The Devil at Large (4 page)

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.