Erica on Henry, this ought to be very good, curious what she has to say about Anais!!!

مَن يجد في نفسه ميلًا لمؤلفات ميللر ويونغ سيجد في هذا الكتاب متعة خالصة!

A feminist defends Miller against the charge of misogyny. An antidote to Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, which attacked Miller.

Review forthcoming

For all those out there that think Miller is just a mysoginst playboy, here is one of 2nd wave feminism's strongest voices presenting a new perspective. I really enjoyed this perspective on HM and his life.

The creation of a book is a rite of passage for the author even more than for the reader. It is a way of stripping down to the essential being, a self-analysis far more profound than any professionally guided psychoanalysis and a way of remaking oneself spiritually. It is for this act of self-transformation that writers write. And they are fortunate when they recognize this, because such self-transformation is the only truly dependable reward of writing.

~ Erica Jong The Devil at Large


Nin’s independence both as a wife and as a lover seems beguiling. At first she appears as a beacon of liberation for women, but perhaps she was more enslaved to men than most of us. Anaïs had an independence in her marriage to Guiler that she would have never possessed with Henry. She remained tied to Guiler all her life, but she always needed at least two men to reenact her oedipal drama.

Her freedom came at a very high cost: she was unable to publish her journals freely during her own lifetime. In a way she traduced her art for the sake of her deceptions. She knew that women can have their sexuality as long as they don’t publish it.

I had an amusing encounter with Anaïs once at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-Second Street Y in Manhattan, where she was speaking after her edited diaries had begun to appear. At that point I had published only one or two volumes of poetry and was just writing Fear of Flying.

“Why did you edit the sexual parts out of your diary, Miss Nin?” I asked from the audience.

“Becasue I had observed,” she replied cooly, “that whenever a woman revealed her sexual life, she was never again taken seriously as a writer.” Nin was pragmatic. I was passionate and young.

“But that’s precisely why we must do it,” I said, unwittingly predicting my entire career. Nin did not comment further. I remember being disappointed by her lack of candor and thought she was being hypocritical. Now, I see that I was terribly green and brash and she was wise.

She was right, of course: if a woman exposes her sexuality in print, she is always exposed to attack. It was a situation she was destined to help change, but only after her death. I was to beard that particular dragon with my very first novel, and in many ways my reputation has never recovered.

~ Erica Jong The Devil at Large

This is going to be short. Thanks to Erica Jong, I went out and bought a second hand copy of Henry Miller's The Wisdom of the Heart, and I plan on spending the rest of my day reading it. After that, I may dust off The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and give them a second go-around, as well.

So, without going into detail, let me just say, The Devil at Large is the first piece of non-fiction I've read in years, but Jong's 1993 gonzo-biography of the larger than life, (pornographer? mystic?) Henry Miller reads like anything but non-fiction. Never have the facts and somewhat facts ("make it all up," Miller had told her) breathed with so much life. I'm sure, from his ramshackle paradise in some Big Sur in the sky, Miller must be smiling and dancing.

If I knew how to make a half-star, The Devil at Large would receive my highest rating -- 4 and-a-half sparkling astral bodies, just to honour Jong's vivacious style of writing itself.

This is an inspiring book for writers, and for those who wish to write. The letters alone at the end of the book, between Jong and Miller, are worth the price of admission. They're frank, tender and reveal so much about the author and her mentor and, dare I say, muse, during the year or so immediately following the publication of Erica Jong's brave first novel, Fear of Flying.

You won't find this bio on the shelf, so I recommend Amazon or Indigo. If you're lucky, like I was, you may just wind up with a used edition in near mint condition, signed by the author.

Erica is amazing always
but when she writes about Henry, it is just genious.

I feel about Erica Jong pretty much the same way Erica Jong feels about Henry Miller.

Wonderful book and a fun and easy read.

Interesting, informative, and insightful. I walked away satisfied on many levels. Read it more like a reference book than a story.

Henry Miller is a strange case. In the 1930s he decided to write books which put in what all other books left out, so that included a whole lot of rude crude sex and nasty behavior and four letter words flying about like rancid confetti. So he got banned right left and centre. You betcha. He wrote raving ranting autobiographical stuff which got called “novels” because he made a lot of it up. (Somewhat similar to Jack Kerouac 30 years later but Jack was a clean living Zen master compared to filthy Henry.) Anyway every other author rewrites his or her life for the first novel, that’s not exceptional, but most of them avoid listing all the boffing and freeloading and upchucking they did while they were doing stuff to have stuff to write about. Boy, what a monkey on your back, having to do a lot of stuff so you have something to write about. Hats off to Nicholson Baker – in his first novel he wrote a detailed account of his lunch hour. Brilliant. Better than Henry Miller.

Erica Jong is a feminist and Henry Miller was a male chauvinist pig woman hater, so the cartoon goes. But when Fear of Flying, Erica’s first famous novel, was languishing in a tiny print run in 1973 Henry championed it all over the place and sent copies to all his friends and eventually it became a No 1 bestseller. He liked it because it was filthy and full of life. Erica and Henry became major pen pals. Henry was a major letter writer. (This shows you how long ago this all was. Ain’t no major letter writers around any more.)

So the feminist ended up writing this book about the chauvinist to figure out this whole thing – essentially whether it was right to ban Henry from the 30s to the 60s (this ban imposed officially by the public authorities) and then ban him all over again in the 70s (this ban imposed unofficially by feminists). An interesting but uncomfortable fate for a writer.

Erica has to admit she sees what the feminists were getting at, because it kind of stuck out like a big erect pink thing :

Henry is best known for his worst writing…It was Kate Millett’s thesis that Miller’s entire apprehension of sex was misogynistic. In this she was not wrong…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. The question comes 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?

Erica concludes that Henry is doing the mirroring, not the advocating. But Erica is very nervous to be publicly defending Henry, she seems to feel beleaguered and backed into a corner by the hordes of Millett-and-Dworkin fembots, and this makes he come out with some crazy talk:

Am I loving the fascist, the brute, the boot in the face? Kate Millett would probably say so. … (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.

In what sense Erica? Are we saying that Francis Bacon is art (wild and violent, chopped up meat and screaming popes) but Claude Monet is not (lily ponds and light rain) ?



("Not art" says Erica Jong)

Henry himself defended his own filthiness thus:

The modern writer, in using obscenity, is trying to rekindle the awe, the shock, the wonder that the ancients found at Delphi or Eleusis.

This also sounds like shite to me. But of course Henry wasn’t living in an age where you can pick up copies of Space Raptor Butt Invasion, The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack, Diary of a Virgin Stripper, Showers of Trump (A Billionaire Romance), Penetrated by Aardvarks and so forth.



Erica explains the violence : Men and women need each other so badly that they also hate each other when sex is at its hottest.

Well, you might try telling that to the judge. Actually, I’m sure a lot of murders wind up with that kind of explanation. (I loved her so much I smashed her brains and drowned her – you heard it a million times.) Okay, you don’t like that explanation of Henry’s misogyny? Here Erica tries a different tack :

Henry’s voice is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet – and isn’t that, after all, what women still are?

She also tries a thin slice of psychobabble :

Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out.

(I mean, get over it Henry. None of us got any more time in the old womb than you did and look, we turned out okay.)

Actually, says Erica, Henry didn’t hate women or want to do violence to them at all, this is a mistake. All that slagging off they get in his books is a bluff.

The violence of his depiction of women is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him.

Actually, when all’s said and done – Henry was a proto-feminist! (Bet you saw that one coming.)

Henry recognized at once that all male literature was frozen compared to the fecund delta of female prose.

(Erica, what could that sentence possibly mean in any part of the universe?)

A strange book all right.

******

Three books to re-read next (I read 'em years back and have, er, well, sort of forgotten them) :

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett