The Devil at Large (24 page)

Henry was wise enough to know that “success” did not bring peace. The royalties on his Paris books caused him endless accounting and tax worries. He had predicted as much in a letter to Barney Rossett: “I see no way to protect anyone through money, through security of any kind.” And it surely proved true in his case. His last years were burdened with the immense loss of privacy that fame brings, and the sense of being an imposter for having become notorious because of books written long ago.

In 1963, Henry was even driven out of his beloved Big Sur by the fame he had given it in
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
, and by the end of his marriage to Eve, had moved first to a flat, then to his last earthly address at 444 Ocampo Drive in Pacific Palisades. At first he shared his home with Val and Tony, their mother, Lepska, and her new husband. Later, he lived there alone, or with a series of caretakers.

Surrounded by his children, by interviewers, movie stars, directors, producers, and all the parasites the famous find themselves playing host to, Henry entered the last period of his life—the period when I was to meet him.

He seems to have made his peace with his fame by capitulating to its distortions and making them worse.

In his last years, he allowed books like
Henry Miller: My Life and Times
(1975) distributed by Playboy Press for Bradley Smith, its editor and publisher, to show him playing Ping-Pong with nude groupies or nuzzling a bikini-clad Israeli beauty—and these pictures certainly helped to trivialize his reputation. It was as if he were rushing to become a caricature of himself.

And yet
My Life and Times
also has wonderful things in it. It is a kind of illustrated autobiography, seen from the point of view of the ancient sage who regards the world as a joke—which, I suspect, is where long life leads.

“Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere,” Henry wrote in the “Notice to Visitors” he had posted at Big Sur. He almost always took his own advice and got nowhere. But often he was led astray by vanity and ego. It was the faulty shit detector again, and he often could not tell the con man from the prophet. His discrimination about people was almost as poor as his discrimination about his work.

After Val and Tony left home in 1964, and even Lepska took off with her new husband, Henry was lonely and looked to his old tonic—new love—to save him. When he met a twenty-seven-year-old Japanese gamine, Hoki (Hiroko) Tokuda, at a party given by his doctor, he fell madly in love with her looks, her Oriental mystery (mostly invented by him) and her singing and piano playing (an old aphrodisiac).

Hoki was unavailable—the essential ingredient. She came and went mysteriously. This, as always, provoked the necessary yearning in Henry. He became “the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws,” as he scribbles on one of the “Insomnia” series of watercolors he painted from the depths of his infatuation with her. He was “the germ of a new insanity,” “a freak dressed in intelligible language,” and there was “a splinter buried in the quick of [his] soul.”

Henry was, in short, in love.

His tribute to this May-December romance was
Insomnia or The Devil at Large,
written in his own hand, published by a small New Mexican press called Loujon and then by Doubleday in 1975, and accompanied by a series of hallucinatory, yearning watercolors covered with fragments of poetry. Henry was “shaking cobwebs out of the sky.” Or rather, inventing a lover out of his own yearning. His late illustrated books show his constant desire to blend genres, to show the slant of his own handwriting, the faces of his ancestors, his children, his wives, his friends, and the rainbow hues of his watercolors.

It’s important to remember that Henry comes out of the same Paris as Picasso, Man Ray, and Leger: mixed media, surrealism, automatic writing are part of his artistic heritage and he displays that heritage especially in the illustrated work of his last years.

Hoki found him too much like a grandfather to be attracted, but when she needed a green card, she relented and married him. The pictures of old Henry and young Hoki were duly carried by all the news magazines. They fitted in nicely with the pop persona of a dirty old man.

Insomnia
is a lovely book, if slight, a wonderful paean to love-as-madness, hallucination, and despair. That Henry was still Pan enough to yearn so violently is a sort of tribute to the green fuse within him. His heart never dried out like a walnut. He remained moist to the end.

Or almost to the end. When I met him in October 1974, he was still overflowing with enthusiasm, with conversation, with the ability to yearn. Hoki had departed. (She now runs a nightclub called Tropic of Cancer in Tokyo.) He was in love then with Lisa Liu and Brenda Venus. And many other pretty ladies (like Twinka Thiebaud, and other friends of Val’s and Tony’s) came to cook for him, care for him, and keep the flame.

I was drawn to Henry because he gave me immense encouragement at a difficult time of my life, but I stayed because he was such a warm fire, such a force for life. His head and his heart lived on the same planet. Anaïs Nin had discovered this quality about him long before the rest of the world did. In an amazing “Boost for
Black Spring
” published in 1937 in
The Booster
, Nin wrote:

Like all the hardy men of literature Henry Miller lives on two planes: either in the peaty soil, among the roots of things, or amidst the ecstasies. Like some hybrid out of ancient myth he walks the earth surefootedly and is one with the earth; but he can also depart the earth at a bound and soar to unheard-of realms, and, if it please him, remain there forever. The region in between, which is flimsy and unreal, which nourishes neither the body nor the soul, that region he never enters, thank God. He lives either on the earth or in the mystery—
never in the salon of the mind.
Others around him are writing in a kind of black void, writing to compensate for their lack of virility. Their insanity is like a whirlpool with a hole in the center, an eddying round a void. But in
Black Spring
, the insanity is produced by an excess of life; it is like a surcharged top spinning wildly, experience ending not in crystallization but in a fantastic spiral ecstasy.

Always there is the smell of the street, the smell of human beings. Even in the upper galleries of metaphysics it smells of truth, of honesty and of naturalness. Depths reached by clairvoyance, not by cohabitation with ideas. It is always a man exploring the heavens; not a spirit hovering over the earth with wilted, offended wings. In one and the same instant he seizes upon man the animal and the dream which obsesses the poet. Always the flesh and the vision together. At moments he stands shouting like a prophet, cursing, vilifying, denouncing, seeing into the future with the same intensity with which he installs himself in the present. He is at one and the same time the man sitting contentedly at a café table and the restless, ghostly wanderer pursuing his secret self in an agony of duality and elusiveness.

Nin, who knew him both as colleague and lover, got him exactly right:
always the flesh and the vision together.
This is something few of the people who have dissected Miller without having known him personally can understand. He gave off heat like a roaring fire. He was more alive than most people ever are, and when you were near him, he shed his light and life force on you.

Surely he did unkind things in his life. But the minatory and grudging tone of his critics, which basically uses the cheap journalistic technique of contrasting his stated beliefs with his behavior and pronouncing him a hypocrite, is far worse than he deserves. Any of us would seem like hypocrites viewed that way, even the greatest saints. So what if he was not Gandhi with a penis? Even Gandhi was not Gandhi in that sense. Only angry adolescents expect their parents to be perfect, and, finding them human, pronounce a death sentence.

In the end, Miller’s character doesn’t matter. His art—flawed but powerful—does.

Laws and traditions are not overthrown by a logistical performance, however good. It takes dynamite of one sort or another.

—
HENRY MILLER, LETTER TO SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM BECKER, JULY 18, 1966

I
T IS NO SECRET
that a great deal of rhetorical rubbish has been written on the subject of Henry Miller, sexist. My conviction is that it has done little good either to the understanding of Henry Miller or toward the destruction of sexism.

Kate Millett, author of
Sexual Politics
and other important books, is not the main offender here. She, in fact, acknowledges Henry as a surrealist, an essayist, and an autobiographer, and many of her own fictions and nonfictions owe something to his unmethodical methods.

It is Millett’s journalistic popularizers, particularly in England and to a lesser extent in the United States, who do both her and Henry an injustice in setting the terms of their opposition so grossly. Kate Millett is too much the artist not to understand that Henry Miller is more than just a misogynist. But her
Sexual Politics
, which, like Henry’s
Tropics
, more people discussed than actually read, left an indelible mark on Miller criticism.

Millett makes a brilliant case for Henry Miller’s autobiographical protagonist as a textbook study of patriarchal attitudes, but she fails to go farther, to explore the source of those attitudes, namely the male terror and envy of female power. (To be fair, this is not the province of her book.) Millett is out to prove that Miller is not “liberated” but that he is enslaved—and surely she is right in this. “Miller,” she says, “is a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them.” Right again. “What Miller did articulate was the disgust, the contempt, the hostility, the violence and the sense of filth with which our culture, or more specifically its masculine sensibility, surrounds sexuality. And women too; for somehow it is women upon whom this onerous burden of sexuality falls.”

Millett’s analysis remains illuminating. But only its grossest elements have entered the debate about Miller. How can we use Henry’s work to understand the roots of sexism and thereby eradicate them? How can we fight sexism without burning books? Some feminist zealots have damaged the movement for equality between the sexes by means of an oversimplification of analysis: all men are brutes and all women must be gay to be free. Zealotry is the enemy here, not feminism; and zealotry always fuels backlash.

In the last few years, we have been faced with a massive backlash against women’s equality before even half the wrongs against women have been righted. Perhaps backlash is inevitable against all movements, and surely women’s movements have characteristically ebbed and flowed, but dare we attempt constructive criticism of our own movement? Dare we look at the ways we may have aided the backlash with our own intransigence? Now, with a welcome third wave of feminism approaching, can we be honest enough to acknowledge that women are full of diversity and contradiction? Women, like men, come in all flavors—gay, straight, and indifferent. Women, to be free, must embrace diversity, not conformity.

In responding to these ebbs and flows, I fear we have not attacked the problem of making feminist reform stick. Female solidarity is the key. If we truly want to end this repetitive cycle of feminism and backlash, we must acknowledge the underpinnings of misogyny, the whore/Madonna split in Judeo-Christian culture and how its setting man against woman and woman against woman has warped us all psychologically.

To blame Henry because he had the courage to articulate it honestly from the male point of view is clearly a case of killing the messenger.

Artists are forever accused of advocacy when they are trying to be mirrors of society, mirrors of the inner chaos of the self. Male chauvinist critics are forever assailing women’s books for being full of rage against men and society—as if this were not inevitable, when one is seeking an honest expression of women’s feelings. Let us be smarter than these two-bit polemicists. Let us understand the war between the sexes so that we can end it.

Henry Miller had the courage to ride his rage to the outermost limit and present an unforgettable picture of the world at war between cock and cunt. As Millett says, he is not a free man but a slave, and I think even Henry would be the first to agree with her notion of enslavement. He actually articulates this slavery himself in
Insomnia
and other books. But he did eventually get free, beyond the body, beyond the sex war, beyond the whore/Madonna split. His freedom came with the book most ignored by his critics:
The Colossus of Maroussi.
He transcended sex and war, as we all must, man and woman both, to become entirely human. And he came, at last, to forgive his mother—as we all must.

Mary Dearborn, a gifted writer who has written a fascinating but highly damning biography of Miller, strongly bears the marks of the feminist critique. It confuses her response to Miller the man and the writer to the point where she seems to vacillate between attacking him for anti-Semitism, veiled homosexuality, and not-so-veiled sexism, and praising him for his scathing honesty and for “being on the side of life.” Her point of view lurches so wildly at times that one wonders why she chose to immerse herself in Miller’s life and work. She hates him, yet she is fascinated by him. She denigrates his craft, yet praises his honesty. She is also confused about the difference between art and advocacy. It is as if Shakespeare were recommending regicide in
Macbeth
and suicide pacts in
Romeo and Juliet.

Dearborn is not alone in her ambivalence. I have certainly felt it too. Anyone immersed in Miller must. Most critics, both academic and popular, are equally confused about the difference between art and advocacy. Feminist novels have been destroyed by the literary establishment because their “givens” were not granted.