The Devil at Large by Erica Jong Page B

was just as determined to resist.
    The dalliance with Beatrice’s mother is another example of Henry’s mythmaking. He tells of this affair so vividly in Sexus and The World of Sex that it appears to be biographical truth. But what if it was only a might-have-been affair, born of Henry’s rich imagination? What if it was intended to “explain” his growing estrangement from Beatrice?
    People do lie to themselves and to the world in order to live, and writers are inclined to use their books to “explain” the failures of their lives. Beatrice’s mother probably turned him on. Ergo: a love affair was born. But, like his meeting with Emma Goldman, it may have happened only in his imagination.
    In 1920, the Miller family tailor shop finally failed and even though Henry no longer worked there, this was a liberation of sorts. Propelled by Beatrice and fatherhood, Henry took the job at Western Union that was to prove so fateful in his literary career. Even the way he got the job was to prove fateful. At first he couldn’t even get hired as a messenger.
    The story of his employment at the “Cosmodemonic Telegraphic Company,” as Henry tells it in Tropic of Capricorn , is the literary analogue of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Here is modern man on the speeded-up assembly line of life—frantic, maddened, moving at a thousand frames per minute.
    Henry’s account of the world of work in New York circa 1920 (he began at Western Union in 1920 and left in 1924) is truly hallucinogenic:
The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the whole system of American labor, which is rotten at both ends…. I had a bird’s eye view of the whole American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock…
    The facts were these: Henry had applied for a messenger job and been refused. That got his dander up. He didn’t want to be a wage slave, but having been refused a job any slob would get, he was mightily pissed off. He took his pique, his rage, his rhetoric in hand and marched into the management headquarters of the company that would ever after be known as “the Cosmodemonic.” It was a historic moment—like Byron arriving in Venice, or Colette following Willy to Paris: literature was about to be born of this encounter between place and person.
… [T]hey had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent superior individual who has asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it.
    So, in the morning, he put on his best clothes and “hotfooted it to the main offices of the telegraph company” up to the empyrean aeries of management, high above the tip of Manhattan.
Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.
    Henry had stumbled into shit—and, as the proverb predicts, into good luck. The “Cosmodemonic” happened to be worried about their hiring policies. They saw a weakness in their own system—and Henry’s rhetoric convinced them that he was just the man to