What Do Women Want? (17 page)

Now, in the age of AIDS panic, uncut Nin journals are gradually reappearing. But Nin is out of fashion as a contemporary feminist, because the political winds have shifted. She is a seductress in a time when all seduction is presumed to be rape, a sensitive chronicler of inner emotion and psychoanalytic transformation when all that is wanted from women writers is angry agitprop which repudiates Freud and all “dead white males.”

But the largeness of her contribution will remain for other times, other politics. Like Colette, she told the inner story of a woman’s life from girlhood to old age. She committed neither suicide nor creative suicide. She was indefatigable (as every artist must be), and she left a body of work that other women writers can build upon. We can love her or hate her. Either emotion will be useful for our future writing. But she is there like a mountain. She must be climbed.

There are signs that as this century ends, her innovations have become part of our literature. The incest taboo has been broken. Autobiography and fiction have been merged into one form. Women writers have a degree of freedom undreamed of by her generation. And the unexpurgated journals will keep on coming. They will continue to be attacked by women who are afraid of freedom and by men who like women that way. But for our daughters and granddaughters, they will be there. When tomorrow’s women are ready, they will read Anaïs Nin and be transformed.

Future generations will discover her with the excitement we felt when we discovered Virginia Woolf, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Angela Carter, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

She will give confidence to women writers who need to validate their own subject matter.

Perhaps that’s the greatest influence a writer can have on the future: to inspire new practitioners of the craft. They will adore her, detest her, debate her, rewrite her, reinterpret her. And why not? She is mother. And mother is the earth from which we spring.

—HENRY MILLER,
SEXUS

 

 

 

All of us,
if we are honest, know that art is a fart in the face of God. Only the establishment artist, whose work exists principally to justify the injustices of the status quo, flatters himself that he is godlike. The renegade, the maverick, the rebel, the Henry Miller, the Petronius, the Rabelais, the Blake, the Neruda, the Whitman, knows that in part what makes his life’s work valuable is its criminality. If somewhere along the line he is
not
banned, burned, deprived of his livelihood, cursed by the academics, denigrated by the self-appointed guardians of art, then he knows he is doing something wrong.

Henry Miller was such a criminal.

On the bottom of his letter paper was printed:
When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.
Other sheets gave the following quote from one of his friends:
Henry, sometimes I’m obliged to sleep in my car—but when I have to take a shit, I go to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

If Henry used the word “shit” a lot, it was because no other word so well conveyed what he thought of the world. But the word became clean in his mouth. He purified the excrement of life and made it roses. “I want a classic purity,” he once said, “where dung is dung and angels are angels.” He knew that angels could not be angels without dung, that a world of angels would be devoid of literature.

Those who criticized him—those who, to the end, denied him his place in the pantheon of poets—were in part, unknowingly, reacting to the fears his honesty roused in them. Like Swift, he lashed the world to bring it to its senses. Like Swift, he was a heartbroken lover of mankind, a naïf pretending to be a cynic. “Just a Brooklyn boy . . .” he often said of himself.

Sometimes I used to think that the critics who hated Henry were really suffering from nooky envy. He seemed to spend so much time fucking, and fucking so
guiltlessly
! How could the perpetually guilty be anything but envious? But even in his fucking he was literary. My former husband Jonathan Fast once asked him if he had ever
really
screwed a woman with a carrot, and he laughed uproariously and denied it—though he always maintained his books were autobiographies, not novels.

I disagree with him here. The Henry Miller of the novels is surely a comic persona, a picaro, a quester, a hero in search of the Holy Grail.

“What is a hero?” Henry once wrote: “Primarily one who has conquered his fears.” And in the
persona
of Henry Miller, the
real
Henry Miller created a fearless alter ego, one who never quailed at a cunt, never wilted, fainted, or failed. As the ancient hero was fearless in battle, the modern hero must be fearless in bed. Thus has our sphere of heroic action shrunk from a meadow to a mattress!

The fearless hero Henry Miller impersonated was often his opposite. Anaïs Nin described his fear of travel, his sensitivity to dislocation, and his extreme dependence on her—and on the other women in his life. I have always thought his impersonation of Braveheart (or Braveprick) stemmed from his massive insecurity. He deluded the world so well that he almost deluded himself.

Henry Miller admired the gurus and the sages even more than he admired the poets and the painters. Moreover, he knew that the essential characteristic of a sage is his gaiety. He would have agreed with Yeats’s line “Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.” And so were Henry’s eyes—even the blinded one—till the end.

I imagine him singing hosannahs on his deathbed and muttering to the maker of the cosmos. His death was clearly a much-sought release, at which all his friends and family rejoiced. I hear that he rejoiced, too. Trapped in an ailing body, he had failed from year to year. He deserved better than such frail flesh, and even in his death he has not left us.

I met him when he was already an old man—met him through literature, not life. Though he never read his contemporaries (except I. B. Singer), though he was said by his detractors to be a sexist and an anti-Semite, though he was blind in one eye and tired quickly, he was coaxed by a friend into reading
Fear of Flying,
and he responded with a torrent of applause, enthusiasm, and unpaid agentry. Many of my foreign publishers were a gift of his enthusiasm.

He was the most generous writer I have ever known (and I have known one or two who, in their generosity, flouted the general rule that writers hate all other writers except the safely dead). He tirelessly wrote to German, French, Japanese, Dutch publishers on my behalf. Asked to do nothing, he did everything—from writing a preface to the French edition of my novel, to writing an essay on the op-ed page of the
New York Times
about it (an essay from which the word “horny” had to be deleted as unacceptable to a “family newspaper”).

I was bowled over by his kindness. Day after day the letters arrived—written in black felt pen on yellow legal sheets or on his own stationery with its curious aphorisms printed at the bottom. My own replies were rather stiff at first. How to cope with the excitement of having a living legend actually writing to
me
! It was daunting. But Henry’s letters were so loose and spontaneous that you had to respond in kind. Having freed himself, he freed everyone he touched; it was his great gift. There was no question that I would see him when I went to California.

I came at the most awful and wonderful time in my life. An early marriage breaking up, a film promised of my first novel but turning to heartbreak before my eyes, sudden notoriety that alarmed me as much as it delighted me. Henry’s house in Pacific Palisades became a refuge of peace in this maelstrom. At his dining room table, listening to him talk of Cendrars, Picasso, Brassaï, John Cowper Powys, Marie Corelli, Gurdjieff, Knut Hamsun, Lawrence Durrell, and Anaïs Nin (and Isaac Singer, whom he—and I—admired above all living writers), I felt safe and protected even in the city of the Lost Angels!

Henry was frail when I met him in 1974. Only rarely would he let me take him (and his friends) out to dinner—usually at the Imperial Gardens, a rather seedy Japanese restaurant on the Sunset Strip, which was his favorite eatery in Los Angeles. More usually, Twinka Thiebaud, his cook and devoted caretaker, made us dinner at home and Henry held forth for the assembled throng. His house was full of young people, often including his kids, Valentine and Tony, and Henry would feed everyone—as, in his Paris days, everyone had fed him. In the last months (when I had already moved to Connecticut), it was rumored that one or two of these young people may have exploited him. But that first autumn I knew him, he was still well enough to write in bed, to emerge for garrulous meals before he grew tired and had to be wheeled back into his room, to grope his numerous nubile visitors, though not (he always maintained) to fuck them. He lived his last years (as he wrote in a letter to me) in the most delicious erotic fantasies. Now and then he copped a feel—though not of
my
breasts. I was not his physical type at all (he adored lithe Asian women), or maybe he thought of me as too bookish, for he always made a great point of how literary I was.

Henry indeed loved women, but he loved them more for the imaginary women he created through them than for the women they actually were. He was a true romantic even in his rebellion against romanticism. Like most romantics, he did not always see people with perfect clarity. He loved or he hated. When his love failed, he often repudiated the love object totally. When a friend died, he ceased to think about him. He claimed he never mourned. He lived in the present more completely than any person I have ever known. For this alone, he shone out from other men as an enlightened soul.

But he
hated
his reputation as a pornographer and longed, despite himself, for literary respectability. He accepted the Légion d’honneur with predictable derision but with unpredictable gratitude, and each year he lusted deeply after the Nobel Prize. Each year, at his urging,
all
his friends and disciples recommended him. Each year, the dynamite factory passed him by.

When a publisher had the temerity to suggest that Henry and I collaborate on a book to be titled, humorlessly enough,
A Rap on Sex
(a sort of companion piece to Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s
A Rap on Race
), Henry wrote back: “In the first place I am not an expert as you dub me—and secondly, though it may well be profitable, there’s something in the idea that stinks.”

I thought the idea stank, too, but I was not yet able to be so blunt in a letter to a publisher.
A Rap on Sex,
indeed. This never-written book’s title, complete with unconscious pun, sounds more dated today than a title of a book by Marie Corelli—who happened, by the way, to be Queen Victoria’s favorite author as well as Henry Miller’s.

His contradictions were many. Victorian and bohemian, schnorrer and benefactor, sexual guru and tireless romantic, he made women up out of pen and ink (and often watercolor). Did he make up his autobiographies, too? In a way, he did. In a way, we
all
make up our autobiographies. He was more of a fabulist than he would have admitted—though the very word would have made him puke. He was “just a Brooklyn boy—don’tcha know?” and if he was the great force that liberated literature (I nearly wrote
liberature
) in our age, he knew it in his gut but did not know it at all in his brain. He desperately sought public recognition of his genius, and in the pursuit of that recognition, he gave far too many interviews and entertained far too many con men. Thus are even enlightened souls seduced by the lust for recognition! That we denied him such final pleasures is a measure not only of official literary meanness but of his own greatness: He still—even to the end—had the power to shock the hypocrite, the faint of heart, the literary pantywaist.

I hope you get your Nobel Prize in heaven, Henry, sent up on blasts of dynamite.

—JAMES JOYCE TO NORA JOYCE

 

 

 

Only a man
(or a woman who had never been pregnant) would compare creativity to maternity, pregnancy to the creation of a novel. The comparison of gestation to creativity is by now a conventional metaphor, as largely unexamined as the dead metaphors in our everyday speech (the arm of a chair, the leg of a table), but it is also inexact.

Although the
idea
for a poem or novel often comes as if unbidden, a gift from the muse, and although at rare moments one may write
as if
automatically, in the grip of an angel who seems to speed one’s pen across the page, most often literary creativity is sheer hard work, quite different from the growing of a baby in the womb, which goes on despite one’s conscious will and is, properly speaking, God’s miracle. It seems hardly to belong to the individual woman who provides it with a place to happen. The growing of the fetus in the womb is DNA’s triumph, the triumph of the genes, the triumph of the species. The woman whose body is the site of this miracle is only being used by the species temporarily, in its communal passion to survive.