The Devil at Large Read Online Free Page B

death in peace. He has no need of other men, he knows them already and has seen enough of them. What he needs is peace. It is not seemly to seek out such a man, plague him with chatter, and make him suffer banalities. One should pass by the door of his house as if no one lived there.
    This was obviously placed to deter unwelcome literary groupies. But Henry was charmingly ambivalent about groupies. He was one of the most gregarious people on earth and was apt to blast his own concentration by inviting in the very visitors the sign on the door seemed meant to discourage.
    I opened the unlocked door. Twinka Thiebaud, a beautiful redhead who was Henry’s cook and caretaker in those days, came out to greet me.
    I was invited into a hallway with a staircase, and followed Twinka into a room dominated by a Ping-Pong table, a piano, and Miller’s watercolors. In the small patio outside, a pool glimmered in the golden October sunlight. Pleased to have found the house without mishap, I was tingly with anticipation at meeting my literary benefactor.
    A thud of rubber in the adjacent hallway. Henry arrived, hunched over an aluminum walker, which he wielded like a shield.
    “ Hello! ” he said in his gravelly voice, redolent of Brooklyn. He wore pajamas and carpet slippers, an old bathrobe, and a hearing aid. He was an old man but his eyes were young.
    We sat at the dining table and our talk ignited. Twinka served tea and chimed in from time to time. I have not the faintest recollection of what we talked about, except that it was an extension of our letters—and that Henry was warm and free. Henry’s conversational vitality made him seem my contemporary. In the pictures taken at that time, he was clearly an old man. But my distinct sense was that he was spiritually younger than me. His exuberance was like a shot of the life force.
    Proust said in his essay “Contre St. Beuve,” “A book is a product of a different self than we manifest in our habits, our social life and our vices.” This is true. The inner self of a writer, the self destined to live beyond the flesh, is not always visible in the writer’s daily life. But the writer’s true voice, once discovered, is congruent with the writer’s soul. This voice is what all writers seek, and a very few find—to raise a cry that is integral with one’s soul.
    Here is the paradox of writing. You can’t hide behind words. What and who you are shines forth on every page—whether you pretend objectivity or not. You strip down to the essential self. That is why the misunderstanding of one’s writing is so painful. It is the misunderstanding of the essence of one’s self.
    What Henry had that others so resented was wholeness. Though his daily life and his writing life were not necessarily one and the same, his exuberance, the happiness that comes across in his work, was visible in him even when he was old and ill. The voice he found expressed the abundance of the man. It was not the sex the puritans hated and feared. It was the abundance. It was not the four-letter words; it was the five-star soul.
    We talked and talked all that afternoon and our talks went on intermittently until he died. They were concentrated in the years I lived in Malibu (1974–76). Sometimes Twinka was present, sometimes Val and Tony Miller, Henry’s daughter and son, sometimes Jonathan Fast, my lover, later my husband, sometimes Tom Schiller, a young comedy writer, sometimes Mike Wallace, the interviewer who recorded our conversations for 60 Minutes in 1974.
    We ranged over dozens of subjects: Paris in the thirties, literature, mysticism, food, life. Henry’s rasping voice, punctuated with a very Brooklynese doncha know? , his habit of saying hmmm hmmm like a meditative mantra, rings in my ears as I write. I wish every reader could hear Henry as well as read him. Henry was a mixed-media person and printed words alone don’t do him justice.
    I always promised Henry I would write a book about him—but