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

about Paris in 1930 that enabled Henry Miller to find his voice? And what was it about New York that prevented it?
    The New York Henry left when he settled in Paris in March 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities to it. In New York it was a dishonor to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write écrivain on one’s passport and hold one’s head high. In Paris it was assumed (it still is) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum. More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist—an attitude that unfortunately persists to our day. “In Europe,” as his friend the photographer Brassaï says in his book on Henry Miller, “poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States, it represents a moral fault, a dishonor that society cannot pardon.”
    To be a poor artist in America is thus doubly unforgivable. To be an artist in America is to be a criminal (its criminality only pardoned by writing bestsellers or selling one’s paintings at outrageous prices to rich collectors and thus feeding the obsolete war machine with tax blood). But to be poor and an artist: this is un-American.
    Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? “Poets have to dream,” says Saul Bellow, “and dreaming in America is no cinch.”
    In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of dreamers leads us to cripple them with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic riches of our country—wealth and emotional health—come from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honor the money counters and money changers over the inventors and dreamers who give them something to count and change.
    This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis we must explore in retracing Henry Miller’s steps. It comes, of course, out of puritan-ism’s assumption that the dream life and imagination are suspect. And it results in a love-hate relationship with sexuality—a violent alternation between fascination and disgust which I call sexomania/sexophobia. We must understand how Henry was buffeted by these powerful forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn.
    “It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand,” says Brassaï. “It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.”
    “Nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America,” Miller writes in Tropic of Capricorn.
    Miller’s life as a protagonist, as a mythic hero—or antihero—is intimately related to this struggle between puritanism and the life of the dreamer. Henry made a religion of art (as did his disciples). In doing this he was following in the footsteps of Whitman, his model of the American writer.
    There are at least two Millers in the books and articles that have been written about Henry. One is the real, historical Henry Miller, born in 1891 in New York, died in 1980 in Los Angeles—a character full of contradictions. The other is Miller the mythic hero or antihero, whose hegira is emblematic of the hegira of the American artist.
    Constrained by puritanism, provoked by a society in which dreaming is no cinch, Miller the antihero creates a way for an American—or anyone—to be an artist, and in doing so makes a path for all of us. One is continually struck by the interplay between these two Millers, but my interest is principally in the Miller who leads the way for a