The Devil at Large (29 page)

In his fascinating book
The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture
, Walter Kendrick surveys the role of sexuality in Western culture and its expression in art and literature.

He observes that there was a drastic difference between the ancient and modern worlds in their attitude toward sexuality. Across the lustiness of Catullus and Ovid, the happy and lighthearted eroticism of the Pompeian frescoes, the good-humored sensuality of Chaucer, the sexuality of Rabelais, even of Byron (who in this respect is a far more eighteenth-than nineteenth-century figure) fell the shadow of the Victorian Age and the banishment of the obscene to the rare-book room. “Though the nineteenth-century invented ‘pornography,’ it did not invent the obscene,” says Walter Kendrick.

While most cultures, as Kendrick points out, did not give equal access to the obscene to all groups, the art of all cultures expressed it. The rise of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century condemned sexuality to the Secret Museum. What had been joyous and healthy to the Greeks, licentious and full of opportunities for biting satire to the Romans, full of life and the possibility for ridicule to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Fielding, and Byron, became now furtive and secretive, pathologically devious.

We are not yet free of the spell of this nineteenth-century sexophobia. The common view of Miller, above all, shows us this. It also proves to us that sexomania and sexophobia are but two sides of the same coin, mirror images of each other.

In our sex-hating culture, we look to blame sex for everything from AIDS to abortion-on-demand. We are in the grip of Mrs. Grundy and Mr. Comstock still. And the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties (which, as we see, was no revolution in consciousness at all) swiftly became little more than an excuse for the biggest backlash of all time.

What shall we do with our sexophobia? It manifests itself on all sides of the political spectrum—from Women Against Pornography to the fundamentalist right. Our sexophobia impedes medical research for contraception, impedes needed reforms of women’s health care, even impedes our ability to prepare teenagers to enjoy their sexuality safely in an overpopulated world.

When I was thirteen, kids were terrified of sex because abortion was illegal and one might die of a back-street abortion. Now my thirteen-year-old daughter and her friends are terrified of sex because of AIDS.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Must we conclude that we have created a society in which teenagers are compelled to hate their own most powerful urges, their own bodies, their own drives? Must we conclude that the excuses vary but the sexophobia remains constant? Must we conclude that on some deep level we
want
such a world?

Sexophobia is ever present, stronger every day. We are creating a sexually tormented younger generation just as our grandparents and great-grandparents did. We no longer say that masturbation causes blindness. We merely say that sex causes death.

In the years since the AIDS epidemic began, I have been accosted again and again by well-meaning journalists who ask me, regarding my early novels, “What about AIDS?”

“What about it?” I say.

“Well—how can you write sexual books in the age of AIDS?”

The reasoning is clear. Sex still equals death. A writer who writes about sex is somehow promoting death. In other words, nothing has changed in the essential paradigm, except that now we have AIDS to prove that sex equals death. If AIDS did not exist, we would have invented it, so powerful is that paradigm.

I usually answer my well-meaning journalists by saying that I shall stop writing about sex when people stop caring about it. As long as it remains a powerful force in people’s lives, it cannot but be a powerful force in novels.

Why is our society so sex-hating, so sex fearing? This is a big question, and one seldom even asked. Why should sex be more despised than hunger, aggression, or any other basic drive? I think we must look to the eighteenth century, to the industrial revolution and the consumerism that even today keeps it humming. There is little doubt that sexophobia became entrenched along with the entrenchment of bourgeois culture. Before that, sex was seen as part of life, rather than as disease. The rich in England and America could have it, the poor could not be stopped from having it, and an amused wink or shrug greeted sexual matters there then as it does in Italy and France today. But in the eighteenth century, the English and American middle class coalesced, finding its basic function as cannon fodder and as consumers of industrial goods. Sex was increasingly seen as a dangerous opiate—a force for revolution. Better drug the masses with gin and cheap entertainments. At least these promote docility.

Miller saw this sexophobia as early as the twenties and related it, even then, to money, consumerism, and war. Money drives out sex, as we all know: the anxiety about getting and spending is an aphrodisiac. The more we focus on money, the less free we are, the less lusty, and the less revolutionary. As Miller himself says regarding
Tropic of Cancer
in
The World of Sex
, “The problem of the author was never one of sex, nor even of religion, but of self-liberation.”

And what was he liberating himself from? The bourgeois need to be a getter and spender, a cog in the wheel of life. When Miller left the Cosmodemonic and went to Paris with June, he was declaring himself free of consumerism. When he became a beggar, he was declaring himself no longer in the thrall of the great god Money. Miller’s economic and his sexual ideologies are totally related.
Your money or your life force
, says the great god Lucre!
Your money or your balls. You can’t have both.

Miller’s detractors understand this better than they let on. If they thought him just a garden-variety pornographer, they would hardly blame him for the death of Western civilization as we know it. It is precisely because they understand, on some deep level, that he is talking about
self
-liberation, that they attack him.

Miller’s self-liberation is sexual in the cosmic, not the genital sense. Yes, he writes of genital sexuality in the
Tropics
, in
Clichy
, in
Black Spring
, in
The Rosy Crucifixion
, but as he explains in
The World of Sex
, the sexual is the first step towards the spiritual:

In that first year or so in Paris I literally died, was literally annihilated—and resurrected as a new man. The
Tropic of Cancer
is a sort of human document, written in blood, recording the struggle in the womb of death. The strong sexual odor is, if anything, the aroma of birth, disagreeable, repulsive even, when dissociated from its significance. The
Tropic of Capricorn
represents another death and birth, the transition, if I may say so, from the conscious artist to the budding spiritual being which is the last phase of evolution….

Henry was wise enough to know that the sexual and the spiritual were twins. He was wise enough to know that by flinging ourselves with utter abandon into the sexual we find that the spiritual beckons. “The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom,” as Blake said. Or, as Miller says, on a similar theme, “Like every man, I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men I know too that I am my own saviour.”

What does sex have in common with salvation for Miller? Each is liberating. Miller often said that his only subject was self-emancipation. He was right. The sexuality of his books points the way to self-liberation. So does the spirituality.

What is it about sex that is so freeing? It is an affirmation of
I am;
an affirmation of life, and at once an affirmation of flux and change.

We go along thinking the world to be thus and so. We are not thinking, of course, or the picture would be different every moment. When we go along thus we are merely preserving a dead image of a live moment in the past. However … let us say we meet a woman. We enter into her. Everything is changed.
What
changed? We do not know precisely. It seems as if
everything
had changed. It might be that we never see the woman again, or it might be that we never separate. She may lead us to hell or she may open the doors of the world for us….

It is this transforming power of sex that led Miller to focus on it in his books. Above all, transformation interests him, and above all, transformation is what the world of sex offers.

Sex galvanizes the individual spheres of being which clash and conflict. It makes the external world in which we are wrapped shed its death-like folds. It affords us glimpses of that stark durable reality which is neither beneficent or cruel.

Sex, in other words, puts us in touch with the center of existence, makes us see the dance of molecules, makes us feel truly alive.

If men would stop to think about this great activity which animates the earth and all the heavens, would they give themselves to thoughts of death? Would a man withhold himself in any way if he realized that dead or alive this frenzied activity goes on ceaselessly and remorselessly? If death is nothing, what fear then should we have of sex? The gods came down from above to fornicate with human kind and with animals and trees, with the earth itself. Why are we so particular? Why can we not love—and do all the other things which give us pleasure too? Why can we not give ourselves in all directions at once: What is it we fear? We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we lose ourselves, there can be no hope of finding ourselves….

This is a message not so different from Dante’s, who also found himself lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life, and who also emerged to see the stars, having discovered that love is what moves them.

Miller is more mystic than pornographer. He uses the obscene to shock and to awaken, but once we are awake, he wants to take us to the stars.

“I did a service to people,” he said to Mike Wallace during our
60 Minutes
interview. “That was my motive in writing. I was beating down the barriers.”

He did not mean linguistic barriers or publishing barriers; he meant barriers to self-liberation. A real sexual revolution—as opposed to the bogus sexual revolution that we had in the sixties—would recognize this liberation as coming from the role of sex in our lives. It would not reduce sex to promiscuity, abandon it to stroke books, porno parlors, and X-rated videos. It would recognize it as one of the great revolutionary forces of our lives, a force that has the power to open eyes and souls.

Is there a place for such sex in “The Age of AIDS”? Of course there is. Sex is more than mere compulsive acting-out, an accumulation of meaningless experiences and deadly viruses. If we are truly open to our own sexuality in the cosmic sense, we are also open to our creativity, our religious awareness, our sense of self-liberation.

In the days when
Fear of Flying
was
the
new sensation, I used to argue in vain that I was not advocating promiscuity, but rather an openness to erotic fantasy. The novel itself concentrated more on the heroine’s erotic daydreams than on her escapades, which often proved hopelessly disappointing because her swains proved impotent or clumsy or mechanical. But the idea of an erotically motivated, actively fantasizing woman was, in itself, so shocking at that time that my protests fell on deaf ears. My denigrators were sexophobic, and attacked me for persisting in my belief that sex is a force for life.

How may we be sexual in the Age of AIDS? Let me count the ways. We live in a time when telephone and computer sex (“Hottalk” they call it), costumes, role-playing, and mutual masturbation are apparently proliferating—along with (good grief) monogamy!

HOT MONOGAMY
reads the headline on a current magazine. Apparently you can even get off with your own spouse if you have a vivid imagination! Human sexuality is that dazzling in its variety. I know a dominatrix who advertises and sells safe sex—with no exchange of bodily fluids—because the clients can only look and sniff and whip or be whipped. The sixties equation of sexual revolution with quantitative promiscuity is too innocent. If we are open to the world of fantasy, we can liberate ourselves with one partner or no partner at all. The recent novel
Vox
by Nicholson Baker describes a man and a woman who have sex on the telephone that is, if anything, hotter than sex in the flesh because there is no reality to block the fantasy.

Eventually we will have virtual-reality sets which will enable us to simulate sex with any famous lover of the past. Women will be able to choose anyone from Mark Antony to Shakespeare to Casanova to Byron, and men, like Dr. Faustus, will have their digitally simulated Helens of Troy.

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” they’ll ask their computer screens. The mind has an infinite capacity for self-liberation and is, after all, our main erogenous zone. Miller himself would have agreed.

I am trying to get at the inner pattern of events.

—
HENRY MILLER,
THE WORLD OF SEX

W
HY MUST WE READ
Miller? Because he invented a new style of writing, a style as revolutionary in its own way as Joyce’s or Hemingway’s or Stein’s, a style that reveals, as he says, “the inner pattern of events.”

Some readers of
Tropic of Cancer
,
Tropic of Capricorn
,
Nexus
,
Sexus
, and
Plexus
, are at first put off by this style. They find it impenetrable, hard to follow, lacking in narrative drive. I confess that I was at first stopped by the density of the long autobiographical narratives and preferred the essays and travel books.

In the narratives, the prose seems to gyrate and meander. One association leads to another. Time sequence is jumbled. The time is the time of the unconscious—which is to say there is no time. The narratives seem like tales told by an idiot (or a brilliant dyslexic), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. People become furious with Miller for being so hard to follow. They accuse him of having no regard for art or artifice.