Chapter 3
I was meant to be the sort of individual that … [is] born on the 25th day of December … and so was Jesus Christ…. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration…. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. “Always dragging behind like a cow’s tail”—that’s how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me inside her until the hour had passed?
— HENRY MILLER, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN
ASSUMING THAT YOU KNOW as little about Henry Miller as I did when I first heard from him in 1974, I am going to give you the crash course in Miller that I wish someone had given me. This will not be a true biography, for several voluminous biographies of Miller have appeared in the last few years (and new information is constantly emerging as Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries are released), but a writer’s take on another writer, with just enough detail to prepare you to read (or reread) Miller with greater understanding.
Perhaps you are like me when I first heard from Henry: you’ve read only Tropic of Cancer, and maybe not even the whole book. It’s possible you only flipped through for the “good parts.” In Henry’s case, this can be totally misleading. I want to give you an overview of Henry’s life so that you can read his books with pleasure and grapple with the issues they raise.
Notwithstanding Henry’s protestations about not wanting a biography or a biographer, he seems always to have been documenting his own life, leaving the most minutely detailed histories in letters. This antlike attention to detail belies his feigned sprezzatura. Even as Henry protests No biographies, please! he leaves careful (and misleading) recitals of his life. Indeed Henry seemed always to be looking backward from the future, accounting for himself to twenty-first-century biographers.
How did Henry Miller find the courage to be a writer? A large part of the answer can be found in the bitterness of his mother’s milk. Born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan at 12:17 P.M. on December 26, 1891, Henry was the son of Louise Nieting Miller and Heinrich Miller, both first generation German-Americans. It was one day after Christmas, a fact Henry always regretted, since he would have liked the distinction of sharing Christ’s birthday. Such coincidences meant much to him, as did astrology, so it is important to add that he was a Capricorn, and that Pluto and Neptune were the planets that influenced his nativity.
Capricorns are said to be tenacious (“I was born with a cussed streak in me,” Henry says) and true to form, “they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb.” Elsewhere, he blames his mother’s “clutching womb” as the reason for his missing, by one day, the Messiah’s birthday. But clearly there was something in his Capricorn tenacity that made him very happy to stay there. Happiness in the womb is a state he refers to often, from his earliest writing to his latest. One feels that he almost remembers the womb, so lovingly does he refer to it:
The ninth year of my life is approaching and with it the end of my first Paradise on earth. No, the second Paradise. My first was in my mother’s womb, where I fought to remain forever, but the forceps finally prevailed. It was a marvelous period in the womb and I shall never forget it. I had almost everything one could ask for—except friends.
And a life without friends is no life, however, snug and secure it may be.
Marvelous period or not, Henry also attacks his mother for holding him “in her grip like an octopus.” This is typical of Henry Miller both as writer and man: he always tells the same story from at least two opposite points of view.
In the first year of his life, Henry moved to Brooklyn from Yorkville and ever after referred to himself as “just a Brooklyn boy.” The family lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, at a time when Brooklyn was still a separate city from New York, as it had been in Whitman’s time.
The family spoke German at home, and as a baby, Heinrich was the darling of his parents and his maternal grandfather, Valentin Nieting, who lived with them. Valentin Nieting was a tailor who was then working at home, often assisting Henry’s father. He had trained in Savile Row and spoke sonorous English, which Henry admired. His grandson also admired him for being a socialist and trade unionist while his own father, Heinrich senior, was a “Boss Tailor.” Such were the myths of Henry’s childhood. Henry’s maternal grandmother had been confined to an insane asylum when his mother was a child. The family story was that she was “taken away.” Louise’s strong sense of order, the iron hand with which she ruled her men, may have been a reaction to the chaos of her early life.
Henry’s only sister, Lauretta Anna, came into the world on July 11, 1895, so Henry was a pampered only child for four years. Even when competition came in the form of a sibling, the sibling was a girl—and retarded. Henry’s mother must have been devastated.
By all Henry’s accounts, Louise was a harridan, and Heinrich père a dreamy alcoholic. In today’s psychobabble, we would call Henry Miller’s family “dysfunctional.” His mother goaded him into achievement, and his father, a wonderful raconteur and hopeless drunk, set the example of spinning webs with words that Henry was to emulate all his life.
But it was Henry’s mother who spurred both the writer and the rebel in him.
“My mother was a first-class bitch,” Henry said to Twinka Thiebaud.
She tried to scold and shame me into respectability…. What she didn’t realize was she was creating a very restless, angry person. When finally I found the courage to write about what I’d been storing up for years, it came pouring out into one long relentless tirade. Beginning with the earliest memories of my mother, I had saved up enough hatred, enough anger, to fill a hundred books.
Henry’s recollections of his mother—Louise Nieting Miller—are almost always about her Prussianness: her oppression of him, of his father, and of his retarded younger sister. According to Henry, his mother beat Lauretta for the “crime” of being retarded; she screamed at his father for being drunk; she hid Henry’s typewriter in a closet because she was so embarrassed to have a son who wanted to be anything as shiftless as a writer. She was a woman given to random rages who must have been frustrated by the difficulties of her marriage. It’s not hard to empathize with Louise and take, with many grains of salt, her son’s violent depictions of her. But to the boy Henry she must have been terrifying, larger than life. How many writers escape into the world of words to find a haven from the uncontrollable world of childhood? The pattern is so common as to seem to be a general rule.
Miller’s idealization of women as love objects and his simultaneous need to strip them brutally naked in his novels is usually traced to his troubled relationship with his mother. But if we look at the dynamics more carefully we see that he was also a very good little boy, who must have worshiped his very strong and domineering mother and who was whiplashed between the opposing poles of her personality.
He even seemed to know this about himself, for in his book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins, this astonishing passage appears:
… [O]ne is still bound to the mother. All one’s rebellion was but dust in the eye, the frantic attempt to conceal this bondage. Men of this stamp are always against their native land—impossible to be otherwise. Enslavement is the great bugaboo, whether it be to country, church or society. Their lives are spent in breaking fetters, but the secret bondage gnaws at their vitals and gives them no rest. They must come to terms with the mother before they can rid themselves of the obsession of fetters. “Outside! Forever outside! Sitting on the doorstep of the mother’s womb.” … It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved …
Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out. In his letters to the critic and professor Wallace Fowlie in the 1940s, he says that Rimbaud was most important to him for helping him recognize his mother-fixation. So we know he came to accept this truth about himself. Still, he could not control his alternation between dependency and rage.
Always, Henry required a muse-mother-lover figure in order to write. First it was his second wife, June, then Anaïs Nin, whom he often credited with the greatest flowering of his creativity. Nin’s recent book, Incest (1992), shows how extraordinarily close their connection was and how much each became the other’s double, lover, and muse. The violence of his depiction of women, which Kate Millett so meticulously analyzes, is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him. His essay “The Enormous Womb” could have been the title of the book of his life. Henry saw in Rimbaud what he saw in himself:
And what is the nature of this secret? I can only say that it has to do with the mothers. I feel that it was the same with Lawrence and with Rimbaud.
Men with domineering mothers (Miller, Mailer, Lawrence) are likely to become prisoners of sex who seek to break their chains with violent words. Under these violent words is often a quivering romanticism. “He has the German sentimentality and romanticism about women,” Anaïs Nin said of Miller in Henry and June. “Sex is love to him.” How can we reconcile this observation with the pop image of Miller the fuckabout misogynist?
The feminist attack on Miller sees in his anger toward women a disregard of them. I think, on the contrary, he grants them too much power and thus must then expose and destroy them. Miller’s depictions of ravenous cunts are akin to the horned hunter’s quarry depicted on the walls of the caves of Lascaux: the painter-shaman fixes the image of the fearsome creature as a magical way of containing its mystery and capturing its power forever.
Miller’s example shows us the dark heart of sexism: a man trying to demolish the power he knows is greater than his own—the power to give life, the seemingly self-sufficient womb.
Henry was so enthralled by women that he sought to demystify their mysterious parts through the violent verbal magic of his books. The violence is rooted in a sense of self-abnegation and humiliation before them. He is, as the Freudians would say, counterphobic. Terrified of women, he reduces them to sex objects, cunts if you will, which he subdues with his penis and his pen.
He had to kill his mother to become a writer. He had to skewer her on his pen even as the “Henry Miller” of The Tropics and Clichy and The Rosy Crucifixion skewers cunts on his cock. His enchantment in later years by Oriental women (his Japanese fifth wife, Hoki, his last beloved, the Chinese actress Lisa Liu), his adoration of exotic Anaïs, of the femme fatale June, all betray an unacknowledged longing for another mother: the sweet caring Madonna of his early childhood whom for most of his life he cannot even remember.
At the end of Henry’s life he told Twinka Thiebaud of a dream that inspired him to rewrite his mother as a Madonna:
Suddenly my mother appears and she’s completely different from my memories of her. She is wonderful, radiant, sensitive, even intelligent! After writing that piece [“Mother, China, and the World Beyond” in Sextet], my view of her softened. I had created a mother of my own making, one I could relate to, one I could love even. It occurred to me that if my mother had been like the mother I had dreamed about, perhaps I wouldn’t have become a writer after all. I might have become a tailor like my father. I might have been an upstanding pillar of society like she wanted me to be.
So the courage to create is fueled by rage. (Courage, after all, could be imagined as heart plus rage.) Perhaps this accounts for the problem critics have with women creators: women are not allowed rage. But only through rage can we separate from our parents and become autonomous creators. Every artist has to make this transition, and for women it is a forbidden one.
Look at how hard it was for Henry—even as a man! He had to renounce his parents, expatriate himself, find a new mother-muse in Anaïs Nin. (June, his second wife, had been the taunting, torturing mother who, despite the pain she caused him, was the first person to believe in him as a writer.) We can never reconstruct the “real” Madonna-mother of Henry’s early childhood. She left no physical traces. But we can posit her existence by tracing Henry’s psychological history.
With a raging mother, a retarded sister, a drunken father, Henry’s childhood cannot have been easy, yet he remembers it as having been “glorious”—and the streets of Brooklyn were, according to him, his preparation for the writer’s life.
Summer nights in New York, or Brooklyn, as it happened to be, can be wonderful when you’re a kid and can roam the streets at will …
Henry says in the Book of Friends, written in his eighties. Looking back eight decades from Pacific Palisades to Brooklyn, Brooklyn—specifically Driggs Avenue in the fourteenth ward, later on Decatur Street in the Bushwick section—seemed like the second Eden of his life.
When Henry recounted his childhood memories of Brooklyn, he invariably stressed the positive: “Born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Got everything I craved, except a real pony.”
He seems to have had a pervasive sense of entitlement, a sense that he would always be cared for. When the kids in his kindergarten class were given Christmas gifts, he refused to accept them, knowing that he would do better at home. “I know Santa is going to bring me better things,” he told his mother. His mother’s reaction to this was to slap him, grab him by the earlobe, and drag him back to school to apologize to the teacher.
“I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong,” Henry said years later. “This … left in my childish mind the feeling that my mother was stupid and cruel.”
His friends were other immigrant kids—Polish-American, Italian-American, and Irish-American. In his many autobiographical writings, he mentions Stanley Borowski, Lester Reardon, Johnny Paul, Eddie Carney, and Johnny Dunne. The whole microcosm of the American melting pot was found in Henry’s Brooklyn. He was not to find another world as varied and congenial till he went to Paris in 1930. “There in Paris, in its shabby squalid streets teeming with life, I relived the sparkling scenes of my childhood.”
What kind of marriage did Henry’s parents have? This incident, recounted in Henry’s Book of Friends, evokes it, seen through Henry’s child-eyes:
After dinner in the evening my father would dry the dishes which my mother washed at the sink. One evening he must have said something to offend her for suddenly she gave him a ringing slap in the face with her wet hands. Then I remember distinctly hearing him say to her: “If you ever do that again I’ll leave you.” I was impressed by the quiet, firm way in which he said it. His son, I must confess, never had the courage to talk that way to a woman.
Sensitive, creative, inclined to drown his sorrows in drink, Henry’s father obliged Louise to be the tyrannical disciplinarian. But this incident, which Henry relates with such approbation, shows the way Henry’s father nevertheless shaped his son’s ideals of manhood. Henry exhibited the same sensitivity and dreaminess as his father, but in his most notorious novels he invents a fast-fucking, fast-talking, hypermanly antihero—just the man to subdue the otherwise overbearing Louise.
Henry was a great reader as a child, and loved to read aloud. He adored Old Testament stories, and he was reading long before he began elementary school. In school he was both pushed to achieve by the fierce disappointment his mother experienced with Lauretta, and pushed to make mischief in rebellion against his mother’s tyranny.
He experienced his first taste of the forbiddenness of sex with Joey and Tony Imhof, his “country” friends in Glendale, Long Island, whose father, John Imhof, was “the first artist to appear in my life.” (Imhof was a friend of Henry’s father and was a watercolorist who also made stained-glass windows for churches.) Henry’s father revered Imhof for being an artist, and so, of course did Henry. We can trace Henry’s reverence for artists directly to this childhood mentor.
Henry and the Imhof boys played together sexually between the ages of seven and twelve—a fact one of Miller’s biographers points to with horror, as if homosexual experimentation were not the rule rather than the exception in childhood.
Henry seems to have been both fascinated and terrified by sex. In Book of Friends, he reports being invited by a girl named Weesie, a friend of his Yorkville cousin, Henry Baumann, to make love to her. Henry was afraid, and hesitated until the opportunity passed. He also hesitated for three years with his great high school love, Cora Seward, a blonde angel whom he idealized too much to fuck. Henry writes about her in Book of Friends: “Strange that I never thought of fucking her,” he says. But Cora was love to him, not sex. And at this time in his life he kept them very separate. “I never mixed the two—love and sex, which shows what an imbecile I must have been.”
How wonderful to be sitting beside her in the open trolley, on our way to Rockaway or Sheepshead Bay, and singing at the top of our lungs—“shine on, Harvest Moon, for me and My Gal” or “I don’t want to set the world on fire.”
Cora was the girl he obsessively fantasized about even when he had his first real sexual relationship. Initiated crudely into sex in a brothel, Henry had to wait to meet Pauline Chouteau, his “first mistress,” to begin to explore his sexuality. After he began his affair with Pauline, he seems to have ruminated constantly on his inability to fuck the idyllic Cora—a failure of nerve he apparently regretted all his life. The man who was destined to liberate American literature first had to liberate himself.
Henry graduated second in his class from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, a school in his old childhood neighborhood he had insisted on going to over the protestations of his parents. He was attached to the old neighborhood, but the old neighborhood had changed a lot since he was little. It was now dominated by newly emigrated Eastern European Jews, and Henry was one of the few gentiles.
To the end of his life he referred to himself as “a goy,” as if he really were a Jew viewing himself as the outsider. This is remarkable, because Henry always had an ambiguous relationship with Jews, envying their culture and bookishness, repeatedly falling in love with Jewish women, having many Jewish boon companions, and eventually even introducing the Star of David into his watercolors as a sort of talisman. According to Anaïs Nin’s report in Henry and June, Henry claimed to be Jewish on their first meeting. If this is true, and not some misunderstanding of Nin’s, then it shows the deep nature of Henry’s ambivalence.
In Henry’s high school world Jews were objects of both resentment and envy, and Henry was never to lose his complicated feelings toward them. He regarded them as outcasts like himself, eternal wanderers—but wanderers who at least belonged to a community. He envied them. He wanted to be one. “I too would become a Jew,” he says in Tropic of Cancer. “Why not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew. Besides, who hates the Jews more than the Jews?”
Passages like these have led to a persistent charge of anti-Semitism, which I find understandable but basically simplistic. The Henry I knew was not an anti-Semite, nor was he a misanthrope, though he railed against the ugliness and pettiness of humanity in all his books and letters. It is Henry’s lifelong habit of letting it all hang out that often makes him appear bigoted, if his words and phrases are taken out of context. One can find just as much criticism of Germans (idiots, he calls them), of Swedes (bores, to Henry), of Viennese (treacherous), of Italians (two-faced), and any other ethnic group you can name. Henry is not a bigot so much as he is an acid satirist of all human hypocrisies. Hear him on his own people:
My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
And yet, for all his acid satire, he remains a cockeyed optimist, always sure there’s a pony in the shit pile, always merry and bright and the happiest man alive. This curious paradox in Henry’s character makes him as enigmatic to his biographers as he often was to his friends and lovers.
Henry began City College at eighteen, but dropped out after two months. He claimed he didn’t like the absurd reading list he was given. Apparently the culprit was Spenser’s Faerie Queene, about which he said, “If I have to read stuff like that, I give up.” He then worked briefly at a series of jobs for which he proved entirely unsuited. Eventually he moved out of his parents’ house, only to move in with Pauline Chouteau, the woman he described as “old enough to be my mother.” She was, in fact, thirty-two to his eighteen, and Henry had met her while teaching piano to one of her friend’s little girls.
Pauline Chouteau, whom Henry called “the widow,” was the mother of a consumptive son, George, who was a bit younger than Henry. In moving out of his parents’ home and briefly into Pauline’s, Henry had recreated a weird and dysfunctional family to rival his own weird and dysfunctional family. But Pauline was kind where his mother was harsh, and this made Henry feel even more obligated to her. He needed her sexually, but felt her age made her unsuitable. In an attempt to shake Pauline’s hold on him, in 1913 he fled out West for six months. Like many of his generation he dreamed of becoming a cowboy, or striking it rich in the goldfields of Alaska.
He always claimed to have had a life-changing experience on this trip—listening to Emma Goldman speak in San Diego. But the historical record belies his recollection, for it seems that Emma Goldman was prevented from lecturing by vigilantes on the dates he would have been there. It is probable that Henry’s Emma Goldman story was another example of his chronic mythmaking.
He told the story so many times that eventually he seemed really to believe he had heard her speak. And surely it is true that she was one of his heroines. Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life (1931), mentions a “Henry Miller” only once and that is in connection with the little theater on Third Street, where the Orleneff troupe performed for what Goldman calls “the whole Radical east side.” It is quite unlikely that Goldman is referring to the same Henry Miller, since in 1905 he would have been only sixteen and “a Brooklyn boy.” Still, Goldman’s depictions of radical New York give us a sense of Miller’s era and the things that shaped him: anarchism was in the air, the Russian Revolution was in progress, and the world was changing drastically. As an intellectual boy in Brooklyn who worshipped the likes of Emma Goldman, Henry Miller must have realized that he lived (as the Chinese curse says) “in interesting times.” Coming to intellectual consciousness in the era of Emma Goldman and the theosophist Madame Elena Blavatsky, Henry retained a fascination with anarchism and transcendental wisdom throughout his entire life.
Henry’s cowboy and gold-rush dreams did not materialize. He wound up picking fruit in Chula Vista. Eventually Henry returned to New York and announced to his mother that he was going to marry Pauline. His mother flew into an insane rage and threatened him with a knife. Henry tried to placate her by finally agreeing to help out in the family shop, though he had no interest in tailoring. It was there that he learned not to tailor, but to write.
I wrote long literary and humorous letters to my friends, which were really disguised essays on everything. Wrote out of boredom, because I was not interested in my father’s business. During this period the first thing I remember writing, as a piece of writing in itself, was a long essay on Nietzsche’s “Anti-Christ.”
Letters remained the chief literary product of Henry’s life. His mind seemed most at ease in the epistolary form, where he could range over the wide assortment of things that mattered to him, without worrying about his nemesis—form—but only about content. Had Henry lived in another age, he might never have attempted novels.
During the period of Henry’s literary apprenticeship in the tailor shop, America was preparing for war. The United States would not break its isolationism for some three years, but the world was in a state of tumultuous change as the Europeans fought “over there.” Women would not get the vote until 1920, but they were already pressing for changes in their status. Feminism was much discussed in Henry’s youth, though it was destined to ebb and flow for another half century before women really organized to give themselves direct access to the political process.
For Henry as a young man, the lack of reliable contraception was horrific and ever present. His passionate live-in relationship with Pauline Chouteau was already on the wane when she became pregnant with his child and aborted it. He came home to find a bloody five-month-old fetus in a drawer and Pauline collapsed on the bed. Torn between his moral obligation and an equally pressing desire to escape her, he chose escape—as he would many times in his life. Once again, his solution was to fall in love. He met a pretty young brunette who shared another of his lifelong passions, playing the piano. Pauline’s days were numbered.
This newest excuse for escape was Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, a girl from Brooklyn whom, in 1917, Henry was to make his first (legal) wife:
From about the age of ten I had been playing the piano. Soon after I joined my father I fell in love with a woman who was my piano teacher. I had been teaching the piano myself, to eke out a little spare money from about the age of 17 on. Now I became serious about it and thought I might possibly become a concert pianist. I married the woman and that finished it. From the day we hitched up it was a running battle. In a year or two I dropped the piano for good, which I have regretted ever since.
Henry adored the pursuit and conquest of Beatrice, a good girl of whom his mother could approve, but it was only the war that convinced him to marry. He had fled the tailor shop and Pauline’s house to work briefly in Washington before the selective service claimed him. It was his draft notice that cemented his resolve to take Beatrice as his wife.
Once married, he found to his dismay that he was again living with his mother: Beatrice, critical and disapproving, sneered at his ambition to write as much as Louise had, and like her, tried to get him into the “real world” of work.
But Henry seemed unable to hold a job. Once he married Beatrice he gamely tried an astonishing variety of gigs—from streetcar conductor to indexer to mail-order catalog compiler. Nothing held his interest; he was clearly not meant to be anyone’s employee. He would invariably be fired for scribbling or reading philosophy on company time. Growing disillusioned with work and the ball-and-chain of marriage, Henry wrote (in The Black Cat magazine at a penny a word):
the single truth about marriage is that it is a disillusion…. It only takes about three days of matrimony to open a man’s eyes …
It was one of his first pieces to be published.
Since Henry always married as a quick fix, he was always quickly disillusioned. His marriage to Beatrice deteriorated sexually, romantically, musically, financially. The pressure of a baby (his first daughter, Barbara, born in 1919) didn’t help, nor did Henry’s dalliance with his mother-in-law the previous year.
On a belated and definitely odd honeymoon that Henry and Beatrice took at Beatrice’s mother’s house in Delaware the year after his marriage to Beatrice, Beatrice’s mother supposedly seduced Henry in her bathtub. Mother-in-law and son-in-law made love all summer, practically under the noses of their mates.
Only after Barbara was born did Beatrice confront Henry with this incestuous infidelity. She’d apparently known about it all along. The marital war escalated. Beatrice was determined to make Henry into a proper bread-winning spouse and Henry was just as determined to resist.
The dalliance with Beatrice’s mother is another example of Henry’s mythmaking. He tells of this affair so vividly in Sexus and The World of Sex that it appears to be biographical truth. But what if it was only a might-have-been affair, born of Henry’s rich imagination? What if it was intended to “explain” his growing estrangement from Beatrice?
People do lie to themselves and to the world in order to live, and writers are inclined to use their books to “explain” the failures of their lives. Beatrice’s mother probably turned him on. Ergo: a love affair was born. But, like his meeting with Emma Goldman, it may have happened only in his imagination.
In 1920, the Miller family tailor shop finally failed and even though Henry no longer worked there, this was a liberation of sorts. Propelled by Beatrice and fatherhood, Henry took the job at Western Union that was to prove so fateful in his literary career. Even the way he got the job was to prove fateful. At first he couldn’t even get hired as a messenger.
The story of his employment at the “Cosmodemonic Telegraphic Company,” as Henry tells it in Tropic of Capricorn, is the literary analogue of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Here is modern man on the speeded-up assembly line of life—frantic, maddened, moving at a thousand frames per minute.
Henry’s account of the world of work in New York circa 1920 (he began at Western Union in 1920 and left in 1924) is truly hallucinogenic:
The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the whole system of American labor, which is rotten at both ends…. I had a bird’s eye view of the whole American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock…
The facts were these: Henry had applied for a messenger job and been refused. That got his dander up. He didn’t want to be a wage slave, but having been refused a job any slob would get, he was mightily pissed off. He took his pique, his rage, his rhetoric in hand and marched into the management headquarters of the company that would ever after be known as “the Cosmodemonic.” It was a historic moment—like Byron arriving in Venice, or Colette following Willy to Paris: literature was about to be born of this encounter between place and person.
… [T]hey had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent superior individual who has asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it.
So, in the morning, he put on his best clothes and “hotfooted it to the main offices of the telegraph company” up to the empyrean aeries of management, high above the tip of Manhattan.
Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.
Henry had stumbled into shit—and, as the proverb predicts, into good luck. The “Cosmodemonic” happened to be worried about their hiring policies. They saw a weakness in their own system—and Henry’s rhetoric convinced them that he was just the man to save them.
Refused as a messenger, he was hired at several times the salary as one of the employment managers and as a sort of company spy. This was his first taste of real power and his first taste of the pleasures of playing Robin Hood—a game that he would continue all the days of his life. For Henry had a Robin Hood-like concept of money. He was as generous as a guest at a potlatch and just as confusing to the average mercantile mind:
In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and lectured for having “too big a heart.” I never had any money in my pocket but I used other people’s money freely. As long as I was the boss I had credit. I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my linen, my books, everything that was superfluous. If I had had the power, I would have given the company away to the poor buggers …
In this passage from Tropic of Capricorn, Henry sounds like an early Christian or a nineteenth-century communal Utopian:
I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I’ll never see it again. Men are poor everywhere—they always have been and they always will be. And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it it can become a conflagration. I was constantly urged not to be too lenient, not to be too sentimental, not to be too charitable. Be firm! Be hard! they cautioned me. Fuck that! … If I had had real power, instead of being the fifth wheel on a wagon, God knows what I could have accomplished. I could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraphic Company of North America as a base to bring all humanity to God …
Miller’s tone is hyperbolic. But he is telling the absolute truth here. His truth. And he would find a way to use the Cosmodemonic to bring all humanity to God, though he would not find it yet. Still, he was on his way.
His brain boiled and his marriage deteriorated. He was engaged at the telegraph company if not entirely happy—and being engaged is the closest thing we mortals know to happiness. To have our energies used—this is the beginning of bliss.
Henry says he never slept during his years at the Cosmodemonic. And that he never stopped whirling like a dervish. Certainly when one reads his account in Tropic of Capricorn, one feels an almost Keystone Kops syncopation and a sense of Jazz-Age energy. What turmoil! What madness! Henry was soaking up experience like a sponge. He was “saturated with humanity.” He was “waiting for a breathing space” when he could write it all down.
Until then he had been a writer without a subject. He knew he had plenty to say, but how to frame it in human experience? He had the drive to write, but no stories to tell. His life had yet to catch up with his ambitions.
It was at the Cosmodemonic that life presented Henry with his first real subject matter: the messengers themselves.
Every novelist must start with empathy and with a great curiosity about people. In many ways, those qualities are even more important than language—important as language is.
Henry was fascinated with people—with the nuts, the clowns, the destitute refuse of life. At the Cosmodemonic, he saw them all, the misery of humanity:
… the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening.
What got Henry going on his first real attempt at a book, Clipped Wings, in 1922, was an offhand remark made by the vice president of the Cosmodemonic that somebody ought to write “a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers.”
“I’ll give you an Horatio Alger book,” Henry thought, “just you wait!”
I entered the Western Union as personnel manager in 1920 and left towards the end of 1924. About 1922, I think it was, I wrote my first book, while on a three-week vacation. I forget the title I gave it, but it was about twelve messengers whom I had studied. The ms was over 75,000 words long and I did it in the three weeks and nearly killed myself doing it. (My second wife probably has the manuscript, but I don’t know where she is and she probably wouldn’t surrender it, or has destroyed it, along with a lot of other manuscripts I wrote while with her—and all the water colors I made then too—and my library of over a thousand books, and my wonderful unabridged dictionary, which I miss more than anything—more than my wife!)
Clipped Wings owes its inspiration to many factors and the Horatio Alger remark is only one of them. Henry had turned thirty in 1921—an age when most would-be writers start to feel the pressure of time at their backs. He had read Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which, above all, had inspired him to believe that he could transform his own autobiographical odyssey into fiction. And he was in that desperate shit-or-get-off-the-pot mood which turns a would-be into a writer.
In March 1922, Henry methodically set out to write the book that would prove once and for all he was a writer.
I wrote it straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought he must say everything all at once—in one book—and collapse afterwards. I didn’t know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless.
Henry’s honesty about this first literary effort as he recounts it over a decade later is touching. Anyone who has ever attempted to write will recognize the ring of truth in it:
Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they said, was only natural. I was attempting at the start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the beginning. It was absurd and pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood.
Many people have found in Miller’s writing just this honesty. He knew what it was to fail, to be desperate, to hit bottom. “Had I succeeded, I would have been a monster,” Henry says. “You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual.”
The way Henry worked on this first book is telling. It shows the drivenness of the writer in him. More perspiration than inspiration, more pastiche than poetry, but when it was done he knew once and for all that he could sit down and actually finish a book.
Tropic of Capricorn, though written in the thirties, is more understandable if it is seen against the background of 1920s New York. This was the Jazz Age, the age of bobbed hair and bobbed skirts, discarded corsets and the introduction of Trojans. Free love was in the air. Margaret Sanger was on the march. Speakeasies were serving drinks called “Between the Sheets” and modern women were learning to drink, smoke, and make love. Henry had married Beatrice before all hell broke loose and now he was getting restless.
Seven years with Pauline, seven years with Beatrice, and Henry was again ready to shed a skin. It was always a woman who took him to the next level in his life. And the woman was always a muse.
My career began with hitching up with my second wife. I wrote two novels while with her, and God knows how many short stories and articles and essays and crazy undefinable things which belong to my own private Dada period. The first novel I called “Moloch”, the second “Crazy Cock.” The first around 100,000 words; the second longer still, but completely revised when I got to Paris, and reduced ultimately to less than 300 pages, and ruined.
Henry’s most enduring muse, June Edith Smith, was a dark, beautiful Jewish femme fatale—he called her Rebecca in some love letters—with a great gift for theatricality and chaos. When Henry met her in 1923, June was working as a taxi dancer—a five-cents-a-dance girl—in a Broadway dance palace, one of those places that proscribed, and yet clearly invited, “dirty dancing.” Henry promptly disregarded the rules and fell madly in love. He fell as much for June’s talk as for her walk, for her mind as for her body; he was utterly bewitched and besotted.
His marriage to Beatrice was doomed, but Henry had found his first great heroine. June gave Henry the courage to quit his job and start writing in earnest. In 1924 he divorced Beatrice and married June. Again, Henry was escaping from responsibility, and the guilt about leaving his daughter and wife tortured him for years.
Henry’s marriage to June was full of passion, madness, and faithlessness, and perhaps that was why it nourished Henry’s fiction for the rest of his life. For much of the time June openly carried on passionate affairs with women and permitted a succession of rich married men to support her (and therefore Henry). For his part, Henry eventually took up with Anaïs Nin, who was also for a time madly infatuated with June. Nevertheless, the chaos of this marriage provided Henry with something he never found again in a wife. What was it? June had the same myth-making ability as Henry. Neither of them knew the difference between fact and fiction. Being with his psychological double proved to be powerful magic.
With June, Henry wrote his first real novels, Crazy Cock and Moloch (unpublished until 1991 and 1992), ran a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, painted and exhibited watercolors, and first toured Europe in 1928, whetting his appetite for the expatriate decade to come.
If Henry’s relationship with his mother was the incubation of the writer, the marriage to June was the hatching of the egg. Henry could not make himself into an antihero without simultaneously making June his antiheroine. By the time June and Henry split in 1933, Tropic of Cancer, written in Paris, was ready to burst forth into the world.
What happened to Henry when he met June? He fell in love in a way he had never experienced before, and never expected to again. “The whole being was concentrated in the face,” he writes of June in Tropic of Capricorn. “I could have put it beside me on a pillow at night and made love to it.”
And June could talk. Crazy, dramatic, a reader, June spoke of characters in books as if they were alive; she identified with them as Henry did. She talked about Strindberg’s heroines as she wove the facts and falsehoods of her life into one shimmering web. She was more than just a femme fatale. She was mythic—Venus, Lilith, earth goddess. Henry mentions his favorite word “womb” repeatedly in the hallucinatory last section of Tropic of Capricorn where he recounts meeting “Mara” (one of his first names for June).
“She’s America on foot, winged and sexed,” he says, identifying Mara/June with the continent he must conquer to become himself and an American writer. “Amurrica, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D.” And Henry is quaking. “One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this,” he says.
What is astounding about his introduction of this muse in Tropic of Capricorn is his understanding that through June he will find himself, that only through such transforming love can a man’s soul, a writer’s soul, be born. And whatever Henry’s feminist detractors may have said, June is not merely an isolated organ to him. June is a weaver of fantasy and an artist like himself. She also believes in him as an artist. That, primarily is what attracts him.
That—and the craziness.
Has anyone ever written about the propensity writers have to fall in love with crazy people? My own first love was a brilliant schizophrenic. F. Scott Fitzgerald linked his life with Zelda, finding her more compelling than other, calmer, women. Henry married June knowing that she could not distinguish fiction from reality, reality from fiction. She had “no boundaries,” we would say today. And, having no boundaries, she opened up his art.
The trancelike state the writer needs to tap the unconscious is one that borderline or psychotic people find comes easily to them. Such people are like artists in being able to invent fantasy worlds, but they are unlike artists in not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. We are caught up in the web of living with their inventions—and disaster ensues.
This was the pattern with June. Her rhapsodic belief in Henry helped him become a writer, but her inability to live in the real world nearly drove him mad. “She put him through the tortures of hell, but he was masochistic enough to enjoy it,” said Alfred Perlès in My Friend, Henry Miller.
Henry and June commenced a chaotic life that was to take him from Brooklyn to Paris, from would-be to published author. Madly in love with hypnotic June in Jazz-Age New York, Henry clearly believed he could do anything—open a bootleg joint and get rich, write the great American novel and get famous. Did Henry live to write about it, or did he write to survive his life? No writer ever knows for sure.
June and Henry first toured Europe in 1928 (the year that Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic), making a kind of bohemian grand tour before the Wall Street crash changed the world. Their relationship was tumultuous always—and always she tortured him with other lovers, particularly women. In the Greenwich Village of the twenties it was suddenly chic to be gay—and June was nothing if not a modern woman of fashion.
In 1930, Henry traveled to Europe without June (she remained in New York to support them with her various liaisons) and embarked upon what was to become the most fecund and joyous period of his life. The early months were desperate and threatened by starvation, but after a year or so of living by his wits, Henry’s gift for friendship saved him and he found himself surrounded by “boon companions,” lovers, and friends. By 1931 Miller was released (or released himself) to write Tropic of Cancer, the book that forever changed the way American literature would be written. The Brooklyn boy was about to be born again in Paris.