The Devil at Large (5 page)

The English publisher of
The Durrell-Miller Letters
had at first wanted to bowdlerize the photo on the jacket (a nude picture of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell on a Greek beach, circa 1940) by “cutting off Henry’s cock,” as Larry said.

“To think that at the end of my life I’d have to defend the
zizi
of a genius!”

He flung the witticism with perfect good humor and went on to explain that for him Miller had always been the
maître
and himself merely the acolyte.

“In order to find your own voice as a writer,” Durrell said matter-of-factly, “you have to have a nervous breakdown. Henry Miller and T.S. Eliot gave me myself…. And yet, I always considered myself a talented also-ran.” He knew, he told me, that a real book is “a tentative chance one takes on the infinite.” Miller wrote real books; he, Durrell, merely wrote literary ones. He had not, he felt, taken that chance on the infinite.

It was Durrell’s modesty that was so beguiling. He was not going to make Miller’s mistake “of accepting the Nobel Prize before it was offered.” He was touched when I brought him some of his poetry books to autograph, but when I also turned up a first edition of his novel
Tunc
, he said: “Oh, forgive me.”

Self-importance is endemic in literary circles. Larry had a lovely humility.
We are all just stumbling human beings,
his demeanor seemed to say,
doing the best we can.

Durrell thought of himself—and I daresay the “literary world” (whatever that is) thought of him—as “a minor poet,” who happened to write novels.
The Alexandria Quartet
(which my husband describes as “wading through halvah”) seems to me to deserve better than that. I have a rather higher opinion of Durrell’s poetry and of his wonderful last book about Provence (
Caesar’s Vast Ghost,
1990). But I liked him above all for understanding Henry’s courage, for understanding that the difference between a small writer and a great writer is that rare commodity,
the courage to create.

After he had shared his reminiscences about Henry on that gray January day in Provence, Durrell spoke of T.S. Eliot. What Larry said about Eliot seemed the absolute definition of the daring that makes a major writer: “He took full responsibility for being an artist in a maelstrom,” Larry said. “In a world of Masefields, Eliot seemed even more shocking then than now.” He was attacked for “The Wasteland,” but it rolled off his back like water off a duck’s. He knew, Durrell said, that one can only incarnate the unrealized pattern of the race by a “surgical operation on the self.”

Who knows if Durrell was a
maître
or an “also-ran”? Only time knows. But he and his generation of writers had a kind of courage that seems lacking now. Whether it is the fault of conglomerate publishing controlled by accountants or a failure of inner-directedness on the part of writers, my generation seems focused upon crowd-pleasing and success to the detriment of being free to tell the truth. As much as their publishers and agents, my contemporaries seem to worry about grosses and sales figures. And often the deal is far more memorable than the book. A sort of literary Gresham’s law has set in with the mass-marketing of hardbacks. The bestselling books of our time are rehashes of
Gone with the Wind
, gossipmongerings about “first” ladies, princesses, and movie stars, and ghostwritten
bubbe-mayses
by ephemeral celebrities. Miller didn’t write that way, nor did Durrell. No one can write a real book looking back over his shoulder at the critics or at the publisher’s number-crunchers.

“How is it to be old?” Larry asked, rhetorically. “Well, your balls drop off—you don’t know where to look. They cut your eyes out and don’t necessarily put them back at the same angle. But thank God I can still drink.”

“To Henry,” I proposed.

“Yes, to Henry,” he countered, emptying his glass.

And to Larry. And to a generation that knew what the calling of author meant. Authority. Being the place where the buck stops.

As we inch into the last decade of this century, the older generation of writers is disappearing day by day. Every week brings a new death crop: Alberto Moravia, Lawrence Durrell, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jerzy Kozinski. (The women writers are not dying as fast, but then the critics have already killed their reputations.) The idea that a writer can be a generalist, not a specialist, seems to die with this generation. The idea that poets can write prose and novelists poetry, that adults can write for children and that authors can maintain the radical innocence (if not the childishness) of children, seems to pass with them. I would like my generation of writers to catch some of their largeness of heart, some of their willingness to crack open genres and take a chance on the infinite.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry. But what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t take chances? “Hating” Henry, after all, was about my own fear of self-exposure. But without taking chances one cannot tell the truth, and what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t tell the truth?

Rimbaud restored literature to life; I have endeavored to restore life to literature.

—
HENRY MILLER,
THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS

For me, the book is the man that I am…. The confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man I am.

—
HENRY MILLER,
BLACK SPRING

M
OST 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.

“Lives of quiet desperation” Thoreau called such existence—though today’s version is noisy desperation. Occasionally, a visionary comes along who seems to have conquered the fears in himself and seems to live with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature—and admiring. They are also envious.

One who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero—or heroine. But such a figure inspires mixed emotions. We are provoked by their example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for having lived too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked, even killed, because of the envy of ordinary mortals. But if we could see the hero as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy but could rather emulate and learn.

Henry Miller was such a hero. He did not start out fearless but he learned to overcome his fears. And he wrote a book—
Tropic of Cancer
—that breathed fresh air into American—and world—literature. The fresh air he breathed was freedom. And it was like pure oxygen to those who would take it in. For the others, the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe, Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or a sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is there for the taking, he said. And those who refused to live fully had to blame him for their own failure.

Like Byron, Pushkin, George Sand, and Colette, Miller became more than a writer. He became a protagonist and a prophet—the prophet 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 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….