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Authors: Erica Jong
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shame me into respectability…. What she didn’t realize was she was creating a very restless, angry person. When finally I found the courage to write about 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.
Henry’s recollections of his mother—Louise Nieting Miller—are almost always about her Prussianness: her oppression of him, of his father, and of his retarded younger sister. According to Henry, his mother beat Lauretta for the “crime” of being retarded; she screamed at his father for being drunk; she hid Henry’s typewriter in a closet because she was so embarrassed to have a son who wanted to be anything as shiftless as a writer. She was a woman given to random rages who must have been frustrated by the difficulties of her marriage. It’s not hard to empathize with Louise and take, with many grains of salt, her son’s violent depictions of her. But to the boy Henry she must have been terrifying, larger than life. How many writers escape into the world of words to find a haven from the uncontrollable world of childhood? The pattern is so common as to seem to be a general rule.
Miller’s idealization of women as love objects and his simultaneous need to strip them brutally naked in his novels is usually traced to his troubled relationship with his mother. But if we look at the dynamics more carefully we see that he was also a very good little boy, who must have worshiped his very strong and domineering mother and who was whiplashed between the opposing poles of her personality.
He even seemed to know this about himself, for in his book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins , this astonishing passage appears:
… [O]ne is still bound to the mother. All one’s rebellion was but dust in the eye, the frantic attempt to conceal this bondage. Men of this stamp are always against their native land—impossible to be otherwise. Enslavement is the great bugaboo, whether it be to country, church or society. Their lives are spent in breaking fetters, but the secret bondage gnaws at their vitals and gives them no rest. They must come to terms with the mother before they can rid themselves of the obsession of fetters. “Outside! Forever outside! Sitting on the doorstep of the mother’s womb.” … It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved …
Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out. In his letters to the critic and professor Wallace Fowlie in the 1940s, he says that Rimbaud was most important to him for helping him recognize his mother-fixation. So we know he came to accept this truth about himself. Still, he could not control his alternation between dependency and rage.
Always, Henry required a muse-mother-lover figure in order to write. First it was his second wife, June, then Anaïs Nin, whom he often credited with the greatest flowering of his creativity. Nin’s recent book, Incest (1992), shows how extraordinarily close their connection was and how much each became the other’s double, lover, and muse. The violence of his depiction of women, which Kate Millett so meticulously analyzes, is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him. His essay “The Enormous Womb” could have been the title of the book of his life. Henry saw in Rimbaud what he saw in himself:
And what is the nature of this secret? I can only say that it has to do with the mothers. I feel that it was the same with Lawrence and with Rimbaud.
Men with domineering mothers (Miller, Mailer, Lawrence) are likely to become prisoners of sex who seek to break their chains with violent words. Under these violent words is often a quivering romanticism. “He has the German sentimentality and romanticism about
Henry’s recollections of his mother—Louise Nieting Miller—are almost always about her Prussianness: her oppression of him, of his father, and of his retarded younger sister. According to Henry, his mother beat Lauretta for the “crime” of being retarded; she screamed at his father for being drunk; she hid Henry’s typewriter in a closet because she was so embarrassed to have a son who wanted to be anything as shiftless as a writer. She was a woman given to random rages who must have been frustrated by the difficulties of her marriage. It’s not hard to empathize with Louise and take, with many grains of salt, her son’s violent depictions of her. But to the boy Henry she must have been terrifying, larger than life. How many writers escape into the world of words to find a haven from the uncontrollable world of childhood? The pattern is so common as to seem to be a general rule.
Miller’s idealization of women as love objects and his simultaneous need to strip them brutally naked in his novels is usually traced to his troubled relationship with his mother. But if we look at the dynamics more carefully we see that he was also a very good little boy, who must have worshiped his very strong and domineering mother and who was whiplashed between the opposing poles of her personality.
He even seemed to know this about himself, for in his book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins , this astonishing passage appears:
… [O]ne is still bound to the mother. All one’s rebellion was but dust in the eye, the frantic attempt to conceal this bondage. Men of this stamp are always against their native land—impossible to be otherwise. Enslavement is the great bugaboo, whether it be to country, church or society. Their lives are spent in breaking fetters, but the secret bondage gnaws at their vitals and gives them no rest. They must come to terms with the mother before they can rid themselves of the obsession of fetters. “Outside! Forever outside! Sitting on the doorstep of the mother’s womb.” … It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved …
Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out. In his letters to the critic and professor Wallace Fowlie in the 1940s, he says that Rimbaud was most important to him for helping him recognize his mother-fixation. So we know he came to accept this truth about himself. Still, he could not control his alternation between dependency and rage.
Always, Henry required a muse-mother-lover figure in order to write. First it was his second wife, June, then Anaïs Nin, whom he often credited with the greatest flowering of his creativity. Nin’s recent book, Incest (1992), shows how extraordinarily close their connection was and how much each became the other’s double, lover, and muse. The violence of his depiction of women, which Kate Millett so meticulously analyzes, is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him. His essay “The Enormous Womb” could have been the title of the book of his life. Henry saw in Rimbaud what he saw in himself:
And what is the nature of this secret? I can only say that it has to do with the mothers. I feel that it was the same with Lawrence and with Rimbaud.
Men with domineering mothers (Miller, Mailer, Lawrence) are likely to become prisoners of sex who seek to break their chains with violent words. Under these violent words is often a quivering romanticism. “He has the German sentimentality and romanticism about
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