The Devil at Large (23 page)

Miller’s family feelings were quite conventional in his later years; he tried to be responsible for those whom life had left behind—Lauretta and June particularly. To the end of his mother’s difficult life, he did not want her to know that he had divorced the mother of Val and Tony and married Eve. He was afraid of her disapproval even then.

I am sorry to have to report that he was not the unmitigated monster feminist critics of the seventies made him out to be. He was just a man—unanalyzed, full of contradictions, imperfect—but able to express the conflicts of life and sexual politics with unparalleled honesty. I would have shunned him as a husband as Nin did, because he was a devourer of women, but as a friend he could be loving and kind. He never claimed to be an angel; he saw himself as a bundle of human foibles who had somehow wandered into earthly paradise.

That Henry was a difficult husband is attested to by the collapse of his marriage to Eve, who, for all her nurturing nature, eventually found the strain of being Henry’s wife too great. Responsible for the children, the ex-wives, the correspondence, inclined to drown her anxieties in drink, Eve became Henry’s victim in a way that June and Anaïs were able to avoid. Henry was a difficult man unless he was kept in a state of perpetual yearning. He didn’t mean to be difficult, but his life was so full of complexities, and he had so many needs, that he used people. But they came back again and again to bask in the radiance of his life force. He always required various male “boon companions” to take care of him (in Paris, Perlès, Belmont, and Fraenkel had done such duty, and in Big Sur, it fell to Ephraim Doner and Emil White).

Yet he could be cold to those women who really cared for him, who gave him what he claimed he most needed. It was for the unavailable ones that he reserved all his heat.

In 1959, at Nepenthe in Big Sur, Henry began an affair with a young woman named Caryl Hill. Eve was an eyewitness to it, and was thoroughly humiliated. It plunged her further into alcohol abuse. Though later Henry was to be deeply remorseful about his marriage to Eve (especially after she took her own life in 1966), at the time he seems to have been oblivious to the effects of his behavior. In certain ways Henry could be incredibly insensitive to those around him, and women as vulnerable as Eve were the ones to suffer. The women who took off and made a new life, like Lepska, were the survivors of the Miller myth.

Henry seemed to know this about himself, for he loved Françoise Gilot’s
Life with Picasso
and sent it to several of his ex-wives, as if daring them to expose him as a humbug and a narcissist. Henry loved spirited women who did not knuckle under to him. He loved honesty and feistiness even at his own expense, and was contemptuous of those who played the victim. One of the things he liked about my writing was the acid, satirical way it depicted men—from the woman’s point of view. Henry knew he had been cruel to many women, and he knew he deserved to be exposed. Perhaps he felt that
Fear of Flying
exposed his own romantic cons. He was a sexist, but a repentant one.

In 1960, as his relationship with Eve was ending, he took off for Europe to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival and he arranged for Caryl Hill to meet him in France. He went first to Germany to see his German publisher, Ledig Rohwalt, and there met Rohwalt’s young, beautiful assistant, Renate Gerhardt, with whom he began a passionate affair. By the time he got to Cannes and met Caryl Hill as planned, he was already in love with Renate.

Renate proved ultimately unattainable and so held Henry’s heart hostage. Henry wanted to marry her, but she was too practical. She had two boys, and was not about to give up her life in Europe to become Henry Miller’s beleaguered helpmate. Eventually Renate started her own publishing firm and Henry sent her money to help finance it, though he had his usual share of financial difficulties. His letters to her show him dizzy with love in typical Henry fashion, signing himself “St. Valentine,” and hypnotizing himself as in the early June-days, Anaïs-days, Lepska-days, Eve-days,
und so weiter.

One feels a kind of hollowness in Henry’s loves as he grows older and older. It is as if he is falling in love with love, or with love remembered. He needs the adrenaline high of being “in love,” the image of himself as St. Valentine, the jump start to his animal spirits and his creativity that “love” provides. But the romantic round has a sort of forced quality to it—all except for the suffering part.

In 1961, Henry made another trip to Europe to press his suit with Renate, but he failed to convince her to join her life with his. On the way home, he stopped in New York, where his past claimed him in the form of June—now a beaten, emaciated “old” woman (she was only 58!), who looked to the now-famous Henry as her savior.

June’s side of the story is a tragic one. She wound up alone, impoverished, hospitalized for madness, released to dire poverty. It would be fascinating to tell her tale in a novel. Anaïs Nin began it in
Henry and June
, and Philip Kaufman sensitively extended it in the movie of the same name. But there is another whole era of June’s life after Paris, and it would make a wonderful, if tragic, saga. Henry never wrote it; the truth is, he never saw June as a separate person. The woman who inspired most of his writing was, when he found her again, a wraith, a will-o’-the-wisp. Henry had to look at the fact that he had devoted his imaginative life to someone who now seemed an apparition. Did this fateful meeting make him understand his own self-deceptions? Apparently not.

By 1961, Henry was at last famous in his own land and an American bestselling author. This was largely due to the efforts of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press and because of a changed publishing climate, which, in turn, was to transform the American novel.

The story of Henry’s books and the law would make a long and revealing volume in itself. His books were banned in many countries with differing legal traditions and liberated by means that were both astonishingly complex and costly. The legal aspects of Henry’s career have been well-documented in Edward de Grazia’s
Girls Lean Back Everywhere
, Charles Rembar’s
The End of Obscenity
, and E.R. Hutchison’s
Tropic of Cancer on Trial.
After
Ulysses
,
Tropic of Cancer
is the book that opened the bedroom door for American writers and for the world. Few people who write about novels seem to remember how short a time it has actually been since fiction was released, and allowed to enter the precincts of the bedroom. As recently as 1960, Alfred Knopf recommended to John Updike that he excise some of the racier bits in
Rabbit, Run
and Updike did so without a backward glance (though he reinstated the cuts in later editions).

1960 is indeed a pivotal year for the freeing of American literature from prudery and threat of legal assault. It was in 1955, after all, that Nabokov’s
Lolita
was published by the Olympia Press in Paris because no American publisher would take it. When it appeared in the United States from Putnam’s in 1958, it caused a sensation, shooting to the top of the bestseller lists in part because the public wrongly mistook it for the memoirs of a pervert. (Nabokov has some witty things to say about this—and the whole question of sexuality and literature—in his brilliant afterword to
Lolita
.)
Lolita
began to change a publishing climate that had kept Miller out of American publishing for three decades. And
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
made the weather even warmer. But it was the many American litigations concerning
Tropic of Cancer
that finally freed our literature. And it was Grove Press, led by Barney Rossett, which finally took the risk of publishing
Tropic of Cancer
and thereby establishing the relatively new legal principle that a book of literary merit might not be suppressed just because it excited lustful desires.
Ulysses
weakened the effect of the Hicklin rule on American jurisprudence, but it was the litigation over
Tropic of Cancer
which established Justice Brennan’s doctrine that sexual excitation alone was not enough to warrant the banning of a book. That doctrine has since been weakened in turn by a Supreme Court that has made “community standards” the most important test.

It is interesting to note that the puritanism of our culture has a tendency to condone pure smut but to vigorously attack artful, good writing that has a strongly sexual element. “Nothing infuriates the vigilante so much as the combination of sex and intellect,” says Charles Rembar in
The End of Obscenity.
And it is true even today that an issue of
Screw
provokes less fury than a book like
American Psycho
or
Vox.
Madonna’s
Sex
has had an easier passage into the world than the Mapplethorpe images she is purloining and betraying.

The sexomania of our culture is such that it simultaneously slavers and condemns. I have in mind an image of pious southern senators leaving a prayer breakfast at the Reagan White House to view—with an eye to censoring—pornographic movies, then buggering their aides, boffing their secretaries, and passing laws preventing the rest of America from doing the same. Sex in America is definitely not for the hoi polloi.

At the beginning of my career I was always amazed that some critics of
Fear of Flying
(and subsequent books) resented Isadora not so much for her lustful thoughts as for her lustful thoughts coupled with her bookishness. It is as if the puritan sexomaniacs want their sex purely smutty—free from all traces of “culture,” ghettoized in a sort of Forty-second Street of the mind. Is that because they are more threatened by literate lust?

Miller’s books always seem to raise similar hackles. This is why, I suspect, the academic community has yet to take him seriously and subject him to intelligent literary scrutiny.

Barney Rossett, by his own account, fell in love with Miller’s work in his student days and had been trying to publish Miller for some time at Grove Press. But Miller shied away from publication in America. Why? The reasons appear to be more complex than is usually assumed. First, Miller was afraid—afraid of arrest, afraid of being branded “the king of smut” (as he wrote to Rossett), afraid of burying books like
Maroussi
under a deluge of scandal, afraid for his children, and for his own loss of privacy (which, in fact, accelerated with his growing fame).

But I submit that Miller also felt guilty about his Paris books, guilty about the way his fiction had sucked June dry and spat her out as a husk of an old woman, while he rode on to adulation. He had mixed feelings about his sexual books. How could it be otherwise, when these books were propelled by such conflicting, tempestuous, oedipal emotions? There must have been a part of Miller that felt the punishment (the banning of his books in his motherland) fit the crime (the betrayal of his mother).

Writers of revealing books normally have a welter of disturbing feelings about them, and sometimes these feelings are resolved by sabotaging their own work in various ways, both conscious and unconscious. Fame raises ambivalent responses, and many people, feeling themselves unworthy, are driven toward various forms of self-destruction—drugs, drink, lawsuits, disastrous money-losing schemes.

Miller had long been ambivalent about having his work published in his own country. He was well-known and widely published abroad, and in some ways it suited him well to be an underground writer in America. But he finally succumbed to Barney Rossett’s ever-escalating offers for
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn
because of the precarious copyright status of the books published in Paris and the threat that another publisher would bring out an unauthorized, possibly expurgated edition. Barney Rossett agreed to pay not only for the books but for the cost of litigation, and the litigation proved to be extensive and expensive.

By the time
Tropic of Cancer
was published in America on June 24, 1961 (and sold 68,000 copies in the first week), Henry had made his peace with his fate as a writer.

“The game of writing, living, being—has come to be for me the end in itself,” he had written to Barney Rossett. And it was true. He also told Rossett “that one’s true fame is kept alive by the good opinion of a thinking few,” and that “a sudden increase in fortune … would undoubtedly cause more harm than good.” He saw American culture as “moving steadily in the opposite direction of Whitman’s vision,” and he expected little from the furor of the
Tropic
s than to be established in the minds of his compatriots as the apotheosis of the dirty old man.

His prophetic vision was astoundingly precise. The extensive litigation over the
Tropic
s fixed Miller in the public’s mind as the author of “filthy, disgusting, nauseating” trash. Of course the public could not wait to get their hands on such stuff. And the
Tropic
s sold like mad the more they were denounced. Sexomania in action.

A number of important literary intellectuals sprang to Miller’s defense in the United States and to the defense of the First Amendment but, as in the later Rushdie affair, it proved easier for them to defend him than to read him. By the time the dust settled, Barney Rossett had sold a ton of books and incurred a ton of legal costs. And Miller had become just what he predicted he’d become—the “king of smut.”

Tropic of Cancer
sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and a million in paperback, caused the arrest of many booksellers, cost Grove Press at least $100,000 in legal fees, and established Henry Miller as a household word. Even when he was finally “vindicated” by the United States Supreme Court in 1964, he was doomed to live out his final decade and a half in the shadow of that ignoble reputation.

It was the final irony that, after the many prosecutions of his books all over the United States, it fell to Henry’s own Brooklyn to sue him for having conspired with Barney Rossett to offer for sale “a certain obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, sadistic, masochistic and disgusting book” called
Tropic of Cancer.
Before this ugliness ended in 1964, Miller had been issued a warrant for arrest, threatened with extradition from California to Brooklyn, and had been forbidden to travel abroad for the duration of the legal action. Though it ended with a victory of sorts, Henry was certainly proven right in his reluctance to publish in the United States. That his books now languish largely unread by a generation that takes their existence in print for granted is, I suppose, the final irony.