Free The Devil at Large by Erica Jong

women,” Anaïs Nin said of Miller in Henry and June. “Sex is love to him.” How can we reconcile this observation with the pop image of Miller the fuckabout misogynist?
    The feminist attack on Miller sees in his anger toward women a disregard of them. I think, on the contrary, he grants them too much power and thus must then expose and destroy them. Miller’s depictions of ravenous cunts are akin to the horned hunter’s quarry depicted on the walls of the caves of Lascaux: the painter-shaman fixes the image of the fearsome creature as a magical way of containing its mystery and capturing its power forever.
    Miller’s example shows us the dark heart of sexism: a man trying to demolish the power he knows is greater than his own—the power to give life, the seemingly self-sufficient womb.
    Henry was so enthralled by women that he sought to demystify their mysterious parts through the violent verbal magic of his books. The violence is rooted in a sense of self-abnegation and humiliation before them. He is, as the Freudians would say, counterphobic. Terrified of women, he reduces them to sex objects, cunts if you will, which he subdues with his penis and his pen.
    He had to kill his mother to become a writer. He had to skewer her on his pen even as the “Henry Miller” of The Tropics and Clichy and The Rosy Crucifixion skewers cunts on his cock. His enchantment in later years by Oriental women (his Japanese fifth wife, Hoki, his last beloved, the Chinese actress Lisa Liu), his adoration of exotic Anaïs, of the femme fatale June, all betray an unacknowledged longing for another mother: the sweet caring Madonna of his early childhood whom for most of his life he cannot even remember.
    At the end of Henry’s life he told Twinka Thiebaud of a dream that inspired him to rewrite his mother as a Madonna:
Suddenly my mother appears and she’s completely different from my memories of her. She is wonderful, radiant, sensitive, even intelligent! After writing that piece [“Mother, China, and the World Beyond” in Sextet ], my view of her softened. I had created a mother of my own making, one I could relate to, one I could love even. It occurred to me that if my mother had been like the mother I had dreamed about, perhaps I wouldn’t have become a writer after all. I might have become a tailor like my father. I might have been an upstanding pillar of society like she wanted me to be.
    So the courage to create is fueled by rage. ( Courage, after all, could be imagined as heart plus rage .) Perhaps this accounts for the problem critics have with women creators: women are not allowed rage. But only through rage can we separate from our parents and become autonomous creators. Every artist has to make this transition, and for women it is a forbidden one.
    Look at how hard it was for Henry—even as a man! He had to renounce his parents, expatriate himself, find a new mother-muse in Anaïs Nin. (June, his second wife, had been the taunting, torturing mother who, despite the pain she caused him, was the first person to believe in him as a writer.) We can never reconstruct the “real” Madonna-mother of Henry’s early childhood. She left no physical traces. But we can posit her existence by tracing Henry’s psychological history.
    With a raging mother, a retarded sister, a drunken father, Henry’s childhood cannot have been easy, yet he remembers it as having been “glorious”—and the streets of Brooklyn were, according to him, his preparation for the writer’s life.
Summer nights in New York, or Brooklyn, as it happened to be, can be wonderful when you’re a kid and can roam the streets at will …
    Henry says in the Book of Friends, written in his eighties. Looking back eight decades from Pacific Palisades to Brooklyn, Brooklyn—specifically Driggs Avenue in the fourteenth ward, later on Decatur Street in the Bushwick section—seemed like the second Eden of his life.
    When Henry recounted his childhood memories of