The Devil at Large Read Free Page B

arrived with the British reviews and softened them considerably. All those little well-bred boys who think sex is “horrible and embarrassing!” Amazing to find the world still so full of them.
    I mailed the two books of poems to you in a post box that frequently disappears from the corner, so I was really delighted that you received them and that you responded so generously. Some characters in this neighborhood are running an ingenious hustle in which they remove the mailbox from the sidewalk, take it to a nearby basement where they break it open and remove any checks. I never know when I’m going to find the corner bereft of mailbox (with those four tell-tale holes in the street where the bolts were). Somehow it seemed more exciting to mail the books in that mailbox!
    I was delighted with your most recent letter and the enclosed fortune. Yes, my name is Chinese and so is my husband—who is not nearly as inscrutable as he was a few years ago when I used him as a model for Bennett Wing. The book has changed him much for the better. Life follows literature, doesn’t it? Have you often found that people you’ve written about are much improved by the experience—humanized, so to speak? I’d really be curious to know!
    I haven’t read Hermann Hesse since I was 15 and mooning over Siddhartha . I must read him again, now that I know a little more about writing and people. He will probably seem like a totally different writer.
    I wonder whether you would like Sylvia Plath’s poetry. She is a splendid poet (much less good as a novelist), but her work is so life-denying and obsessed with suicide that I think you would be put off. She learned a great deal from Theodore Roethke and has the same kinds of very condensed, laconic and intense images, but all her brilliance is in the service of her death obsession—she did finally take her own life at the age of 31. A terrible waste, really. I know many of the details of her life and know that she was always a rather disturbed woman—but I persist in believing that her suicide was hastened by the fact that she had to live in England with all those goddamned Englishmen! Her husband, Ted Hughes, is a hulking Yorkshireman who always seemed like a warlock to me, and the literary gents in London never seemed to have much use for women themselves. They mostly like each other, and thrive on literary infighting. Healthy sexuality is so unknown to them that when they come upon it, they shriek with horror. My character Adrian was something of a secret pervert himself. His trip was not sex, but mind-manipulation. Nevertheless, it was true that the intensity of that experience brought Isadora to her senses….
    I wish I could convey to you how much joy and courage I have gotten from your writing in the past. Just last week I was reading and rereading your remarks on obscenity and literature in Remember to Remember . They seem brilliant to me. I think it’s true that the modern artist uses “obscenity” as the ancient artist used the miraculous—to jolt the reader and create an epiphany. I could go on and on about your work and the things it’s done for me at different times in my life, but I’ll stop in the interest of getting this letter to California (via my floating mailbox).
    Love and thanks
    Erica Jong
    Henry responded almost instantaneously.
From bed—May 6, 1974
    (Can’t always see clearly, lost one eye during recent operation.)
    Dear Erica Jong—I hope you don’t think I’m a nut ! I am only your devoted fan, and more than ever “just a Brooklyn boy.” I write you with a smile on my lips because everyone is Talking about you. You are the sensation of the year! I am going to order copies of your books so I can give them to those who can’t afford to buy them. It seems to me my best readers—in the beginning—could not afford to buy my books. What a struggle I had to sell Tropic of Cancer to the public. If it had not been for the hundreds of letters I wrote (praising the