Chapter 6
In the last reaches of being there is but one true marriage; each person wedded to himself.
— HENRY MILLER IN A NOTE TO BILL PICKERILL, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH
I STAYED IN HENRY Miller’s Big Sur studio one night in 1974. Henry was already living in Pacific Palisades, and I was his daughter Valentine’s guest in the old homestead on Partington Ridge.
It was one of the most glorious, cold, foggy and uncomfortable places I’ve ever stayed. Henry’s “studio” was a shack with practically no insulation, and my then-lover and I clung to each other to keep warm. We were too cold to get up to go to the bathroom, too cold to sleep, except fitfully. The wind whistled through the slats of the cabin. The damp settled in our bones. And I had the most amazing dreams—undersea dreams, sailing dreams, flying dreams. Henry’s paradise was about as comfortable as the Andes, but spiritually it was magical. You felt that if Big Sur did not exist, Henry would have invented it—as he invented Brooklyn, Paris, and Greece.
Writers and places constitute a strange synergy. Do we absorb the energy from the place, or do we find the place when our own energy is right?
Big Sur seems to have taught Henry many spiritual lessons. Both the arduousness of the life there (and the beauty) and the strange way he came to find his home were lessons he needed. He wanted a home, but could not afford one, and then he discovered what we all discover on spiritual journeys:
When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance…. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing….
The home in Big Sur came to Henry in an almost magical way. He described the process to Anaïs Nin:
I told you I am getting a piece of property—a home. It came about strangely. It is almost impossible to get land or house here. There was a neighbor on the hill where I lived, a Mrs. Wharton, who seems to understand me—without reading the books. She is supposed to be a Christian Scientist—but she’s outgrown that. She’s the only person I know who uses the word Reality as I do. That’s our meeting ground … [S]he is virtually offering me her place…. [T]he price is ridiculous…. Sometimes I think, in offering me my dream, she is only teaching me another lesson. She says, for instance, in explaining her willingness to relinquish it, that it is now inside her, can’t be lost…. Have I not become more and more aware latterly that the things I deeply desire come without struggle?
After the house came watercolors, came devoted friends like Emil White, the Austrian book dealer—“boon companions” the like of whom he had not known since his Paris days. All he needed was another June. Henry’s romances in the second part of his life always seemed to be attempts to conjure the past, just as his early romances had been attempts to conquer his mother.
He hadn’t been happy with the first June, and he wasn’t destined to be happy with the second. She turned up like a sort of mail-order bride, provided by a friend in New York who had known the first June.
Henry’s romance-by-letter with June II (June Lancaster) seems inexplicable to anyone but another writer, who knows that the disease of our kind is to invent our lovers out of whole cloth, so that they may become characters in our books. Henry did this often and expertly. He decided to fall in love and then conveniently invented the person to fall in love with.
True, he needed certain reference points: the name June was one. June Lancaster had been a taxi dancer and an artists’ model. She had what Henry called a “metamorphic” personality—meaning that he thought he could shape her according to his needs—and she was young enough to be his daughter. This was a May-December relationship, one of a series that was to form a repeating pattern throughout the latter part of Henry’s life.
A friend of Miller’s, Harry Herschkowitz, went to New York to “interview” (and mattress-test) her on Henry’s behalf. He also apparently tested various other potential mail-order Mrs. Millers. Harry triumphed, and brought June II to Big Sur, where, despite her beauty and sensuality, she didn’t last long. Miller could whip himself up into a frenzy of long-distance infatuation, but even he could not counterfeit lasting love. And June II was too undomestic to be much help in as rugged a place as Big Sur. Without indoor plumbing or running water to cook and wash, Big Sur required a pioneer-woman spirit for survival. June II didn’t have it.
Lepska did. At least for seven years or so.
The pivotal women in Miller’s life were always highly intelligent—and certainly this was true of Janina Lepska, now known as Lepska Warren, Henry’s third wife. There is little about Lepska in his writings, but the watercolors he painted of her (recently published in Henry Miller: The Paintings. A Centennial Retrospective) depict her as a serious, Athena-like blonde and himself as a floating, Chagall-inspired lover.
He first met Lepska in 1944, while on a trip East to visit his mother. Louise was being operated on for cancer, and Henry arrived like the dutiful son he really was. Then, with his mother out of danger, he visited Lepska at Yale, where she was studying philosophy, and where Henry had an important literary pen pal in Wallace Fowlie. It wasn’t long before the romance between Henry and Lepska became serious and they headed out West together, marrying in Denver in December 1944, with Henry’s friends the Neimans as witnesses.
Henry recorded the marriage in a watercolor called Marriage sous la lune (1944). It shows a blue crescent moon above a jagged mountain range, and a twinkling six-pointed star that says “Lepska.”
“There was a near conjunction of Venus with the moon on the day we were married,” Lepska Warren writes of the watercolor. “At that elevation, everything was luminous.” The lovers returned to Big Sur and took up life in their Spartan paradise.
We have a glimpse of the idyllic beginning of their marriage in one of Henry’s letters to Larry Durrell:
Going to bed now. End of a quiet Sunday at Big Sur. My Polish wife, Lepska, has just been telling me stories of Poland. I’ve only learned two words of that language so far—Good Morning: sounds like Gin Dobrie…. Every day we take a sun bath. It’s like Spring now. Amazing climate and gorgeous scenery. Something like Scotland, I imagine. It’s one of the few regions in America you would like. I must describe it to you some day. One of the features of it are the vultures. The other is the fogs. And the third is the lupine which is like purple velvet over the mountain sides. There are also four crazy horses which I meet on my walks through the hills. They seem glued to the spot. And two of them are always in heat. I have a wonderful cabin, you know, dirt cheap—ten dollars a month. I have a young wife (21), a baby on the way probably, food in the larder, wine à discrétion, hot sulphur baths down the road, books galore, a phonograph coming, a radio also coming, good kerosene lamps, a wood stove, an open fireplace, a shower, and plenty of sun—and of course the Pacific Ocean, which is always empty. Alors, what more? This is the first good break I’ve had since I’m living in America. I open the door in the morning, look towards the sun rising over the mountains, and bless the whole world, birds, flowers and beasts included. After I have moved my bowels I take the hound for a walk. Then a stint of writing, then lunch, then a siesta, then water colors, then correspondence, then a book, then a fuck, then a nap, then dinner, and so to bed early and up early and all’s well except when I visit the dentist now and then.
Henry’s fame—and notoriety—were growing in a cultish sort of way; he had many helpers and admirers—almost too many—but money continued to be tight.
When Valentine, his second daughter, was born in 1945, he was still sending out begging letters for baby food, money, and clothes. Watercolors and handouts continued to be a more reliable source of income than his books. He was nearing sixty and a father of three.
In the forties, the press began circulating rumors of Henry Miller’s “cult of sex and anarchy” at Big Sur, and admirers kept arriving on the rugged coast looking for same. Henry complained of these tourists and hangers-on, but often invited them in to talk and eat, and it fell to Lepska to cook and entertain them. She must have felt like Madame Tolstoy with the Tolstoyans.
Whatever its myth, life at Big Sur was difficult, and Henry and Lepska quarreled over the children, the visitors, their differing views of how life should be run. There is no question that Lepska understood and admired Henry as an artist, but that doesn’t mean she found it easy to share his life. In his later years, Henry often seems to be using women as appliances to make himself more comfortable. A monumental selfishness, ironically, accompanies the blossoming of the sage.
Henry adored Val and Tony and spent time with them that he never spent with his first child. He was an enchanted, middle-aged father, and he once confessed to me that the greatest defeat of his life after Lepska left was his inability to care for his children totally. He was astounded, he said, by the power of women to raise children. “The greatest wrestler or boxer in the world would be worn out in one week if he had to take care of two little children. Feed them! Put diapers on them. Wipe their ass,” Henry said to me with sheer amazement in 1975. He thought that if the next generation were left to men, the human race would surely perish.
The years 1944–48 were important ones for Miller in many ways, but, creatively, they were less fertile. The birth of Val and Tony and the flowering of the reputation of his Paris books were important to him, as was the defense of his literary reputation by French intellectuals such as Sartre, Camus, and Gide. Henry wrote Sexus, The Time of the Assassins, and The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder in these years, but one gets the feeling that he was mostly rehashing old experiences. Why was he delving again into his marriage to June—the first June—in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy? The books are full of wonderful digressions on writing and all manner of other things, but the relationship with June hardly seems a sturdy enough theme on which to base a whole trilogy. Was Henry written out? Or did he lack a new muse?
There is also a sense in Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus that Henry is imitating himself, trying to repeat what had been so fresh, new, and explosive in Cancer, Capricorn, and Black Spring, and which now has become stale. Often the sex in The Rosy Crucifixion is formulaic, and the women seem robotic. They have become nothing but isolated holes, begging to be filled. Henry did not fulfill his early promise with these books. It seems that at this point, Henry had no shit-detector: he did not know his good writing from his bad.
Both Anaïs Nin and Gore Vidal have commented trenchantly on the sloppiness that began increasingly to invade Miller’s writing. In a letter of 1937, Nin assails Miller for his tendency to reduce “all women to an aperture,” and she calls this “a disease.” In a brilliant essay on “The Sexus of Henry Miller,” written in 1965, Gore Vidal faults not only Miller’s “hydraulic approach to sex” but also his tendency to reduce all characters except his autobiographical protagonist to “shadows in a solipsist’s daydream.” The criticism is apt. Henry’s writing is nowhere more uneven than in The Rosy Crucifixion.
After the liberation of Paris, Maurice Girodias, the son of Henry’s first publisher, Jack Kahane, wrote to Henry with the good news that his early books were selling. They were being constantly reprinted, probably for the GI market, and Henry had accumulated more money in royalties than had passed through his hands in his whole life. (No trip to Paris at this time would have been complete without the purchase of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. One edition even bound them together in paper covers with Jane Eyre printed on the front!) For the briefest of moments, Henry was rich in France—the owner, in name only, of a fortune in French royalties that, for a few months, was worth an astonishing $40,000. But before he could collect this small fortune or move to France and spend it, the franc was devalued and his royalties all but evaporated.
Everyone wanted a piece of Henry’s uncollectible fortune—his ex-wife June, the IRS, freeloaders who arrived in Big Sur to sit at the master’s feet, old friends from Paris like the astrologer Conrad Moricand, whom Henry wrote about in the “Paradise Lost” section of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
Henry’s financial life reads like a surrealist farce. Even when he had money, he sometimes couldn’t get his hands on it, and when he didn’t have any, the fates or his water-colors provided. He really needed the philosophy he espoused—the philosophy of the Tao Te Ching, the eternal ebb and flow of riches, both spiritual and material. His life was almost a constant lesson in letting go. He had to cultivate the detachment of the Zen sage, or go mad.
By 1949, the Paris books were appearing in sufficient numbers in the United States—smuggled in by returning Americans—to bring Henry a new burst of attention from the postwar generation of writers and readers.
The Happy Rock, printed by Bern Porter in California in 1945, shows the way Miller’s reputation was growing in postwar years. Dedicated “to the freedom of the Press—should there ever be any,” this little volume contains an odd assortment of selections from Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Moore, Wallace Fowlie, Lawrence Durrell, William Carlos Williams, and others.
Porter was a Berkeley physicist who established his own small press with the exclusive purpose of furthering Miller’s career. The Happy Rock is a strange festschrift, but one that shows how much Miller’s work meant to many literary people, and how, despite the relatively small numbers of his books available in his native land, he was transforming the culture.
It is a fallacy of our benighted publishing industry that numbers and sales figures predict the “importance” of books. The truth is that many of the most significant books of our time were either printed in tiny first editions by hitherto unheard of presses—Ulyssesappeared in 1922 in an edition of 750 copies—or not printed at all until many decades after their composition, like Anaïs Nin’s diaries. The millions of copies of Scarlett, the so-called sequel to Gone with the Wind, and Danielle Steele’s old wives’ tales, will have vanished into the landfill when Miller’s banned, smuggled books are still being read. Life is short, art is long, and freedom of the press moves forward like the light from vanished stars. Often the author is not around to enjoy the fruits of creation. No wonder the most important discipline the writer must cultivate is detachment.
Perhaps this was why, when Miller finally found himself famous for books written years earlier, he did not quite believe he had entered the realm of the kosher literary gent, and continued to publish with tiny presses and to live at the margins of “official” literary culture. Official literary culture had never been kind to him, had never understood him or granted him the barest livelihood from his work, even during his most productive years, and he truly felt he did not belong with its supposed worthies.
This must also account for much of the distressing unevenness of Henry’s work. He never received any useful, practical criticism or enjoyed any nurturing editorial relationships. He was either an embattled, rejected author or the object of cult adulation. In order to continue working, he was forced to take a fuck-everything attitude toward the literary world. Either that, or slit his throat. He had to be defiant. As late as 1975, Henry said to me: “I read the literary pages and my name is never mentioned, it seems.” (Even today a quick check of major universities and colleges, including Columbia, UCLA, Reed, Bennington, and Barnard, reveal no courses in Miller, and no Miller titles show up even in survey courses.)
It was Henry’s fate to change the culture from underground, as it were, and never to be given official credit for doing so until well after he was dead. He vacillated between defiance and detachment, and had little trust in the advice given to him about his writing, even when it came from beloved friends.
Larry Durrell didn’t like Sexus any better than I do. He cabled Henry that it would completely ruin his reputation and that he should withdraw it from publication. Henry flatly refused to do so, and even forgave Durrell the slur on his work. When Durrell wrote to Henry “what on earth possessed you to leave so much twaddle in?” Henry calmly replied:
Larry, I can never go back on what I’ve written. If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.
It is possible that Henry might have felt this way even if he had encountered a caring editor whom he felt he could trust, but I wonder whether his narcissism would have permitted an editor to function. It was not in the cards for Henry to be able to trust anyone, because his best work was so far ahead of its time—and his worst work, as with many writers, was horrendous self-parody. Henry wrote the only way he knew how—out of a blind, brute desire to get it all down. The next stage—the shaping and honing and selecting—was in a sense denied him, because he had no choice but to write headlong and pell-mell. His fear of not writing at all was too great. He was creating a new level of honesty in his work and sometimes grace went with it, as in Maroussi, and sometimes grace went out the window, as in Sexus. What mattered to Henry was not grace but truth: he was so afraid of the silences and indecisions of his early career that he published too much sloppy, repetitive, unedited work.
I think time will prove his unmethodical method just. Even Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus, my least favorite Miller books, have wonderful moments. But I also think it is unfortunate that Henry, perhaps because he was forever embattled, had to choose between truth and grace. Is grace, perhaps the province of the serene?
We think too little of the conditions artists need in order to make the best possible use of their creativity. We expect our most talented people to blossom despite all odds.
Most of Lepska’s and Henry’s quarrels were over child rearing. Henry was indulgent, and to him Lepska was a Germanic (she was in fact Polish) disciplinarian like his mother. They parted in 1951. The next year Henry fell in love with Eve McClure, a woman many of his friends considered the best for him of all his wives. Eve was an artist, and she and Henry met by letter and by book, as Henry was to meet so many people in his life. Eve’s admiration of his work, her beauty, her willingness to take care of him and Val and Tony, made her, for a while, the perfect wife. Lepska had decamped with a biophysicist who came to visit Big Sur—and in time Eve was to decamp as well. Henry and all his contradictions cannot have been easy to live with. His books were open, but he was often closed to his wives. He was intimate with everyone but the women he loved—perhaps with the exception of Anaïs, whose secret was her unavailability.
During Henry’s relationship with Eve (who was twenty-eight to his sixty when they met), his fortunes as a writer finally began to change from cult status to superstardom. And Eve was there as his helpmate during this transition. They began to live together in Big Sur on April Fool’s Day, 1952, and left for a seven-month tour of Europe on December 29, 1952. They arrived in Paris on New Year’s Eve, to find Henry enormously famous. He was suddenly a target for paparazzi, adulated for books that had been written decades ago but had only recently captured the attention of the public as scandalous bestsellers—a curious fate for any writer. One is at once gratified by recognition and bitter that it did not come when it was most needed.
After the fifties, Henry was never really a poor man again. But by then his best work was behind him. The money he had been unable to collect from Girodias in the late 1940s was eventually replaced by royalties on the French editions of some of his early books. From then on, Henry was continually reprinted in France, in Germany, in Japan—everywhere but at home. As soon as he had money he tried to share it with everyone.
Georges Belmont reports that when he arrived in Paris with Eve, the first thing he said was: “Do you need money, Georges? I have plenty.” He couldn’t wait to get rid of it. His inner abundance was such that he believed that the more he gave away, the more he actually had. Many people claim to believe this; few live by it.
Henry always said that censorship had the opposite effect the authorities decreed. And this was surely true in his case. The Paris novels of the thirties had been selling steadily all over the world, but it was his being prosecuted for “pornography” that would finally make Henry world-famous—for all the wrong reasons.
First, there had been L’Affaire Miller in 1946, when a Frenchman named Daniel Parker sued Henry’s publisher, insisting he suppress the French version of Tropic of Capricorn on the grounds that it was pornography. A group of distinguished French intellectuals led by Maurice Nadeau sprang to Henry’s defense, caused a stir, and in the process made Henry a household word and a bestselling author in France. Then, in 1949, Sexus was published in France and banned as pornography without benefit of intellectual protest from the likes of Sartre, Gide, and Camus.
Henry defended himself pretty well. Here’s one story—as he told it to me in California in 1975:
I was in France on a visit there and I’m informed one day that I must go to court in the Palais du Justice—do you know where that is? And this is a court like we don’t have. It’s a preparatory court before the trial and in this preparatory thing there’s only a judge there with a clerk taking the notes and you and your lawyer, and you have the freedom to tell the judge everything you want about the thing. How he should look at it, what you think, and so on. You can speak your mind freely, you understand, he will ask questions too. And so I went through that. Incidentally, I was so excited, you know, nervous, that I pissed in my pants. I asked my lawyer, “Can’t I go to the can? I have to go.” He said, “Just do it in your pants.” Yeah! And it went all over the floor, you know? The judge must have seen it and I had to go on with the whole thing. The good thing was the clerk sitting at a separate little table while the judge was on the dais at another desk, talking down to me. I’m sitting down below. And the clerk is always regarding me. When the judge asked me a question this little clerk watches me closely. I’m aware that he’s hanging on my words. So the thing is just about over and the judge says, “Oh yes, now Mr. Miller, one more question. And I want you to take your time answering it. I want to ask you, do you honestly believe now … do you honestly in your own heart and soul believe that a writer has the right to say anything he likes in a book?” And I knew this was a great moment so I didn’t answer that. I was pondering it, pondering it, but I knew right away what I was going to say and the clerk is watching me like a rabbit. And finally I look up at the judge and I say, “Your Honor, I really do think that an author has the right to say whatever he likes.” And the clerk judge comes down and I stand up, he greets me, puts his arms around me, kisses me on each cheek and he says, “Would that France had more men like you.” And then he says you know, of course, that you’re in honorable company, don’t you know … François Villon, de Maupassant, he mentioned a whole string of writers, do you see? Isn’t that marvelous?
I try to piece this very Henryish narrative together with what I know about the history of the censorship of Henry’s books. Is he talking about Sexus? Or had he conflated the Sexus case with another of the many obscenity prosecutions he suffered? It appears that the only obscenity prosecution in which Henry was actually summoned to appear occurred in Brooklyn in 1962. But his books were always being banned somewhere in the world and Henry must have dreamed of judges.
The story Henry told me is therefore another example of Henry’s mythmaking. It may contain some garbled recollections of the Sexus banning in Paris, but it has all the ingredients of a typical Henry story: a protagonist, an antagonist, a moral. And the protagonist calls himself “Henry Miller,” but the historical coordinates are among the missing. Or at least among the woolly.
Also note the conjunction of abstract ideas and quotidian details! He talks about free expression while pissing on the floor! This is typically Henry: a classic purity, as he said in Black Spring, where dung is dung and angels are angels. Also, it’s a terrific story. Especially the peeing in the pants and the kiss from the judge. That Henry would construct such stories gives us further insight into his books. Henry was the hero of his own life. His pants were damp. His cheeks were wet. But what’s a hero for?
Henry’s long trip to Europe with Eve in 1953 was one of the great times of his life, despite his distress at finding Europe so changed since his expatriate decade. He visited old haunts. In Paris he saw Man Ray, Brassaï, Belmont, Léger. And he went to Wells, England, where his old pal Alfred Perlès now lived with his wife, Anne. Eventually Henry and Eve returned to California and he married Eve in 1953.
Henry was a marriage addict, though once married he had a tendency to become cut off emotionally from his wives. He was happiest in pursuit, in courtship, in anticipating the delights of bonding, and always somewhat prone to move away from the intimacy of the bond itself. He had made his great bond early in life to a mother who, he claimed, never showed any affection for him. And he tended to become uncomfortable with closeness. Once the lover of his dreams was installed as a mate, he fled.
Psychoanalysis would perhaps have changed this pattern, had Henry wanted to change it strongly enough. So much of his writing about men and women was triggered by—and was a retelling of—the tempestuous relationship with June, that one feels he needed this central conflict in his life, that it was essential to his creativity.
One often sees this pattern in the lives of writers, who, of course, merely document the human condition: a pivotal unhappy relationship that recapitulates the pivotal unhappy relationship of childhood, and a creative life wedded to the past, to the constant winding and unwinding of this same ball of yarn. The oedipal struggle, disguised in a new relationship, is played out endlessly, even to the edge of doom. This was certainly the case with Henry. It seems never to have been resolved until, long after Louise Nieting Miller’s death, Henry reinvented her as the loving mother of his dreams, the mother he encounters in paradise in “Mother, China, and the World Beyond” in Sextet.
It was in the fifties that all Henry’s stories started to come full circle: Barbara, his first child, came back to him; June, his second wife, became his correspondent; Lauretta, his retarded sister, became his ward after his mother’s death of cancer in 1956, and Louise’s death itself consolidated his position as the head of the family and provider of stability for all the others.
This was an odd position for Henry to find himself in, since in many ways he remained childlike all his life. It is this childlike quality that accounts for the naïf wondrousness of his watercolors and for the open-heartedness of many of his essays on watercolor painting, places, and people. It also accounts for the openness of his response to new people in his life, which continued up to his death.
It is important to see just how responsible Henry could be. After his mother’s death, he saw to it that his sister Lauretta was eventually moved to a home in California. He saw to it that June was minimally looked after (by his fans James and Annette Kar Baxter). He was reunited with Barbara, and eventually, in his will, made her equal legatee with Val and Tony.
Miller’s family feelings were quite conventional in his later years; he tried to be responsible for those whom life had left behind—Lauretta and June particularly. To the end of his mother’s difficult life, he did not want her to know that he had divorced the mother of Val and Tony and married Eve. He was afraid of her disapproval even then.
I am sorry to have to report that he was not the unmitigated monster feminist critics of the seventies made him out to be. He was just a man—unanalyzed, full of contradictions, imperfect—but able to express the conflicts of life and sexual politics with unparalleled honesty. I would have shunned him as a husband as Nin did, because he was a devourer of women, but as a friend he could be loving and kind. He never claimed to be an angel; he saw himself as a bundle of human foibles who had somehow wandered into earthly paradise.
That Henry was a difficult husband is attested to by the collapse of his marriage to Eve, who, for all her nurturing nature, eventually found the strain of being Henry’s wife too great. Responsible for the children, the ex-wives, the correspondence, inclined to drown her anxieties in drink, Eve became Henry’s victim in a way that June and Anaïs were able to avoid. Henry was a difficult man unless he was kept in a state of perpetual yearning. He didn’t mean to be difficult, but his life was so full of complexities, and he had so many needs, that he used people. But they came back again and again to bask in the radiance of his life force. He always required various male “boon companions” to take care of him (in Paris, Perlès, Belmont, and Fraenkel had done such duty, and in Big Sur, it fell to Ephraim Doner and Emil White).
Yet he could be cold to those women who really cared for him, who gave him what he claimed he most needed. It was for the unavailable ones that he reserved all his heat.
In 1959, at Nepenthe in Big Sur, Henry began an affair with a young woman named Caryl Hill. Eve was an eyewitness to it, and was thoroughly humiliated. It plunged her further into alcohol abuse. Though later Henry was to be deeply remorseful about his marriage to Eve (especially after she took her own life in 1966), at the time he seems to have been oblivious to the effects of his behavior. In certain ways Henry could be incredibly insensitive to those around him, and women as vulnerable as Eve were the ones to suffer. The women who took off and made a new life, like Lepska, were the survivors of the Miller myth.
Henry seemed to know this about himself, for he loved Françoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso and sent it to several of his ex-wives, as if daring them to expose him as a humbug and a narcissist. Henry loved spirited women who did not knuckle under to him. He loved honesty and feistiness even at his own expense, and was contemptuous of those who played the victim. One of the things he liked about my writing was the acid, satirical way it depicted men—from the woman’s point of view. Henry knew he had been cruel to many women, and he knew he deserved to be exposed. Perhaps he felt that Fear of Flying exposed his own romantic cons. He was a sexist, but a repentant one.
In 1960, as his relationship with Eve was ending, he took off for Europe to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival and he arranged for Caryl Hill to meet him in France. He went first to Germany to see his German publisher, Ledig Rohwalt, and there met Rohwalt’s young, beautiful assistant, Renate Gerhardt, with whom he began a passionate affair. By the time he got to Cannes and met Caryl Hill as planned, he was already in love with Renate.
Renate proved ultimately unattainable and so held Henry’s heart hostage. Henry wanted to marry her, but she was too practical. She had two boys, and was not about to give up her life in Europe to become Henry Miller’s beleaguered helpmate. Eventually Renate started her own publishing firm and Henry sent her money to help finance it, though he had his usual share of financial difficulties. His letters to her show him dizzy with love in typical Henry fashion, signing himself “St. Valentine,” and hypnotizing himself as in the early June-days, Anaïs-days, Lepska-days, Eve-days, und so weiter.
One feels a kind of hollowness in Henry’s loves as he grows older and older. It is as if he is falling in love with love, or with love remembered. He needs the adrenaline high of being “in love,” the image of himself as St. Valentine, the jump start to his animal spirits and his creativity that “love” provides. But the romantic round has a sort of forced quality to it—all except for the suffering part.
In 1961, Henry made another trip to Europe to press his suit with Renate, but he failed to convince her to join her life with his. On the way home, he stopped in New York, where his past claimed him in the form of June—now a beaten, emaciated “old” woman (she was only 58!), who looked to the now-famous Henry as her savior.
June’s side of the story is a tragic one. She wound up alone, impoverished, hospitalized for madness, released to dire poverty. It would be fascinating to tell her tale in a novel. Anaïs Nin began it in Henry and June, and Philip Kaufman sensitively extended it in the movie of the same name. But there is another whole era of June’s life after Paris, and it would make a wonderful, if tragic, saga. Henry never wrote it; the truth is, he never saw June as a separate person. The woman who inspired most of his writing was, when he found her again, a wraith, a will-o’-the-wisp. Henry had to look at the fact that he had devoted his imaginative life to someone who now seemed an apparition. Did this fateful meeting make him understand his own self-deceptions? Apparently not.
By 1961, Henry was at last famous in his own land and an American bestselling author. This was largely due to the efforts of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press and because of a changed publishing climate, which, in turn, was to transform the American novel.
The story of Henry’s books and the law would make a long and revealing volume in itself. His books were banned in many countries with differing legal traditions and liberated by means that were both astonishingly complex and costly. The legal aspects of Henry’s career have been well-documented in Edward de Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Everywhere, Charles Rembar’s The End of Obscenity, and E.R. Hutchison’s Tropic of Cancer on Trial. After Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer is the book that opened the bedroom door for American writers and for the world. Few people who write about novels seem to remember how short a time it has actually been since fiction was released, and allowed to enter the precincts of the bedroom. As recently as 1960, Alfred Knopf recommended to John Updike that he excise some of the racier bits in Rabbit, Run and Updike did so without a backward glance (though he reinstated the cuts in later editions).
1960 is indeed a pivotal year for the freeing of American literature from prudery and threat of legal assault. It was in 1955, after all, that Nabokov’s Lolita was published by the Olympia Press in Paris because no American publisher would take it. When it appeared in the United States from Putnam’s in 1958, it caused a sensation, shooting to the top of the bestseller lists in part because the public wrongly mistook it for the memoirs of a pervert. (Nabokov has some witty things to say about this—and the whole question of sexuality and literature—in his brilliant afterword to Lolita.) Lolita began to change a publishing climate that had kept Miller out of American publishing for three decades. And Lady Chatterley’s Lover made the weather even warmer. But it was the many American litigations concerning Tropic of Cancer that finally freed our literature. And it was Grove Press, led by Barney Rossett, which finally took the risk of publishing Tropic of Cancer and thereby establishing the relatively new legal principle that a book of literary merit might not be suppressed just because it excited lustful desires. Ulysses weakened the effect of the Hicklin rule on American jurisprudence, but it was the litigation over Tropic of Cancer which established Justice Brennan’s doctrine that sexual excitation alone was not enough to warrant the banning of a book. That doctrine has since been weakened in turn by a Supreme Court that has made “community standards” the most important test.
It is interesting to note that the puritanism of our culture has a tendency to condone pure smut but to vigorously attack artful, good writing that has a strongly sexual element. “Nothing infuriates the vigilante so much as the combination of sex and intellect,” says Charles Rembar in The End of Obscenity. And it is true even today that an issue of Screw provokes less fury than a book like American Psycho or Vox. Madonna’s Sex has had an easier passage into the world than the Mapplethorpe images she is purloining and betraying.
The sexomania of our culture is such that it simultaneously slavers and condemns. I have in mind an image of pious southern senators leaving a prayer breakfast at the Reagan White House to view—with an eye to censoring—pornographic movies, then buggering their aides, boffing their secretaries, and passing laws preventing the rest of America from doing the same. Sex in America is definitely not for the hoi polloi.
At the beginning of my career I was always amazed that some critics of Fear of Flying (and subsequent books) resented Isadora not so much for her lustful thoughts as for her lustful thoughts coupled with her bookishness. It is as if the puritan sexomaniacs want their sex purely smutty—free from all traces of “culture,” ghettoized in a sort of Forty-second Street of the mind. Is that because they are more threatened by literate lust?
Miller’s books always seem to raise similar hackles. This is why, I suspect, the academic community has yet to take him seriously and subject him to intelligent literary scrutiny.
Barney Rossett, by his own account, fell in love with Miller’s work in his student days and had been trying to publish Miller for some time at Grove Press. But Miller shied away from publication in America. Why? The reasons appear to be more complex than is usually assumed. First, Miller was afraid—afraid of arrest, afraid of being branded “the king of smut” (as he wrote to Rossett), afraid of burying books like Maroussi under a deluge of scandal, afraid for his children, and for his own loss of privacy (which, in fact, accelerated with his growing fame).
But I submit that Miller also felt guilty about his Paris books, guilty about the way his fiction had sucked June dry and spat her out as a husk of an old woman, while he rode on to adulation. He had mixed feelings about his sexual books. How could it be otherwise, when these books were propelled by such conflicting, tempestuous, oedipal emotions? There must have been a part of Miller that felt the punishment (the banning of his books in his motherland) fit the crime (the betrayal of his mother).
Writers of revealing books normally have a welter of disturbing feelings about them, and sometimes these feelings are resolved by sabotaging their own work in various ways, both conscious and unconscious. Fame raises ambivalent responses, and many people, feeling themselves unworthy, are driven toward various forms of self-destruction—drugs, drink, lawsuits, disastrous money-losing schemes.
Miller had long been ambivalent about having his work published in his own country. He was well-known and widely published abroad, and in some ways it suited him well to be an underground writer in America. But he finally succumbed to Barney Rossett’s ever-escalating offers for Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn because of the precarious copyright status of the books published in Paris and the threat that another publisher would bring out an unauthorized, possibly expurgated edition. Barney Rossett agreed to pay not only for the books but for the cost of litigation, and the litigation proved to be extensive and expensive.
By the time Tropic of Cancer was published in America on June 24, 1961 (and sold 68,000 copies in the first week), Henry had made his peace with his fate as a writer.
“The game of writing, living, being—has come to be for me the end in itself,” he had written to Barney Rossett. And it was true. He also told Rossett “that one’s true fame is kept alive by the good opinion of a thinking few,” and that “a sudden increase in fortune … would undoubtedly cause more harm than good.” He saw American culture as “moving steadily in the opposite direction of Whitman’s vision,” and he expected little from the furor of the Tropics than to be established in the minds of his compatriots as the apotheosis of the dirty old man.
His prophetic vision was astoundingly precise. The extensive litigation over the Tropics fixed Miller in the public’s mind as the author of “filthy, disgusting, nauseating” trash. Of course the public could not wait to get their hands on such stuff. And the Tropics sold like mad the more they were denounced. Sexomania in action.
A number of important literary intellectuals sprang to Miller’s defense in the United States and to the defense of the First Amendment but, as in the later Rushdie affair, it proved easier for them to defend him than to read him. By the time the dust settled, Barney Rossett had sold a ton of books and incurred a ton of legal costs. And Miller had become just what he predicted he’d become—the “king of smut.”
Tropic of Cancer sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and a million in paperback, caused the arrest of many booksellers, cost Grove Press at least $100,000 in legal fees, and established Henry Miller as a household word. Even when he was finally “vindicated” by the United States Supreme Court in 1964, he was doomed to live out his final decade and a half in the shadow of that ignoble reputation.
It was the final irony that, after the many prosecutions of his books all over the United States, it fell to Henry’s own Brooklyn to sue him for having conspired with Barney Rossett to offer for sale “a certain obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, sadistic, masochistic and disgusting book” called Tropic of Cancer. Before this ugliness ended in 1964, Miller had been issued a warrant for arrest, threatened with extradition from California to Brooklyn, and had been forbidden to travel abroad for the duration of the legal action. Though it ended with a victory of sorts, Henry was certainly proven right in his reluctance to publish in the United States. That his books now languish largely unread by a generation that takes their existence in print for granted is, I suppose, the final irony.
Henry was wise enough to know that “success” did not bring peace. The royalties on his Paris books caused him endless accounting and tax worries. He had predicted as much in a letter to Barney Rossett: “I see no way to protect anyone through money, through security of any kind.” And it surely proved true in his case. His last years were burdened with the immense loss of privacy that fame brings, and the sense of being an imposter for having become notorious because of books written long ago.
In 1963, Henry was even driven out of his beloved Big Sur by the fame he had given it in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, and by the end of his marriage to Eve, had moved first to a flat, then to his last earthly address at 444 Ocampo Drive in Pacific Palisades. At first he shared his home with Val and Tony, their mother, Lepska, and her new husband. Later, he lived there alone, or with a series of caretakers.
Surrounded by his children, by interviewers, movie stars, directors, producers, and all the parasites the famous find themselves playing host to, Henry entered the last period of his life—the period when I was to meet him.
He seems to have made his peace with his fame by capitulating to its distortions and making them worse.
In his last years, he allowed books like Henry Miller: My Life and Times (1975) distributed by Playboy Press for Bradley Smith, its editor and publisher, to show him playing Ping-Pong with nude groupies or nuzzling a bikini-clad Israeli beauty—and these pictures certainly helped to trivialize his reputation. It was as if he were rushing to become a caricature of himself.
And yet My Life and Times also has wonderful things in it. It is a kind of illustrated autobiography, seen from the point of view of the ancient sage who regards the world as a joke—which, I suspect, is where long life leads.
“Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere,” Henry wrote in the “Notice to Visitors” he had posted at Big Sur. He almost always took his own advice and got nowhere. But often he was led astray by vanity and ego. It was the faulty shit detector again, and he often could not tell the con man from the prophet. His discrimination about people was almost as poor as his discrimination about his work.
After Val and Tony left home in 1964, and even Lepska took off with her new husband, Henry was lonely and looked to his old tonic—new love—to save him. When he met a twenty-seven-year-old Japanese gamine, Hoki (Hiroko) Tokuda, at a party given by his doctor, he fell madly in love with her looks, her Oriental mystery (mostly invented by him) and her singing and piano playing (an old aphrodisiac).
Hoki was unavailable—the essential ingredient. She came and went mysteriously. This, as always, provoked the necessary yearning in Henry. He became “the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws,” as he scribbles on one of the “Insomnia” series of watercolors he painted from the depths of his infatuation with her. He was “the germ of a new insanity,” “a freak dressed in intelligible language,” and there was “a splinter buried in the quick of [his] soul.”
Henry was, in short, in love.
His tribute to this May-December romance was Insomnia or The Devil at Large, written in his own hand, published by a small New Mexican press called Loujon and then by Doubleday in 1975, and accompanied by a series of hallucinatory, yearning watercolors covered with fragments of poetry. Henry was “shaking cobwebs out of the sky.” Or rather, inventing a lover out of his own yearning. His late illustrated books show his constant desire to blend genres, to show the slant of his own handwriting, the faces of his ancestors, his children, his wives, his friends, and the rainbow hues of his watercolors.
It’s important to remember that Henry comes out of the same Paris as Picasso, Man Ray, and Leger: mixed media, surrealism, automatic writing are part of his artistic heritage and he displays that heritage especially in the illustrated work of his last years.
Hoki found him too much like a grandfather to be attracted, but when she needed a green card, she relented and married him. The pictures of old Henry and young Hoki were duly carried by all the news magazines. They fitted in nicely with the pop persona of a dirty old man.
Insomnia is a lovely book, if slight, a wonderful paean to love-as-madness, hallucination, and despair. That Henry was still Pan enough to yearn so violently is a sort of tribute to the green fuse within him. His heart never dried out like a walnut. He remained moist to the end.
Or almost to the end. When I met him in October 1974, he was still overflowing with enthusiasm, with conversation, with the ability to yearn. Hoki had departed. (She now runs a nightclub called Tropic of Cancer in Tokyo.) He was in love then with Lisa Liu and Brenda Venus. And many other pretty ladies (like Twinka Thiebaud, and other friends of Val’s and Tony’s) came to cook for him, care for him, and keep the flame.
I was drawn to Henry because he gave me immense encouragement at a difficult time of my life, but I stayed because he was such a warm fire, such a force for life. His head and his heart lived on the same planet. Anaïs Nin had discovered this quality about him long before the rest of the world did. In an amazing “Boost for Black Spring” published in 1937 in The Booster, Nin wrote:
Like all the hardy men of literature Henry Miller lives on two planes: either in the peaty soil, among the roots of things, or amidst the ecstasies. Like some hybrid out of ancient myth he walks the earth surefootedly and is one with the earth; but he can also depart the earth at a bound and soar to unheard-of realms, and, if it please him, remain there forever. The region in between, which is flimsy and unreal, which nourishes neither the body nor the soul, that region he never enters, thank God. He lives either on the earth or in the mystery—never in the salon of the mind. Others around him are writing in a kind of black void, writing to compensate for their lack of virility. Their insanity is like a whirlpool with a hole in the center, an eddying round a void. But in Black Spring, the insanity is produced by an excess of life; it is like a surcharged top spinning wildly, experience ending not in crystallization but in a fantastic spiral ecstasy.
Always there is the smell of the street, the smell of human beings. Even in the upper galleries of metaphysics it smells of truth, of honesty and of naturalness. Depths reached by clairvoyance, not by cohabitation with ideas. It is always a man exploring the heavens; not a spirit hovering over the earth with wilted, offended wings. In one and the same instant he seizes upon man the animal and the dream which obsesses the poet. Always the flesh and the vision together. At moments he stands shouting like a prophet, cursing, vilifying, denouncing, seeing into the future with the same intensity with which he installs himself in the present. He is at one and the same time the man sitting contentedly at a café table and the restless, ghostly wanderer pursuing his secret self in an agony of duality and elusiveness.
Nin, who knew him both as colleague and lover, got him exactly right: always the flesh and the vision together. This is something few of the people who have dissected Miller without having known him personally can understand. He gave off heat like a roaring fire. He was more alive than most people ever are, and when you were near him, he shed his light and life force on you.
Surely he did unkind things in his life. But the minatory and grudging tone of his critics, which basically uses the cheap journalistic technique of contrasting his stated beliefs with his behavior and pronouncing him a hypocrite, is far worse than he deserves. Any of us would seem like hypocrites viewed that way, even the greatest saints. So what if he was not Gandhi with a penis? Even Gandhi was not Gandhi in that sense. Only angry adolescents expect their parents to be perfect, and, finding them human, pronounce a death sentence.
In the end, Miller’s character doesn’t matter. His art—flawed but powerful—does.