2 Devils at Large : Books: Erica Jong has written a paean to Henry Miller, branded the ‘King of Smut.’ Feminists must read him, she says: ‘He is telling honestly . . . how men feel about women.’

You and I, we have the itch. --Henry Miller in a letter to Erica Jong, July 7, 1974

The subject on the table is that much-vaunted bugaboo, the sexual revolution. But everything else appears to be, shall we say, discreet. The table sits genteelly in the plein-air restaurant of the Bel-Air Hotel. And the woman who has thrown out the subject is conservatively garbed in a bottle-green Claude Montana suit. Indeed, the topic shocks her.

“What is shocking to me is that things haven’t changed,” she is saying. “So where was the sexual revolution? There was no sexual revolution.”

Thus spake one of its many architects, Erica Jong, whose bawdy first novel, “Fear of Flying,” was credited with--or blamed for--giving women permission to be sexual. Yet here she is, an entire generation away from that early volley, complaining that it all turned out to be much ado about nothing.

Not that Jong would have us all gamboling nude en masse, as one did in that optimistic sliver of Woodstockian time. What she is railing against in the age of AIDS, she says, are the fear and loathing that infuse sex in this country, the pox on sexuality that comes and goes and is back.

“Americans are absolutely crazy on the subject of sex. They don’t see it as a part of life. So the minute you write about sex, people say, ‘Horrors! It’s the devil.’ ”

The devil in question is Henry Miller, the subject of the new book “The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller.” Jong, 50, a disciple, friend and kindred spirit of Miller, wrote the adoring tract in part to resurrect Miller’s reputation from infamy and his work from obscurity. It’s an odd, highly individual pastiche--part biography, part criticism, part polemics.

“The irony is that we have this great philosophical writer--great and uneven, let me point out, because not all his books are of equal value--who is really the heir of Thoreau and Whitman. And instead he’s seen as the King of Smut,” she says with distaste. “This is ridiculous.”

Certainly no one is going to be flabbergasted to learn that the inventor of the Zipless You-Know-What is rallying to Miller’s defense. Millerthink was obvious in Jong’s coming-out novel, even to the uninitiated. At one point, Jong tips her hat bluntly: “. . . nobody (as Henry Miller says) can tell the absolute truth.”

But how could Jong declare herself “a passionate feminist” in one breath and yet go to the rescue of a writer who has been pilloried by Kate Millett and generations of feminists, a man who was even lambasted by his own lover, Anais Nin, for reducing women to “biological apertures”?

What’s more, Jong insists feminists would do well to dust off Miller and read him.

“He is telling honestly in the sexual books like ‘Tropic of Cancer’ how men feel about women,” Jong says. “Some of it is very unpleasant to read, but we have to know about that, just as men have to know about our rage. That’s the only way the sexes are ever going to get to know each other and get along. Censoring is of no use whatsoever.”

Here’s where Miller and Jong fit in on the timeline for nouveau sex lit:

In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the bedroom door in literature with its decision that Miller’s banned 30-year-old novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” could not constitutionally be suppressed. Explicit novels soon appeared by important American male writers--John Updike’s “Couples” came out in 1968, and Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” followed the next year.

In the early ‘70s, women began returning the favor with literature revealing their own intimate view of the world. “Fear of Flying” made the biggest splash in 1973; it sold 10 million copies in 22 languages and touched off a fierce, early battle involving the National Endowment for the Arts.

At the same time that novelists were baring their boudoirs in the name of Art, a huge pornography industry was springing up.

“So we have this irony that for decades, we couldn’t get ‘Tropic of Cancer,’ we couldn’t get ‘Lolita,’ we couldn’t get ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ ” Jong says. “And then suddenly we not only can get literature, but we also get disgusting pornography.

“But the irony is you have to have one to have the other. The First Amendment lets in the good and the bad. People naturally are put off by the ugliness of it, but who is going to be in charge of what we see or read? We need the door open in order to criticize the way society treats women.”

Translation: If you can’t have Henry Miller, you may not be able to have feminism either. And danger, in Jong’s view, lies in continuing to bar the door--in practice if not in law--lo these many years later. She lays that common tendency at the feet of the American puritan strain. It’s so strong, she says, that readers refuse to tackle even his ebullient albeit chaste masterpiece, “The Colossus of Maroussi.”

“Henry thinks that humanity has less to lose by embracing the depths than by pretending to the heights, “ she writes. “His vision of woman . . . may offend some feminists--and all those who think we can ‘rise above’ our physical natures--but it also has a primal truth about it. And the truth is always liberating.”

Jong’s unconventional views on Miller are gleaning a characteristically complicated response from critics. The Times mentioned the book’s “annoying moments” but praised Jong for performing “a real service to American civilization” if she succeeds in sending people back to read Miller.

The New York Times was far more dismissive, spurning her arguments as “silly” and sniffing that the book “rings less like a paean to a great dead writer than a yelp from a frustrated living one.”

In fact, Jong doesn’t deny that her highly personal defense of the much-reviled Miller is, in part, intended to respond to her own barrage of criticism.

And reactions to Jong, like Miller, have often been intense and complex. This, even though “Fear of Flying,” for all its bandying about of four-letter words, was actually rather moralistic; it exposed the heroine’s free-love fantasies as empty delusions.

Jong nonetheless was crowned the Happy Hooker of American letters, as she puts it. And that sobriquet was abetted by reports that her own lusty behavior sometimes rivaled her heroines’.

Jong blames the knocks on her recurring nemesis--the puritanical response to her literary bailiwick.

“Naturally if it’s bad for a man who (writes about sex), imagine what it’s like for a woman who dares to say women should feel sexual pleasure. . . . For the last 20 years, I’ve been treated as a menace to morality, as if I were personally responsible for the uppityness of American women.”

Jong also suddenly found herself a sex guru, to borrow the vernacular of the period; countless readers decided Jong’s intimate books qualified her as mother confessor for their own highly personal dramas.

“I never expected to be famous, so my number was in the book and people would call me and people would come out of prison and camp out on my doorstep,” she says. “I once got a letter from a man who wanted my soiled underwear to sniff. I was so polite. I said, ‘Of course I cannot accede to your request, but perhaps you would like this inscribed book of poems.’ ”

Another letter came from a far more interesting correspondent. It was Henry Miller, who wrote to Jong in April, 1974, to congratulate her for her “gay, witty (and) thoroughly uninhibited” novel. And, in perhaps the crowning compliment by Miller’s standards, he wrote: “I don’t know when I’ve read a book by a woman which has made such an impact on me.”

That missive touched off a mutually admiring correspondence that ripened into friendship during Miller’s old age in the Pacific Palisades. The two saw a lot of each other when Jong lived in Malibu, although they lost touch before his death at 88 in 1980 as Jong became absorbed in her new novel and new family in Connecticut.

Miller’s admiration for Jong was so great that he wrote a piece for the New York Times in 1974 declaring her debut novel “the feminine counterpart to my own ‘Tropic of Cancer.’. . . It is full of obscenity, whatever that means, but underneath it all, there is a most serious purpose. The book . . . is a paean to life.”

Jong, who has been accused in the press of bearing an overweening ego, is careful to point out that it was Miller--not she--who drew the comparison.

Miller told Jong back in the mid-’70s that he wanted her to write a book about him. “When you write about me,” Miller told her, “make it all up!”

But for a long time, Jong reserved her fiction writing for, well, her fiction. She turned out seven novels and seven books of poetry before turning to this, her first work of nonfiction. Somewhat ironically, Jong was finally spurred to defend Miller, partly by the backlash years of the Republican administrations.

“The book is very polemical,” she says. “I don’t think polemical is a bad word. But some of it really deals with my passionate feelings that we’re on the wrong track about sexuality of men and women.”

Well into her “mid-life thing,” Jong finds herself at a turning point. She has become far more political in her latest book, in newspaper opinion pieces, in public debates. And in typical Jongian fashion, she’s cresting the topical tide--sexual politics in the ‘90s--and doing so with provocative punch.

In the book, she chastises radical feminists for linking arms with family values right-wingers in a misguided bid for censorship: “It’s like the Hitler-Stalin pact,” she says.

And in a recent piece for the Washington Post, Jong panned feminists who have made much of sexual harassment when they should be focusing on the economy, stupid: “ . . . take away economic inequity, and I believe that sexual inequity will eventually wither too.”

“I think people sort of expect me to speak for my generation of women and their contradictions,” she says. “It’s a funny generation, the generation that was raised to be Doris Day or Debbie Reynolds and came into our 20s wanting to be Gloria Steinem.”

So who better to speak for them and their evolving sexual political agenda than the ever-contradictory Jong, the literary tart cum politico, the sexual “anarchist at heart” who is settling into cozy respectability with her fourth marriage, to literary and family lawyer Ken Burrows?

“It seemed to me that people were approving of me much more when I remarried,” says Jong, who straddles New York City, Connecticut and Vermont with Burrows and her 14-year-old daughter, Molly Jong-Fast.

“Intellectually I don’t believe in marriage, but somehow I always end up getting married. I really believe that men and women should live together but be single.”

Then why do it?

Jong hoots with pleasure. “Because I’m totally inconsistent.”