The Devil at Large Read Online Free PDF Page A

for years I resisted the notion. Too hard, I felt, to write in my own persona. Masked by characters of my own invention, I can be free. But history is a death mask. Writing about factual events is daunting because one knows that objectivity does not, in truth, exist, and that “the facts” are really just another fiction.
    “Make it all up!” Henry often told his would-be chroniclers—including me. “That’s the only way to get it right—make it all up!” But the former graduate student in me could not allow that, though the novelist wanted to tell a rattling good yarn even if “facts”—whatever they are—were ignored. So this is the story of my search for Henry after his death, the story of a young writer trying to reconstruct an old writer, of a person of one generation trying to understand someone old enough to be her grandfather—with the manners, mores, and prejudices of her grandfather’s generation.
    Henry’s story and my story have one thing above all in common: the search for the courage to be a writer. The courage to be a writer is, in a sense, the courage to be an individual, no matter what the consequences.
    Doris Lessing points out in her introduction to a reissue of The Golden Notebook that the “artist as exemplar” is a relatively new protagonist for the novel, and wasn’t the rule one hundred years ago when heroes—there being few heroines—were more often explorers, clergymen, soldiers, empire builders. This may well be because the artist is seen as the only true individual left in an increasingly chained society. Both Henry’s persona “Henry Miller” and the real historical Henry Miller spoke to this longing for freedom. He freed himself—and then he passed the gift along to us.
    So now you know: I am in his debt. Debts are uncomfortable. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that between the first page of the first chapter of this book and the last, a year mysteriously disappeared. Normally a fluent writer, I couldn’t write. I was furious at Henry. I didn’t want to pay the debt. I did research, reread Henry and books about Henry. I also debriefed various elderly Millerian disciples before they died. But I was fighting this book in my head and heart. I could not let it go. It would not ride, as Robert Frost says somewhere, on its own melting.
    “Writing problems are always psychological problems,” I used to tell my writing students. “They’re obstructions which you haven’t yet recognized and named. Once you find the obstruction, you discover that the problem disappears.” But I couldn’t take my own advice. I was enraged at Henry and I didn’t want to write about him. Once I knew this, I was already halfway there.
    “What’s the secret about Henry that you don’t want anyone to know?” a friend asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?” she asked.
    “That I don’t really like Henry Miller,” I blurted out.
    “Why?”
    “Because of his sexism, his narcissism, his jibes at Jews. And because he’s so free,” I said. “I work so hard at my writing and he’s such a slob. I rewrite and rewrite and he lets it all hang out. He’s such a blagueur and I try so hard to be honest. Everything is cake to him. He treats women horribly and doesn’t seem to care. He turns on the people who help him. Even his suffering seems like fun.”
    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. Is my jealousy of his freedom poisoning my affection? Does my reaction show why the happy man—that rarity—is not beloved by the general unhappy lot of manunkind (and womanunkind)?
    This perception should have opened the floodgates, but it didn’t.