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by ephemeral celebrities. Miller didn’t write that way, nor did Durrell. No one can write a real book looking back over his shoulder at the critics or at the publisher’s number-crunchers.
    “How is it to be old?” Larry asked, rhetorically. “Well, your balls drop off—you don’t know where to look. They cut your eyes out and don’t necessarily put them back at the same angle. But thank God I can still drink.”
    “To Henry,” I proposed.
    “Yes, to Henry,” he countered, emptying his glass.
    And to Larry. And to a generation that knew what the calling of author meant. Authority. Being the place where the buck stops.
    As we inch into the last decade of this century, the older generation of writers is disappearing day by day. Every week brings a new death crop: Alberto Moravia, Lawrence Durrell, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jerzy Kozinski. (The women writers are not dying as fast, but then the critics have already killed their reputations.) The idea that a writer can be a generalist, not a specialist, seems to die with this generation. The idea that poets can write prose and novelists poetry, that adults can write for children and that authors can maintain the radical innocence (if not the childishness) of children, seems to pass with them. I would like my generation of writers to catch some of their largeness of heart, some of their willingness to crack open genres and take a chance on the infinite.
    A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry. But what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t take chances? “Hating” Henry, after all, was about my own fear of self-exposure. But without taking chances one cannot tell the truth, and what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t tell the truth?

Chapter 2
Henry Hero
    Rimbaud restored literature to life; I have endeavored to restore life to literature.
— HENRY MILLER, THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS
    For me, the book is the man that I am…. The confused man, the negligent man, the reckless man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically truthful man I am.
— HENRY MILLER, BLACK SPRING
    M OST PEOPLE ARE NOT free. Freedom, in fact, frightens them. They follow patterns set for them by their parents, enforced by society, by their fears of “they say” and “what will they think?” and a constant inner dialogue that weighs duty against desire and pronounces duty the winner.
    “Lives of quiet desperation” Thoreau called such existence—though today’s version is noisy desperation. Occasionally, a visionary comes along who seems to have conquered the fears in himself and seems to live with bravado and courage. People are at once terrified of such a creature—and admiring. They are also envious.
    One who has conquered human fears is recognized as a hero—or heroine. But such a figure inspires mixed emotions. We are provoked by their example, but we are also inclined to blame ourselves for having lived too timidly. So the hero or heroine is often attacked, even killed, because of the envy of ordinary mortals. But if we could see the hero as embodying our own aspirations, we would not need to destroy but could rather emulate and learn.
    Henry Miller was such a hero. He did not start out fearless but he learned to overcome his fears. And he wrote a book— Tropic of Cancer —that breathed fresh air into American—and world—literature. The fresh air he breathed was freedom. And it was like pure oxygen to those who would take it in. For the others, the fearful, the envious, those who refused to breathe, Miller had to be discredited as a pervert or a sex maniac because his message was too terrifying. Life is there for the taking, he said. And those who refused to live fully had to blame him for their own failure.
    Like Byron, Pushkin, George Sand, and Colette, Miller became more than a writer. He became a protagonist and a prophet—the prophet