In The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller we get more insight into the mind of my favorite writer and thinker. Miller's romantic view of the animal in us is always refreshing.  

Excerpts

“I have no money, no resources, no hope, I am the happiest man alive,” he exults on the first page of Tropic of Cancer. It is his exuberance, his freedom, his bumptiousness that is infectious, not his chronicles of copulation. That sensuous terrain Henry Miller called the land of fuck is seductive because of its radical innocence, not because of its repetitive frictions. Rubbing, after all, is just rubbing. But ecstasy partakes of freedom, a glimpse of the divine. Henry Miller used the body to transcend the body, and something in his impish, mischievous voice implied that he could extend this freedom to us, his readers. That was his primal seduction—freedom, not fornication.

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On the door, which was unlocked, was a quote from Meng-tse, an ancient sage invented by Herman Hesse as a pseudonym: When a man has reached old age and has fulfilled his mission, he has a right to confront the idea of death in peace. He has no need of other men, he knows them already and has seen enough of them. What he needs is peace. It is not seemly to seek out such a man, plague him with chatter, and make him suffer banalities. One should pass by the door of his house as if no one lived there.

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What Henry had that others so resented was wholeness. Though his daily life and his writing life were not necessarily one and the same, his exuberance, the happiness that comes across in his work, was visible in him even when he was old and ill. The voice he found expressed the abundance of the man. It was not the sex the puritans hated and feared. It was the abundance. It was not the four-letter words; it was the five-star soul.

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So I had unwittingly discovered the source of the Miller animosity, discovered it in myself (where one always discovers everything, as Freud knew). Miller is having too much fun. He seems unashamed of his failings. He lets all his warts show, and for this I envy him and hate him. For this I want to attack him, even though I am in his debt.

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Nature is red in tooth and claw, and men and women need each other so badly that they also hate each other when sex is at its hottest. Only the woman who utterly renounces her need for the penis, only the woman who shuns penetration and embraces exclusively her own sex, can find violence purely a phallic attribute. Cruelty is built into the dance of life, the longing of one sex for the other, the fear of rejection, the hatred for the lover who may leave, who may exercise the ultimate betrayal, abandonment.

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Vulnerability in love is at the root of each sex’s fear and hatred of the other. Naked need is at the bottom of all our rage. Which is not to say that Miller is not a chauvinist. He is. He was. My grandfather was. Most men of that generation (and the next, and the next) were. But the charge of chauvinism does not invalidate everything he has to say. It does not wash away the perfection of Maroussi or the energy Miller’s best prose has injected into American literature.

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What great writer do we not hate? The nature of greatness is that it irritates. It irritates by being new, by being honest, by baring bone.

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The generation that replaces us will be bewitched by electronic images that collage the works of all past ages without knowing or crediting their sources. Perhaps copyright will also pass away. Solitude surely will. And when these go, so inevitably will the Bill of Rights and the freedom of expression it promises. The meditative calm of one book/one reader will become a heresy, as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.

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Miller was the most contradictory of characters: a mystic who was known for his sexual writings, a romantic who pretended to be a rake, an old-fashioned Victorian sexist who could nevertheless be enormously supportive and loving to women, an accused anti-Semite who loved and admired Jews and had no use at all for prejudice or political dogma. He was, above all, a writer of what the poet Karl Shapiro called “wisdom literature.” If we have trouble categorizing Miller’s “novels” and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of “the well-wrought novel.” And Miller’s novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants—undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that “eternal and irrepressible freshness” Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic.

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Just as Shakespeare’s monarchism does not invalidate the beauty of his verse, Miller’s sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature.

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Men with domineering mothers (Miller, Mailer, Lawrence) are likely to become prisoners of sex who seek to break their chains with violent words. Under these violent words is often a quivering romanticism. “He has the German sentimentality and romanticism about 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Georges Belmont reports that when he arrived in Paris with Eve, the first thing he said was: “Do you need money, Georges? I have plenty.” He couldn’t wait to get rid of it. His inner abundance was such that he believed that the more he gave away, the more he actually had. Many people claim to believe this; few live by it.

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Henry Miller had the courage to ride his rage to the outermost limit and present an unforgettable picture of the world at war between cock and cunt. As Millett says, he is not a free man but a slave, and I think even Henry would be the first to agree with her notion of enslavement. He actually articulates this slavery himself in Insomnia and other books. But he did eventually get free, beyond the body, beyond the sex war, beyond the whore/Madonna split. His freedom came with the book most ignored by his critics: The Colossus of Maroussi. He transcended sex and war, as we all must, man and woman both, to become entirely human. And he came, at last, to forgive his mother—as we all must.

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Since sex is indeed a violent pagan force, we cannot blame the artist who attempts to mirror this force. Similarly, women who write about female sexuality, female rage, female vulnerability to rape, ought not to be attacked for mirroring life accurately. We must stop demanding of our artists, male and female, that they sweeten sour nature, that they cook what is meant to be raw. To do this is to demand a Walt Disney theme-park treatment of all our art.

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Why is sex important? The answer is so obvious as to need immense obfuscation and denial to be ignored. Sex is important because it is at the very root of life. The savage is not a sick man. The savage retains his sense of awe, mystery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is … That animal, lacking the self-consciousness which names things, puts no veil between itself and sex, between itself and death. Sex just is—namelessly. So is death.

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If woman is womb, the misogynist reasons, she is also tomb. If woman is life, she is also death. But the “primitive,” the “savage,” accepts this dichotomy unjudgmentally, making woman both the goddess of life and death; Kali; the Great Mother; Venus of Willendorf; the Goddess-Creatrix of the universe and everything in it. Woman is also the door to death, and to the afterlife. How much less primitive is the primitive than we are!

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Miller’s equation of womb with death is not an inevitable one; it is patriarchal one. By extension, it implies that only the wombless members of the human race can embody an imperishable spirit. It therefore designates men alone as prophets, preachers, and artists. Women are condemned to be vessels—vessels of birth and also vessels of death.

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And what was he liberating himself from? The bourgeois need to be a getter and spender, a cog in the wheel of life. When Miller left the Cosmodemonic and went to Paris with June, he was declaring himself free of consumerism. When he became a beggar, he was declaring himself no longer in the thrall of the great god Money. Miller’s economic and his sexual ideologies are totally related. Your money or your life force, says the great god Lucre! Your money or your balls. You can’t have both.

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We live in an age of mannered writing, an age of writers who forget that their purpose is to tell truths, not merely to be clever. Perhaps truth-telling makes us uncomfortable because we no longer have any consensus about what truth is.

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For the most part, the “fictional” novels we read today belong to a dead genre, a genre that somnolizes rather than awakens. People read mysteries, romances, and thrillers to anesthetize themselves, not to alert their souls. Most books are enslaving rather than liberating. They lull the senses; they hypnotize the moral imagination.

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Miller’s joy and self-liberation threaten people. They claim to be “bored” by his exuberance—a sure sign that something in it frightens the fearful. His cosmic definition of sex is still rejected. It is somehow easier to alternate between the dualities; sexomania one decade, sexophobia the next. The truth is, we will never fulfill our potential as a species until we properly understand Miller and his cry for wholeness.