I've finally realized that Erica Jong is a narcissist. The book was supposed to be about Henry Miller, but it ended up being about Erica Jong.

I read this in the 90s when everyone was screaming about sexual harassment and sexual politics in general. This was a welcome relief from all that and enlightening too. The unlikely correspondence between these writers is refreshing as you see that it's the inner qualities that connect people, not the biological ones.

Henry Miller was a major reason I became a writer. His exuberant, rambunctious style and huge love of just being alive, the raw edged description of his own (slightly fictional) character and that of his friends in Tropic of Cancer, life at the 'Villa Chaotica' as a cheerful poverty-artist, gave me permission to write in an imperfect way, which is the only way to create art. I'd been so intimidated by the polished novelists I'd read that it wasn't until I found in Miller a voice that made me say, "I can do that." He lets all the seams show.

So when I saw Jong, also a lover of the things of this earth, the body, truth telling and all, had written a book on Miller, had to grab it.

She had met Henry when he wrote to her following publication of her 'Fear of Flying', which publication had been up to then treated rather gingerly by the literary establishment. He loved the book, he bought multiple copies and handed them out to all his friends, talked it up--and a literary friendship was born.

And I found that Jong had exactly the same experience I had as a young writer, that Miller gives you the freedom to write. "Henry's story and my story have one thing above all in common: The search for the courage to be a writer. The courage to be a writer is, in a senses, the courage to be an individual, no matter what the consequences.

"Doris Lessing points out in her introduction to a reissue of The Golden Notebook," Jong notes "that the 'artist as exemplar' is a relatively new protagonist for the novel, and wasn't the rule one hundred hears ago when heroes--there being few heroines--were more often explorer, clergymen, soldiers, empire builders. This may well be because the artist is seen as the only true individual left in an increasingly chained society. Both Henry's persona "Henry Miller" and the real historical Henry Miller spoke to this longing for freedom. He freed himself--and then he passed the gift along to us."

She also talks about being furious at Henry, because of his freedom--and I can remember this too. When a friend asks why she's having such trouble with Miller, she replies, "Because of his sexism, his narcissism, his jibes at Jews. And because he's so free... I work hard at my writing and he's such a slob. I rewrite and rewrite and he lets it all hang out. He's such a blageur and I try so hard to be honest. Everything is cake to him. He treats women horribly and doesn't seem to care. He turns on the people who help him. Even his suffering seems like fun."

"So I had unwittingly discovered the source of the Miller animosity, discovered it in myself... Miller is having too much fun. He seems unashamed of his failings. He lets all his warts show, and for this I envy him and hate him. For this I want to attack him, even thought I am in his debt. Is my chelousy of his freedom poisoning my affection? Does my reaction show why the happy man--that rarity--is not beloved by the general unhappy lot of manunkind (and womanunkind?)"

She has an assignment to write the book and kept pushing back the deadline.... why? "I hate miller," I told my friend. "I don't want to be his flame-keeper. I don't want to sere the patriarch. I have books of my own to write. Fuck Henry Miller's memory! So what if he's misunderstood--we're all misunderstood."

"... But I was busy hating Miller--have I forgotten? Hating him for going to Paris, for living off women: June, Anais, Lepska, Eve, countless others. The life open to him was never open to me. The happy vagabond on his 'racing wheel', the clochard sleeping under the bridges of Paris; the psychopath of love fucking the wives of his hosts; the guiltless fucker, the schnorrer, the artist of the say touch, the free meal, the man who comes to dinner and eats the hostess.

"Who am I to identify with this bounder, this braggart, this blowhard? I, the A student, the PhD candidate, the scribbler of sonnets who then rebelled against academe and wrote impolite novels. I should have identified with Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson or Simone de Beauvoir. And of course I did. But there was something in the lives of literary women (except Colette, except George Sand) that smelled of the lamp. Our heroines had all been forced to choose between life and work and those who chose work were strange as women. And those who chose womanhood sometimes were forced to submerge the work. Or else they died in childbirth.... In short, I hate him because I love him. In short, I hate him because he's great enough to encompass the contradictions of life."

I wasn't as interested in their mutually complimentary letters, or in the various controversies around. Miller, but earthy and passionate insights about Miller and the writing life, about joy and creativity and obsession, are well nworth its place on the writing shelf. I cannot imagine anyone reading this and. not wanting to at least try Tropic of Cancer. Now I want to go back to the unexpurgated Nin diary of her Miller years, Henry and June.

There was much controversy about Miller in that time, there was a streak in the feminist movement that was in favor of censorship and kind of anti-sex--though there was always controversy about Miller because he was so uncensored to himself and the page--and Jong does him the return favor, debunking common misunderstandings

"'In order to find your own voice as a writer,' Durrell said matter-of-factly, 'you have to have a nervous breakdown.'"

Not so long ago I read about this book on the net and was thinking I should read it, only to discover that I referred to it in some detail in a monograph I wrote in the mid-nineties. Oh, so I'd read it; probably, I imagine, even owned a copy; wrote about it...and yet it would seem to be a most forgettable book.

I have this idea I keep giving Jong's books too many stars.

A thoughtful and passionate discussion of the battle of the sexes.

Most of what Erica Jong, author of the controversial '70s novel Fear of Flying, is saying in The Devil at Large can be summed up as follows: "If we have trouble categorizing Miller's 'novels' and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of 'the well-wrought novel.' And Miller's novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants -- undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that 'eternal and irrepressible freshness' Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic."
Jong asserts that "it is not unusual to hate great writers before we love them," and Miller was such a mass of contradictions in both his personal life and his writing, that he's often misunderstood. "The Devil At Large" is a defence of Miller by someone who started out loathing him, and who grew to respect him when she was around his "magnetic life-force." When Miller unveiled his now-famous Tropic of Cancer, it was banned nearly everywhere, and only found its audience decades after being written. Jong says that "The four-letter words in Tropic of Cancer distracted everyone but the most diligent from the truth of Miller's discovery: peace only comes to a mortal creature when he starts to see himself as part of the flow of creation."
I'm not a huge fan of biographies, but this one flows like prose. Jong is intelligent, and she can't suppress the vitality that was there in Fear of Flying, even when focused on a narrow and singular question: "Why Henry Miller?" I loved this and highly recommend it.

This is not an ordinary biography. It goes places not normally seen and is meant for the true Henry Miller fan.
Erica Jong and Henry Miller became friends in the last 6 years of his life. He had read Fear of Flying and wrote her a "fan letter". They had a lot in common, both being treated as pornographers due to the nature of their writing. Much of this book goes into these comparisons. It appears that for both of them this writing was very liberating and freed them to move on to their next writing.
Most persons, if they even know who Henry Miller is, when asked to name any of his books would only be familiar with his banned Tropic of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn. This is so unfortunate as there was so much more to Henry and these were written so early on, in the 30's.
He lived many interesting lives and his books reflected that diversity.
Starting with the boy from Brooklyn, then the ex-pat writer in Paris. WWII chased him back to the USA and he became the re-pat vagabond rediscovering his country. The bohemian Henry settled into Big Sur, Ca for a long stay. And then finally, the octogenarian Henry held court in Pacific Palisades for the remainder of his years.
It was the books of the re-pat Henry that got my attention, as the earlier ones did not hold an interest for me. I loved his descriptions of my country as seen through his eyes. And then when he moved on to Big Sur, one of my favorite places, I was hooked. His words are just poetry for me.

"Most people are not free. Freedom, in fact, frightens them. They follow patterns set for them by their parents, enforced by society, by their fears of 'they say' and 'what will they think?' and a constant inner dialogue that weighs duty against desire and pronounces duty the winner."

"First we must see the problem inside ourselves; then we must see it in society; then we must fight to change it."

"Honesty is the beginning of all transformation."

"In 5 minutes some men have lived out the span of an ordinary man's life. Some men use up numbers of lives in the course of their stay on earth."

"The struggle of the human being to emancipate himself, that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own making, that is for me the supreme subject."

"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."

"Fear is a sign - usually a sign that I'm doing something RIGHT."

"I lost myself so I could find myself."

I'm not sure what I think of this book.

I don't usually like biography as a genre: the author is under too much pressure to include everything, simply because it happened. The span of a life is not always the most interesting story. Jong avoids that problem here. She offers an abbreviated biography of Henry Miller, based on published material and her own interactions with him. The brevity serves her well, and she is able to distill Miller's essence nicely. As is the wont in current scholarship--and correct, I think--she sees him primarily as a religious writer, using sex and obscenity to shock the reader and push him or or her to consider the presence of divinity. It's not such a remarkable claim, given that Miller himself said the same thing again and again. But, as Jong notes, his claims about himself were usually ignored, overwhelmed by the salaciousness of his writing.

The rest of the book is an attempt to rescue Miller from obscurity--obscurity caused by those who censored him because of his obscenities, and, later, by feminist critics who saw him as a misogynist, and anti-Semite. Jong does good job resuscitating Miller's reputation on these fronts, in part by admitting that, yes, he was patriarchal, yes he used and (emotionally) abused women. No, he was not a role model. But that his writing, nonetheless, has some wisdom, a way of engaging the world that is open--liberated. That while he embraced obscenity asa necessary technical device in his writing, he was wholly uninterested in vulgarity. Indeed, he tried his hand writing pornography and failed--because his writerly concerns were other than sex; they just used sex.

Jong offers a personal, though defensible, hierarchy of Miller's best works, valuing his earliest two Tropic books and Black Spring (Miller's own favorite) above the Rosy Crucifix, which, she says, reads as self-parody. She attributes the unevenness of his work to his outsider status: he never found a sympathetic editor who could get him to differentiate the shit from the good stuff. There's a certain truth to this, but even edited authors often produce bad or overwritten stuff (I'm looking at you, Thomas Wolfe). In a sense, the mixture is what you are destined to get from Miller, as Miller: he couldn't tell the good from the bad--and wouldn't have let anyone make the distinction for him--because to him it was all good. The mark of the true artist was not technical virtuosity but revelation.

The paratext that rounds out the book is not especially useful. Jong provides an annotated bibliography, which really only hits the most obvious of Miller's work, and repeats the some judgments she offered in the main section of the book, often word for word. I'm not sure of the point of the imaginary dialogue, as we have real dialogue between them--in the form of letters, which are also printed here--and I recognize some of Miller's responses simply as condensations of his writings elsewhere.

The book also has two other aims. Part of it is a memoir, recounting Jong's experience being thrust into the limelight with the publication of her "Fear of Flying," which was first almost lost to obscurity before being salvaged by John Updike (talk about male chauvinists!) and Miller. She then became a lightning rod for discussion about sex and the sexual revolution in the 1970s. Miller helped her navigate this terrain, having been a similar figure for years.

The other part of the book is an attempt to discuss the meaning of sex in public, in light of the rise of feminism in the 1970s and AIDS in the 1980s. These are interesting, I suppose, but also date the book horribly, which is why I have yet to make up my mind about it. The theme she is addressing--the meaning of sex in being a human--is a transcendent one, but it is set against parochial--if also important, life-and-death--concerns. The issues today are different--not distant, just different--but the problem remains. I guess I'd maybe even like to read an update on the book, twenty years later now, and see how Jong thinks the problems evolved.

Love the treatment of Henry Miller's writing and persona, but Jong's dismal prophesies about the new world of writers and readers is rather embarrassing and certainly presumptuous. She writes that the current generation of writers is tepid and afraid to write the truth, holding up her (and Miller's, but mostly her) generation as a sterling example of a dying breed of honest writers and accepting readers, overlooking the fact that Miller's works were largely banned and therefore unavailable to readers for several years after they were written. I love when she writes about Miller, I don't mind when she writes about herself, and I hate when she tries to write about me.

This is a one-of-a-kind kind of book on the writer Henry Miller - it is part biography over Miller, part literature analysis of the role he has played, but also what has happened after him, and part a description of Jong's own relationship with him (as friends, admirers and writing colleagues). What comes out is a picture of a complicated man, that you can both love and hate (even at the same time), and it all adds up to quite an interesting read. You don't have to love Miller's books to read this one - but if you are uncomfortable reading about sex it would be best to stay away.