The Devil at Large (3 page)

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.