The Devil at Large by Erica Jong

makes him as enigmatic to his biographers as he often was to his friends and lovers.
    Henry began City College at eighteen, but dropped out after two months. He claimed he didn’t like the absurd reading list he was given. Apparently the culprit was Spenser’s Faerie Queene , about which he said, “If I have to read stuff like that, I give up.” He then worked briefly at a series of jobs for which he proved entirely unsuited. Eventually he moved out of his parents’ house, only to move in with Pauline Chouteau, the woman he described as “old enough to be my mother.” She was, in fact, thirty-two to his eighteen, and Henry had met her while teaching piano to one of her friend’s little girls.
    Pauline Chouteau, whom Henry called “the widow,” was the mother of a consumptive son, George, who was a bit younger than Henry. In moving out of his parents’ home and briefly into Pauline’s, Henry had recreated a weird and dysfunctional family to rival his own weird and dysfunctional family. But Pauline was kind where his mother was harsh, and this made Henry feel even more obligated to her. He needed her sexually, but felt her age made her unsuitable. In an attempt to shake Pauline’s hold on him, in 1913 he fled out West for six months. Like many of his generation he dreamed of becoming a cowboy, or striking it rich in the goldfields of Alaska.
    He always claimed to have had a life-changing experience on this trip—listening to Emma Goldman speak in San Diego. But the historical record belies his recollection, for it seems that Emma Goldman was prevented from lecturing by vigilantes on the dates he would have been there. It is probable that Henry’s Emma Goldman story was another example of his chronic mythmaking.
    He told the story so many times that eventually he seemed really to believe he had heard her speak. And surely it is true that she was one of his heroines. Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life (1931), mentions a “Henry Miller” only once and that is in connection with the little theater on Third Street, where the Orleneff troupe performed for what Goldman calls “the whole Radical east side.” It is quite unlikely that Goldman is referring to the same Henry Miller, since in 1905 he would have been only sixteen and “a Brooklyn boy.” Still, Goldman’s depictions of radical New York give us a sense of Miller’s era and the things that shaped him: anarchism was in the air, the Russian Revolution was in progress, and the world was changing drastically. As an intellectual boy in Brooklyn who worshipped the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller must have realized that he lived (as the Chinese curse says) “in interesting times.” Coming to intellectual consciousness in the era of Emma Goldman and the theosophist Madame Elena Blavatsky, Henry retained a fascination with anarchism and transcendental wisdom throughout his entire life.
    Henry’s cowboy and gold-rush dreams did not materialize. He wound up picking fruit in Chula Vista. Eventually Henry returned to New York and announced to his mother that he was going to marry Pauline. His mother flew into an insane rage and threatened him with a knife. Henry tried to placate her by finally agreeing to help out in the family shop, though he had no interest in tailoring. It was there that he learned not to tailor, but to write.
I wrote long literary and humorous letters to my friends, which were really disguised essays on everything. Wrote out of boredom, because I was not interested in my father’s business. During this period the first thing I remember writing, as a piece of writing in itself, was a long essay on Nietzsche’s “Anti-Christ.”
    Letters remained the chief literary product of Henry’s life. His mind seemed most at ease in the epistolary form, where he could range over the wide assortment of things that mattered to him, without worrying about his nemesis—form—but only about content. Had Henry lived in another age, he might