The Devil at Large (33 page)

Adrian was a bastard—& not that lovable, after a while. He was really very bourgeois, very much the
pater familias
, very un-free. He had a kind of magnetism (what is modishly called) charisma nowadays. There was a post-script to the Adrian story which I never wrote. Shortly after leaving Isadora, he knocked up his girlfriend, & when I visited them both (
en famille
) in London, last year, they had a little girl (with a squint eye like her Daddy) & they called me her “godmother.” It was really awful. I ought not to write this. I always deny that any of the characters have any basis in reality—but how can I lie to you? Writer-to-writer, the truth can be understood. You know how characters change when one tries to capture them on the page. Even if you want to tell the truth, the truth escapes.

Please thank your daughter (& her friend) & your daughter-in-law for their good wishes. I’m delighted to have Diane’s letter. I feel a little guilty for being a home-wrecker…. Did my book do it? You seemed to imply that. I seem to have become the patron saint of adulteresses. Last week, a young woman told me “I’ve just read your book & loved it. Spent last night with a beautiful man & now I’m going home to my husband. Thank you!” I stood there with my mouth open. I guess people are so tight-ass about their sexuality that this book (all about IMPOTENCE & unfulfillment) is seen as a ticket to liberation. I do mean to have Isadora survive at the end—& be an inspiration to women who want to survive. There are too damn many books about women who commit suicide, women who go mad, women who destroy themselves over men…. I wanted it to be clear (especially in the last chapters of the book—the tampax scene, etc.) that humor was Isadora’s survival tool. I myself need to laugh at least 3 times a day or I get sick.

I could go on & on with letter, but I have to get ready to go to a convention of goddamned booksellers in Washington. Thousands of book-salesmen in pinky rings & I am being sent by my paperback publisher (NAL) to sign books & blow kisses & all the rest of it. So I’m off to Washington for three days. If I come to California this summer (to see about the supposed movie of Fear of Flying) I want to meet you & the Miller menage. Especially Val & Diane—& friends. I promise not to be boring & literary. I hate visits from writers too. They always WANT SOMETHING.
Blurb me!
they cry. Or
grant me!
Or
Guggenheim me!
You must get lots of fans wanting to touch you like the magic man. It must be awful for you at times.

Lots of hugs & good wishes……….

Erica

*& In Italy by Bompiani

6/5/74

Dear Erica—

I wrote a few pages about your book which Connie is typing for me. Will send it late today or tomorrow, so that you may suggest changes or deletions, if necessary. Bradley will place it for me.

I wrote Christian de Bartillat of Editions Stock—6, rue Casimir Delavigne—75006, Paris, France today, urging him to give your book serious consideration. I told him you would send him a copy of the book.

I also write H. M. Ledig-Rowohlt of Rowohlt Verlag—Hamburger str. 17, 2057-Reinbek-bei-Hamburg, West Germany—same thing.

Rowohlt is more than my publisher, he is like a brother to me. Bartillat I only know since a year or so. He is very friendly and has a great regard for me. He listens or pays heed to my suggestions, which is more than my American publishers do.

I’m worry I never saw that review of your book by Updike, or any review for that matter.

About Singer, yes, he is one of the very few Jews I know who is not afraid or ashamed to tell the whole truth about the Jews. Some of the episodes he relates are fabulous. I hope my remarks about your treatment of the Jews won’t prove injurious to you. Some people will start calling me an anti-Semite again, but you must know that I am not. I simply can’t swallow that stuff about “the Chosen People.” (Unless it is meant—“chosen to suffer.”) Yes, you are a liberator. But Diane, who loved your book, is not yet liberated. To be honest, she’s a pain in the ass. Always a long face, sad, mournful. Always concerned with herself Can bore the shit out of you. I’ve given her up, as hopeless. No. Your book had nothing to do with the divorce….

Can you give me Bompiani’s add. in Italy? I want them to send a copy of the Italian version to a woman I correspond with in
Sicily.
Must be tough to be a woman there.

Well, I must stop now. Write me from Washington or anywhere when you have the impulse.

Cheers!

Henry

P.S. Bradley thinks you are coming soon. Finds you very attractive.

Saturday—6/15/74

Dear Erica—

Hugs and kisses to you too. No, I am not Aries, I am Capricorn (Dec. 26, 1891)—really ancient, what! But Aries is my rising sign. I have been in love several times with Aries women—always
disastrously.
(Sic) So, don’t let me fall in love with
you
!

About my review…. Bradley took it and thinks to place it with the Saturday Review. (We did think of the others you mentioned.) I have almost no traffic with American mags, nor British. Bradley inserted two sentences, with my permission, which supposedly help clarify my thinking. (Maybe that’s what’s wrong with par. 2. (?)

Listen, don’t waste time on Diane Miller. Not worth it. I know this sounds bad on my part, but I have good reason to talk thus. She is an egotist and worse. She seems to listen, is very grateful and all that, but goes her own sweet way just the same. She’s a real (Gentile) neurotic. She thinks highly of me, because I paid attention to her and read her poems. She fucked Tony up good and proper. His own fault, of course. He doesn’t seem to do too well with women. Quite an ego too, very handsome, and
outwardly
very sure of himself. (Bad combination.) I think he has talent for writing. He just got a job as book reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter
—five dollars a review!
I read his first two and must say I couldn’t have done better myself. By the way, he too loves your writing
—
has just finished your novel. You think
I
am loose
—
but that’s precisely what every one says about
your
writing. I think I’m best when I’m running on endlessly
—
sort of Dada style. I wish I were crazier! “Madness is all”, to paraphrase the bard.

Thank you for the Updike review. It is good, a bit slick here and there,
but
…. Wish there were more like this. By the way, I never read him—I don’t read any Americans, it seems, except Isaac B. Singer. But I saw on T.V. “The Ugly American” with Brando. Wasn’t that based on
his
book?

(Detour: Do you know I blushed for Brando when I saw “The Last Tango in Paris”. When he gives his first fuck, with overcoat on, all hunched up by the door—he reminded me of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I thought the film cheap,
vulgar
. Would you believe that I hate vulgarity?)

I hope you are reading Céline—either “Journey to the end of the Night” or “Death on the Instalment Plan.” I don’t know if you read French or not. In the case of Cendrars, you should read him only in French. (To translate Céline, by the way, is a feat!)

The truly magnificent writer is John Cowper Powys, now virtually forgotten. If you have the time and the patience for it, “A Glastonbury Romance” will do wonders for you. I paid a visit of homage to him in his old age. He was living in a small town in Wales. Have had only two or three such meetings in my life:—with him, with Cendrars, with Chaplin, for example.

I am getting a lot of fan mail from “cunts”, especially in France, where a wonderful documentary on me is now showing. As a result of it, the French government (M. de Peyrefitte) has written to ask if I would accept the Legion of Honor. He writes
—
“I know you despise such things
….
” But I’m accepting it. Why not? It’s nice to be despised by the intellectuals and made a Chevalier by the Establishment!

Well, here’s a good hug for you. I love to hear from you. Hope you visit me when you get to the Coast, yes?

Henry

June 29, 1974

Dear Henry,

I loved your letter about my “Sexual Guru” piece. I myself had some misgivings after I wrote it. Of course, a writer is seen as a liberator and a giver of truth, and one should not mock that very deep response from people—however nutty they are. I am grateful to have a gift that goes straight to people’s hearts and guts—but at the same time I know how impossible it is to deal with all these outpourings of emotion. If I were to get involved in even one-fourth of the people who write to me, my life would consist of nothing but that. Each one seems to think he is unique and that I have received no other letter but his. This week I’ve been plagued (by telephone and mail) by a young man who is having an adulterous affair in New York (his wife is in Indiana). For some reason he feels that I must meet his beloved and cast blessings upon them both. I told you I was becoming the patron saint of adulterers! I should write this man what Oscar Wilde is purported to have said about homosexuals: “I don’t care what people do as long as they
don’t
do it in the streets and frighten the horses.”

I loved your letter from Lady Jeanne and I am returning it to you for your files after many mirthful readings and rereadings. In general I used to think that it was
men
who were preoccupied with penile size. Women know better. It’s not the size but the skill and the hardness and the passion and etc. I tend to think the talk about size is myth, too, but up to now I always thought it was a male myth. As for
racial
differences between penises, what can I tell you?! The number of Arabs and blacks I have known could be counted on the fingers of one amputated hand! I don’t know much about vaginal passages, either. I do think people differ a lot in their love-making, but very little of that comes from anatomy. The movement of the body in some way mirrors the movement of the soul.

Enough of sex! On to money!! Yes, New York magazine pays for articles. Everything from $400 to $700 for a short piece, to $1,000 and up for a longer piece. Do you have something to send them? Or maybe we could some day do an article together? Possibly a discussion of sex?! (Or maybe that would be better for
Playboy
.) I raise this possibility half in jest, but maybe it would appeal to you, and if so, let me know.

About the nut mail, I value it too, and certainly agree with you that it’s more interesting than the academic drivel. I get a little frightened of nuts from time to time, though, because I never know how far they’re going to go. Sometimes they actually show up on the doorstep. Once last summer I was dashing into the house with arms full of grocery bags, an umbrella over one arm, a briefcase, a shoulder bag, and a shoe that had a broken heel, and as I stood there struggling with the locks, looking very ungurulike, hassled and distraught, a young man came forward and said, “Are you the poet?” “I’ve never felt less like a poet in my life,” I said. The question is, do poets shop for groceries? And are you a poet while choosing groceries? I leave these great existential questions to you.

I always have a feeling I will disappoint my admirers. If they expect me to be serious, I usually wind up making a million wisecracks and acting like a clown. If they expect me to be beautiful, I show up in old bluejeans and my slobbiest clothes. I don’t really know why I do this—maybe to emphasize the gap between the writer and the writing. In one way, you know, the writer and the writing are one, but one hates to have a reader make
literal
equivalences. I think we are also afraid because when these strangers come to us, they come to us with a very intimate knowledge of our souls and we have no knowledge of theirs. They have read our books, but they have no books we can read. The relationship is unequal from the start. So often I have had the experience of being kind to a person only to discover that I was the only person to tolerate him in so many years that he interpreted my kindness as an invitation to deep, passionate love. At such times I feel like the Pied Piper or a seductress. But what’s the alternative? Becoming cold, formal and Edmund Wilson-ish? It’s just not in my character to be that way. (Edmund Wilson, as you know, used to have a famous card he sent to correspondents. He would check off one of numerous answers, all of them “no’s.” Edmund Wilson does not dance, Edmund Wilson does not speak, Edmund Wilson does not read manuscripts, Edmund Wilson does not sing, etc. John Updike told me about a month ago (I met him for the very first time after his review of my book) that he had designed for himself a series of “repellent rubber stamps” to stamp his correspondence—but then he chickened out and didn’t have the heart to use them. He gets mostly Jesus freaks, he says. The rubber stamps are interesting to me because in one of Updike’s books, a writer named Henry Bech
does
actually stamp all of his correspondence with things like “It’s your Ph.D. thesis, please write it yourself” or “Henry Bech is too old and doubtful to submit to questionnaires. “It’s the sort of fantasy a writer would have, but it’s very hard to go through with it. I myself love writing letters when I have a good correspondent like you, someone who doesn’t measure words, but writes straight out of the heart.

I got a lovely letter from Twinka, who sounds delightful. Haven’t answered it yet. If she wants to play the part in
Fear of Flying
she ought to get in touch with the producers, Julia and Michael Phillips, who live in Malibu and whose office is at Columbia Pictures in Burbank. Not having met her, I have no idea whether she’d be right for the part, but I suppose she would know the method of making her interest known.

I loved your description of “Last Tango in Paris.” Yes, Brando did look like “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in that first fucking scene. I must say that the film was far too anal for my taste. Writing about it in
The New York Review of Books,
Norman Mailer said the film proved that “love is not flowers, but farts and flowers.” Typical Mailer line. The sex seemed terribly violent and crude to me
—
scarcely tender or erotic at all. One good thing about it was that anonymous room bathed in amber light where the lovers met. But as lovers they seemed very unlikely to me. I didn’t like either of them very much.

I congratulate you on the Legion of Honor and I congratulate you on being “despised by intellectuals.” There is no surer sign that a writer will live. There are certain super-intellectual writers of puzzles who appeal immediately to academics (I am thinking particularly of Pynchon). They are admired at least in part because they provide such good material for doctoral theses. There are so many puzzles to unpuzzle. A writer like you who defies all categories, who is at once straightforward and passionate yet crafty and clever will always confound the academic critics.