Chapter 10
SCENE:
A kind of scuzzy waiting room with a rudimentary kitchen (complete with microwave and coffee urn) stage right, and a door marked WOMEN stage left. Sagging Naugahyde couches; vending machines selling apples, sodas, candy bars; a table; chairs. Is this the battered greenroom of a regional theater where the actors foregather between scenes of Peer Gynt, Macbeth or The Wild Duck? Or is this the waiting room of a hospital where doctors and relatives exchange tragic news? The place is at once familiar and strange. At curtain, the stage is empty. Henry Miller, in his eighties, crashes in, wearing an old tartan bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. He is moving carefully with the help of an aluminum walker. He looks around.
Lights come up at the back of the stage, revealing Erica Jong sitting at a desk and madly scribbling on a yellow legal pad. Startled by the commotion, she looks up.
ERICA
Henry! What are you doing here? I thought you were dead!
HENRY
It turned out not to be that simple. I don’t know whether I’m dead or alive and they don’t know whether to send me to heaven or hell.
ERICA
Henry, I tried to help, but I was blocked.
HENRY
Hurry up. After Mary Dearborn, they’re seriously considering sending me you-know-where.
ERICA
You mean there really is a you-know-where?
HENRY
Absolutely! For writers it takes its own form. Out of print. Not studied in the universities. Ripped off by inferior talents who later denounce you. I’m the king of smut, don’tcha know? They still don’t get what I’m about.
ERICA
They will after this book.
HENRY
Don’t be so sure. It takes more than books to change the world. I found that out. It takes dynamite! If every man or woman were to say yes to life, what a blow it would be for the politicians and the warmongers. Where would those bloody bastards be? Slavery would die. Money would be of no account. Creation! Desire! Enlightenment! The cockroaches love the darkness so they can scurry.
ERICA
What are you saying, Henry?
HENRY
I’m saying that fear serves a very important purpose. Liberty has enemies everywhere. Fear of freedom. Fear of liberation. You called it fear of flying. My writing still terrifies people. First they said it was too new. Then they said it’s old hat. They never really read it.
ERICA
They’re still saying it. They tell me I’m crazy to defend you—that you’re a sexist, an anti-Semite. The Anti-Sex League is in charge again. People are afraid of their sexual feelings and they take it out on you. You remind them how rich life can be and how pathetically restricted their own lives are. You challenge their denial and they hate you for it.
HENRY
What about you?
ERICA
I’m going to hell too. No question. In fact, I’m thinking of changing my name.
HENRY
The people here will figure it out.
ERICA
So what the hell do we do, Henry? I read in the paper that 60 percent of American families didn’t buy a single book in 1992.
HENRY
Don’t worry. Books are the least of the problem. The forms of communication may change. The art of dreaming when wide awake will be in the power of everyone someday. When we are all wide awake and dreaming, the spirit that moves us will be so enhanced as to make writing unnecessary. We write to throw off the poison because of our false way of life. We write to recapture our innocence. But if we’re constantly whirling in the primal flux, we become part of the original creation which is taking place all the time.
ERICA
So now what are you trying to tell me, Henry?
HENRY
Fling yourself in the flow. Don’t be afraid. The whole logic of the universe is contained in daring. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life preservers around their necks! And more often than not it is the life preserver that sinks them.
ERICA
I’ve always known that fear is a sign—usually a sign that I’m doing something right.
HENRY
Don’t pick the pen up from the page. Keep on at all costs. It’s all a question of hearing the Voice! That Voice! It was while writing Tropic of Capricorn that the real shenanigans took place … and how! I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing! I had to take it in one fell swoop or risk the penalty of excommunication.
ERICA
If everyone could hear that voice, they would believe.
HENRY
They deliberately drown it out. It’s the music of the spheres. Shakespeare heard it. And Merton.
ERICA
Have you run into them?
HENRY
Yes. And Madame Blavatsky. And Marie Corelli. And my mother. Even my mother has calmed down a lot.
ERICA
Have you been writing?
HENRY
I’m beyond that. Here the writer and the writing are one. No man ever puts down what he intended to say. The original creation belongs to the primal flux.
ERICA
Looking down on the world now, what do you make of it?
HENRY
Still a chancre on a worn-out cock. Only worse than before. Because now even kids are afraid of life. All they talk about is death, AIDS, pollution, radiation, holes in the ozone layer. They’ve lost the joy. What I had that made all the difference was joy: I wrote for madmen or angels. I was just a Brooklyn boy. Communicating with the red-haired albinos of the Zuni region. But I was saying yes! I am still saying yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
ERICA
Even though you’re “dead”?
HENRY
Especially because I’m dead!
ERICA
Then let us say yes with you!
HENRY
It’s harder to do than to say. We have need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the automobile, without the high-class bombers—but we can’t do without new beings.
ERICA
How can we be reborn?
HENRY
Follow me! I lost myself so I could find myself. I had a vision of heaven once. It swims in underwater light, the trees spaced just right, the willow in front bowing to the willow in back, the roses in full bloom, the pampas grass just beginning to don its plumes of gold, the hollyhocks standing out like starved sentinels with big, bright buttons, the birds darting from tree to tree, calling to one another imperiously, and Eve standing barefoot in her Garden of Eden with a grub live in her hand, while Dante Alighieri, pale as alabaster, and with only his head showing above the rim, was making to slake his awesome thirst in the birdbath under the elm.
[He looks off into the middle distance. Erica bends to her scribbling. When she looks up, he is gone.]