The Devil at Large Read Free

in addressing Henry Miller—irrelevant as it is to the books he most wanted to be known by: The Colossus of Maroussi and The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder.
    Miller was faintly disreputable—that much I knew. He was associated with Paris in the thirties, Big Sur in the fifties, banned books, young Oriental women, sex. But I also remembered that when I was searching for the freedom to write Fear of Flying , I picked up Tropic of Cancer and the sheer exuberance of the prose unlocked something in me. And I also remembered reading an essay of Miller’s which had hit me right between the eyes. The modern writer uses obscenity as the ancient writer used the sacred, Miller alleged, in “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection.” The modern writer, in using obscenity, is trying to rekindle the awe, the shock, the wonder that the ancients found at Delphi or Eleusis. Something about that perception struck me as absolutely right.
    Interestingly enough, Tennessee Williams (as quoted by Gore Vidal in Two Sisters ), said something quite similar about the uses of sex in literature. He used sex, Williams told Vidal, to “raise the temperature of the audience. You key them up. Then you can tell them anything.”
    I had not studied Miller in Modern American Literature class at Barnard. Or in the Ph.D. program at Columbia. He was not taught. Bookworm and passionate scribbler that I was, Miller had largely eluded me. In part, this was because his most famous books were banned, and the others were poorly distributed or out of print.
    If I could have obtained Miller’s books easily, I would have gobbled them up. Friends who are five or ten years older report the tonic effect on their literary lives of smuggled copies of Tropic of Cancer brought home from Paris.
    Discovering literature at a time when publishing was undergoing a revolution led to abrupt changes in my freedom to read. I have a recollection of having had to track down Fanny Hill , or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure from a locked case in the rare-book room at Butler Library, but this recollection must go back to high school days because, by the time I was in graduate school, she was available in paperback almost everywhere.
    In the sixties, after the freeing of Tropic of Cancer , younger American writers began to respond to this new freedom with books that could never have been written, let alone published, before. After John Updike’s Couples in 1968 and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, American fiction dared to open the bedroom door. I think we conveniently tend to forget how recently all this occurred. And Miller was at the root of this change though he was never given official credit.
    Fear of Flying was a dare to myself to write from the female point of view with as much verve (and nerve) as Roth and Updike had written from the male. Fear of Flying traveled a road less rocky than Tropic of Cancer’s , but rocky nonetheless. The first printer refused to set type. TV networks would not take ads. And I remember my own astonishment at the sheer violence of some of the critical responses to the book. Cloistered in the Ph.D. program at Columbia, I had imagined that everyone knew Chaucer, Rabelais, Lawrence, and Joyce were full of sex—so why all the fuss? I had not bargained on book-chat sexophobia—of both the feminist and male chauvinist variety. It was as if I were advocating the barbecuing of infants!
    Nor was the book calculated to win easy acceptance in the hotly politicized climate of 1973. Separatist feminists attacked it as “soft on men” (because my heroine was heterosexual—something considered counterrevolutionary by some politically correct feminists of that era), and certain literary male chauvinists pronounced the liberated female voice trash. Had John Updike not rescued the book in The New Yorker , it might not have stayed in print long enough for Henry Miller to read it. So Miller’s first letter came as a planche de salut —a life raft—to a