, mysticism, food, life. Henry’s rasping voice, punctuated with a very Brooklynese doncha know?, his habit of saying hmmm hmmm like a meditative mantra, rings in my ears as I write. I wish every reader could hear Henry as well as read him. Henry was a mixed-media person and printed words alone don’t do him justice.
I always promised Henry I would write a book about him—but for years I resisted the notion. Too hard, I felt, to write in my own persona. Masked by characters of my own invention, I can be free. But history is a death mask. Writing about factual events is daunting because one knows that objectivity does not, in truth, exist, and that “the facts” are really just another fiction.
“Make it all up!” Henry often told his would-be chroniclers—including me. “That’s the only way to get it right—make it all up!” But the former graduate student in me could not allow that, though the novelist wanted to tell a rattling good yarn even if “facts”—whatever they are—were ignored. So this is the story of my search for Henry after his death, the story of a young writer trying to reconstruct an old writer, of a person of one generation trying to understand someone old enough to be her grandfather—with the manners, mores, and prejudices of her grandfather’s generation.
Henry’s story and my story have one thing above all in common: the search for the courage to be a writer. The courage to be a writer is, in a sense, the courage to be an individual, no matter what the consequences.
Doris Lessing points out in her introduction to a reissue of The Golden Notebook that the “artist as exemplar” is a relatively new protagonist for the novel, and wasn’t the rule one hundred years ago when heroes—there being few heroines—were more often explorers, clergymen, soldiers, empire builders. This may well be because the artist is seen as the only true individual left in an increasingly chained society. Both Henry’s persona “Henry Miller” and the real historical Henry Miller spoke to this longing for freedom. He freed himself—and then he passed the gift along to us.
So now you know: I am in his debt. Debts are uncomfortable. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that between the first page of the first chapter of this book and the last, a year mysteriously disappeared. Normally a fluent writer, I couldn’t write. I was furious at Henry. I didn’t want to pay the debt. I did research, reread Henry and books about Henry. I also debriefed various elderly Millerian disciples before they died. But I was fighting this book in my head and heart. I could not let it go. It would not ride, as Robert Frost says somewhere, on its own melting.
“Writing problems are always psychological problems,” I used to tell my writing students. “They’re obstructions which you haven’t yet recognized and named. Once you find the obstruction, you discover that the problem disappears.” But I couldn’t take my own advice. I was enraged at Henry and I didn’t want to write about him. Once I knew this, I was already halfway there.
“What’s the secret about Henry that you don’t want anyone to know?” a friend asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?” she asked.
“That I don’t really like Henry Miller,” I blurted out.
“Why?”
“Because of his sexism, his narcissism, his jibes at Jews. And because he’s so free,” I said. “I work so hard at my writing and he’s such a slob. I rewrite and rewrite and he lets it all hang out. He’s such a blagueur and I try so hard to be honest. Everything is cake to him. He treats women horribly and doesn’t seem to care. He turns on the people who help him. Even his suffering seems like fun.”
So I had unwittingly discovered the source of the Miller animosity, discovered it in myself (where one always discovers everything, as Freud knew). Miller is having too much fun. He seems unashamed of his failings. He lets all his warts show, and for this I envy him and hate him. For this I want to attack him, even though I am in his debt. Is my jealousy of his freedom poisoning my affection? Does my reaction show why the happy man—that rarity—is not beloved by the general unhappy lot of manunkind (and womanunkind)?
This perception should have opened the floodgates, but it didn’t. The ice froze around my heart. I read, interviewed, began a novel, edited a volume of my poems, worked on adapting a novel for the musical stage. In short, I ran away. The deadline came; it passed. I told my agent I was giving back the advance. Then I changed my mind. Then I changed it back.
“I hate Miller,” I told my friend. “I don’t want to be his flame keeper. I don’t want to serve the patriarch. I have books of my own to write. Fuck Henry Miller’s memory! So what if he’s misunderstood—we’re all misunderstood.”
“So why don’t you begin by writing why you hate Henry Miller?” my friend asked. “Maybe you’ll discover something that way.”
Literary grandfathers. It has something to do with that. Henry Miller and my grandfather were nearly contemporaries. Both were Victorians who sought to liberate themselves. Miller wrote the things he feared the most—and became notorious. My grandfather painted proper portraits and kept his dark imaginings in secret sketchbooks, which he bequeathed to me. He never became famous—though he was a better artist than many who did—and, in a sense, my lust for fame was conditioned by his having embraced obscurity. I was famous for him, I felt. In his place. And Henry, who did so much to propel that fame, was both grandfather and literary alter ego. On one hand, I had fantasies of devoting my life to rescuing my grandfather’s work from obscurity; on the other, I fiercely wanted to press on with my own career. Knowing as I did that the path was always clearer for women to be flame keepers than to be creators in their own right, I was torn. Some part of me craved the sanctified good-girl role of flame keeper. But I also wanted the damnable and dangerous bad-girl role of making my own books. The Miller book clicked into the conflict in my head: my life or Papa’s? Which was it to be? The tigress or the lady? That old battle between self and soul had come back to haunt me and here it was again wearing Henry’s face!
So I hated Henry for putting me back in my old stew. And I also hated him for not really being my grandfather. And I hated him for being famous when my own grandfather was not. And I hated him for claiming the filial fealty I never gave to my own grandfather’s memory. And I hated him for liberating himself publicly as my own grandfather could not.
Complicated stuff. Writing problems are always psychological problems. And the choice of subjects is always overdetermined. Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex and then “repents” with Must We Burn Sade? I validate women’s fantasies in six novels and seven books of poetry and then “atone” with a book on Miller.
Am I loving the fascist, the brute, the boot in the face? Kate Millett would probably say so. She accuses Miller of adhering to “the doctrine of the cave” in which women who are not sexually compliant are properly beaten for it (and women who are sexually compliant are also beaten for it). Women, as Millett knows, are always seen to be in the wrong. Women, as Millett knows, are always beaten. And yes, there is blatant sexism in Miller’s depictions of sexual seduction. He does hold up the mirror to patriarchy and tells it true. He does show the violence of intercourse no less than Andrea Dworkin shows it. He shows it from a man’s point of view as she shows it from a woman’s. The question is: is he advocating this violence? Or is he showing it because it exists?
This is a primal question with Miller—and with all literature. This question has come up repeatedly lately because, I think, we have lost the sense of what literature is. Was Bret Easton Ellis advocating murder in American Psycho, or was he mirroring the violence of our culture? Was Salman Rushdie blaspheming Mohammed in The Satanic Verses, or was he creating an antimythology for our antimythological age?
We seem less and less able to tell the difference between myth and fact, between wisdom and factoids. In a television culture, we no longer seem to know the social function of literature. And so we lynch those very sages who have the doubleness of vision our age requires, while we follow the fools and sycophants, the sloganeers and politicians who tell us what we want, for the moment, to hear.
Henry has fallen into this abyss of sexual politics. He is attacked for a simplicity he would never have embraced, let alone recognized. He was neither pure pig (who is?) nor pure humanist. He was complicated, a mass of contradictions—like all human beings, like all great writers.
Nature is red in tooth and claw, and men and women need each other so badly that they also hate each other when sex is at its hottest. Only the woman who utterly renounces her need for the penis, only the woman who shuns penetration and embraces exclusively her own sex, can find violence purely a phallic attribute. Cruelty is built into the dance of life, the longing of one sex for the other, the fear of rejection, the hatred for the lover who may leave, who may exercise the ultimate betrayal, abandonment. Women, if they are honest, also see their own potential for cruelty in love. For we are also capable of using others as objects, and we also experience the fusion between love and hate.
Can we admit that basic psychological fact and yet mass our solidarity against rape, against sexual and intellectual harassment, against the battering of women? I hope so. It would be tragic if the feminist dialectic became as rigid and unforgiving as the male chauvinist has often been.
Vulnerability in love is at the root of each sex’s fear and hatred of the other. Naked need is at the bottom of all our rage. Which is not to say that Miller is not a chauvinist. He is. He was. My grandfather was. Most men of that generation (and the next, and the next) were. But the charge of chauvinism does not invalidate everything he has to say. It does not wash away the perfection of Maroussi or the energy Miller’s best prose has injected into American literature.
But I was busy hating Miller—have I forgotten? Hating him for going to Paris, for being a man, for living off women: June, Anaïs, Lepska, Eve, countless others. The life open to him was never open to me. The happy vagabond on his “racing wheel,” the clochard sleeping under the bridges of Paris; the psychopath of love fucking the wives of his hosts; the guiltless fucker, the schnorrer, the artist of the easy touch, the free meal, the man who comes to dinner and eats the hostess.
Who am I to identify with this bounder, this braggart, this blowhard? I, the A student, the Ph.D. candidate, the scribbler of sonnets who then rebelled against academe and wrote impolite novels. I should have identified with Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson or Simone de Beauvoir. And, of course, I did. But there was something in the lives of literary women (except Colette, except George Sand) that smelled of the lamp. Our heroines had all been forced to choose between life and work and those who chose work were strange as women. And those who chose womanhood sometimes were forced to submerge the work. Or else they died in childbirth.
So I hated Henry for not having to choose, for having a cock (and the freedom that goes with it), for having the vagabondage no woman ever knows, for having the freedom to be a fool, and the freedom to indulge his follies, and to die at a ripe old age, surrounded by young women.
So here are the things I hate him for thus far: my debt; his happiness; his cock; his being my grandfather; his not being my grandfather; his writing with freedom; his being honest about sex and rage; his being a male chauvinist; his being enough of a feminist to validate me.
In short, I hate him because I love him. In short, I hate him because he’s great enough to encompass the contradictions of life.
What great writer do we not hate? The nature of greatness is that it irritates. It irritates by being new, by being honest, by baring bone.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” Whitman brags, “and what I assume you shall assume.” And the college practitioner of sonnets (myself at nineteen) hates him for being so free. At thirty, that same young writer, having grown old enough to praise, loves him. And for the very same exultant spirit she once hated.
“A great writer modifies everything,” Anthony Burgess says in Re: Joyce. And it is natural that at first we hate those writers for modifying everything and changing our precious point of view. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence are great in proportion to their power to irritate. We know that Emily Dickinson is a great writer because she irritates us so on first reading: because she must mold us as an audience to read her, because she changes the conditions of verse, of language itself. She melts down the language as in a crucible and makes it into quite a new thing. She modifies everything.
So it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.
I write all this balanced on a ledge of time before the end of the century. I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion. Books require readers and readers are rapidly becoming passé. Books require solitude and the new world of virtual reality booths and roboreaders abhors solitude.
Mixed media will be the art of the future. Giant jukeboxes, with scanners or modems or faxes built in, will blaze at us from every wall and we will couple interactive “art” with electronic pencils or voice commands so as to eradicate solitude. CD ROM is the voice of the future. Cartoonovels are its eyes. Already the novels of Trollope, George Sand, not to mention Fielding or Smollett, are unreadable by most. Those fossils (like me) who worship the ghosts of Petronius and Rabelais are getting long in the tooth. And we tend, in truth, to worship more than read them.
The generation that replaces us will be bewitched by electronic images that collage the works of all past ages without knowing or crediting their sources. Perhaps copyright will also pass away. Solitude surely will. And when these go, so inevitably will the Bill of Rights and the freedom of expression it promises. The meditative calm of one book/one reader will become a heresy, as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.
We are more in danger of totalitarianism coming from appealing to the pleasure principle than from appealing to the death instinct—as Huxley also knew. And the world of the future will certainly be one in which people are controlled by omnipresent sensory input. All our battles of books will eventually seem quaint and inexplicable. Whether Henry Miller was a pornographer, a male chauvinist, or a Zen monk will seem utterly antique when the new mixed-media world arrives, since neither he nor anyone else will be read, there being no longer any real readers. If he is remembered it will be for his pop persona: the man who listed his free meals and rotated them through the nights of the week, the ultimate example of the man who came to dinner.
But we are not yet in the postliterate world. And I still write for a few dying librophiliacs like myself. The violence of my love/hate for Miller shows that he did indeed have the power to move the brain molecules around. And that’s all the virtual reality machines and cartoonovels will be able to hope for: metamorphosing those molecules, rearranging by a nanometer the electrical charge of thoughts. The rest is silence. And radioactive dust.
I belong to a generation for whom reading and writing are sacraments. Perhaps that is one of my ties to Miller and his younger contemporary, Lawrence Durrell.
I went to see Lawrence Durrell in Sommières, in pagan Provence, shortly before he died. I needed to talk to him about Henry Miller, needed to hear about the flavor of their friendship at firsthand. Durrell had written enough about Miller for me to have it from texts, but now that Larry is gone (he died November 1990, in Sommières, at the age of seventy-eight) I’m glad I went. Though Durrell had expressed himself thoroughly on the subject of our mutual friend Henry, it was still a revelation to talk to him if only to know the impish humor behind the mellifluent prose.
The English publisher of The Durrell-Miller Letters had at first wanted to bowdlerize the photo on the jacket (a nude picture of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell on a Greek beach, circa 1940) by “cutting off Henry’s cock,” as Larry said.
“To think that at the end of my life I’d have to defend the zizi of a genius!”
He flung the witticism with perfect good humor and went on to explain that for him Miller had always been the maître and himself merely the acolyte.
“In order to find your own voice as a writer,” Durrell said matter-of-factly, “you have to have a nervous breakdown. Henry Miller and T.S. Eliot gave me myself…. And yet, I always considered myself a talented also-ran.” He knew, he told me, that a real book is “a tentative chance one takes on the infinite.” Miller wrote real books; he, Durrell, merely wrote literary ones. He had not, he felt, taken that chance on the infinite.
It was Durrell’s modesty that was so beguiling. He was not going to make Miller’s mistake “of accepting the Nobel Prize before it was offered.” He was touched when I brought him some of his poetry books to autograph, but when I also turned up a first edition of his novel Tunc, he said: “Oh, forgive me.”
Self-importance is endemic in literary circles. Larry had a lovely humility. We are all just stumbling human beings, his demeanor seemed to say, doing the best we can.
Durrell thought of himself—and I daresay the “literary world” (whatever that is) thought of him—as “a minor poet,” who happened to write novels. The Alexandria Quartet (which my husband describes as “wading through halvah”) seems to me to deserve better than that. I have a rather higher opinion of Durrell’s poetry and of his wonderful last book about Provence (Caesar’s Vast Ghost, 1990). But I liked him above all for understanding Henry’s courage, for understanding that the difference between a small writer and a great writer is that rare commodity, the courage to create.
After he had shared his reminiscences about Henry on that gray January day in Provence, Durrell spoke of T.S. Eliot. What Larry said about Eliot seemed the absolute definition of the daring that makes a major writer: “He took full responsibility for being an artist in a maelstrom,” Larry said. “In a world of Masefields, Eliot seemed even more shocking then than now.” He was attacked for “The Wasteland,” but it rolled off his back like water off a duck’s. He knew, Durrell said, that one can only incarnate the unrealized pattern of the race by a “surgical operation on the self.”
Who knows if Durrell was a maître or an “also-ran”? Only time knows. But he and his generation of writers had a kind of courage that seems lacking now. Whether it is the fault of conglomerate publishing controlled by accountants or a failure of inner-directedness on the part of writers, my generation seems focused upon crowd-pleasing and success to the detriment of being free to tell the truth. As much as their publishers and agents, my contemporaries seem to worry about grosses and sales figures. And often the deal is far more memorable than the book. A sort of literary Gresham’s law has set in with the mass-marketing of hardbacks. The bestselling books of our time are rehashes of Gone with the Wind, gossipmongerings about “first” ladies, princesses, and movie stars, and ghostwritten bubbe-mayses by ephemeral celebrities. Miller didn’t write that way, nor did Durrell. No one can write a real book looking back over his shoulder at the critics or at the publisher’s number-crunchers.
“How is it to be old?” Larry asked, rhetorically. “Well, your balls drop off—you don’t know where to look. They cut your eyes out and don’t necessarily put them back at the same angle. But thank God I can still drink.”
“To Henry,” I proposed.
“Yes, to Henry,” he countered, emptying his glass.
And to Larry. And to a generation that knew what the calling of author meant. Authority. Being the place where the buck stops.
As we inch into the last decade of this century, the older generation of writers is disappearing day by day. Every week brings a new death crop: Alberto Moravia, Lawrence Durrell, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jerzy Kozinski. (The women writers are not dying as fast, but then the critics have already killed their reputations.) The idea that a writer can be a generalist, not a specialist, seems to die with this generation. The idea that poets can write prose and novelists poetry, that adults can write for children and that authors can maintain the radical innocence (if not the childishness) of children, seems to pass with them. I would like my generation of writers to catch some of their largeness of heart, some of their willingness to crack open genres and take a chance on the infinite.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry. But what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t take chances? “Hating” Henry, after all, was about my own fear of self-exposure. But without taking chances one cannot tell the truth, and what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t tell the truth?