The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page A

rhetoric—just as simplistic in its way as the simplistic rhetoric of male supremacy. But the feminist critique, valid as it is, neglects to address the main question Henry Miller poses: how does a writer raise a voice? How does a writer take the chaos of life and transform it into art? The raising of a voice is the red thread through chaos. The raising of a voice is the essence of freedom. It is where every writer, every person, must begin.
    Can a woman writer learn anything from Henry Miller’s voice? Doesn’t his sexism invalidate his work? Shouldn’t we boycott his work because of its underlying politics?
    I don’t think so. Just as Shakespeare’s monarchism does not invalidate the beauty of his verse, Miller’s sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature. Besides, if we proscribe all literature whose sexual politics we do not agree with, we shall have nothing left to read—not even the Bible, Homer, or the novels of Jane Austen (whose heroines are often happy to make conventional marriages).
    In fact, the freedom that Henry Miller discovered in finding his voice can inspire women writers as well as men.
    It is the voice of the outsider, the renegade, the underground prophet—and isn’t that, after all, what women still are?
    The problem of finding a voice is essential for all writers. It may be more fraught with external difficulties for women writers, because no one agrees what the proper voice of woman is—unless it is to keep silent—but it is still basically the same process of self-discovery. To define the self in a world that is hostile to the very notion of your selfhood is still every woman writer’s challenge. It was Henry Miller’s challenge, too—for different reasons. In tracing his self-liberation, we can, by analogy, trace our own.
    I do not mean to minimize the differences between the male writer’s odyssey and the female writer’s. The pen, as so many feminist critics have shown, has been treated as analogous to the penis in our literary culture. This accounts for the trouble that feminists, myself included, have with Henry Miller. Henry liberates himself, becomes the vagabond, clown, poet, but the open road he chooses has never really been open to women. Henry’s picaresque sexual odyssey was, for centuries, a male prerogative. Still, it is useful for writers of both sexes to trace the steps of his liberation. The freedom of Paris plus first-person bravado equals the voice we have come to know as Henry Miller.
    Listen:
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
    This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing….
    Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between his early, unsuccessful efforts at writing fiction, and Tropic of Cancer: he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette’s advice to the young Georges Simenon: “Now go and take out the poetry.”
    Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his true voice of authority merges at white heat with the subject he was born to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is life—raw, pulsating life: “A gob of spit in the face of Art.”
    For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover nature. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied twentieth-century literature.
    What was it