Free The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Page A

Brooklyn, he invariably stressed the positive: “Born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Got everything I craved, except a real pony.”
    He seems to have had a pervasive sense of entitlement, a sense that he would always be cared for. When the kids in his kindergarten class were given Christmas gifts, he refused to accept them, knowing that he would do better at home. “I know Santa is going to bring me better things,” he told his mother. His mother’s reaction to this was to slap him, grab him by the earlobe, and drag him back to school to apologize to the teacher.
    “I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong,” Henry said years later. “This … left in my childish mind the feeling that my mother was stupid and cruel.”
    His friends were other immigrant kids—Polish-American, Italian-American, and Irish-American. In his many autobiographical writings, he mentions Stanley Borowski, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul, Eddie Carney, and Johnny Dunne. The whole microcosm of the American melting pot was found in Henry’s Brooklyn. He was not to find another world as varied and congenial till he went to Paris in 1930. “There in Paris, in its shabby squalid streets teeming with life, I relived the sparkling scenes of my childhood.”
    What kind of marriage did Henry’s parents have? This incident, recounted in Henry’s Book of Friends , evokes it, seen through Henry’s child-eyes:
After dinner in the evening my father would dry the dishes which my mother washed at the sink. One evening he must have said something to offend her for suddenly she gave him a ringing slap in the face with her wet hands. Then I remember distinctly hearing him say to her: “If you ever do that again I’ll leave you.” I was impressed by the quiet, firm way in which he said it. His son, I must confess, never had the courage to talk that way to a woman.
    Sensitive, creative, inclined to drown his sorrows in drink, Henry’s father obliged Louise to be the tyrannical disciplinarian. But this incident, which Henry relates with such approbation, shows the way Henry’s father nevertheless shaped his son’s ideals of manhood. Henry exhibited the same sensitivity and dreaminess as his father, but in his most notorious novels he invents a fast-fucking, fast-talking, hypermanly antihero—just the man to subdue the otherwise overbearing Louise.
    Henry was a great reader as a child, and loved to read aloud. He adored Old Testament stories, and he was reading long before he began elementary school. In school he was both pushed to achieve by the fierce disappointment his mother experienced with Lauretta, and pushed to make mischief in rebellion against his mother’s tyranny.
    He experienced his first taste of the forbiddenness of sex with Joey and Tony Imhof, his “country” friends in Glendale, Long Island, whose father, John Imhof, was “the first artist to appear in my life.” (Imhof was a friend of Henry’s father and was a watercolorist who also made stained-glass windows for churches.) Henry’s father revered Imhof for being an artist, and so, of course did Henry. We can trace Henry’s reverence for artists directly to this childhood mentor.
    Henry and the Imhof boys played together sexually between the ages of seven and twelve—a fact one of Miller’s biographers points to with horror, as if homosexual experimentation were not the rule rather than the exception in childhood.
    Henry seems to have been both fascinated and terrified by sex. In Book of Friends , he reports being invited by a girl named Weesie, a friend of his Yorkville cousin, Henry Baumann, to make love to her. Henry was afraid, and hesitated until the opportunity passed. He also hesitated for three years with his great high school love, Cora Seward, a blonde angel whom he idealized too much to fuck. Henry writes about her in Book of Friends: “Strange that I never thought of fucking her,” he says. But Cora was love to him, not sex. And at this time in his life he