THE LETTERS TO AND from Henry end abruptly at this time because we now lived close enough to visit often and this was a period of much talk, dining, and hanging out. In October of 1974, on the very same day I met Henry, I was entertained by friends from Connecticut, Howard and Bette Fast, and met and fell in love with their son, Jonathan Fast. After many trips back and forth to Los Angeles, I left my marriage and moved to Malibu with Jonathan in February 1975. Henry lived in Pacific Palisades, just twenty minutes away, and it was easy to visit him.
Henry was open and generous about living arrangements. On one occasion when our plumbing broke down in Malibu, Jonathan and I moved in with him in Pacific Palisades. It was a merry house. Henry had a gift for being a mentor to young people and his place was a sort of sanctuary for my contemporaries. Besides Jonathan and me, there were Twinka Thiebaud (who later wrote Reflections), Tom Schiller (who made a wonderful film called Henry Miller Asleep and Awake), Bill Pickerill, the artist, who cared for Henry at the very end of his life, and many others—including Henry’s late-life loves, the actresses Brenda Venus and Lisa Liu.
So the letters ended, but the conversations went on, and the friendship deepened. And then quite suddenly, fleeing the movie business and California, Jonathan and I moved back to New York. Shortly thereafter, we settled in Connecticut. I recovered from the trauma of a lawsuit over Fear of Flying by plunging into the eighteenth century, my old love from graduate school, and writing a mock-picaresque novel, Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. During the five-year period of composing that novel, I corresponded with no one—not even Henry. (Writing a book in eighteenth-century English does tend to occupy the mind and I was also pregnant or nursing during the final stages of the book.)
When Henry died in 1980, I was ensconced in Connecticut, had a new marriage, a two-year-old daughter, and was in the midst of launching my eighteenth-century novel. But I was thrown by the news of Henry’s death—he had seemed immortal to me—and I wrote a eulogy called “Good-bye to Henry-San” in which I remarked on the many ironies of Henry’s reputation, the fact that he had sent postcards to his literary friends promoting himself for a Nobel prize, the fact that he hated his reputation as a pornographer, and the fact that he was the opposite of what the world presumed him to be: gentle, not rough; a romantic, not a rapist. I knew that I would have to expand that eulogy into a book someday, but I was far from being ready. (Just as I had to wait twenty years after graduate school to write my eighteenth-century novel, I would have to wait ten years after Henry’s death to write my Miller book. Books gestate slowly and mysteriously; and the process can’t be rushed.)
The memorial service was held at The New School. Arriving late after a long drive from Connecticut, I ran downstairs to the bathroom and was promptly soaked when a geyser of water shot up from the toilet upon flushing.
“Henry!” I cried. Apparently Henry was still hovering, playing tricks with the plumbing.
The event was a typical Miller mishmash. (I have never attended an event in Henry’s honor that did not, somehow, go awry.) Norman Mailer was there with his wife and mother. David Amram played music, and various Miller wives and sweethearts had their say. Henry would have found the whole thing ridiculous. That was only fitting. Chaos was his element. But he understood that chaos was also the precondition for creativity.
Henry left this world still not having been given his due by the self-appointed judges of “culture.” And the situation persists to our own day. Perhaps Miller is a hard genius to recognize because he sticks his tongue out at all our sacred cows. Dualism disgusts him. He knows that sexomania and sexophobia are one and the same thing. He has little respect for our so-called freedom of the press—which is more a pious ideal than a reality. He has little hope for modern man unless he is reborn. We need a new race of beings, he says, an explosion of sorts, dynamite to blow up all our false pieties. Women can ignite this dynamite, but both men and women must together remake the world. They can only remake it one way: by first remaking themselves. The question is: will they be honest enough to do it? Honesty has never been more needed. Our very existence as a species is at stake.
After Henry’s death, disturbing news began to reach me about his last days. “Henry had little strength, and slept off and on day and night,” Noel Young, one of his last publishers (Capra Press) wrote to me. “He spoke much of the richness of his dreams and of the line between sleep and wakefulness not always being clear. Sometimes the dreams were more interesting and comforting than being awake and he’d want to sink back into them.” Other friends reported that Henry was not always well served by the crowd of young people who congregated in his house. While he was dying downstairs, some distressing things were happening upstairs, among people who didn’t even know who Henry Miller was. Rumors of drug abuse, financial abuse, and neglect haunt the accounts of those final days. Val and Tony were apparently frustrated in their attempts to help their father and eventually the artist Bill Pickerill, Henry’s great friend, moved in to be at Henry’s side during his last days on earth. He lovingly helped Henry die.
As Noel Young reports: “His faculties were failing—blind in one eye and poor sight in the other, partially paralyzed in one arm and leg, he moved in a walker with difficulty. Yet he still turned out watercolors using the Ping-Pong table for support, and still enjoyed company at dinner time. Alas, during the last months his memory and ability to recognize friends began to fade, and it tended to embarrass him.”
Twinka Thiebaud and Bill Pickerill tried to protect and nurture him. Even in health, Henry was a dreadful judge of character, too open to con men and exploiters. Many times in his life, his generosity had brought him pain (the misadventure with Moricand in “The Devil in Paradise” section of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is a good example of this). At the end of his life, Henry was captive to his own excessive generosity and he would hear no evil about those who used him, some of whom were on the payroll.
Yet even this sad end is not inconsistent with Henry’s character or his beliefs. Henry was enough of a Buddhist to understand that eternal circles get completed. He had been supported by many during his life, and now it was his turn to support others. If they were not always artists as great as himself, that was inevitable. We are not in control of the cosmic checks and balances, debits and credits.
In The Red Notebook, Henry had copied out a quote from the Buddha that reveals his philosophy about all things:
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Henry knew that even the greatest teacher is not infallible. If this was true of Buddha, it was also true of Henry. Wise as the Buddha in some respects, Henry could also be as naive as a child in his judgment of people. Sometimes he knew but didn’t want to know he knew. He would say to Twinka and Val, “Don’t disillusion me, I need my illusions.” Some of his late loves also abused his generosity, but if they inspired him to write and made him feel young, wasn’t that enough? Henry’s friends could not always protect him from himself.
Noel Young reports that he saw Henry “every month or so” in the last days and “was dismayed to see him in ebb tide.” Noel “tried to rush the printer to have The World of Lawrence in his hands, but he died the very day the first copies were shipped from the bindery.”
An irony: The World of Lawrence was to have been Henry’s first published book, and it became his last. At the end, with the help of Noel Young, Evelyn J. Hinz, and John J. Teunissen, this “passionate appreciation” of D.H. Lawrence finally found its form. Like all Henry’s books and essays on writers, it is not orthodox literary criticism, and yet it tells us a great deal more about the creative process. The creative process was what Henry knew best, and he had the gift for communicating it to others. He was more than a writer; he was also a muse and a prophet.
Miller’s joy and self-liberation threaten people. They claim to be “bored” by his exuberance—a sure sign that something in it frightens the fearful. His cosmic definition of sex is still rejected. It is somehow easier to alternate between the dualities; sexomania one decade, sexophobia the next.
The truth is, we will never fulfill our potential as a species until we properly understand Miller and his cry for wholeness.
Down with sexomania and sexophobia both! Up with the full acceptance of the complexities of our humanity! We have been walking blindfolded through most of history, through our own lives, even, condemning all that we cannot see. Miller is telling us to strip the bandages from our eyes and let the light enter. He is offering us peace in the midst of war and life more abundant on our march toward death.
Only fear makes us fail to hear him—fear of falling, fear of flying. He wants us to come home to the world and to understand that all true revolution starts inside us. He asks us to recover the divinity of man and woman. We shut out his voice at our peril. He is offering us nothing less than life.