The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller.

• Author: Kernowski, Frank

In this collection of reminiscences, biographical and literary observations, bibliographical annotations, and letters, Erica Jong engages readers in a continuous assessment of their own expectations of life and literature. Looking directly at Miller's unabashed anti-Semitism and his derogation of women, she never lets her audience dismiss these views by advising them just to look at the literature; nor does she allow Miller to be a scapegoat for readers' fears and prejudices. Instead, they look with her at a man and his writing that are near the primitive. Her Henry Miller, like her Isadora Wing, would fly into the unknown arts, but can not quit the battles of the here and now - life in 20th-century America.

For both Jong and Miller, the puritanism of time and place are maddening and drive them to excesses of taste and rhetoric that ultimately keep them out of lending libraries and university syllabi, as well as out of literary heaven. But then, books have little currency in a time whose icons are on television screens. In "An imaginary Dialogue," Jong has her Miller explain that he is beyond writing, having sunk into the "primal flux." Presumably, he has landed in...