Free The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Page B

kept them very separate. “I never mixed the two—love and sex, which shows what an imbecile I must have been.”
How wonderful to be sitting beside her in the open trolley, on our way to Rockaway or Sheepshead Bay, and singing at the top of our lungs—“shine on, Harvest Moon, for me and My Gal” or “I don’t want to set the world on fire.”
    Cora was the girl he obsessively fantasized about even when he had his first real sexual relationship. Initiated crudely into sex in a brothel, Henry had to wait to meet Pauline Chouteau, his “first mistress,” to begin to explore his sexuality. After he began his affair with Pauline, he seems to have ruminated constantly on his inability to fuck the idyllic Cora—a failure of nerve he apparently regretted all his life. The man who was destined to liberate American literature first had to liberate himself.
    Henry graduated second in his class from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, a school in his old childhood neighborhood he had insisted on going to over the protestations of his parents. He was attached to the old neighborhood, but the old neighborhood had changed a lot since he was little. It was now dominated by newly emigrated Eastern European Jews, and Henry was one of the few gentiles.
    To the end of his life he referred to himself as “a goy,” as if he really were a Jew viewing himself as the outsider. This is remarkable, because Henry always had an ambiguous relationship with Jews, envying their culture and bookishness, repeatedly falling in love with Jewish women, having many Jewish boon companions, and eventually even introducing the Star of David into his watercolors as a sort of talisman. According to Anaïs Nin’s report in Henry and June , Henry claimed to be Jewish on their first meeting. If this is true, and not some misunderstanding of Nin’s, then it shows the deep nature of Henry’s ambivalence.
    In Henry’s high school world Jews were objects of both resentment and envy, and Henry was never to lose his complicated feelings toward them. He regarded them as outcasts like himself, eternal wanderers—but wanderers who at least belonged to a community. He envied them. He wanted to be one. “I too would become a Jew,” he says in Tropic of Cancer. “Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jews?”
    Passages like these have led to a persistent charge of anti-Semitism, which I find understandable but basically simplistic. The Henry I knew was not an anti-Semite, nor was he a misanthrope, though he railed against the ugliness and pettiness of humanity in all his books and letters. It is Henry’s lifelong habit of letting it all hang out that often makes him appear bigoted, if his words and phrases are taken out of context. One can find just as much criticism of Germans ( idiots, he calls them), of Swedes ( bores, to Henry), of Viennese ( treacherous ), of Italians ( two-faced ), and any other ethnic group you can name. Henry is not a bigot so much as he is an acid satirist of all human hypocrisies. Hear him on his own people:
My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
    And yet, for all his acid satire, he remains a cockeyed optimist, always sure there’s a pony in the shit pile, always merry and bright and the happiest man alive. This curious paradox in Henry’s character