I too like Miller’s work, and I don’t want to see him hustled off the stage over broad, unexamined charges of misogyny. Jong’s letter doesn’t address any particular points in my review, and reads like a generic broadside that she keeps in a drawer for whenever someone, somewhere writes about Miller’s depictions of sex in a way not wholly laudatory, I’m glad to have the opportunity to respond to a few of these jabs. It is not fair to Miller’s legacy nor is it fair to how twentieth and twenty-first-century literature have evolved. To toss him away as if he were a hater of women and nothing more is to allow puritanism to rob us of literary openness.

Surely he was not politically correct by today’s standards but he was a romantic and a dreamer who had an immense impact on the literature we write today. He inspired so many writers who wanted to understand how mind and body interact. You can’t throw out an entire literature of the body by taking a censorious approach to human behavior. We are not minds without bodies and our bodies often surprise us. Many writers in Paris in the 1930s took aim at our puritanical society and tried to open up ways of telling the truth about men and women and lust. If you only read Tropic of Cancer and read it through the lens of Kate Millett, you will get him entirely wrong. It was as if he showed new ways to be honest about sexuality. I know so many literate, intelligent men who were thrilled by his writing and not because of anything pornographic. He was trying to open up the territory of sex to modern writers. He was trying to expand the language of sex in ways not so different from James Joyce. Of course I knew Miller quite well and wrote a book, The Devil at Large, about him and the way he had become the clichéd model of a misogynist. She seems to share the fear of sexuality that in fact he opposed. In fact, she sees Miller in such a narrowed, clichéd manner that you would think she had never read him.

She seems to have an animus against Miller, the sexist, completely forgetting that he liberated the language for many generations of writers-Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, myself-and that he was a disappointed romantic who adored and was terrified of women, that he was “always looking for the secret of life,” a searching philosopher, a student of the ancient Greeks, and a brilliant watercolorist. Of course she makes no reference to The Colossus of Maroussi, one of Miller’s best books. It seems to get Henry Miller entirely wrong-as it if were just an update of the late Kate Millett’s misinterpretation of Miller in Sexual Politics. I was quite horrified by Elaine Blair’s review of On Henry Miller: Or, How to Be an Anarchist by John Burnside.

Erica jong books