BOOK REVIEW : Rediscovering the Genius of Henry Miller : THE DEVIL AT LARGE; Erica Jong on Henry Miller by Erica Jong ; Turtle Bay Books/Random House; $22; 320 pages

Up in Big Sur, there’s an art gallery where you can pick up a signed lithograph by Henry Miller for a couple thousand dollars or so. A one-page typewritten bio is on display along with the artwork just in case the collector has forgotten that Henry Miller was an author as well as an artist.

“No, he’s not the one who married Marilyn Monroe,” the salesman is sometimes called upon to explain.

Such is the curious fate of the man who produced what is arguably the richest body of work by any American writer since Walt Whitman. Despite a devoted cult following, a large body of work still in print, and a couple of scholarly biographies published in 1991, Henry Miller is still best remembered as the purveyor of high-toned pornography, if he is remembered at all.

“Miller remains among the most misunderstood of writers--seen either as a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert,” writes Erica Jong in “The Devil at Large,” her newly published appreciation of Henry Miller. “It fell to him to both express and to exemplify the role of the creative artist in a world that has increasingly little use for dissent, for art (except as a salable item), for honesty. . . .”

Back in 1974, when Henry Miller was an 83-year-old housebound literary icon and Erica Jong was a hot commodity with an erotic novel of her own (“Fear of Flying”), Miller sent a fan letter to Jong. Their correspondence, which is reproduced at length here, ripened into a friendship--and friendship, too, was an art form in which Miller displayed real genius.

Now, more than a decade after Miller’s death, Jong honors her old friend in the pages of “Devil at Large” by elevating him to his rightful place in American letters. At the same time, she struggles to make sense of Miller as a man, as an artist, as the bogyman of both censorious bluenoses and radical feminists. Miller called himself “always merry and bright,” she concludes, but he can be regarded as a kind of martyr to the “sexophobia” of American culture.

“As a paradigm of the plight of the creative artist in America, Miller’s life is nothing short of terrifying,” she writes. “Always rejected by both the literary Establishment and the literary anti-Establishment, broke until he was a relatively elderly man, he had no choice but to live on the margins and like it.”

“The Devil at Large” weaves in and out of Henry Miller’s life and work: his origins in Brooklyn, his crucial expatriate years in Paris, his serial marriages and affairs, his legal and financial woes. But do not mistake this for biography. As much about its author as its subject, “The Devil At Large” goes on at length about Jong’s own writing, her husbands and lovers, her dreams. Jong even imagines a dialogue with a ghostly Henry Miller--but I doubt that Miller himself would have objected.

“When you write about me,” he told Jong, “make it all up!”

Miller certainly would have appreciated Jong’s real motive--the rehabilitation of an author who was very nearly written out of the American literary canon. Jong argues that he “is best known for his worst writing”--the “good parts” of “Tropic of Cancer” and his other banned books. And she points us in the direction of his neglected but utterly luminous masterpieces, including the book that Miller said he liked best of all, “The Colossus of Maroussi.”

“If ‘Tropic of Cancer’ is Miller’s ‘Inferno,’ ” Jong writes, “then ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’ is his ‘Parad iso.’ ”

Jong acknowledges Miller’s foibles and failings, the uneven quality of his writing, and his conflicted relationships with women. She delicately notes what she calls Miller’s “complicated feelings” toward the Jews, but she acquits him of the charge of anti-Semitism. “It is Henry’s lifelong habit of letting it all hang out,” she writes, “that often makes him appear bigoted.”

Then, too, Jong seeks to debunk the damning feminist critique that came along just when Henry Miller’s books were no longer banned by the courts and the censors: “I am sorry to have to report that he was not the unmitigated monster feminist critics of the 70s made him out to be,” she insists. “He was just a man--unanalyzed, full of contradictions, imperfect--but able to express the conflicts of life and sexual politics with unparalleled honesty.”

“Devil at Large” has its rough edges and its annoying moments, but Jong openly declares her real mission: “I want to send you back to read him--with an open head and heart.” And if she succeeds in drawing a new generation of readers to the work of Henry Miller, then Jong will not only have repaid the debt of friendship that she owed the old man--she will have performed a real service to American civilization.