The Devil at Large Read Online Free PDF Page B

television culture, we no longer seem to know the social function of literature. And so we lynch those very sages who have the doubleness of vision our age requires, while we follow the fools and sycophants, the sloganeers and politicians who tell us what we want, for the moment, to hear.
    Henry has fallen into this abyss of sexual politics. He is attacked for a simplicity he would never have embraced, let alone recognized. He was neither pure pig (who is?) nor pure humanist. He was complicated, a mass of contradictions—like all human beings, like all great writers.
    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. Women, if they are honest, also see their own potential for cruelty in love. For we are also capable of using others as objects, and we also experience the fusion between love and hate.
    Can we admit that basic psychological fact and yet mass our solidarity against rape, against sexual and intellectual harassment, against the battering of women? I hope so. It would be tragic if the feminist dialectic became as rigid and unforgiving as the male chauvinist has often been.
    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.
    But I was busy hating Miller—have I forgotten? Hating him for going to Paris, for being a man, for living off women: June, Anaïs, Lepska, Eve, countless others. The life open to him was never open to me. The happy vagabond on his “racing wheel,” the clochard sleeping under the bridges of Paris; the psychopath of love fucking the wives of his hosts; the guiltless fucker, the schnorrer, the artist of the easy touch, the free meal, the man who comes to dinner and eats the hostess.
    Who am I to identify with this bounder, this braggart, this blowhard? I, the A student, the Ph.D. candidate, the scribbler of sonnets who then rebelled against academe and wrote impolite novels. I should have identified with Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson or Simone de Beauvoir. And, of course, I did. But there was something in the lives of literary women (except Colette, except George Sand) that smelled of the lamp. Our heroines had all been forced to choose between life and work and those who chose work were strange as women. And those who chose womanhood sometimes were forced to submerge the work. Or else they died in childbirth.
    So I hated Henry for not having to choose, for having a cock (and the freedom that goes with it), for having the vagabondage no woman ever knows, for having the freedom to be a fool, and the freedom to indulge his follies, and to die at a ripe old age, surrounded by young women.
    So here are the things I hate him for thus far: my debt; his happiness; his cock; his being my grandfather; his not being my grandfather; his writing with freedom; his being honest about sex and rage; his being a male chauvinist; his being enough of a feminist to validate me.
    In short, I hate him because I love him. In short, I hate him because he’s great enough to encompass the contradictions of life.
    What great writer do we not hate? The nature of greatness is that it irritates. It irritates by being new, by being honest, by