The Devil at Large (8 page)

The feminist attack on Miller sees in his anger toward women a disregard of them. I think, on the contrary, he grants them too much power and thus must then expose and destroy them. Miller’s depictions of ravenous cunts are akin to the horned hunter’s quarry depicted on the walls of the caves of Lascaux: the painter-shaman fixes the image of the fearsome creature as a magical way of containing its mystery and capturing its power forever.

Miller’s example shows us the dark heart of sexism: a man trying to demolish the power he knows is greater than his own—the power to give life, the seemingly self-sufficient womb.

Henry was so enthralled by women that he sought to demystify their mysterious parts through the violent verbal magic of his books. The violence is rooted in a sense of self-abnegation and humiliation before them. He is, as the Freudians would say, counterphobic. Terrified of women, he reduces them to sex objects, cunts if you will, which he subdues with his penis and his pen.

He had to kill his mother to become a writer. He had to skewer her on his pen even as the “Henry Miller” of
The Tropics
and
Clichy
and
The Rosy Crucifixion
skewers cunts on his cock. His enchantment in later years by Oriental women (his Japanese fifth wife, Hoki, his last beloved, the Chinese actress Lisa Liu), his adoration of exotic Anaïs, of the femme fatale June, all betray an unacknowledged longing for another mother: the sweet caring Madonna of his early childhood whom for most of his life he cannot even remember.

At the end of Henry’s life he told Twinka Thiebaud of a dream that inspired him to rewrite his mother as a Madonna:

Suddenly my mother appears and she’s completely different from my memories of her. She is wonderful, radiant, sensitive, even intelligent! After writing that piece [“Mother, China, and the World Beyond” in
Sextet
], my view of her softened. I had created a mother of my own making, one I could relate to, one I could love even. It occurred to me that if my mother had been like the mother I had dreamed about, perhaps I wouldn’t have become a writer after all. I might have become a tailor like my father. I might have been an upstanding pillar of society like she wanted me to be.

So the courage to create is fueled by rage. (
Courage,
after all, could be imagined as
heart
plus
rage
.) Perhaps this accounts for the problem critics have with women creators: women are not allowed rage. But only through rage can we separate from our parents and become autonomous creators. Every artist has to make this transition, and for women it is a forbidden one.

Look at how hard it was for Henry—even as a man! He had to renounce his parents, expatriate himself, find a new mother-muse in Anaïs Nin. (June, his second wife, had been the taunting, torturing mother who, despite the pain she caused him, was the first person to believe in him as a writer.) We can never reconstruct the “real” Madonna-mother of Henry’s early childhood. She left no physical traces. But we can posit her existence by tracing Henry’s psychological history.

With a raging mother, a retarded sister, a drunken father, Henry’s childhood cannot have been easy, yet he remembers it as having been “glorious”—and the streets of Brooklyn were, according to him, his preparation for the writer’s life.

Summer nights in New York, or Brooklyn, as it happened to be, can be wonderful when you’re a kid and can roam the streets at will …

Henry says in the
Book of Friends,
written in his eighties. Looking back eight decades from Pacific Palisades to Brooklyn, Brooklyn—specifically Driggs Avenue in the fourteenth ward, later on Decatur Street in the Bushwick section—seemed like the second Eden of his life.

When Henry recounted his childhood memories of Brooklyn, he invariably stressed the positive: “Born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Got everything I craved, except a real pony.”

He seems to have had a pervasive sense of entitlement, a sense that he would always be cared for. When the kids in his kindergarten class were given Christmas gifts, he refused to accept them, knowing that he would do better at home. “I know Santa is going to bring me better things,” he told his mother. His mother’s reaction to this was to slap him, grab him by the earlobe, and drag him back to school to apologize to the teacher.

“I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong,” Henry said years later. “This … left in my childish mind the feeling that my mother was stupid and cruel.”

His friends were other immigrant kids—Polish-American, Italian-American, and Irish-American. In his many autobiographical writings, he mentions Stanley Borowski, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul, Eddie Carney, and Johnny Dunne. The whole microcosm of the American melting pot was found in Henry’s Brooklyn. He was not to find another world as varied and congenial till he went to Paris in 1930. “There in Paris, in its shabby squalid streets teeming with life, I relived the sparkling scenes of my childhood.”

What kind of marriage did Henry’s parents have? This incident, recounted in Henry’s
Book of Friends
, evokes it, seen through Henry’s child-eyes:

After dinner in the evening my father would dry the dishes which my mother washed at the sink. One evening he must have said something to offend her for suddenly she gave him a ringing slap in the face with her wet hands. Then I remember distinctly hearing him say to her: “If you ever do that again I’ll leave you.” I was impressed by the quiet, firm way in which he said it. His son, I must confess, never had the courage to talk that way to a woman.

Sensitive, creative, inclined to drown his sorrows in drink, Henry’s father obliged Louise to be the tyrannical disciplinarian. But this incident, which Henry relates with such approbation, shows the way Henry’s father nevertheless shaped his son’s ideals of manhood. Henry exhibited the same sensitivity and dreaminess as his father, but in his most notorious novels he invents a fast-fucking, fast-talking, hypermanly antihero—just the man to subdue the otherwise overbearing Louise.

Henry was a great reader as a child, and loved to read aloud. He adored Old Testament stories, and he was reading long before he began elementary school. In school he was both pushed to achieve by the fierce disappointment his mother experienced with Lauretta, and pushed to make mischief in rebellion against his mother’s tyranny.

He experienced his first taste of the forbiddenness of sex with Joey and Tony Imhof, his “country” friends in Glendale, Long Island, whose father, John Imhof, was “the first artist to appear in my life.” (Imhof was a friend of Henry’s father and was a watercolorist who also made stained-glass windows for churches.) Henry’s father revered Imhof for being an artist, and so, of course did Henry. We can trace Henry’s reverence for artists directly to this childhood mentor.

Henry and the Imhof boys played together sexually between the ages of seven and twelve—a fact one of Miller’s biographers points to with horror, as if homosexual experimentation were not the rule rather than the exception in childhood.

Henry seems to have been both fascinated and terrified by sex. In
Book of Friends
, he reports being invited by a girl named Weesie, a friend of his Yorkville cousin, Henry Baumann, to make love to her. Henry was afraid, and hesitated until the opportunity passed. He also hesitated for three years with his great high school love, Cora Seward, a blonde angel whom he idealized too much to fuck. Henry writes about her in
Book of Friends:
“Strange that I never thought of fucking her,” he says. But Cora was love to him, not sex. And at this time in his life he kept them very separate. “I never mixed the two—love and sex, which shows what an imbecile I must have been.”

How wonderful to be sitting beside her in the open trolley, on our way to Rockaway or Sheepshead Bay, and singing at the top of our lungs—“shine on, Harvest Moon, for me and My Gal” or “I don’t want to set the world on fire.”

Cora was the girl he obsessively fantasized about even when he had his first real sexual relationship. Initiated crudely into sex in a brothel, Henry had to wait to meet Pauline Chouteau, his “first mistress,” to begin to explore his sexuality. After he began his affair with Pauline, he seems to have ruminated constantly on his inability to fuck the idyllic Cora—a failure of nerve he apparently regretted all his life. The man who was destined to liberate American literature first had to liberate himself.

Henry graduated second in his class from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, a school in his old childhood neighborhood he had insisted on going to over the protestations of his parents. He was attached to the old neighborhood, but the old neighborhood had changed a lot since he was little. It was now dominated by newly emigrated Eastern European Jews, and Henry was one of the few gentiles.

To the end of his life he referred to himself as “a goy,” as if he really
were
a Jew viewing himself as the outsider. This is remarkable, because Henry always had an ambiguous relationship with Jews, envying their culture and bookishness, repeatedly falling in love with Jewish women, having many Jewish boon companions, and eventually even introducing the Star of David into his watercolors as a sort of talisman. According to Anaïs Nin’s report in
Henry and June
, Henry claimed to be Jewish on their first meeting. If this is true, and not some misunderstanding of Nin’s, then it shows the deep nature of Henry’s ambivalence.

In Henry’s high school world Jews were objects of both resentment and envy, and Henry was never to lose his complicated feelings toward them. He regarded them as outcasts like himself, eternal wanderers—but wanderers who at least belonged to a community. He envied them. He wanted to be one. “I too would become a Jew,” he says in
Tropic of Cancer.
“Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jews?”

Passages like these have led to a persistent charge of anti-Semitism, which I find understandable but basically simplistic. The Henry I knew was not an anti-Semite, nor was he a misanthrope, though he railed against the ugliness and pettiness of humanity in all his books and letters. It is Henry’s lifelong habit of letting it all hang out that often makes him appear bigoted, if his words and phrases are taken out of context. One can find just as much criticism of Germans (
idiots,
he calls them), of Swedes (
bores,
to Henry), of Viennese (
treacherous
), of Italians (
two-faced
), and any other ethnic group you can name. Henry is not a bigot so much as he is an acid satirist of all human hypocrisies. Hear him on his own people:

My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say
idiots.
Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.

And yet, for all his acid satire, he remains a cockeyed optimist, always sure there’s a pony in the shit pile, always merry and bright and the happiest man alive. This curious paradox in Henry’s character makes him as enigmatic to his biographers as he often was to his friends and lovers.

Henry began City College at eighteen, but dropped out after two months. He claimed he didn’t like the absurd reading list he was given. Apparently the culprit was Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
, about which he said, “If I have to read stuff like that, I give up.” He then worked briefly at a series of jobs for which he proved entirely unsuited. Eventually he moved out of his parents’ house, only to move in with Pauline Chouteau, the woman he described as “old enough to be my mother.” She was, in fact, thirty-two to his eighteen, and Henry had met her while teaching piano to one of her friend’s little girls.

Pauline Chouteau, whom Henry called “the widow,” was the mother of a consumptive son, George, who was a bit younger than Henry. In moving out of his parents’ home and briefly into Pauline’s, Henry had recreated a weird and dysfunctional family to rival his own weird and dysfunctional family. But Pauline was kind where his mother was harsh, and this made Henry feel even more obligated to her. He needed her sexually, but felt her age made her unsuitable. In an attempt to shake Pauline’s hold on him, in 1913 he fled out West for six months. Like many of his generation he dreamed of becoming a cowboy, or striking it rich in the goldfields of Alaska.

He always claimed to have had a life-changing experience on this trip—listening to Emma Goldman speak in San Diego. But the historical record belies his recollection, for it seems that Emma Goldman was prevented from lecturing by vigilantes on the dates he would have been there. It is probable that Henry’s Emma Goldman story was another example of his chronic mythmaking.

He told the story so many times that eventually he seemed really to believe he
had
heard her speak. And surely it is true that she was one of his heroines. Emma Goldman’s autobiography,
Living My Life
(1931), mentions a “Henry Miller” only once and that is in connection with the little theater on Third Street, where the Orleneff troupe performed for what Goldman calls “the whole Radical east side.” It is quite unlikely that Goldman is referring to the same Henry Miller, since in 1905 he would have been only sixteen and “a Brooklyn boy.” Still, Goldman’s depictions of radical New York give us a sense of Miller’s era and the things that shaped him: anarchism was in the air, the Russian Revolution was in progress, and the world was changing drastically. As an intellectual boy in Brooklyn who worshipped the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller must have realized that he lived (as the Chinese curse says) “in interesting times.” Coming to intellectual consciousness in the era of Emma Goldman and the theosophist Madame Elena Blavatsky, Henry retained a fascination with anarchism and transcendental wisdom throughout his entire life.