The Devil at Large (31 page)

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting up the world by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets.

This was Miller’s gift: to lift up the world by its scalp.

I want to send you back to read him—with an open head and heart.

SCENE:

A kind of scuzzy waiting room with a rudimentary kitchen (complete with microwave and coffee urn) stage right, and a door marked
WOMEN
stage left. Sagging Naugahyde couches; vending machines selling apples, sodas, candy bars; a table; chairs. Is this the battered greenroom of a regional theater where the actors foregather between scenes of
Peer Gynt, Macbeth
or
The Wild Duck
? Or is this the waiting room of a hospital where doctors and relatives exchange tragic news? The place is at once familiar and strange. At curtain, the stage is empty. Henry Miller, in his eighties, crashes in, wearing an old tartan bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. He is moving carefully with the help of an aluminum walker. He looks around.

Lights come up at the back of the stage, revealing Erica Jong sitting at a desk and madly scribbling on a yellow legal pad. Startled by the commotion, she looks up.

ERICA

Henry! What are you doing here? I thought you were dead!

HENRY

It turned out not to be that simple. I don’t know whether I’m dead or alive and they don’t know whether to send me to heaven or hell.

ERICA

Henry, I tried to help, but I was blocked.

HENRY

Hurry up. After Mary Dearborn, they’re seriously considering sending me you-know-where.

ERICA

You mean there really is a you-know-where?

HENRY

Absolutely! For writers it takes its own form. Out of print. Not studied in the universities. Ripped off by inferior talents who later denounce you. I’m the king of smut, don’tcha know? They still don’t get what I’m about.

ERICA

They will after
this
book.

HENRY

Don’t be so sure. It takes more than books to change the world. I found that out. It takes dynamite! If every man or woman were to say yes to life, what a blow it would be for the politicians and the warmongers. Where would those bloody bastards be? Slavery would die. Money would be of no account. Creation! Desire! Enlightenment! The cockroaches love the darkness so they can scurry.

ERICA

What are you saying, Henry?

HENRY

I’m saying that fear serves a very important purpose. Liberty has enemies everywhere. Fear of freedom. Fear of liberation. You called it fear of flying. My writing still terrifies people. First they said it was too new. Then they said it’s old hat. They never really read it.

ERICA

They’re still saying it. They tell me I’m crazy to defend you—that you’re a sexist, an anti-Semite. The Anti-Sex League is in charge again. People are afraid of their sexual feelings and they take it out on you. You remind them how rich life can be and how pathetically restricted their own lives are. You challenge their denial and they hate you for it.

HENRY

What about you?

ERICA

I’m going to hell too. No question. In fact, I’m thinking of changing my name.

HENRY

The people here will figure it out.

ERICA

So what the hell do we do, Henry? I read in the paper that 60 percent of American families didn’t buy a single book in 1992.

HENRY

Don’t worry. Books are the least of the problem. The forms of communication may change. The art of dreaming when wide awake will be in the power of everyone someday. When we are all wide awake and dreaming, the spirit that moves us will be so enhanced as to make writing unnecessary. We write to throw off the poison because of our false way of life. We write to recapture our innocence. But if we’re constantly whirling in the primal flux, we become part of the original creation which is taking place all the time.

ERICA

So now what are you trying to tell me, Henry?

HENRY

Fling yourself in the flow. Don’t be afraid. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life preservers around their necks! And more often than not it is the life preserver that sinks them.

ERICA

I’ve always known that fear is a sign—usually a sign that I’m doing something
right.

HENRY

Don’t pick the pen up from the page. Keep on at all costs. It’s all a question of hearing the Voice!
That
Voice! It was while writing
Tropic of Capricorn
that the real shenanigans took place … and how! I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing! I had to take it in one fell swoop or risk the penalty of excommunication.

ERICA

If everyone could hear that voice, they would believe.

HENRY

They deliberately drown it out. It’s the music of the spheres. Shakespeare heard it. And Merton.

ERICA

Have you run into them?

HENRY

Yes. And Madame Blavatsky. And Marie Corelli. And my mother. Even my mother has calmed down a lot.

ERICA

Have you been writing?

HENRY

I’m beyond that. Here the writer and the writing are one. No man ever puts down what he intended to say. The original creation belongs to the primal flux.

ERICA

Looking down on the world now, what do you make of it?

HENRY

Still a chancre on a worn-out cock. Only worse than before. Because now even
kids
are afraid of life. All they talk about is death, AIDS, pollution, radiation, holes in the ozone layer. They’ve lost the joy. What I had that made all the difference was joy: I wrote for madmen or angels. I was just a Brooklyn boy. Communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region. But I was saying yes! I am still saying yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

ERICA

Even though you’re “dead”?

HENRY

Especially because I’m dead!

ERICA

Then let us say yes with you!

HENRY

It’s harder to do than to say. We have need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers—but we can’t do without new beings.

ERICA

How can we be reborn?

HENRY

Follow me! I lost myself so I could find myself. I had a vision of heaven once. It swims in underwater light, the trees spaced just right, the willow in front bowing to the willow in back, the roses in full bloom, the pampas grass just beginning to don its plumes of gold, the hollyhocks standing out like starved sentinels with big, bright buttons, the birds darting from tree to tree, calling to one another imperiously, and Eve standing barefoot in her Garden of Eden with a grub live in her hand, while Dante Alighieri, pale as alabaster, and with only his head showing above the rim, was making to slake his awesome thirst in the birdbath under the elm.

[He looks off into the middle distance. Erica bends to her scribbling. When she looks up, he is gone.]

T
HE LETTERS THAT FOLLOW
were mostly written during the spring and summer of 1974, when I was undergoing a transformation I didn’t even recognize from “promising younger writer” to public figure. My first novel,
Fear of Flying
, had been out in hardcover for about six months. Initially, the book received lukewarm reviews but passionate word-of-mouth. By the time John Updike discovered it in
The New Yorker
, the novel was nearly unobtainable and constantly out of stock. It had been underprinted for the success it was to become, and for six months I had gnashed my teeth over the poor distribution of the book, feeling powerless to affect its fate (which I now understand is every author’s karma). When Henry’s long, enthusiastic welcome came in the spring of 1974, I was grateful.

Looking back, I see how neurotic I was about the publication of
Fear of Flying
—perhaps because it was such a break with the good girl inside me, the part of me that really wanted to write nice things and not embarrass the family. When the novel began to be ferociously talked about, galleys stolen from the publisher’s desk, paperback and movie rights sold, I felt guilty: I was winning fame and money for being a bad girl: When critics trashed the book, something inside me felt I deserved to be trashed; when there were raves, I was at once thrilled and guilty. This was because I knew I was breaking old rules of female silence and female submission. I would shout out my rebellion only to become frightened of my own echo.

Henry was in a unique position to understand this fate. And his letters show it. They also reflect his generosity, his taste in reading, his views on sex, literature, anti-Semitism, and women’s freedom.

It is especially important that the letters referring to anti-Semitism, Jewishness, and feminism be made available, because Henry has often been accused of anti-Semitism and woman-hating. I have addressed the charge of woman-hating throughout this book, but the anti-Semitism issue deserves some more space here. It followed Miller throughout his life and it has recently been vigorously renewed by Mary Dearborn in her biography of Miller.

Even to my paranoid Jewish mind, Miller was not an anti-Semite. He merely reserved the right, typically claimed by Jews but denied to gentiles, to make fun of us. Most fair-minded Jews will acknowledge that we are the toughest self-critics and the most barbed satirists of all things Jewish, but most of us bristle when a gentile claims the same prerogative. Certainly I do—though I reserve the right of the typical diaspora Jew to direct self-mockery, cynicism, and gallows humor at my own people and their foibles.

Henry saw this hypocrisy and called us on it. If Jews could criticize Jews, why couldn’t he? The great fabulist of the Jews, Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was Henry’s favorite twentieth-century writer (and mine) and yet another of his correspondents, was allowed to show Jewish thieves, Jewish fools, Jewish knaves, as well as Jewish saints—so why was Miller, a gentile, not allowed? Why should the Jews alone be permitted to tell the truth about Jews?

We know very well why. It is the same reason we alone are allowed to criticize our parents and children, but bristle when others do so. The horrors of twentieth-century Jewish history have given us every reason to be sensitive to the anti-Semitic slur, however subtle.

But let me remind the reader who would like to like Miller, but fears he is an anti-Semite, that for every supposed slur on Jews in Miller, there are startlingly vivid examples of valiant attempts to squelch the banal anti-Semitism of his time. There is the incident related by Alfred Perlès, in which Henry nearly throttles the saloonkeeper who refers to his place as the “
Judenfrei
café.” And there are repeated examples of Miller’s wish to be Jewish—if only to justify his differentness, his bookishness, his sense of being an outcast and an eternal vagabond. Note also his admiration for people and things Jewish—from June to Singer to the author of this book.

Miller’s feelings toward Jews were complicated. Jews represented New York and home to Miller, and Miller hated New York. Jews represented the admiration of bookishness in men—something Henry yearned for from his mother, and could not have. (Anaïs would give it to him; Louise never would.) No wonder that so many of the pivotal figures in Henry’s life—from June to Michael Fraenkel to Abe Rattner—were Jewish. Jews effortlessly had so much Henry coveted: respect for the man who chose to live in a world of books, respect for the man who shunned the practical world for the world of ideas, metaphysics, and religion, respect for the man whose main talents were Torah and procreation. Henry envied Jews. He wanted to be a yeshiva
bucher
himself! That, by the way, was his wistful term for my former husband, Jonathan Fast. “Jonathan, you’re a real yeshiva
bucher
,” he liked to say. The yeshiva scholar, like the ancient sage, was one of Henry’s ideals of manhood.

Inevitably, Henry and I were asked to comment on each other publicly. It was such a promotable combination—dirty old sage and young Wife of Bath—that television producers and print-media editors found us irresistible. So there was a wonderful
60 Minutes
documentary with Mike Wallace, and side-by-side op-ed pieces in
The New York Times
(September 7, 1974). I reprint two of these “boosts” among the letters because they are a continuation of them and share their spirit.