The Devil at Large Read Online Free PDF

The ice froze around my heart. I read, interviewed, began a novel, edited a volume of my poems, worked on adapting a novel for the musical stage. In short, I ran away. The deadline came; it passed. I told my agent I was giving back the advance. Then I changed my mind. Then I changed it back.
    “I hate Miller,” I told my friend. “I don’t want to be his flame keeper. I don’t want to serve the patriarch. I have books of my own to write. Fuck Henry Miller’s memory! So what if he’s misunderstood—we’re all misunderstood.”
    “So why don’t you begin by writing why you hate Henry Miller?” my friend asked. “Maybe you’ll discover something that way.”
    Literary grandfathers. It has something to do with that. Henry Miller and my grandfather were nearly contemporaries. Both were Victorians who sought to liberate themselves. Miller wrote the things he feared the most—and became notorious. My grandfather painted proper portraits and kept his dark imaginings in secret sketchbooks, which he bequeathed to me. He never became famous—though he was a better artist than many who did—and, in a sense, my lust for fame was conditioned by his having embraced obscurity. I was famous for him, I felt. In his place. And Henry, who did so much to propel that fame, was both grandfather and literary alter ego. On one hand, I had fantasies of devoting my life to rescuing my grandfather’s work from obscurity; on the other, I fiercely wanted to press on with my own career. Knowing as I did that the path was always clearer for women to be flame keepers than to be creators in their own right, I was torn. Some part of me craved the sanctified good-girl role of flame keeper. But I also wanted the damnable and dangerous bad-girl role of making my own books. The Miller book clicked into the conflict in my head: my life or Papa’s? Which was it to be? The tigress or the lady? That old battle between self and soul had come back to haunt me and here it was again wearing Henry’s face!
    So I hated Henry for putting me back in my old stew. And I also hated him for not really being my grandfather. And I hated him for being famous when my own grandfather was not. And I hated him for claiming the filial fealty I never gave to my own grandfather’s memory. And I hated him for liberating himself publicly as my own grandfather could not.
    Complicated stuff. Writing problems are always psychological problems. And the choice of subjects is always overdetermined. Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex and then “repents” with Must We Burn Sade? I validate women’s fantasies in six novels and seven books of poetry and then “atone” with a book on Miller.
    Am I loving the fascist, the brute, the boot in the face? Kate Millett would probably say so. She accuses Miller of adhering to “the doctrine of the cave” in which women who are not sexually compliant are properly beaten for it (and women who are sexually compliant are also beaten for it). Women, as Millett knows, are always seen to be in the wrong. Women, as Millett knows, are always beaten. And yes, there is blatant sexism in Miller’s depictions of sexual seduction. He does hold up the mirror to patriarchy and tells it true. He does show the violence of intercourse no less than Andrea Dworkin shows it. He shows it from a man’s point of view as she shows it from a woman’s. The question is: is he advocating this violence? Or is he showing it because it exists ?
    This is a primal question with Miller—and with all literature. This question has come up repeatedly lately because, I think, we have lost the sense of what literature is. Was Bret Easton Ellis advocating murder in American Psycho , or was he mirroring the violence of our culture? Was Salman Rushdie blaspheming Mohammed in The Satanic Verses , or was he creating an antimythology for our antimythological age?
    We seem less and less able to tell the difference between myth and fact, between wisdom and factoids. In a