The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Page A

never have attempted novels.
    During the period of Henry’s literary apprenticeship in the tailor shop, America was preparing for war. The United States would not break its isolationism for some three years, but the world was in a state of tumultuous change as the Europeans fought “over there.” Women would not get the vote until 1920, but they were already pressing for changes in their status. Feminism was much discussed in Henry’s youth, though it was destined to ebb and flow for another half century before women really organized to give themselves direct access to the political process.
    For Henry as a young man, the lack of reliable contraception was horrific and ever present. His passionate live-in relationship with Pauline Chouteau was already on the wane when she became pregnant with his child and aborted it. He came home to find a bloody five-month-old fetus in a drawer and Pauline collapsed on the bed. Torn between his moral obligation and an equally pressing desire to escape her, he chose escape—as he would many times in his life. Once again, his solution was to fall in love. He met a pretty young brunette who shared another of his lifelong passions, playing the piano. Pauline’s days were numbered.
    This newest excuse for escape was Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, a girl from Brooklyn whom, in 1917, Henry was to make his first (legal) wife:
From about the age of ten I had been playing the piano. Soon after I joined my father I fell in love with a woman who was my piano teacher. I had been teaching the piano myself, to eke out a little spare money from about the age of 17 on. Now I became serious about it and thought I might possibly become a concert pianist. I married the woman and that finished it. From the day we hitched up it was a running battle. In a year or two I dropped the piano for good, which I have regretted ever since.
    Henry adored the pursuit and conquest of Beatrice, a good girl of whom his mother could approve, but it was only the war that convinced him to marry. He had fled the tailor shop and Pauline’s house to work briefly in Washington before the selective service claimed him. It was his draft notice that cemented his resolve to take Beatrice as his wife.
    Once married, he found to his dismay that he was again living with his mother: Beatrice, critical and disapproving, sneered at his ambition to write as much as Louise had, and like her, tried to get him into the “real world” of work.
    But Henry seemed unable to hold a job. Once he married Beatrice he gamely tried an astonishing variety of gigs—from streetcar conductor to indexer to mail-order catalog compiler. Nothing held his interest; he was clearly not meant to be anyone’s employee. He would invariably be fired for scribbling or reading philosophy on company time. Growing disillusioned with work and the ball-and-chain of marriage, Henry wrote (in The Black Cat magazine at a penny a word):
the single truth about marriage is that it is a disillusion…. It only takes about three days of matrimony to open a man’s eyes …
    It was one of his first pieces to be published.
    Since Henry always married as a quick fix, he was always quickly disillusioned. His marriage to Beatrice deteriorated sexually, romantically, musically, financially. The pressure of a baby (his first daughter, Barbara, born in 1919) didn’t help, nor did Henry’s dalliance with his mother-in-law the previous year.
    On a belated and definitely odd honeymoon that Henry and Beatrice took at Beatrice’s mother’s house in Delaware the year after his marriage to Beatrice, Beatrice’s mother supposedly seduced Henry in her bathtub. Mother-in-law and son-in-law made love all summer, practically under the noses of their mates.
    Only after Barbara was born did Beatrice confront Henry with this incestuous infidelity. She’d apparently known about it all along. The marital war escalated. Beatrice was determined to make Henry into a proper bread-winning spouse and Henry