Erotic Venus

April 1940: A book collector offered Henry Miller a hundred dollars a month to write erotic stories. It seemed like a Dantesque punishment, condemning Henry to write erotica at a dollar a page. He rebelled because, at the time, his humor was anything but Rabelaisian, because writing on commission was a castration, because writing with a voyeur glued to the keyhole deprived his fantastical adventures of all pleasure and spontaneity.