Chapter 5

The Last Man on Earth

I want to kiss the man whose passion rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world.

— ANAÏS NIN, HENRY AND JUNE

THE CREATION OF A book is a rite of passage for the author even more than for the reader. It is a way of stripping down to the essential being, a self-analysis far more profound than any professionally guided psychoanalysis and a way of remaking oneself spiritually. It is for this act of self-transformation that writers write. And they are fortunate when they recognize this, because such self-transformation is the only truly dependable reward of writing.

After Cancer, Henry was released to write other things. Black Spring, a book he originally called Self-Portrait, remained “one of my favorite books” as he inscribed my copy in 1974. It is written in a sort of surrealist prose poetry. It is the most exuberant of his books, full of the colors, sounds, and smells of life. It reeks of his joy in Paris.

He was working on Black Spring even as he revised (four times at least) Tropic of Cancer, wrote endless letters to Anaïs Nin, and nearly lost himself in the book on Lawrence he was destined never to finish.

At this time—between the acceptance of Cancer by Jack Kahane in November 1932 and its publication in September 1934—Henry was living with Perlès in Clichy, having a passionate affair with Nin at her house at Louviciennes, on holidays (before her husband arrived) at her mother’s apartment in Paris, at a series of Paris hotels, and elsewhere. The affair blossomed throughout the months of mad writing, the revisions of Cancer, Anaïs’s two psychoanalyses, and through all her various writing projects, chief among which was her journal. The sexual current between Anaïs and Henry spurred them both to frenetic literary activity, proving how allied the forces of sexuality and creativity always are.

In August of 1934, Anaïs gave birth to a stillborn girl. Although she made it appear in her first published diary that the child was her husband’s, Anaïs Nin’s last great love, Rupert Pole, revealed to Miller biographer Robert Ferguson that “Anaïs knew the child was Henry’s and should not be brought into the world.” Incest, published late in 1992, confirms that the child was indeed Henry’s and that Anaïs deliberately aborted it. She identified with the unborn child and imagined that it would be abandoned as she was by her father. Reading about the abortion, one feels that this event led inexorably to her growing estrangement from Henry. Anaïs told herself that she was making the sacrifice for Henry, the child-man-artist. Such sacrifices never come without repercussions.

A month after that empty birth in September, on the same day Cancer was published, Miller moved into 18 Villa Seurat, his first permanent writing home and his base for the next five years in Paris. The studio owned by Michael Fraenkel, rented by Anaïs, and known to Henry from an earlier stay, was the envy of other writers and artists for its skylight, its spaciousness, its artist neighbors (including Chaim Soutine and Salvador Dali). A house can be a confirmation of success to someone who has drifted for a very long time—and 18 Villa Seurat was just that to Henry. At last he felt he was an artist, not a bum. At last he had a published book and a studio to call his own. He fervently hoped that it would be his home with Anaïs.

The Villa Seurat, a sunny impasse in the fourteenth arrondissement, a modest but pleasant section of Paris, was named after Georges Seurat, who had lived and painted there. A little mews of small, brightly colored houses with big studio windows, it still seems inviting and warm, a hospitable place to live. There is no plaque commemorating Henry’s years at Number 18, but perhaps that will come.

Another attraction of the Villa Seurat was Betty Ryan, an artist, then in her twenties, who had the studio under Henry’s and at some point became Henry’s friend and secret love. Betty Ryan was young, pretty, and employed a great cook (always important to Henry). She was a passionate Hellenophile. She claims that she and Henry fell in love talking about the wonders of Greece. Of course this relationship had to be kept secret from Anaïs, with whom Henry was “entangled and indebted.” Anaïs held sway and sometimes Ryan had to go out with Henry “in mufti.” Anaïs, meanwhile, still had a harem of lovers to juggle.

Anaïs did with Henry what many strong women do with the weak men they love: she mothered him. She did not trust him to be strong enough to support her in motherhood and she did not want to bring Henry’s child home to Hugo. Despite some wavering, she maintained her marriage and her deepening affair with Otto Rank, which was also an affair with psychoanalysis.

Anaïs was so important to Henry that he would do nothing to risk her disapproval. When he figured out that monetary support brought with it an unexpressed infantilization and perhaps even contempt, he was devastated. And when she went to New York in the fall of 1935 to help Otto Rank open a psychoanalysis clinic, Henry was wildly jealous. By now Nin made no secret of the fact that she thought Miller was weak, and that she needed time away from him. In the coming years she would even begin to criticize his writing, something she had never done before. The affair with Ryan, known only to Durrell and a few others, is seldom mentioned in connection with the Villa Seurat days. Why is this? Betty Ryan claims she burned her correspondence with Henry after their break. A very private person, she has been slow to confide in Henry’s chroniclers. After three years of inquiries on my part, she finally wrote me of her connection with Henry and responded to my request for an interview. Living with her dog on the island of Andros, Betty Ryan was apparently moved to talk by the spate of books appearing about Miller. She is typical of the women Henry loved in that she is very strong.

The truth is that all the women Henry loved best in his life were strong; they accepted him only on their own terms. Chief among them was Nin. When she took off for New York to work with Otto Rank, she was following her own creative karma, and neither husband or lover could change her mind. Anaïs had an independence in her marriage to Guiler that she would have never possessed with Henry. She remained tied to Guiler all her life, but she always needed at least two men to reenact her oedipal drama.

Nin’s independence both as a wife and as a lover seems beguiling. At first she appears a beacon of liberation for women, but perhaps she was more enslaved to men than most of us. Her freedom came at a very high cost: she was unable to publish her journals freely during her own lifetime. In a way she traduced her art for the sake of her deceptions. She knew that women can have their sexuality as long as they don’t publish it.

I had an amusing encounter with Anaïs Nin once at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y in Manhattan, where she was speaking after her edited diaries had begun to appear. At that point I had published one or two volumes of poetry and was writing Fear of Flying.

“Why did you edit the sexual parts out of your diary, Miss Nin?” I asked from the audience.

“Because I had observed,” she replied coolly, “that whenever a woman revealed her sexual life, she was never again taken seriously as a writer.” Nin was pragmatic. I was passionate and young.

“But that’s precisely why we must do it,” I said, unwittingly predicting my entire career. Nin did not comment further. I remember being disappointed by her lack of candor and thought she was being hypocritical. Now, I see that I was terribly green and brash and she was wise.

She was right, of course: if a woman expresses her sexuality in print, she is always exposed to attack. It was a situation she was destined to help change, but only after her death. I was to beard that particular dragon with my very first novel, and in many ways my reputation has never recovered.

In the winter of 1935, Henry, desolate without Anaïs, followed her and Otto Rank to New York. He ever after claimed that he “practiced psychoanalysis.” It’s not clear what he meant by this. After one practice session with Otto Rank, Henry was brash enough to believe he could do it on his own. Maybe he treated patients to his special Millerian philosophy, which was composed of Emerson, Zen, Lao-tzu, Rimbaud, and Lawrence. It was an intoxicating brew even when I knew him, but you couldn’t really call it psychoanalysis.

But the real reason for Henry’s presence in New York was his determination to capture Anaïs from her various men and make her his wife. She would have none of it. She knew Henry too well. Like many men, he was more devoted as a lover than a husband. Early in their relationship, Nin had longed to open herself utterly to him and she had contemplated leaving Hugh Guiler for him, but now she was in retreat. Her husband appeared: Henry disappeared. He threw himself into conquering literary New York, meeting e.e. cummings, Nathanael West, and James T. Farrell. He tried to sell Tropic of Cancer to Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster without success. He also had hopes of publishing in The New Yorker and Esquire; both turned him down. Driven back on himself, he finished Black Spring—a book filled with the Paris spirit, though completed in New York. The exuberance he had tapped in Paris was now within him, and he would never lose it. But it would take thirty years for publishers in his own country to catch up with him.

If we look at Black Spring as a key to this period in Henry’s life, we see that he is integrating the New York of his youth with the Paris of his literary breakthrough. Some of the chapters deal with his early life (“The Fourteenth Ward,” “The Tailor Shop”) and some with present-day Paris “(A Saturday Afternoon” and “Walking Up and Down in China”) but the tone of Black Spring is the tone of celebration—the celebration of being free at last, free to write, free to be a man.

In one of my favorite pieces, “A Saturday Afternoon,” Henry describes a ride on a bicycle, stopping to pee at a urinal and what a man thinks while the wheels roll and the bladder empties. His mind flows over the books in his life, from Rabelais to Robinson Crusoe. He ruminates on writing. He understands that all writers’ blocks are about fear of criticism.

Begin! That’s the principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take Van Norden—he’s another case. He has been trying for two months to get started with his novel. Each time I meet him he has a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening. Yesterday he said: “You see what my problem’s like. It isn’t just a question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the whole book. Now here’s a start I made the other day: Dante wrote a poem about a place called H_____. H-dash, because I don’t want any trouble with the censor.”

Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which mustn’t offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a poem he writes: “I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health! … I am afoot with my vision…. I dote on myself…. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding…. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs…. Here or henceforward it is all the same to me…. I exist as I am, that is enough….”

With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon.

In Black Spring, Henry writes like a man recently freed to write, like a man to whom life is suddenly joyous: “I am delirious because I am dying so fast,” he proclaims. “I am riding in full sunlight, a man impervious to all but the phenomena of light.” And when he stops rolling on his “racing wheel” to take a pee, “it is all gravy, even the urinal.”

As I stand there looking up at the house fronts a demure young woman leans out of a window to watch me. How many times have I stood thus in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and deposit sometimes at the base of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously and man comes along with his fly open and pours the steaming contents of his bladder over the dissolving crumbs. Standing thus, with heart and fly and bladder open, I seem to recall every urinal I ever stepped into—all the most pleasant sensations, all the most luxurious memories, as if my brain were a huge divan smothered with cushions and my life one long snooze on a hot, drowsy afternoon. I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there and I think it is a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the tricolor above it. Un peu trop fort, ça! And yet, how is a Frenchman to know that one of the first things which strikes the eye of the American visitor, which thrills him, warms him to the very gizzard, is this ubiquitous urinal? How is a Frenchman to know that what impresses the American in looking at a pissotière, or a vespasienne, or whatever you choose to call it, is the fact that he is in the midst of a people who admit to the necessity of peeing now and then and who know also that to piss one has to use a pisser and that if it is not done publicly it will be done privately and that it is no more incongruous to piss, in the street than underground where some old derelict can watch you to see that you commit no nuisance.

I am a man who pisses largely and frequently, which they say is a sign of great mental activity. However it be, I know that I am in distress when I walk the streets of New York. Wondering constantly where the next stop will be and if I can hold out that long. And while in winter, when you are broke and hungry, it is fine to stop off for a few minutes in a warm underground comfort station, when spring comes it is quite a different matter. One likes to piss in sunlight, among human beings who watch and smile down at you. And while the female squatting down to empty her bladder in a china bowl may not be a sight to relish, no man with any feeling can deny that the sight of the male standing behind a tin strip and looking out on the throng with that contented, easy, vacant smile, that lone, reminiscent, pleasurable look in his eye, is a good thing. To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.

Henry’s mind rolls on, from pissoirs to books read in toilets, from the King James Bible to Rabelais building the walls of Paris with cunts, from dung to angels and back again. He calls for “a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels.”

A classic purity, then—and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human bones—whilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

Without salt, we are unpreserved. Without obscenity, there is no divinity. Henry embraces dung so he can have angels.

It is this exultant acceptance of all life that he celebrates in Black Spring. Its mood is lighter than Cancer though it continues many of Cancer’s themes. It urges surrender and acceptance. This “message” still offends the Miller antagonist, while those who understand his spirit recognize that it is this very acceptance that is the essence of his greatness.

“The great writers are the ones who don’t judge,” says novelist, journalist, and screenwriter David Black, one of our most sensitive contemporary interpreters of America’s love-hate relationship with sexuality.

Black understands that it is Miller’s all-embracing worldview that makes him unique:

I discovered Miller late. Through Mailer I read Miller. I think Miller is the world-class American twentieth-century writer, the greatest. He has more life in him than anyone. Does he work all the time? No. But when I read him writing about Brooklyn, burlesque shows, different neighborhoods, a sense of life comes through in Miller. The man is filled with love of humanity. Reading Miller is closest in artistic experience to the pornographic carvings in India … They were showing all of life in this art.

Black Spring shows Miller’s philosophy of acceptance more than any other book. It is full of the joy of being human. With Paris in his blood and bones, Miller can even make sense of and come to terms with his crazy family, the family that caused him such grief:

However, always merry and bright! If it was before the war and the thermometer down to zero or below, if it happened to be Thanksgiving Day, or New Year’s or a birthday, or just any old excuse to get together, then off we’d trot, the whole family, to join the other freaks who made up the living family tree. It always seemed astounding to me how jolly they were in our family despite the calamities that were always threatening. Jolly in spite of everything. There was cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders—and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia. The morgue and the insane asylum. The merry crew and the table loaded with good things—with red cabbage and green spinach, with roast pork and turkey and sauerkraut, with kartoffelklösze and sour black gravy, with radishes and celery, with stuffed goose and peas and carrots, with beautiful white cauliflower, with apple sauce and figs from Smyrna, with bananas big as a blackjack, with cinnamon cake and Streussel Küchen, with chocolate layer cake and nuts, all kinds of nuts, walnuts, butternuts, almonds, pecans, hickory nuts, with lager beer and bottled beer, with white wines and red, with champagne, kummel, malaga, port, with schnapps, with fiery cheeses, with dull, innocent store cheese, with flat Holland cheeses, with limburger and schmierkäse, with homemade wines, elderberry wine, with cider, hard and sweet, with rice pudding and tapioca, with roast chestnuts, mandarins, olives, pickles, with red caviar and black, with smoked sturgeon, with lemon meringue pie, with lady fingers and chocolate eclairs, with macaroons and cream puffs, with black cigars and long thin stogies, with Bull Durham and Long Tom and meerschaums, with corncobs and toothpicks, wooden toothpicks which gave you gum boils the day after, and napkins a yard wide with your initials stitched in the corner, and a blazing coal fire and the windows steaming, everything in the world before your eyes except a finger bowl.

In this passage, Miller has finally accepted his family, accepted both their nourishment and their starvation of being, accepted their death-dealing and life-giving qualities, as part of one gestalt.

No one can equal Miller in evoking the physical side of life—food, hunger, illness, health—but always he breaks through the physical to the spiritual. They are intertwined, indivisible. Henry does not say people must always be happy and free of suffering. He does not expect to have no ugly feelings or violent thoughts. He accepts all the extremes of life—the rape fantasies and the murderous thoughts as well as tenderness and affection—and his acceptance gives the reader the gift of self-acceptance.

Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge…. Is this the world, this walking up and down, these buildings that are lit up, the men and women passing me? I watch their lips moving, the lips of the men and women passing me. What are they talking about—some of them so earnestly? I hate seeing people so deadly serious when I myself am suffering worse than any of them. One life! and there are millions and millions of lives to be lived. So far I haven’t had a thing to say about my own life. Not a thing. Must be I haven’t got the guts. Ought to go back to the subway, grab a Jane and rape her in the street. Ought to go back to Mr. Thorndike in the morning and spit in his face. Ought to stand on Times Square with my pecker in my hand and piss in the gutter. Ought to grab a revolver and fire point-blank into the crowd. The old man’s leading the life of Reilly. He and his bosom pals. And I’m walking up and down, turning green with hate and envy. And when I turn in the old woman’ll be sobbing fit to break her heart. Can’t sleep nights listening to her. I hate her too for sobbing that way. The one robs me, the other punishes me. How can I go into her and comfort her when what I most want to do is to break her heart?

Such admissions soften our hearts rather than harden them. Henry is one of us: he cannot control his fantasies.

Those who have condemned Miller have confused the word with the deed. Henry is not a rapist: he is a man honestly confronting the imaginary rapist in himself. In truth, his message is not so different from Freud’s: let the unconscious bubble into consciousness and freedom will be the result. If we censor him, we are really censoring our humanity. It is only by admitting to our own murderous thoughts that we can be free of them, and only by exploring the whole range of our sexuality that we can understand its dark pull on our lives. Censorship is not the answer. Acceptance is.

There was little chance of above-ground publication for Tropic of Cancer or Black Spring. American publishing was still controlled by the Hicklin rule, a 1868 British judicial interpretation of obscenity as anything that might “corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” U.S. Customs personnel regularly seized and destroyed all literature deemed obscene under this definition—including James Joyce’s Ulysses, until Judge Wolsey exempted it in 1934, pronouncing it too “emetic” to encourage lustful thoughts.

Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press could never have published Tropic of Cancer in French either (for French obscenity laws were equally strict), but potentially “obscene” books could be published in France if they were in English and thus unavailable to corrupt the incorruptible French. Obelisk Press owed its very existence to this loophole. In his native country, however, Henry was a writer non grata. He was too sensitive to rejection to bear this for long, and after an unpromising attempt to crack the American literary establishment, he sailed back to Paris in May of 1935, soon after Anaïs Nin and her husband had returned.

He settled again into 18 Villa Seurat and focused on trying to make himself famous. People who knew him at this period describe the Villa Seurat as a kind of Warholesque “Factory,” with Miller writing, writing, writing and sending copies of his underground book to critics and authors all over the world. He was determined to make his reputation by sheer force of will (and postage).

Meanwhile, he was also working on The World of Lawrence (he would struggle with it through the forties), on Max and the White Phagocytes, on Money and How It Gets That Way, on Aller Retour New York (an account of his recent trip to New York, which showed him again how America misused its artists), and on letters to Anaïs Nin, Michael Fraenkel, and many others.

The “June book,” which was to become Tropic of Capricorn, was also beginning to grow its wings and claws. An attempt to make sense of his relationship with June would occupy Henry for much of the rest of his writing life, eventually inspiring four huge novels: Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus. And yet the theme of Henry’s abasement before his women was all foretold in “Mademoiselle Claude”:

Where women are concerned I always make an ass of myself. The trouble is I worship them and women don’t want to be worshiped….

Anaïs Nin was the muse to whom Henry dedicated Black Spring. It was published in June 1936, by Obelisk, though it had first been under contract to Michael Fraenkel’s tiny Carrefour Press. It is the second published book that cements a writer’s identity. A first book may be a fluke, but with the second, one becomes a writer. Black Spring let Henry know that he had found his métier.

That winter, Henry and Anaïs made another brief trip to New York. Anaïs was ending her connection with Rank’s institute and Henry was resuming his literary assault on his hated native land. Tropic of Cancer was garnering fame and readers around the world, making Henry an underground celebrity. But he was still irked to be unavailable in “Amurrica.” He had conquered Paris, but “America winged and sexed” still eluded him. Though the breakthrough of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1934 had given him and other writers some vague hope of having the customs ban lifted for books of “recognized value,” it seemed unlikely to benefit Tropic of Cancer. As Edward de Grazia shows in his important study of censorship Girls Lean Back Everywhere (1992), Ulysses did not open the door for other sexually explicit books because it was admitted to the United States on the grounds that it was not arousing to the average reader. Not until 1962–63 would the Hicklin rule be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court for Tropic of Cancer. Now I fear we are giving it new life in our various proposed legislations against pornography.

But Henry found another way into America for Tropic of Cancer. Frances Steloff and David Moss, the owners of the Gotham Book Mart in New York, met Henry in 1936 and became his most important patrons.

It is impossible to overstate the role of avant-garde booksellers in the spread of new works of art during the twenties and thirties. From Shakespeare & Company in Paris, to the Gotham in New York, important contemporary writers of that era came to us through the indispensable offices of open-minded booksellers, often women, who were truly the midwives of literary culture. (Once again women were more easily accepted in this role than in the role of creators in their own right.)

The story continues today with independent bookstores all over the U.S. who have the gumption to stock and hand-sell the unpopular, the new, the politically incorrect, the literary. Bookselling remains a business of passion and conviction, however much the corporate computer and unfair discounting practices that discriminate against the independents try to eliminate all passion from the process. As large media conglomerates expand their stranglehold on what can and cannot be published, new small presses also make their way into the world through the good offices of independent booksellers, who are still fighting to keep literacy alive in a world that seems to want to crush it on all sides.

Henry, like Joyce and Zola, was to be the beneficiary of such feisty booksellers and publishers all his writing life. Without Frances Steloff, Jack Kahane, Maurice Girodias, James Laughlin, and Barney Rosset, Henry Miller would be unknown to us today. I cannot help but wonder where all the future Henry Millers are, and whether we shall ever even know of their existence. It grows harder and harder to break through the indifference of “official” publishing with all its rationalizations for publishing ghostwritten celebrity books to the exclusion of almost everything else.

The years 1936 to 1938 were years of amazing fecundity for Miller. Both his inner and his outer life were unbelievably rich. While writing Capricorn, Henry also worked on one of his most delightful books, The Hamlet Letters, a correspondence (about almost everything but Hamlet) with his friend Michael Fraenkel. The play of Miller’s mind in correspondence, the mischievous ideas about literature, the sprightliness of the writing, make this book (first published in very limited editions in 1939 and 1941 and published in abridged form in paperback in 1988) one of Miller’s most revealing. Henry was made for the epistolary book and digression was his art form. In The Hamlet Letters, he ranges over every subject from Shakespeare to anti-Semitism, from Buddha to reincarnation. He reveals the sage at his most contemplative and entertaining. We are immersed in Henry’s mind, which is like no other.

While this flurry of activity was going on, Tropic of Cancer began to make new friends for Henry—friends like George Orwell, Lawrence Durrell, and James Laughlin (then a Harvard student, later the founder of New Directions and one of Henry’s publishers to this day). This is one of the most amazing results of publishing a first book: it reaches out into the world for the author and inevitably changes the author’s life.

In time the Villa Seurat became a sort of magnet for creative people. An informal group of painters and writers gathered around Henry. They boosted each other’s work and had wonderful times together. Among them were Betty Ryan, David Edgar, Hans Reichel, Alfred Perlès, Michael Fraenkel, Abe Rattner. The atmosphere was electric and Henry was the current that ran through it.

Henry Miller radiated from No. 18. Radiated is the correct word. There was a quixotic mood of coercion hanging about the place, like an atmosphere. On approaching, the least sensitive visitor must have become aware of an exceptional presence. Even I who had by now known him for nearly six years, even I couldn’t mount the stairs to his first-floor studio without experiencing a queer feeling of exultation and enthusiasm. I seldom entered without pausing outside the door for a minute or two to take in the familiar Miller noises within. Usually it was the clatter of the typewriter I caught. The door to the sanctum was peppered with notices and avis importants: “If knock you must, knock after 11 A.M.”—“Am out for the day, possibly for a fortnight.”—“La maison ne fait pas de crédit.”—“Je n’aime pas qu’on m’emmerde quant je travaille.” And so forth. He pinned these notes to the door because he hated to be pestered while at work. But he never fooled me: I always knew when he was genuinely out: I smelled it.

Anaïs Nin still visited Henry a couple of afternoons a week, when her husband came into town to take painting lessons with Hans Reichl. Their projects together were literary as well as sexual at this point. Hugo knew yet did not know or did not let himself knowthat he knew. Anaïs, for her part, did not know about Betty Ryan. She once imperiously ordered Ryan to knock on a pipe that went up from her apartment to Henry’s studio should Hugo appear. What a busy place the Villa Seurat was.

Henry and Anaïs worked together on The Booster, a turgid publication of the American Country Club of Paris that was shanghaied by Henry’s Villa Seurat circle and turned into a literary joke. (Imagine a country club publication being taken over by a group of surrealists!) Henry and his writer friends were able to get their hands on a printing press and they turned The Booster from puffery for rich expatriates to a genuine avant-garde magazine. They also produced the Siana series of books for Obelisk Press (Anaïs spelled backward). Georges Belmont’s literary magazine Volontés and The Phoenix, an American journal devoted to D.H. Lawrence, also attracted Henry’s abundant energy during his Villa Seurat days.

At what point did Henry give up all hope of marrying Anaïs? Probably not until the war broke out and they both returned to America. But he never ceased to credit Anaïs for his breakthrough as a writer. As late as 1939, he wrote to Huntington Cairns, a lawyer and admirer of Henry’s work, who advised U.S. customs on censorship (and was therefore an important contact for Henry):

I owe nearly everything to one person—Anaïs Nin. I want you to remember, if you survive me, what I have said and written about her Diary. I haven’t the slightest doubt that one hundred years from now this stupendous document will be the greatest single item in the literary history of our time. Anyway, had I not met her, I would never have accomplished the little I did. I could have starved to death here, for all the French care.

In 1937, at the Villa Seurat, Henry made another of the great friendships of his life—with Lawrence Durrell. Durrell often joked that he had found Tropic of Cancer in a public toilet on Corfu, where it had been abandoned by a disgusted reader. The truth was that Barclay Hudson, a friend of his, had given it to him during a literary discussion in Greece. It changed Durrell’s life—and Henry’s. Durrell immediately—in August 1935—wrote to Henry: “I love its guts…. It really gets down on paper the blood and bowels of our time.”

Miller immediately replied: “You’re the first Britisher who’s written me an intelligent letter about the book … it’s curious how few people know what to admire in the book.”

At the time Durrell discovered it, Tropic of Cancer was beginning its underground life, being admired by many and sold at the Gotham Book Mart, but receiving almost no official literary recognition.

“It is almost unobtainable,” Henry wrote to Durrell, who answered: “I always imagine the book scorching through apathy like a hot knife in butter.”

Miller was dazzled (as I was forty years later) at being understood by a kindred spirit.

As Henry described in one of his letters to me, he had to fight to have his book read. The world never knows it needs a new book. And only the insane tenacity of the author ever gets it to those who need it most.

Durrell responded to Henry in a way that was essential: “the only man-sized piece of work which this century can really boast of,” he wrote of the book. And Henry loved him, as we always love everyone who understands us.

When Durrell first wrote to Miller in 1935, neither was known except to a coterie. The two were destined to influence each other, and to give each other courage.

Here is Perlès’s account of the beginnings of their friendship:

I arrived at the Villa Seurat somewhat out of breath. Lawrence Durrell was there with Henry. He had arrived fresh from Corfu, a handsome young fellow in his middle twenties with golden hair and a boyish face that made him look like a cherub. The two were drinking wine and seemed to be getting along splendidly. Durrell’s wife, Nancy, was preparing food in the kitchenette at the back of the studio; she was tall and slender, like an elegant flamingo.

Both Henry and Larry were in high spirits. They seemed to have recognized each other immediately as “old souls”—people of the same atavism who have everything in common with one another. They had been talking and drinking and making merry all day and by the time I arrived were already bosom friends. A veritable coup de foudre à la russe.

The first evening with the Durrells (there were many more to follow) was an unforgettable event. Nancy had prepared a delicious dinner of filet steak (only the English know how to grill a steak so that it is neither underdone nor carbonized but just à point, as the French always say but never do), and we were in fine fettle as we settled down to the feast. We drank a lot of wine, but the wine didn’t make us drunk—we were intoxicated with one another. The conversation flowed like music. No one tried to monopolize the table talk: no tedious monologues, no indigestible intellectual pronunciamenti. Larry was scintillating and radiantly happy. He was the first truly civilized Anglo-Saxon I had come across since Henry Miller himself; he was sufficiently civilized to make his culture and erudition palatable—which is a great deal. Already a poet of distinction despite his youth, he had just completed his second book, The Black Book, “a chronicle of the English Death,” he called it, which was to be published a few months later by the Obelisk Press.

The correspondence with Durrell (which began in 1935) and the face-to-face friendship (which began in 1937) were both important because these were the years that Henry finally found the courage to tackle the June-book in its ultimate form—Tropic of Capricorn. He had attempted this book in Crazy Cock and Moloch, and for years he had carried around the notes of his relationship with June, hoping he could effect their transformation into fiction. When the time came, however, he was better off forgetting his notes and letting the book rip. Cancer and Black Spring had prepared him to tackle his New York life with abandon. At last he was ready. He began by dedicating Tropic of Capricorn “To Her,” and exploding with his own Abelard—like historia calamitatum, a flashback to his New York life in the twenties from his Paris present in the thirties.

What a difference a decade can make in a writer’s life! With literature left behind, Henry was ready to capture “Her” forever. June had been the “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” the Ayesha of his life (after Louise), the primal Lilith-Eve, the Sorceress, the torturer, the muse. He had to subsume life into literature in order to capture her and conquer her forever. The process of writing was essential to overcoming the obsession. What Henry says in his “coda” to Capricorn is true of every writer who ever lived:

It came over me, as I stood there, that I wasn’t thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I wrestled with this question of “truth.” For years I have been trying to tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is inexhaustible.

“The truth can also be a lie.” This is critical to Henry’s whole concept of life and writing. He tries to tell the whole truth in Capricorn, the truth of June, of Louise, of Pauline, of the Cosmodemonic. He tires to rise above his New York existence and transubstantiate it into art—or something even higher: life. And what happens when his book is finished? He realizes he will have to write more and more books before he gets to the core of his story. And in fact he will write The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Nexus, Plexus) about this same material.

What is Capricorn about? Outwardly, it is about how Henry rose (as Saul Bellow might say) from humble origins to complete disaster. It is a book about his people (those “Nordic idiots”), about his mother (with her “clutching womb”), the world of work in Jazz-Age New York and finally about Henry falling in love with his muse—a Venus who turns out to be Lilith. The meeting with the muse makes it possible for him to take his earth-bound sorrows and transmute them into soaring words. The meeting with June comes at the very end of the book, but it is the basis for everything that comes before and after, the basis, in fact, of Henry’s whole writing life. By capturing his mother in June, he is launched on his way forever, and he can never turn back.

Like every writer, Henry must build an elaborate tomb to bury the woman who embodies his obsession:

Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her—and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an “end” is intolerable to me.

Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it or we can refuse the knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe itself fall apart.

For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who, wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story is situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the soaring, crenelated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping, confused, encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off.

Capricorn is remarkable for the honesty with which it details the role of sexual obsession in a writer’s life. The muse comes to us dressed in human sexuality in order to extract us from time and allow us to enter timelessness. This could be Shakespeare writing about his Dark Lady: “You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it.”

This could be Petrarch writing of Laura, or Dante writing of Beatrice:

It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks!

Henry is relating his progress from man to angel, from man to artist:

These are the facts and facts mean nothing. The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality. At such a moment what a man does is of no great importance, it’s what he is that counts. It’s at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is precisely what happened to me: I became an angel. It is not the purity of an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night in question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was detached, I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern about the future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my wings and hid them beneath my coat.

Without June, the muse, Henry the artist-angel could not have been born.

Montparnasse in the late thirties was being transformed even as the world was being transformed. German refugees were fleeing Hitler, bringing with them terrible stories of anti-Semitism. Henry’s reaction to Hitler was not what you would expect from an anti-Semite. He despised Hitler and regarded his Jew-baiting as drivel. If confronted by anti-Semitism, Henry often claimed to be a Jew himself. He was a man always against the grain.

As war threatened and Paris became less and less secure, Larry Durrell, who was ensconced in his retreat on Corfu, kept inviting Henry to visit Greece, the paradise Betty Ryan had described to him on their first meeting at Villa Seurat. Henry eventually accepted, and the trip resulted in what may be Henry’s most important book, The Colossus of Maroussi. But first Henry had to make the break with Paris.

He was terrified of war and violence, was cowardly about fighting, and hated both the Fascists and Communists equally. He also, of course, despised America. Only when the French mobilized for war was Henry finally motivated to leave Paris. He knew he was coming to the end of another period in his life, but for the moment didn’t know where the next period would unfold. Tropic of Capricorn was done and Larry was urging him to bring it to Greece. Henry got as far as Bordeaux, but he was still not sure of his next move:

Hotel Majestic, 2, Rue de Conde,

Bordeaux

Sunday—

25th September [1938]

Dear Larry & Nancy—

I left Paris a few days ago to take a vacation after finishing Capricorn and having my teeth fixed. Found the country too dull and came on here just as things began to look really bad. Before leaving Paris I packed all my belongings carefully—Anaïs will take them to storage, unless war is declared so suddenly that she hasn’t time. I have been in a very bad state up until last night when things looked so bad that I could begin to think of action. Sending you this by air mail—hope it will reach you before declaration of war. I am stuck here—no use returning to Paris because the city will be evacuated. Can’t go anywhere from here as I haven’t the money. (If an American gun boat comes along I may have to take it!)

I’d like to know what you intend doing—stay in Corfu or return to England to be drafted et cetera. Could you send me a telegram to the above address? Anaïs is still in Paris and Hugo is in London. Communications are already poor, interrupted. I am here with just enough to last about a week. I won’t budge from here, if I can help it. There’s no place to go to! Have written Kahane for an advance on royalties due, but doubt if he’ll come across, he’s such a tight bugger. I may be stranded here in this bloody awful place where I don’t know a soul and never intended to be. No doubt I shall pull out all right—Jupiter always looks after me—but I’d like a word or two from you. Maybe I might find a way to get to Corfu—if it’s safe there? If you don’t reach me here try Kahane. I have two valises with me, a cane (bequeathed by Moricand) and a typewriter. If necessary I’ll throw it all overboard and swim for it.

Everything would be O.K. if Anaïs could depend on receiving money from London regularly—but who can say what will happen to communications, banks, etc? If I need some dough in an emergency—if I have to make a break for it somewhere—can I depend on you for anything? I won’t ask unless I’m absolutely up against the wall. I’m already on a war basis, ferreting about like an animal, not a thought in my head except to keep alive by hook or crook. The worse it gets the keener I will be. It’s the tension, the inaction, the pourparlers, that gets me. Five minutes alone with Hitler and I could have solved the whole damned problem. They don’t know how to deal with the guy. He’s temperamental—and terribly earnest. Somebody has to make him laugh, or we’re all lost! Haven’t spoken to a soul since I left Paris. Just walk around, eat, drink, smoke, rest, shave, read papers. I’m an automaton. Fred was still at the Impasse Rouet—not called for yet. And without a cent as usual. Love to Veronica Tester—what a wonderful name!

Henry

[P.S.] If you lose track of me, if Paris is bombed & Obelisk wiped out, write to my friend Emil Schnellock—c/o Mrs. L.B. Gray, Orange, Va., U.S.A. Anaïs is at the Acropolis Hotel—160 Blvd. St. Germain, Paris (6e). She may come here. Everything depends on that boyo Hitler! P.P.S. I gave Kahane MS. of Capricorn to put in vault of his bank. Have carbon copy with me—also Hamlet MS.

A few months before, Henry had written to tell Huntington Cairns that he might head for Arizona or Easter Island or even India. He was very much at loose ends as the war threatened:

I am giving notice now that I will leave the Villa Seurat within the next three months, as I am obliged to do by law. If I can, I will ship a trunkful of my documents to Schnellock in Virginia, in advance of sailing. This is the end of another period for me. The end of my European adventure, perhaps. I don’t know precisely what I’ll do, but I plan to get to Arizona and stay there a while, and, if the money is available, make a whirlwind tour of the whole country, in order to write that book I have planned: America, the Air-Conditioned Nightmare. After that, we’ll see. Perhaps the Orient. Perhaps some remote, outlandish island. I would like to get to Northern India and then thence to Tibet, but at the moment I lack the courage for further hardships. But I have thought often of a place like Easter Island, or the Caroline Islands, where some of my German ancestors are reported to have settled long ago. I can do without civilized society, without art, without culture: I have enough inside me to last me the rest of my life.

His “Easter Island” would in fact turn out to be Big Sur, California.

Torn between destinations, in 1939 Henry settled on Greece, hoping he could wait out the war there. This proved providential. Greece was to become another spiritual locus in his life.

At forty-seven, Henry the sage was about to be born.

One senses the transformation from the opening pages of The Colossus of Maroussi:

I would never have gone to Greece had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the same house with me in Paris. One evening, over a glass of white wine, she began to talk of her experiences in roaming about the world. I always listened to her with great attention, not only because her experiences were strange but because when she talked about her wanderings she seemed to paint them: everything she described remained in my head like finished canvases by a master.

The prose is suddenly simple, lucid, calm. Betty Ryan had described Greece to Miller as “a world of light such as I had never dreamed of,” and that light is in the prose, as is the limpidity of Grecian waters. Suddenly the long, tortuous sentences of Cancer and Capricorn, full of outrageous and surreal contradictions, become short, clear, shimmering in Maroussi. The writer is sublimed into a seer. He is ready to give up chaos for serenity. He is ready to give up darkness for light.

If one looks at the evolution of Miller’s books, from Clipped Wings to Crazy Cock to Moloch to Tropic of Cancer (and the other Paris books), to Maroussi, one sees a fascinating progression. The derivative pastiche of Clipped Wings gives way to mannered, self-conscious literary writing (Crazy Cock and Moloch), which in turn yields to madcap fuck-everything formlessness (the Tropics, Black Spring, et cetera), which in turn transforms itself into the radiant clarity of Maroussi. And yet they are clearly all the work of the same writer, the same soul. That soul goes down to hell like Dante and ascends the mountain to find the gates of Paradise in Greece. New York is the entrance into the underworld, Paris the entrance into purgatory, and Greece the entrance into paradise.

Maroussi is Miller’s central book. It explains everything that comes before and after. He was, as he once said to me, “always looking for the secret of life.” And it was in Greece that he found his true calling as an author/sage whose mission was to liberate his readers.

As the Paris books are full of bloody womb images, the Greece book is full of images of illumination. The sentences themselves are different. Instead of twisting back on themselves like pretzels, they are clear and sharp. There are still lists—Henry’s favorite trope—but they are not full-throttle, cacophonic Rabelaisian ones, they are brief and visionary:

The tree brings water, fodder, cattle, produce; the tree brings shade, leisure, song, brings poets, painters, legislators, visionaries.

How different this is from the rambunctious list-making of Cancer, Capricorn, and Black Spring—full of wombs, shoes, fur, pus, wings, chancres, cancers, spiders, and vitriol …

The “supernal light” has transformed Henry.

One would have to be a toad, a snail, or a slug not to be affected by this radiance which emanates from the human heart as well as from the heavens.

“The only paradise in Europe,” he calls Greece—and for him this was true. In Greece his “heart filled with light”; he opened like a flower.

I don’t know which affected me more deeply—the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. Coming into Poros gives the illusion of the deep dream. Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress. The men and women of Poros are hanging out of the windows, just above your head. You pull in right under their friendly nostrils, as though for a shave and hair cut en route. The loungers on the quay are walking with the same speed as the boat; they can walk faster than the boat if they choose to quicken their pace. The island revolves in cubistic planes, one of walls and windows, one of rocks and goats, one of stiff-blown trees and shrubs, and so on. Yonder, where the mainland curves like a whip, lie the wild lemon groves and there in the Spring young and old go mad from the fragrance of sap and blossom. You enter the harbor of Poros swaying and swirling, a gentle idiot tossed about amidst masts and nets in a world which only the painter knows and which he has made live again because like you, when he first saw this world, he was drunk and happy and care-free. To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb. It is a joy too deep almost to be remembered. It is a kind of numb idiot’s delight which produces legends such as that of the birth of an island out of a foundering ship. The ship, the passage, the revolving walls, the gentle undulating tremor under the belly of the boat, the dazzling light, the green snake-like curve of the shore, the beards hanging down over your scalp from the inhabitants suspended above you, all these and the palpitant breath of friendship, sympathy, guidance, envelop and entrance you until you are blown out like a star fulfilled and your heart with its molten smithereens scattered far and wide.

Summing up what Greece taught him, Henry says, “I can see the whole human race straining through the neck of the bottle here, searching for egress into the world of light and beauty.”

Maroussi shows Henry climbing up out of the bloody womb of time into the radiance of eternity. The book works on many levels. It is the odyssey of fallen man moving from darkness into light, from mortality to immortality, from mutability to permanence, from benighted materialism to enlightened spirituality. It also tells the story of the world at the exact fulcrum of the twentieth century. In 1939, this planet with its millions of war-bound inhabitants was crossing an inexorable divide from the pre-Nuclear to the Nuclear Age, from the illusion of species immortality to the conviction of species mortality, from the war to end all wars to the understanding that war would be with us always in various forms—both cold and hot. Henry’s odyssey in Maroussi is exactly the odyssey the human race needed in 1939—but failed to take. It is prophetic that it concludes with the line “Peace to all men, I say, and life more abundant!”

Maroussi creates a new form for the spiritual travel book, building on and extending Thoreau. It astonishes me that so few of the people who have written about Miller have seen this. The sex of the Paris books has blinded them. They do not even look at Maroussi.

Mary Dearborn acknowledges the beauty of Maroussi’s prose, but she dismisses the book in a few lines: “[H]is recounting of one spiritual experience after another tends to bore readers who are not taken up with mysticism.”

Of course, “mysticism”—the very word has become pejorative—is always boring to those who believe only in materialism. “Boring” is in itself a codeword for fear—as any psychoanalyst can tell you. There is a whole school of journalists and critics who will dismiss as “New Age claptrap” everything from Maroussi to Walden to the Tao Te Ching to Shirley MacLaine’s bestsellers as if there were no difference in quality or in kind.

Probably the fear of enlightenment is greater in some people than the attraction toward it, but some of us are drawn to it, while others stubbornly turn their backs, claiming the light does not exist. One cannot argue about the possibility of enlightenment any more than one can argue about the existence of god and goddess. It requires a leap of faith, an act of amazing grace. Miller made that leap of faith in Greece. Many of his chroniclers cannot follow him.

Even Robert Ferguson, who is a somewhat less grudging and bitter critic of Henry than Mary Dearborn, says of Maroussi that “a second rebirth, coming so soon after the first one in Paris with Tropic of Cancer, might seem like one rebirth too many.” But spiritual experiences are cumulative. They gather like waves and result in breakthroughs. Creative life does not proceed by accumulating anthills of “facts.” Rather there is a slow accretion of experience, of learning one’s craft, of growing spiritually, until suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, one soars to a new level. If you’ve experienced it, you believe it. If you haven’t, you disbelieve.

Of all Henry’s biographers, Jay Martin best comprehends Miller’s mission to free his readers. He records the sense of liberation and ease Miller felt in Greece. After the frenzy of the Paris years, where he wrote and wrote to empty himself of the bitterness of his past, he was finally able to draw a long breath of life and light. He returned to America a new person. In a sense, his soul had been shriven.

Perhaps Maroussi is played down by Miller’s biographers because it is “a book without sex,” as one of his Greek friends predicted. It doesn’t fit the Miller stereotype, so it is safer to ignore it than to acknowledge that Miller was multifaceted, both as a human being and as a writer. In this age of electronic sound bites and media stereotyping, few public figures are allowed complexity, complication, or chiaroscuro. Miller is seen as the antic goat, nothing more. How can we notice that his central book is full of sea and sun, not slime and sperm? It would make our precious point of view seem wrong! The truth is that Miller was on a spiritual journey his whole life—and Greece was at the heart of it.

In Greece, Henry mingled with poets and philosophers and traveled to ancient sites—Poros, Nauplia, Epidaurus, and Mycenae—with George Katsimbalis, whom Henry was to immortalize as The Colossus of Maroussi. Like Henry, Katsimbalis was a great talker as well as a writer. As he led Henry on a spiritual and literary journey, he also captivated him.

Henry turned serene, almost seraphic in Greece, and all his friends noticed the change. He began his lifelong romance with the wisdom of the ages—yoga, Zen, the I Ching. His friend Ghika (whom he called Giks), the painter from Hydra, predicted that Greece would change Henry: “If you came to Greece as a Parisian bohemian, you have become a pilgrim,” he said. “Henceforth your writing must be different.” Maroussi was to prove Ghika right.

In September 1939, Henry’s publisher at Obelisk Press, Jack Kahane, died, and Miller’s modest monthly stipend from Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring was interrupted. Durrell was going to fight with the Greeks against Italy; Paris was in chaos, preparing for war. Like it or not, it was time for Miller to return to America. He always fled war when he could, knowing its uselessness. Just three weeks before his forty-eighth birthday on December 26, all Americans were told to leave Greece, and Henry’s friend George Katsimbalis, the mad word-spinner, took Miller to see a fortune-teller.

Like the fortune cookie he later gave me (“your name will be famous in the future”), the prediction he received was also destined to come true: Henry was to be a joy-giver, fated never to die, but simply to disappear from the earthly sphere like Lao-tzu. The prediction was truer than Henry would know, even in his own lifetime, for though obscurity and struggle awaited him in his homeland, he had already written most of the books that would bring him immortality. All except Maroussi, which he wrote in New York upon his return.

When Henry arrived in his native city in January 1940, he was as broke as when he had left ten years earlier, unknown to the general reading public and still without a nurturing mate.

Anaïs had also fled Europe and returned to New York, but she was ill and didn’t meet Henry’s ship, the Exocharda, when it docked. She was, anyway, retreating from Henry with each passing year.

This was no triumphal return from abroad. Henry had published only one book in the States, The Cosmological Eye, a miscellany of pieces brought out by James Laughlin of New Directions in 1939, and it had not done at all well even in literary circles. Henry was afraid and ashamed to see his elderly parents, terrified of being wholly unable to write in America, terrified of being claimed by the Cosmodemonic New York he had fled.

New York was a city of failures and defeats for him, and yet somehow he was able to sit in its midst and write The Colossus of Maroussi and some of his best essays (The World of Sex and “Reflections on Writing”) in Caresse Crosby’s apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street. She was the widow of Harry Crosby of The Black Sun Press, and another returned expatriate—albeit a solvent one.

Henry began The Colossus between the winter and spring of 1940, and it covers the period in Greece that immediately preceded it. It feels like a book that was written in a blaze of inspiration. It is not labored, but clean and true. Henry Miller’s letters to Anaïs Nin from Greece have the same clarity. Greece had focused his energies. He was almost fifty, and ready to enter the next phase of life.

During Henry’s New York sojourn another important literary event occurred that illuminates Miller the writer. Always desperately hard up, and unable to sell his work to mainstream publishers, Henry was tempted to try his hand at pornography-on-demand, writing for a rich collector at a dollar a page. He proved as unsuited for this “job” as for the others he’d taken in his life, and, like them, he lost it.

He did turn out a few pieces, some of which have unfortunately been published posthumously as “Sous les Toits de Paris,” “Rue de la Screw,” and “France in My Pants” in Opus Pistorum (1983), but his “career” as a paid pornographer was to prove Vladimir Nabokov’s maxim that pornography lovers insist on their smut being “limited to the copulation of clichés.” “Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust,” Nabokov says in Lolita. Henry couldn’t write pornography for long. The porno collector found him “too poetic.”

This shows how little most censors, critics, and even sober First Amendment specialists understand about the impetus to write about sex. As Nabokov says in his afterword to Lolita, “no writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual.” Life contains both, and in order to evoke it, writing must also contain both.

But the porno fancier is seeking something else altogether—a masturbatory aid. Too much poetry distracts him from his single goal: an efficient orgasm. Henry’s goals were always far less single-minded and far less efficient. The sex in his books was there just as the spirituality was—to awaken, to enlighten, to bring the reader to his senses. Those who confuse the Paris books with pornography clearly do not know how tedious and repetitive pornography really is. Those who accuse Henry of putting in the sex “to sell” do not realize that in his case the sex was an impediment to his “career.” But he had no choice. He wrote what “the voice” dictated.

The posthumous publication of Henry’s small output of for-hire pornography has, sadly, further besmirched his reputation—not only because it is sexual, but because it is so dreary, dull, and badly written.

At the same period, in 1940, in New York, he wrote his truest book about the uses of sex in literature. It is a brief essay entitled The World of Sex, and in it Miller discusses the various responses to his sexual books. He explains that people either despise them or see them as liberating, but that very few readers can make sense of the way the sexual and the spiritual are interrelated. Henry speaks of his oeuvre as if his place in literature were already established.

For me The World of Sex remains the last word on the still misunderstood subject of sex and spirituality. Like Flaubert, Henry did not choose his subject matter, he submitted to it. That he wrote The World of Sex hard on the heels of Maroussi and the pornography-for-hire experiment is fascinating. Henry could only be himself. That is surely one definition of genius.

In New York, Henry at last found the courage to visit his parents, who were old, poor, ill, and very glad to see him. The empathy he felt for them, the transformation of his feelings of anger, also had a profound effect upon his writing and his life to come. His parents finally accepted him, not because of his work—by their standards an underground writer was a failure—but as their son, which is perhaps more important.

Maroussi was turned down by ten publishers, including Blanche Knopf, and it finally came out with a small, financially strapped San Francisco press called Colt. Although Henry was rejected again and again, he still would not allow Penguin Books to bowdlerize Tropic of Cancer just to get it published in America (an offer that came to him at this time). Some hostile Miller critics imply that he would do anything for money, but the fact is that his stubborn individualism always made his economic life very difficult. He simply could not compromise with the taste of the mainstream. He couldn’t even publish in The Kenyon Review, Esquire, or The New Republic. He was so far ahead of his time that even the little magazines and literary quarterlies were afraid of him. And The New Yorker turned up its aristocratic nose at his work. Nor could he get a grant from the Guggenheims. Henry has a wry take on grants in his coda to Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Though he “answered all questions faithfully” and “submitted names of persons of good repute” who would vouch for the fact that he was neither a “moron, adolescent, insane or alcoholic,” he did not get the grant. Of the list of nineteen professors, journalists, and psychologists who made the grade in 1941, when Henry Miller didn’t, not one has been heard of since.

As a paradigm of the plight of the creative artist in America, Miller’s life is nothing short of terrifying. Always rejected by both the literary establishment and the literary antiestablishment, broke until he was a relatively elderly man, he had no choice but to live on the margins and like it. Had he been a chronic depressive, he probably would not have survived. But Henry’s great good luck was his temperament—“always merry and bright,” as he said—and he went on writing for the sheer joy of it.

So Henry “the failure” was in fact the greatest success. If climbing one’s own mountain against all odds is the mark of spiritual success, Miller was a dazzling success. His tenacity is exemplary. And no one needs tenacity more than an American writer who cannot cut his conscience to the taste of the times—that is, any writer of value.

When Maroussi was turned down almost everywhere, when his short pieces could find no home in magazines, Miller asked his new literary agent, John Slocum of Russell and Volkening, what on earth would sell in America? Desperate to be read in his native land, Henry needed to know this. Slocum canvassed the publishers, who all seemed to want Miller, the returned expat, to write a book on America.

What a coincidence! He had been thinking of a book on America for a while, and in his head had called it The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The book, as he envisioned it, would have fifty chapters, with illustrations by his artist friend Abe Rattner, and would be based on notebooks he’d keep on a trip across the United States.

But Doubleday, the contracting publisher, didn’t see it his way. They didn’t want an illustrated book—too expensive to produce. And they didn’t want to give Henry enough money to do the tour of the United States. They wanted a guarantee of no pornography and advanced him $500 for the book, the trip, the whole project.

It was scarcely enough to cover half his expenses, traveling modestly. But Henry had things to say about America that had to find expression, and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was fated to be written.

His timing, as usual, could not have been worse. When Henry finished The Air-Conditioned Nightmare on Christmas Day, 1941, he had in his hand a broadside attack on America just in time for America’s entry into World War II. He knew that the book would not only never be accepted for publication, but might get him locked up as a traitor like the Japanese-Americans who were currently being interned in camps. It was hardly a propitious moment to publish rough truths about America.

Henry and Rattner made their 250,000 mile car trip through America between October 1940 and October 1941. “A year wasted!” Miller wrote of that period. But the book is far from a waste, even though The Air-Conditioned Nightmare would not be published till 1945 in hardcover, not till 1970 in paperback. Miller revised it in 1944 at Big Sur. Read today, it is an amazing prophecy of things to come. It is almost as though Miller foresaw the eighties turning nineties: “We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor.”

The American passion for materialism and the treadmill of mediocrity it creates is anatomized:

The most terrible thing about America is that there is no escape from the treadmill which we have created. There isn’t one fearless champion of truth in the publishing world, not one film company devoted to art instead of profits. We have no theatre worth the name…. We have no music worth talking about except what the Negro has given us, and scarcely a handful of writers who might be called creative.

Miller saw through to the heart of American hypocrisy—saw it was a country founded on misplaced theories of freedom that had allowed all its ideals to become nothing more than “the biggest profits for the boss, the utmost servitude for the workers….”

But Miller saved his most scathing barbs for the treatment of the American artist:

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold … is debased … the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal …

“I feel at home everywhere, except in my native land,” Miller told a Hungarian friend, a recent émigré to New York:

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare reads like a page out of our own times. It predicts the utter debasement of art and literature to forms of commerce. And The Nightmare Notebook, Henry’s notebook during the trip, which was later published with his and Rattner’s watercolors, is full of life and insight into Miller’s way of thinking—his list-making, his search for the secret of life, his search for an America he could love—under all that hate.

It is typical of writers to burn with the next book while finishing the book on the desk. Even as Henry wrote The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he chafed about his next book, which he had been carrying in his heart for ten years: The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Nexus, Plexus), his final settlement of the debt to June. He had only begun the story in Capricorn, he felt. Now he must tell it all.

What is this drive to write? Surely not for fame or money—which are far more easily gained in less disciplined, less lonely pursuits—but in search of that ecstasy one feels while in the trance of creation, that unity with self, with heart, with Mother. It becomes more necessary than life. It is meditation, balm, release.

“Writing is an act of healing,” says the novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. Every real writer feels this. The fate of the book is almost irrelevant. And thank goddess for that, because the energy to write is needed long before the applause (more likely rotten tomatoes or mute indifference) comes along.

To write is to live in a time warp between creation and response. The labor of writing must be borne long before the reaction, if any. Often, as in Miller’s case, the true response is many decades off.

Henry was still imagining himself in love with June on The Air-Conditioned Nightmare trip. He says as much in his Nightmare Notebook: “Where are you sitting now? … I love you!” he writes in an imaginary telegram to June from Hollywood. And he signs himself: “Valentine Valentino.” He was determined to embark on a great Proustian saga that would make sense of his great love and finally release him from it. But first he had to settle down and find a home, and this time it was the West that would call him.

During the Nightmare journey, Henry had become fascinated with Hollywood, which was, in that period, a haven for writers, artists, European émigrés. “A Hollywood conception of Hollywood,” he wrote in the notebook. “Familiar faces—from Paris, Vienna, Cracow, Berlin. Everybody is here. Looks lousy. But the sky is bright. One hopes …”

Miller hoped to find work on the film gravy-train, though he was soon to prove as unsuited for that as for other forms of knuckling under to bosses. Besides, his reputation had preceded him to Los Angeles. Women expected him to be a goatish stud and Hollywood businessmen thought he would be too pure an artiste to sell out and become just another schmuck with an Underwood.

They were both right and wrong. Henry was still a romantic about women and servicing “Hollywood wives” was not his idea of romance. He was not about to become a Hollywood writer-for-hire, either. His temperament couldn’t have been less suited. And his skills as a dramatist were all reserved for his own life.

But painting, miraculously, saved him.

During the lean years in Hollywood, between 1942 and 1943, when Miller was shacking up in Beverly Glen with his friends Margaret and Gilbert Neiman and striking out as a potential Hollywood hack, he turned to watercolor painting, which he had loved since the twenties when Emil Schnellock first gave him lessons.

Henry had seen many of the best painters at work, and he himself had the innate freedom of the artist. When he wrote, he worked; when he painted, he played—and everyone could see the joy in the results. Joy was to rescue him once again. In 1942, in Los Angeles, Henry painted for love, not money. He followed his bliss and his bliss always provided for him.

A trip to an art-supply store in Westwood put him in touch with Attilio Bowinkel, a dealer in painters’ supplies, who gave him materials and then displayed the resultant watercolors in his window. When they were snatched up by Arthur Freed, the MGM producer and art collector, Henry was so elated that he began to paint as demonically as he once had written. When the Neimans moved to Colorado, Henry turned their Beverly Glen cottage into a studio and eventually into a gallery where he sold his own work.

This beggar-artist was opening his palms to the heavens, and the heavens were answering. In 1943, he wrote his famous “open letter to all and sundry,” asking for handouts of cash and clothes. The letter was published in The New Republic and caused a stir. Even today, people remember it—either with disapproval or amusement.

Henry was an ironic beggar:

Anyone wishing to encourage the watercolor mania would do well to send me paper, brushes and tubes, of which I am always in need. I would also be grateful for old clothes, shirts, socks, etc. I am 5 foot 8 inches tall, weigh 150 pounds, 15½ neck, 38 inch chest, 32 inch waist, hat and shoes both size 7½. Love corduroys.

The New Republic called Henry “one of the most interesting figures on the American literary scene” (though apparently they didn’t find him interesting enough to showcase his work). His fame was as a character, not a writer—and to some extent this remains true even today.

Perhaps it is Henry’s view of money that makes him seem so odd. He had no pride about money because he had ceased to accept the American view that poverty is moral turpitude. When he did have money, he shared it with everyone. When he had none, he expected others to share with him. He was generous as only one who does not believe in material things can be. Giving it all away was his religion. As the sages predict, it always came back.

Some Miller “experts” claim the myriad limited editions of his essays and books were made with hope of gain—but nothing could be farther from the truth. Anyone who has made beautifully printed books and pamphlets knows that the process is painstaking and far from economically remunerative. One does it for the love of hot type on rag bond, the desire to blend various senses: sight, touch, and the music of words.

A writer and a painter who came out of the same Paris that produced Picasso, the surrealists, the small presses of Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare & Co.), Harry Crosby (Black Sun), and Nancy Cunard (Hours), Henry truly cared for the look of books—the synesthesia of books—in a way that was obsolete in publishing even then. There is a great American tradition of self-publishing that goes back to Whitman and before. Henry was aware of this tradition, and aware that he was part of it. That some of the books, letters, lists, and watercolors have become collectors’ items is serendipitous. The American writer who “sells out” hardly does so through limited editions. In fact, when Henry was finally offered a screenwriting contract from MGM in 1943, he refused it, preferring to live by his watercolors, with the angel as his watermark.

In this he knew himself well. He would have been incapable of dealing with the psychological situation of the Hollywood writer-for-hire, the constant rewrites at the behest of the “suits,” the constant attempt to second-guess a fickle public, the committee decisions, the fear, the chronic covering of one’s rear. Henry must have sensed he’d never be able to stand it. And he was right.

But he needed to settle down, have a home, a woman, a place to write, and in 1943 security still eluded him. He wanted to get on with writing his trilogy about his tumultuous romance with June, and for that he needed a calm life. (The irony of writing is that the most tumultuous books require the most regular lives.) He had been rebuffed by two young women he had recently become infatuated with; his watercolor income, which had started like a downpour, had suddenly dried up; and he had no hope of a permanent home. He was feeling his age and, like many writers, he began dreaming of a paradise for artists—and of a patron to free him to create. Everything he needed was given to him.

An anonymous donor set up a modest trust fund for him, much of which, characteristically, he immediately gave to Anaïs Nin and others. He then found his next earthly paradise in Big Sur. After that, he found the woman who was to give him the greatest gifts of his later years: his daughter Valentine and his son, Tony.

Henry came to Big Sur initially because of Jean Varda, the sculptor, but stayed because of the sky, the birds, the fog, the mountains. As he wrote to Anaïs Nin:

I have a sort of Paradise here, as to scenery, but the work involved is almost too much. I live up a steep road, over a mile long, away from the highway. Three times a week the food and mail arrives, and I drag it up with the last ounce of energy in me. Coming down to get it, I feel elated. Always I think I am in the Andes, the view so magnificent.

Henry found in Big Sur a landscape to which his soul responded. “It is a region where extremes meet, a region where one is conscious of weather, of space, of grandeur, and of eloquent silence,” Henry writes in Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.This was his place to contemplate eternity, the next stop on his spiritual journey after Greece. “And who can say when this region will once again be covered by the waters of the deep?” he asked.

Henry settled here, between earth and sky, between time and eternity, to make the next stage of his journey. “Here the redwood made its last stand … [Big Sur has] the look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity.”

The city boy from Brooklyn and Paris was beguiled by the grandeur of the Pacific Coast. It was to be his last earthly stop.