Truthfully, at any rate

depoliticized text of Prisoner which has been reproduced in Genius and Lust makes an even poorer showing against the body of elastic and informative, if not exceptionally original, criticism presented.) You suspect that although the critic recognizes the injury in sexism, he can't bring himself to take it too much to heart. Rather than go through the motions of confronting this aspect of Miller's work, he scrupulously ignores it. The women's liberation movement long ago slung the albatross of sexism around Mailer's own neck, and he must have considered that intentionally reconjuring its specter in this book would put a large part of his potential readership in a stalking mood--not good, when a writer is out to purvey his product, and the subject of this anthology has the sales promise of Marilyn Monroe.

Without facing up to it in either himself or his subject, Mailer projects his intolerance of the opposite sex onto Miller, exaggerating the latter's drift at least once over:

Something in a woman wishes to be killed went the old wisdom before Women's Liberation wiped that out, something in a woman wishes to be killed, and it is the weakest part of herself, have it ploughed under, ground under, kneaded, tortured, squashed, sliced, banished, and finally immolated. Burn out my dross is the unspoken cry of his girls--in every whore is an angel burning her old rags.

That's fanaticism. And Henry Miller is not fanatic about anything, not even sex. Curiously enough, under the macho veneer of the critic's voice lies a kind of prudery. That Miller sublimates murderous inclinations into lust is plausible. But this camphorous old wives' tale--or old codger's tale, say--evinces fear of female sexuality. Mailer's near hysterical protestation of a woman's weakness fronts for an appalled reaction to her spongy, devouring vagina and the ballooning mystery of her womb.

Miller's friend Anais Nin took the measure of his self-expression through lust and literature more coolly and hit home instantly.

You will have a harder time than other men because to dominate doesn't interest you. You will always be trying to dominate yourself; the woman you love will only be an instrument for you to practice on.

Mailer readily admits that of all Miller's acquaintances, Nin pierced his psyche most straightforwardly, yet he persists in reading her judgments through the aperture of his biases. The writer foundering in the brothers and streets of Paris during the '30s was more gullible. But self-consciousness wasn't in his nature, and when he let it impinge on his novels, Nin's analysis paralyzed the frowzy romanticism of his vision as an entomologist pins the wings of a moth. Mailer is right in pointing out that Miller was "without philosophy--he had only sentiments, at their best likely to be some of the most eloquent sentiments voiced in English. Still there was nothing near to an underlying idea which might contain his characters."

The novelist simply had a knack for the commonplace, the down and out, the ironic humanity and atonal music of destitution. He loathed the stingy, petty-bourgeois tailoring trade of his parents, but in mimicking their gab and strut, he made them sympathetic and worthwhile in spite of himself and of them because he saw where they were authentic beneath their fraudulence. He found the poetry in a whore; for all the disgust, indifference and thoughtless obeisance to some purely sexual nerve communicated by the images, there is something totally absorbing in his spasmodic narrative. You just can't tell what it means to see corruption and what it means to see sublimity any more. Carrying this from the level of human interaction to human transaction, there are no longer any villains in the world seen by Henry Miller. Materialism--as opposed to physicality--doesn't count. Oh, it's there all right. But Miller has a hard-nosed talent for surviving without giving in to unnatural conventions--above all, to society's surrogate for the basic biological needs, money. There is after all one philosophy which Miller has honed to ingenious and good-humored perfection: the art of borrowing and lending "as with Yoga exercises, that is to say, wholeheartedly, without squeamishness or reservations of any kind."

Henry Miller knew how to get along with life, and the genius of his novels is that he also knew how to write in the idiom of getting along with life. That good old euphimism "the facts of life" is a more profound statement about sexual matters than those who generally resort to it would care to admit. Sex really is the single most unavoidable fact of human existence. If the total abandonment of Miller's men and women to the demands of their bodies, to all kinds of fucking and anything they can think of to go with it, is perceived in a sexist light, it is only because society has too often made sex instrumental to female subjugation.

The substance of Miller's writing is too evanescent for condensation into one ideology or another. For the essence of Miller's style lies in his disinclination to impose meaning or authorial will on the people and experiences of his books. It doesn't seem far fetched to suggest that he approaches a novel rather in the way that Virginia Woolf explained it should be done in her essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown":

Your part is to insist that writers shall come down off their plinths and pedestals, and describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown. Your should insist that she is an old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety ... the things she says and the things she does and her eyes and her nose and her speech and her silence have an over-whelming fascination, for she is, of course, the spirit we live by, life itself.

Whether or not Miller described his Mrs. Browns beautifully is a matter of individual taste, but he described them truthfully, at any rate.