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in any woman. As for the business of a big prick, it’s all a myth, don’t you think?
    Last night I made Irene Tsu, the Chinese actress (I’m not in love with her ) promise to read your book. Every day I make new converts to it. You have started a new religion, it seems.
    How is the second book coming? More difficult to write, I suppose, than the first. But don’t let that bother you.
    Incidentally, does the New York mag. pay for articles?
    I look forward to seeing you here soon. Cheers! And love and kisses.
    Henry
    The correspondence with Miller galloped on into the summer of 1974. Sometimes Henry would write two or three letters a day and I would struggle to keep up with him.
    Meanwhile I was undergoing a public metamorphosis from graduate student and “younger poet” to somebody whose name—and even face—at times brought knowing nods. Buffeted by the contradictory reviews of my first novel, I looked forward to the balm of Henry’s letters. My book had struck a nerve, and people detested or adored it. It became an event in their lives and they tended to hold the author responsible for the consequences. Henry Miller understood, perhaps better than anyone, what I was living through. His understanding kept me going.
    Henry knew that however much one may be grateful for sudden recognition, it is also a cataclysm. When Fear of Flying was published I still half-expected to go back to graduate school at Columbia, to finish my Ph.D., publish poetry and criticism, and teach at a university. Serious writers, I believed, could not reach a wide audience. (I had all the academic prejudices and snobbery typical of my epoch at Columbia.) The scholar in me—which Henry always twitted me about—was quite horrified by the idea of popular success, however much the narcissist in me may have welcomed it.
    Fear of Flying was not a predictable bestseller. For the first year of its life, its hardcover publisher never quite believed in its commercial potential. There were never enough copies printed and whenever it hit the bestseller list, it would promptly go out of stock. Foreign publishers were initially also wary.
    “ Frenchwomen don’t need psychoanalysis ,” I was told by one French editor. “ I’ll publish it if I can edit out all the anti-German parts ,” I was told by a German editor. Male editors, who were threatened by the female boisterousness of the book, found all sorts of other reasons to reject it. Henry, ever the defender of the underdog, took up Fear of Flying ’s cause, sending it around the world to publishers and editors he trusted. Many of the friends he made for me as a writer have lasted to this day.
    Irritated by the stupidity and male chauvinism of the responses to Fear of Flying, Henry wrote an essay for the op-ed page of The New York Times (see p. 259). In it he shows more charity toward women’s writing than some feminist zealots, who judge every book against an imaginary yardstick of political correctness and care for neither irony nor imagination. Henry was neither a zealot nor an ideologue, and he proved more open to a woman’s writing than many women. He called Fear of Flying the female counterpart to his own Tropic of Cancer —a description that delighted me. In his assessment of the book, there was no trace of the spite and competitiveness one usually finds lurking in reviews. I had every reason to be grateful to Henry Miller when in October I finally went to Los Angeles with his private phone number in my pocket.
    I drove my rented Buick down Sunset Boulevard—the only road I knew—to the Palisades. With some difficulty, I found Henry’s house, an unremarkable white raised ranch house at 444 Ocampo Drive, which seemed awfully bourgeois to be the home of an old bohemian.
    On the door, which was unlocked, was a quote from Meng-tse, an ancient sage invented by Herman Hesse as a pseudonym:
When a man has reached old age and has fulfilled his mission, he has a right to confront the idea of