The Devil at Large (27 page)

Historically, politicians care less about pornography than they care about their power bases. Once they achieve power through pushing the “hot button” of porn, they tend to use that power to crush dissent from
any
source.

Even though we must raise society’s consciousness about the many ways in which images of female abuse pervade our culture, there is a greater danger in legally equating such images—or words, for that matter—with acts. Some feminists believe the pornographic image is, in itself, an act of violence (see Susan Griffin’s
Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature
for a lucid exegesis of this idea), but I believe it is deeply dangerous to the First Amendment to equate an image with an act for any purpose whatsoever.

The image of an abused woman is not the same thing as an abused woman. Words are not deeds. If we allow such laws to be promulgated in order to protect women, I think it will not be long before they are used against women as a way to prevent their free expression of their very real grievances.

Imagine a society in which novelists and poets could only write nice things about women. How would we show the very real suffering of women in our culture? Suppose we could never write about sadomasochistic relationships? How would we show that sadomasochistic relationships are often the rule, not the exception? How could we change society if we could not chronicle it honestly?

Even if we are horrified by “snuff films,” and by images of violence against women, I think we would be better off changing minds and hearts by a vigorous campaign of consciousness-raising than by altering our laws to interpret a representation of an act as the act itself. If we do that, we are well on our way to promulgating
fatwas
that condemn authors to death, or to lopping off hands and heads like Moslem fundamentalists.

Let Henry rail against the enormous womb. Let women writers rail against the various crazy cocks (and cunts) in their lives. Let the culture be aerated by controversy and debate. But let us not start punishing even the sleaziest creators of images for the harm that might come from ideas.

“Every idea is an incitement,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1925. He was speaking about sedition, but he might as well have been speaking about pornography. Any text may cause action—sometimes destructive action. Once we punish writers and publishers for their words, we have opened the door to the obliteration of the word.

At present we have an incomplete feminist revolution, one in which women are still institutionalized as the second sex but are beginning to break out of their prison. A thousand censors and guards stand at the gates to silence their valid anger, but at least the Bill of Rights still protects their power to voice it. Overturning the Bill of Rights will hurt feminism more than it will hurt male chauvinism. Laws follow consciousness, and changing consciousness transforms society. This is a better sequence of events than the sequence that relies on suppression of expression to bring about what must eventually be a Pyrrhic justice. If we erase the First Amendment in the name of gender justice, such “justice” will surely backfire.

Ours may be the first culture on earth that has attempted the bold experiment of letting differing groups have their not always equal say. This is unprecedented in human history. Hierarchical animals that we are, we do not take easily to equality. It’s too soon—merely two hundred years in the case of the Bill of Rights—to toss away this experiment without carrying it to its conclusion. It may yet bear fruit.

So how shall we write honestly about men and women in a culture where we have, as some have said, two sexes divided by a common language? I think we must grant the sexes the same freedom of expression that multiculturalists grant to differing cultural groups in our heterogenous culture. We must acknowledge that men and women have a different emotional experience of life, experience sex differently, mothering differently, fathering differently, love differently, rage differently. And we must grant each sex its honest expression of feeling. In a sense, this is what both the women’s movement and the men’s movement have asked for. Easy as it is to mock the excesses of these movements, each asks for something authentic: to have its sex’s view of the world declared valid and significant.

Why are we so threatened by this eminently reasonable demand? We can, I hope, distinguish the desire to validate emotional truth from the desire to crush the opposite sex.

The fact is that we are in transition from patriarchy to a new sort of society, one which I hope will combine the best elements of matriarchy and the best elements of patriarchy, and, in the process, make both words obsolete.

Equalarchy
is what we seek, but that does not mean we ask each sex to be identical. The world has been ruled by men’s emotions for the last several thousand years. Now we are trying to create a society that equally validates women’s emotions. We are still a long way from it, as many recent events have shown, from Willy Smith’s rape trial to Clarence Thomas’s hearings for the Supreme Court.

Henry Miller’s writing, with its open expression and final transcendence of male rage and its ability to recognize female creativity, is a good place to begin searching for the honesty both sexes must find. Shall we burn Miller? Better to emulate him. Better to follow his path from sexual madness to spiritual serenity, from bleeding maleness to an androgyny that fills the heart with light.

The readers of my books fall usually into two distinct classes—those who are disgusted by the strong element of sexuality and those who rejoice in discovering that this element forms such a large ingredient…. Only a few discerning souls seem to be able to reconcile the so-called contradictory aspects of my being as revealed through my writing.

—
HENRY MILLER,
THE WORLD OF SEX

I
N 1974, A PUBLISHER
wrote to Miller to ask him whether I he would be interested in conspiring with me on a book to be called
A Rap on Sex.
Margaret Mead and James Baldwin had just published
A Rap on Race
, and it seemed a likely and promotable idea.

Miller didn’t mince words in responding to this possibly lucrative proposal. “I think it stinks,” he wrote back. “In the first place I am not an expert [on sex] as you dub me and secondly, though it may well be profitable, there is something about the idea that stinks.”

So much for those commentators who say that Henry would do anything for money or that he put in the sex to make it sell. As he said repeatedly, he would rather not have written unpublishable books:

Here I was begging the Muse
not
to get me into trouble with the powers that be,
not
to make me write out all those “filthy” words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan
et alii
, I would have to write my books in jail or at the foot of the gallows … and these holy cows deep in clover, failing to recognize dross from gold, render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up “to make money!”

What did sex mean to Henry Miller and why was he willing to risk everything to describe it so vividly in his books? Most of his contemporaries—Margaret Mitchell, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf (to name just a few)—made the conscious or unconscious decision to facilitate publication by referring only obliquely to sexual acts in their books. In the decision to be explicit whatever the price, Miller stands in a tiny crowd: D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Burroughs. Why was depicting sex more important to him than anything else? What did he think sex was? Why did he think it mattered so deeply to human life?

He answers the question clearly in
The World of Sex:

Sometimes in the recording of a bald sexual incident great significance adheres. Sometimes the sexual becomes a writhing, pulsating facade such as we see on Indian temples. Sometimes it is a fresco hidden in a sacred cave where one may sit and contemplate on things of the spirit. There is nothing I can possibly prohibit myself from doing in this realm of sex. It is a world unto itself…. It is a cold fire which burns in us like a sun. It is never dead, even though the sun may become a moon. There are no dead things in the universe—it is only our way of thinking which makes death.

This “cold fire” of sexuality was equivalent to the life force for Miller. It was what he had in common with Lawrence, and why he labored so long and so maddeningly over
The World of Lawrence.
He shared with Lawrence the pagan sense of sex—sex as primal flux, sex as the gyre of birth, sex as the DNA of existence, the matrix of all creativity. Miller used the word
sex
in a cosmic, not a genital sense. And he was surprised to discover that the world did not agree with him.

But he did not start at this point.

He started in Brooklyn, full of the same sexual neuroses and inhibitions that bedeviled the rest of his contemporaries. That was why he was so keen to free himself. Only the most enslaved of us longs with such intensity to be free. Working his way through letters, vignettes,
Clipped Wings
,
Moloch
, and
Crazy Cock
to the new life of
Tropic of Cancer
, he gradually liberated himself to partake of life’s cosmic sexual dance, thereby coming to understand that only by such participation could freedom be won.

The only way Henry could write, finally, was by listening to the divine dictation of the Voice. He had to write what that Voice dictated, or risk writing nothing at all. He did not choose his subject matter; it chose him. He discovered he was nothing but a medium, a channel, and he let language flow through him.

What was sex to him? It was precisely this flow, this flux, this seeming chaos out of which life springs. If he suppressed it, he would suppress
all
expression. He had no choice but to write about sex.

Miller’s book on Lawrence, written and rewritten in the early thirties, was abandoned after the publication of
Tropic of Cancer
(though never definitively: he continued to work on it through the mid-forties). It was finally published in 1980, becoming his last book rather than what he had intended to be his first.
The World of Lawrence
gives us many important clues as to Miller’s understanding of sex and its role in his writing.

Is
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
obscene? If so, how is this obscenity justified? Miller asks. No justification is necessary, he concludes: “Life is obscene and miraculous, and neither is there any justification for life.”

Obscenity is a divine prerogative of man, and is always to be used carelessly, heedlessly, without scruple or qualms, without religious or aesthetic defense. When the body becomes sacred, obscenity comes into its own. Purity of speech is as much bosh as purity of action—there is no such thing. Obscenity is stomped down when the body is degraded, when the soul is made to usurp the body’s proper function.

In discussing Lawrence, Miller does a mini-survey of the history of civilization and its varying attitudes toward sexuality. He notes how sex changes from an open, natural act to one performed in shameful privacy as Christianity overtakes the pagan world. He blames Christianity and its dualism for our culture’s rejection of the body and all its wants.

“Obscenity,” he notes, “figures large and heavily, magnificently and awesomely, in all primitive peoples….” Miller observes that in so-called primitive cultures, where people are in touch with their instinctual selves, religion and ritual always contain powerful elements of both sex and death. Why? Because sex and death are fiercely important parts of life, evoking our deepest pleasures and our deepest fears.

Why is sex important? The answer is so obvious as to need immense obfuscation and denial to be ignored. Sex is important because it is at the very root of life.

The savage is not a sick man. The savage retains his sense of awe, mystery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is …

That animal, lacking the self-consciousness which names things, puts no veil between itself and sex, between itself and death. Sex just
is
—namelessly. So is death.

Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death. It is never one or the other, it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved.

At the front of The World of Lawrence is one of Miller’s distinctive diagrams, the kind he used to guide himself while writing. He draws a tree of life at whose base are the words: “GRAVE = WOMB.” Below that: “Mother Earth.” Below that: “He embraces his animal nature in a primal frenzy for livingness.” Up above, where the tree begins to open heavenward, are these words: “Fear of death becomes fear of life. By embracing death the artist restores life.”

Miller is ostensibly referring to Lawrence here, but he more likely is referring to himself. Miller never wrote about another writer (Rimbaud, Lawrence, Nin, me) without writing about himself. And the same, no doubt, may be said of all of us.

When we embrace sex, we are also symbolically embracing our own mortality. Fear of sex is therefore also the fear of death. And for many men, the fear of woman is equivalent to the recognition of mortality. It is woman’s fecundity that reminds man of the everlasting dance of birth and death.

Miller himself states this baldly:

Ah, and man’s coition, how ironic, mocking, comic it is in the last analysis—man lying on top of woman, dominating her, subjugating her, man the great fighting cock, the strong master of the world. He triumphs cruelly when he enters her and makes her obey, but it is the short triumph of a moment or two, just enough for nature to play her role, to wreak her havoc; and woman submits, submits so willingly (this alone ought to make him suspicious of her), submits so easily (and not just with him but with any one … the great whore that she is) because she is accomplishing
her
destiny. … The moment the child is born, however, she is through with man; as far as she is concerned now, as woman, he is finished, he can croak.