The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

of a new consciousness. His writings and his life mingled to create a larger myth, a myth that embodies the human attraction toward freedom. Miller’s writing is full of imperfection, bombast, humbug. Sometimes its very slovenliness makes it hard to defend. But the purity of his example, his heart, his openness, makes him unique among American writers. He will surely, however, draw new generations of readers to him. At present, Miller’s reputation still hangs in the balance and even those who have written about him seem to disapprove of him.
    Miller is in many ways a world unto himself. One searches in vain for a contemporary to compare him with. Tropic of Cancer burst forth into the world in the same year, 1934, that gave us F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night , Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales , Robert Graves’s I, Claudius , Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Wine from These Grapes , and Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.
    Not only is Miller’s characteristic style comparable to none of his contemporaries, but his spirit harks back to Whitman or Rabelais. In an age of cynicism, Miller remains the romantic, exemplifying the possibility of optimism in a fallen world, of happy poverty in a world that worships Lucre, of the sort of gaiety Yeats meant when he wrote of the Chinese sages in “Lapis Lazuli,” “their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
    I only knew Henry Miller in the last decade of his life. In a number of ways, he became my mentor.
    I was a very young writer, very green and suddenly famous; he was a very old writer, seasoned in both fame and rejection, when we met—by letter—and became pen pals, then pals. I feel lucky to have known him, but in some sense I only got to know him well after his death.
    Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake, an old-fashioned Victorian sexist who could nevertheless be enormously supportive and loving to women, an accused anti-Semite who loved and admired Jews and had no use at all for prejudice or political dogma. He was, above all, a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called “wisdom literature.” 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.
    In the profound shocks and upheavals of the twentieth century, from the trenches of World War I to Auschwitz to the holes in the ozone layer, we in the West have produced a great body of “wisdom literature,” as if we needed all the wisdom we could garner to bear what may be the last century of humans on earth. Solzhenitsyen, Primo Levi, Günter Grass, Pablo Neruda, Idries Shah, Krishnamurti, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir have all written predominantly wisdom literature. Even among some of our most interesting novelists—Saul Bellow, Natalia Ginzberg, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Christina Stead, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Marguerite Yourcenar—the fictional form is often a cloak for philosophical truths about the human race and where it is heading. The popularity of writers like Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, M. Scott Peck, and Robert Bly in our time also serves to show the great hunger for wisdom. We are, as Ursula LeGuin says, “dancing at the edge of the world,” and it takes all our philosophy to bear it.
    Henry Miller remains the most disturbing and misunderstood of prophets. Because even the style of writing he discovered has become convention; it is hard today to grasp how electric his voice was in 1934. The feminist critique of the sixties came in to bury Henry under