Like a Fluid (The False Pornographer)

I’ve led a good rich sexual life, and I don’t see why it should be left out.

—Henry Miller, Paris Review interview

Aimer l’autre, cela devrait vouloir dire que l’on admet qu’il puisse penser, sentir, agir de façon non conforme à nos désirs, à notre propre gratification, accepter qu’il vive conformément à son système de gratification personnel et non conformément au nôtre.1

—Henri Laborit, Éloge de la fuite

The charge that Miller could not write about “sex with love” is one that he didn’t even begin to contest. But then, in his experience, sex-with-love had been reduced to something highly problematic—not by any choices he had made, but by the societal conditioning around love and marriage to which we are all more or less subjected. According to the dominant narrative, love and sex do overlap, briefly, during late courtship and the honeymoon period (according to my own, somewhat causal researches, this might be anywhere from three months to five years or so after the wedding) but from that point on, both parties, male and female, are supposed to get on with their societally defined roles. She, as wife (as distinct a role from lover as can be imagined), is designated mother and nest builder; he, as husband-breadwinner, is considered manly based on earnings, social status, and maturity, that is, his ability to conform to a system that has almost nothing to offer him except competition with other men and some kind of pastime, sports, say, or nights out with “the boys.” (It is revealing that, as André Dubus has pointed out, whenever a man does anything he considers remotely satisfying, he either does it alone or with other men who are invariably referred to as “the boys”).2 In the 1970s, feminism pointed out how diminished women were by this marriage narrative, but, for some reason, most men pretended they were fine with it, presumably for the same reasons that men are more reluctant than women to seek medical advice when they are ill.

Exhibit 1, then: no sex-with-love scenes in Miller’s work. But then, I wonder how anyone would go about writing such scenes. The novel, fiction generally, tends to work in and around problem areas of human experience. Any writer proposing a book to her agent or editor along the lines of “two people meet at a picnic, eat some fried wings, agree that they both prefer Cajun to Texas Barbecue sauce, fall in love, and decide to marry” needn’t expect a hefty advance. Fiction is about conflict, loss, irresolution, fear, crime and punishment, adultery, war, and other conflicts. In the novel, as in the real, post-honeymoon world, sex with love (or any sex at all) is something of a luxury.

However, that doesn’t mean that sex in fiction, while it may be problematical, should demean or degrade women—any more than it should demean or degrade men. I raise this point because, time and time again, whether from an informed feminist standpoint, or from the censorious Right—who would rather we had no sex at all, in books or anywhere else other than the marital bed (for the purpose of procreation only)—criticism of sexual pornography is never matched by similar disapprobation of those products in which a bowdlerized and hopelessly idealized sex-with-love fantasy is transformed into unrealistic and reductive narratives about both men and women (file under rom-com).

When I was a teenager, my mother would have me borrow such books from the library on her behalf (she was a shy woman, socially, and would not go to the library to choose for herself). I could never remember the titles; they were, to me, both venial and hopelessly interchangeable, but I did recall the cover images, and I could tell what kind of book each was from the characters depicted. Books about the nurse who secretly loves the brilliant young surgeon who, after some misunderstandings, comes to love her too and then they get married. Or the aristocratic woman, betrothed to a social “equal” (or preferably a superior, like a Duke) who is secretly in love with the taciturn groom from the stables, who is secretly in love with her too (that’s why he’s taciturn, you see), and they stumble around in a fog for some two hundred pages before everything clears, the Duke is ditched, and our protagonists come together—and then they get married. Or a young actress has a crush on the leading man, leading to various mishaps, and then—part of the pleasure, apparently, is that one could see where this was going—they get married. And when people get married in books like this, nobody has to say they all lived happily ever after. They are in love, after all. QED. More recently, our real love affairs are with consumer goods (capitalism’s ultimate triumph), with men preferring their game consoles and cars to their partners, and women rating their spouses pretty low after cats, chocolates, and certain varieties of sparkling wine. Naturally, the advertising capitalizes on this. New lover or the boxed set of seasons 1–7 of The Good Wife? Hell, life’s complicated enough as it is, the customer thinks. So if it’s all the same, I’d rather just sit down with a box of chocolates and replay that scene in Series 7 where Jason and Alicia kiss in the elevator.

It would be wrong to claim that such fantasy fictions are as obnoxious or as troubling as the worst examples of pornography, in which the degradation of women is played out physically, as such, and not just implied (e.g., as in the rejection of actual men in romance books and TV programs). On the other hand, while some aspects of Miller’s work are repellent—as in the extended Ida Verlaine passage from Sexus cited in Sexual Politics—these are often pastiches, possibly parodies, of soft porn standards that would have been available in his boyhood. Certainly, as has been conceded, Sexual Politics is fair as an indictment of how a sexist society’s attitudes toward women are reflected in one strand of Miller’s writing (it does no harm to note, on the other hand, that Kate Millett is highly selective in her analysis, basing her entire argument on one very ugly—and highly derivative—passage). But this is only one strand, a mode of “manly” talk about sex, inherited from turn-of-the-century pornography like The Pearl, A Man with a Maid, and, most particularly, given his slight personal connection with Miller’s father, the work of Frank Harris (of whom more in the discussion of property, below).

What Millett does not take into account is Miller’s stated aversion to the commodification of sexuality in general by a property-based society, on the one hand, or his resistance to the puritan strain in America and western Europe that demeans both men and women, on the other (here, if the source of his loathing was his mother, his immediate literary model was D. H. Lawrence, whose work he wrote about at what some would consider enervating length). Nor does she acknowledge Miller’s own self-diagnosis of the emotional and spiritual damage that the cult of manliness inflicted on him, or his efforts to outgrow the legacy of a twice-poisoned childhood (first, by having to witness the steady war of attrition waged by his mother against his supposedly “unmanly” father, and second, the cult of impossible manly virtue that reached its zenith as Miller was growing up, with Teddy Roosevelt as its highest model and Frank Harris himself as its sexual master of ceremonies).3 It also seems important to note that, in spite of his mother’s influence, in spite of that manliness cult, and in spite of his farcical relationship with June, Miller evinces more affection for actual (as opposed to idealized or demonized) women than many of his contemporaries. Finally, I might add that, aside from the distastefully triumphalist passage that Millett selects to condemn Miller overall, a great deal of his writing reveals him as powerless, degraded, humiliated, and rejected in any number of unmanly ways—and it is here that he is at his most honest, in the major novels. To damn him to hell on the basis of a specific, possibly parodic passage in one of his lesser works seems more than a little unfair, on a level with judging Nabokov’s personal character on the basis of a literal reading of the first fifty pages or so of Lolita.

That Miller is a product of his times is clear. As I have noted, his writings about sex all too frequently follow in the soft pornographic tradition of the anonymously authored Pearl, or Man with a Maid books, or the “adventures” of Frank Harris—a tradition in which manliness is preserved by the exercise of power (though it should also be remembered that, when Miller, perennially short of cash, took to writing “smut” for money, his output was quite often sent back as not being smutty enough. It would appear that these mercenary tales contained more storyline than the average reader of soft pornography requires). The typical narrative of this tradition shows the man as masterful, confident, utterly in control, while the woman is gradually reduced from an initial position of prudish resistance to obedient and grateful slave. This transformation is achieved by a combination of the hero’s mastery and the lucky victim’s cravings for the pleasures that only he can give her:

Soothingly, I passed my right hand over Alice’s quivering bottom and stroked it caressingly, alleviating in a wonderfully short time the pain. In spite of the severity of the whipping she had received, she was not marked at all! Her flesh was like that of a baby, slightly pinker perhaps, but clean and fresh. As I tenderly restored her to ease, her tremblings died away, her breath began to come more freely and normally, and soon she was herself again.

“Well, has the nonsense been whipped out of you, Alice?” I asked mockingly. She quivered but did not answer.

“What, not yet?” I exclaimed, pretending to misunderstand her. “Must I give you another turn?” and I raised the whip as if to commence again.

“No, no!” she cried in genuine terror. “I’ll be good!”

“Then lie still and behave yourself,” I replied, throwing the whip away into a corner of the room.4

All of this is highly ritualized and, of course, it is important that the victory over the woman does not require too much force, for that would give the impression that our hero is not as attractive as he pretends. As Millett points out, in her analysis of the seduction of Ida Verlaine in Sexus: “In accord with one of the myths at the very heart of a Miller novel, the protagonist, who is always some version of Miller himself, is sexually irresistible and potent to an almost mystical degree. It is therefore no very great surprise to the reader that Ida falls into his hands.”5

We need hardly point out that Henry Miller did not invent the myth of the mystically potent, irresistible protagonist; this manly man is a staple, not only of Victorian pornography, but of popular fiction generally. At the same time, Miller understood that the myth was heightened by showing, as in Frank Harris’s coming-of-age narrative My Life and Loves, how the manly man learns to understand the “moods” of his chosen prey. Sensitivity is, at times, a virtue: to win over is often more enjoyable than to overwhelm. The following passage, in which our hero wins the love of a girl called Jessie, a fellow passenger on a boat to America, shows Harris enjoying a subtler kind of power, a mix of skilled “lascivious touchings” and self-restraint that further enhances his manly character, even as he defers actual conquest:

What a gorgeous afternoon we had! I had learned enough now to go slow and obey what seemed to be her moods. Gently, gently I caressed her sex with my finger till it opened and she leaned against me and kissed me of her own will, while her eyes turned up and her whole being was lost in thrills of ecstasy. When she asked me to stop and take my hand away, I did her bidding at once and was rewarded by being told that I was a “dear boy” and “a sweet” and soon the embracing and caressing began again. She moved now in response to my lascivious touchings and when the ecstasy came on her, she clasped me close and kissed me passionately with hot lips and afterwards in my arms wept a little and then pouted that she was cross with me for being so naughty. But her eyes gave themselves to me even while she tried to scold.6

There is power in the giving of pleasure, a power that comes, not just from seeing the other “lost” in her ecstasy, but also from seducing the woman from the moral scruples she has been taught. She tries to scold, but she cannot; she says she is cross at him for being so naughty, but she is as much a participant in that naughtiness as he is. Significantly, all these lascivious touchings are committed under the very nose of Jessie’s father, a fierce, overbearing Scottish Chief Engineer, who epitomizes the puritanical, joyless norms of conventional society. This is a victory indeed: not only does Harris show enviable control, both of himself and the situation, as cunning interloper, armed only with his native wit and youthful charm; he also defeats puritanism as a whole, in the form of the Chief Engineer.

It is not until the ship reaches America that, with Jessie as his willing accomplice, the young man finally consummates his lust. He now settles down to enjoy the fruits of a long and careful campaign—but Jessie has her own surprise in store:

That very afternoon I took Jessie for a walk in the Park, but when we had found a seat in the shade she confessed that her sister thought we ought to be engaged, and as soon as I got steady work we could be married: “A woman wants a home of her own,” she said, “and oh, Boy! I’d make it so pretty! And we’d go out to the theatres and have a gay old time.”

I was horrified; married at my age, no, Sir! It seemed absurd to me and with Jessie. I saw she was pretty and bright, but she knew nothing, never had read anything: I couldn’t marry her.

This is the next lesson our hero has to learn—and it is a painful one. A man may win victory in the short term over an individual woman but, in the long term, he is in greater danger. For, as soon as she sets her sights on marriage, a woman becomes an agent of the puritan enemy, working undercover to lure the man into a life of “steady work” and responsibility. It’s the same lesson we learn in every hard-boiled detective or spy movie: the woman can’t be trusted, she has her own agenda, and sex is only a staging post on the way to her ultimate goal. We recognize that this agenda is learned—ingrained from birth as part of the socialization process—but it is no less powerful for that. And if the woman wins this battle, the man is done for.7 There is no greater, or more disgraceful self-betrayal in human affairs than the transformation that changes a man into a husband. What follows, inevitably, is a kind of self-defeat. If boys do not learn this from observation (of their own fathers, of neighbors and kin), then they must learn it the hard way. And this is why the priapic alter-ego in Miller’s work is angry: promised power and independence by the long tradition of manly literature, he finds that every woman he meets (other than some impossible, idealized beauty) is a potential snare.

This perspective on marriage (and “relationships” generally) will be unpopular with (and dismissed by) many readers, but it arises, not from conviction, but from observation. As a teenager in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I used to wonder why “The System” got so het up whenever it was faced with the least sign that men and women—or boys and girls, at least—might be able to create new paradigms for sex and love, following the precepts of mutual respect and openness that were being voiced around that time. Ideas like those expressed by Henri Laborit in the epigraph to this chapter seemed at once self-evident (to us) and dangerously idealistic (to the powers-that-be).

Laborit further elaborates on this idea in Éloge de la fuite, pointing out that the main obstacle to our accepting the other on this level is a deep-grained social conditioning in which our relationships have been engineered in terms of possession and appropriation—in short, the potential for an intimate, mutually tolerant and mutually curious relationship between equals has been sacrificed to a property-based social paradigm. None of this was ever news. What was surprising, for some of us, was how ferocious the backlash against such analyses was back in the 1960s and ’70s, whether it struck back at open relationships, radical feminism, an increased openness among lesbians and gay men, or even those marriagelike relationships into which people were entering without drawing up the prescribed property-based contract. That backlash seemed mysterious to me—to begin with. Now, however, looking back at that era, it becomes clear that the capitalist society I thought we were overthrowing was not only as strong as ever, but that it would not rest until everything—every object, every “resource,” every human activity, every need—everything became a commodity. This included love, sex, and romance—all of them big earners in an ideal consumer society.

For example: everybody knows how expensive a wedding can be (the range is anywhere between “Are you serious?” and “Pass me the Cozaar, now”). Meanwhile, it costs American couples an average of about $20,000 to get divorced,8 and, according to figures drawn up by the US government, around 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. To put this in perspective, that means there is one divorce every thirty-six seconds or so,⁹ or to put that another way: 2,400 divorces per day, 16,800 divorces per week, and 876,000 divorces a year. The average length of a marriage that ends in divorce is eight years. No need to do the math to see that marriage and divorce provide healthy revenue streams to any number of industries every year. Meanwhile, there are those who believe there is a direct relationship between the inevitable sexual and romantic disappointment inherent in turning our most basic desires and needs (not just for sex, however that happens, but for the real basics of touch and mutuality) into an institution and the huge sums of money spent on the various diversions and consolations on offer in a property-based society. Even if we leave aside the debate over confectionery (with one UK survey, as noted above, suggesting that more than half of all women prefer chocolate to sex) and sentimentality-porn, we might justifiably wonder why, if married love is so satisfying, the value of the more or less mainstream porn industry averages out, when a number of estimates are reconciled, at somewhere near $13 billion in the United States alone. Meanwhile, an Urban Institute study found that, across just eight American cities, the underground sex economy’s worth in 2007 was estimated between $39.9 and $290 million.10 Clearly, the unfulfilling marriage is a money-spinner for all kinds of businesspeople—which suggests that it may well be time to start asking (yet again) what is wrong with the institution of marriage per se. Or maybe we should be asking another question altogether.

As noted above, Henry Miller, like the Wife of Bath, married five times. Late in life, he described four of these as accidents: “I was trapped you might say. I don’t know myself how I fell into them,” but he made an exception for June Mansfield, who, he says mysteriously, “helped me.”¹¹ It’s an odd claim to make—especially considering the lengths to which he went in persuading his third wife, Janina Lepska, to abandon not only her family in New York but also a philosophy scholarship at Yale so she could move, with a much older man, into what wasn’t much more than a shack at Big Sur. But then, Miller had a complex view of what marriage involved, or should involve—and it is this, and the echo it allowed him of his parents’ dreadful marriage (an echo he sought, perhaps, in order to revise the imbalance of power he had witnessed there) that may have driven him to play the game, on his own estimate, four times too often. Here he is, in a revealing, less obviously parodic passage from Sexus, reflecting on power relations between the sexes:

How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to everyone, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellow men, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained to behave that way. When she meets no resistance she falls headlong into the trap.

And he continues:

To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without first traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyser, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage.12

Here we see why, for Miller, the man finds himself in such a bind when it comes to sex-with-love, which he seems to see as predicated upon some kind of slavery. On the one hand, he desires women for the pleasure they offer, but he hates them for the twin dangers they present: the first, as we have noted, is that every woman is an agent of society, a means by which that society seeks to control and domesticate him; second, if his desire (love?) for the woman is great, or if it becomes too evident, he may be rendered truly helpless. She may choose to withhold from him the sexual responses he needs to feel manly and in control and if he cannot command such responses, the Roosevelt Man may come to despise himself for his unmanliness. Miller was particularly sensitive to such questions, for, throughout his early years, he had witnessed the incessant humiliation imposed upon his father by a hard, puritanical woman who could never be satisfied (in material terms), and for a large part of his life, he wondered if, like his father, he too was not manly enough. Because she treated his father, first, and then her children, so badly, Miller never made any secret of his loathing for his mother; indeed, he waxed bitterly lyrical on the subject on many occasions:

Like Madame Rimbaud, my mother was the Northern type, cold, critical, proud, unforgiving, puritanical. My father was of the South, of Bavarian parents, while Rimbaud’s father was Burgundian. There was a continual strife and clash between mother and father, with the usual repercussions upon the offspring. The rebellious nature, so difficult to overcome, here finds its matrix . . . the demon of revolt had taken possession of me at a very early age. It was my mother who implanted it in me. It was against her, against all that she represented, that I directed my uncontrollable energy. . . . I felt her shadow across my path constantly. It was a shadow of disapproval, silent and insidious, like a poison slowly injected into my veins.13

And again, in a late interview: “When I finally found the courage to write what I’d been storing up for years, it came pouring out into one long relentless tirade. Beginning with the earliest memories of my mother, I had saved up enough hatred, enough anger, to fill a hundred books.”¹⁴

For Miller, his mother was a template for the loveless, judgmental, joyless wife whose entire view of her husband, and of the quality and potential of married life, is based on property. No matter how funny, or tender, or kind he may be, the wife sees a man who does not provide as unmanly—and, in his earlier years at least, Miller had a horror of being perceived in that light. But what is manliness? In our time, that sounds like such an old-fashioned question, but for Miller and his peers, it was critical—and it is hard not to believe that, even now, in spite of the old-fashioned nature of the term, the idea of what is manly (and what is not) haunts many of us still. For the most part, however, is has to do, not with sex so much, as with property in all its myriad forms.