The Devil at Large (26 page)

Ultimately Miller can be a stronger force for feminism than for male chauvinism. His writing consistently shows a ruthless honesty about the self, an honesty that even women writers would do well to emulate, because honesty is the beginning of all transformation.

Despite the decade of backlash we experienced during the eighties, despite the success of the divide-and-conquer technique used against feminist progress, I think we are on the verge of a brave new world of equality between the sexes. This is because I see the next generation of daughters—the young women born in the seventies and eighties—and I see that they take for granted a new level of freedom, a new level of choice and self-determination. They will
not
sit quietly while an authority figure tells them what to write. They are already feisty arguers and advocates. They have only to learn the all-important lesson: that it is wisest not to conspire against their sisters, however tempting it may seem.

Every time I read an article or book in which a woman trashes another woman, I think:
Fool!
You don’t realize you have been programmed to attack women and coddle men. You don’t realize you are the walking embodiment of male chauvinism—even though you have the anatomy of a woman.

Henry Miller’s openness to women’s writing started at the beginning of his life (Marie Corelli, Emma Goldman, Madame Blavatsky), and never ceased. He passionately advocated the historic contribution Anaïs Nin’s diaries made, even after their estrangement. When I met him, he was full of admiration for women creators and intellectuals, and he strongly promoted not only my work but that of Suzanne Brøgger, the Danish writer whose
Deliver Us From Love
(1976) was full of polemics against monogamy, the nuclear family, and rape that had made her a heroine with Scandinavian feminists. Despite his quarrels with Nin, he publicly reunited with her. And he was more able to absorb the lessons of female creativity than many women are. In his Paris days, when Henry discovered Anaïs Nin’s writing and celebrated that discovery in the essay “Un Etre Etoilique” (
The Cosmological Eye
), he knew at once he was in the presence of something female, revolutionary, and destined to change the world.

The contrast between this language and that of man’s is forcible; the whole of man’s art begins to appear like a frozen edelweiss under a glass bell reposing on a mantelpiece in the deserted home of a lunatic.

Henry recognized at once that all male literature was frozen compared to the fecund delta of female prose. He absorbed Nin’s writing and let its influence enliven his own art. He understood that Nin had put her finger on a revolutionary change in the nature of writing in the twentieth century. Henceforth the novels of our time would be autobiography and documentary, as Emerson had predicted when he spoke of novels giving way to diaries or autobiographies. The line between fiction and fact would blur. Just as the epic gave way to the novel in the mid-eighteenth century, so the twentieth century was the age of autobiography, an age in which fiction itself would give way to first-person chronicles based on fact:

More and more, as our era draws to a close, are we made aware of the tremendous significance of the human document. Our literature, unable any longer to express itself through dying forms, has become almost exclusively biographical. The artist is retreating behind the dead forms to rediscover in himself the eternal source of creation. Our age, intensely productive, yet thoroughly un-vital, un-creative, is obsessed with a lust for investigating the mysteries of the personality. We turn instinctively towards, those documents—fragments, notes, autobiographies, diaries—which appease our hunger for life because, avoiding the circuitous expression of art, they seem to put us directly in contact with that which we are seeking.

Henry Miller predicted the art of our age—and even our journalism, film, television, and visual arts—all based on the exploration of personality and the blurring of the line between fiction and fact. It was Henry’s ability to seize upon this tendency in his own work, to make the most of both it and the androgyny of his own personality, that made him a radical and prophetic writer. In a sense, he points toward a future of feminized art. His novels may dissect sexism, but his essays and meditative books show a man profoundly in touch with the feminine side of his own nature, releasing the heat of the feminine principle to melt the frozen patriarchal world.

Just as Henry discovered the truth of what made Anaïs Nin a revolutionary writer, Anaïs understood Henry’s contribution perhaps better than anyone. In
Henry and June
, the unexpurgated diary of her affair with Henry Miller and June Mansfield Miller (not published till 1987), she remarks on her first feelings while reading
Tropic of Cancer:
“He has left softness, tenderness out of his work, he has written down only the hate, the violence.”

Anaïs believes he has done this because the violence of love is easier to express than the tenderness. “But the man who leans over my bed is soft,” she writes “and he writes nothing about these moments.”

It is the violence of Henry’s writing about women that has so angered feminist commentators, just as the violence of much women’s writing—Andrea Dworkin’s, for example—about men has so angered male commentators. But it is the role of the artist to express this violence. Art
is
pagan, wild, red in tooth and claw. It must be, in order to reflect the chthonic side of nature. It follows the furies, the bacchae, the dybbukim—or it is not truly art. No one has enunciated this view of art more clearly than the controversial critic Camille Paglia, in her brilliant and troubling book
Sexual Personae.
Paglia’s abrasive public persona and her regrettable tendency to trash other women makes her hard to accept. But some of her wildest ideas are provocative and much needed: “I see sex and nature as brutal pagan forces,” says Paglia. And she challenges orthodox critical canons that attempt to sanitize art and literature, and, in the process, deeply misread them.

Whether one agrees with Paglia’s views of maleness and femaleness or not, her analysis is a brisk tonic for the misinterpretations perpetrated by feminist criticism of Miller. Since sex is indeed a violent pagan force, we cannot blame the artist who attempts to mirror this force. Similarly, women who write about female sexuality, female rage, female vulnerability to rape, ought not to be attacked for mirroring life accurately. We must stop demanding of our artists, male and female, that they sweeten sour nature, that they cook what is meant to be raw. To do this is to demand a Walt Disney theme-park treatment of all our art.

Theme parks are one thing, art another. And it would be tragic if, in the name of “family values,” we so sanitized art that it was suitable only for children and therefore could no longer mirror the passions of real life. For years, censorship in America was founded upon the Hicklin rule, which insisted books and films be judged according to whether they would be a possible corrupting influence on minors. This has regrettably hampered the production of grown-up art—in all genres.

In a way, this same censorship is already prevalent in television and movies—two art forms whose immense promise has been utterly traduced, especially in America. Books and the visual arts alone have been allowed the power to disturb, to upset, to inspire controversy. And always, there are censors preparing to take away this freedom. The book industry, run by bean counters who buy shelf space in bookstores as toothpaste manufacturers buy space in drugstores, has begun seriously to dilute freedom of choice. Next time you stand in an airport bookstore and notice that you can choose only between A and B, think how restricted is your access to disturbing books. Try even today to find Henry Miller in the average mall bookstore. He most probably is not there.

“These choices are market-driven,” the cynic says, “they stock what sells.”

Not quite. A million decisions, made before the fact, determine subject matter, breadth of distribution, and the tenor of expression. In the name of “market forces,” your freedoms are being eroded. You are the proof that the market-driven censorship has worked when you say, “They stock what sells.”

We cannot pass over the subject of one sex’s ability to crush the other without touching at least briefly on the issues raised by Women against Pornography and the Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon-drafted model statute that seeks to punish pornography as a crime against women.

Dworkin and MacKinnon define pornography as:

the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or (vi) women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks—are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

The statute seems clear and specific and impossible to oppose unless you look at the history of sexual censorship all over the world. Alas, this history demonstrates that sexual censorship is
always
used to mask political goals. Frequently, it is not about sex at all.

People like Edward de Grazia, who have chronicled the censorship wars both in the U.S. and abroad, have shown that the suppression of books can often be linked to more than the reasons initially given. A few examples: D.H. Lawrence’s
The Rainbow
was banned in 1914–15 supposedly for obscenity, but in reality because of Lawrence’s antiwar sentiments and the fact that he had a German wife at a time when many people were virulently anti-German. Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
was banned in 1929, supposedly for lewdness and obscenity, but really for presenting lesbian characters in a favorable light. Countless books on contraception and sexual technique were banned, again supposedly for obscenity, but in reality because they enabled women to control their fertility or their access to pleasure. Writers like Margaret Sanger and Havelock Ellis were persecuted for these “sins.”

Whatever the laws on the books, they tend not to be enforced by feminist intellectuals like Dworkin and MacKinnon, but by police yahoos. It is the societies of busy-bodies who fear—yet slaver over—sexuality, and the politicians who pander to them, who wind up determining what we can read or see. Wherever sexual laws exist, they will sooner or later be used to repress dissent.

One would think that the viciousness of the attacks on Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, James Joyce, Edmund Wilson, and Robert Mapplethorpe would convince MacKinnon and Dworkin that
any
law governing sexual behavior or sexual representation in words or images eventually gets used by Big Brother to silence opposition. Homosexuality itself has historically been attacked as a loss of “family values.”

I do not think we can afford to have any sexually repressive laws on the books at all, however benign or protective they may at first seem. I can easily foresee a day when parents who have taken nude pictures of their adorable babies will be arrested for child pornography. All that is needed is another House Un-American Activities Committee—an ever-present danger in the country that invented the First Amendment, but doesn’t seem to understand it. Its very point is that we must tolerate certain obnoxious words and images simply in order to protect our larger freedoms.

Although I remain a First Amendment fundamentalist, I respect the courage of those feminists who have come forward to illuminate the nature of pornography as a symbolic form of violence against women. Abusive images of women are ubiquitous in our culture, and these images do serve to condone society’s abuse of women. But it seems that some feminists have allowed themselves to be manipulated by a cynical right wing, led by evangelical groups. The attack on pornography that began under the auspices of the woman-hating Reagan administration was clearly politically motivated, and those feminists who endorsed it were, alas, politically naïve.

Disturbing as it is to be surrounded by images of abused women, it is equally disturbing to be surrounded by the pretty young females who dominate our visual media. It is as if old women did not exist, or were somehow obscene. Women are forced to homogenize their public images in public life. As long as they are forced to be “feminine” to be heard and seen, and as long as “femininity” is defined as young, pretty, soft, and perfumed, women will have no way to assert the full range of their selfhood in public or private life.

A distressing conformity is imposed upon us all. Pornography is only part of the problem. Advertising, movies, television, and romance novels also overwhelmingly present only one face of woman. Until I look at the TV screen and see women allowed to go without makeup, without dyed hair, showing their true age, and as long as First Ladies are forced to prate of cookie baking and to stand by, or behind, their husbands, we shall have a society in which it is a dishonor to be a complete woman. These things are just as damaging as pornography. And I would like to see the entire female population rise up against them. But I would not create codes of censorship or legislation against specific images of women.

All women today live like those African-Americans of an earlier generation who used to feel obliged to bleach their skin. Whatever we are is not enough. Why aren’t we fully human unless we are blonde, slim, and have no excess skin on our necks? To be a woman is to be always in the wrong. If we can change this, we can surely change pornography. If we can change this, there will no longer be titillation in the image of an abused woman.