The Devil at Large (13 page)

Henry’s greatest philosophic insight follows that amusing episode in
Tropic of Cancer
in which he guides a young Hindu (a disciple of Gandhi) to a Paris brothel. The Hindu commits a terrible gaffe. He takes a shit in a bidet, mortifying himself before the madame and all her girls. The Hindu’s mortification becomes Henry’s epiphany. He remembers that

For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

What burden is this? The burden of hope:

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me…. At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.

Once Henry gives up hope, once he frees himself from expectation, he can see the truth:

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

In
Tropic of Cancer
, Henry is writing of the life that comes after one has been declared dead, of the illumination that comes in the darkness of the pit, of the abundance that comes in the midst of deprivation. A man must go to the bottom and become a
clochard
to find the truth about life and death. Henry’s message is not so different from Dante’s or, for that matter, from that of any shamanic vision quest. Semistarvation in Paris equals forty days in the desert; the free meal is his manna; cunt is his illumination; God is dead; Miller is alive.

If
Tropic of Cancer
is Miller’s
Inferno,
then
Capricorn
is his
Purgatorio
and
The Colossus of Maroussi
is his
Paradiso.
In an age when the average man has been reduced to a beggar-vagabond for his idiotic belief in Progress, Miller shows the way for the average man to endure his life, even to triumph over it.

The incessant march of history has come to this: starvation and the collective back to the wall. And what does Henry find? That if to live is the paramount thing, then he will live, even as a cannibal. And the cannibal finds God by feeding on his fellow man—and woman.

A rough message for rough times:
what is left out of books.
With your back to the wall, you either live or die. Perhaps the reason Henry loved the Paris episodes in
Fear of Flying
was because Isadora found there what Henry himself had found: totally humiliated, she found herself. She hit bottom and became free.

Why is hitting bottom necessary? Ask any recovering alcoholic. Only at the absolute bottom can illumination be found. Only at the bottom can you decide whether to live or die. Miller had been half alive for his first forty years. Now he decided to go whole hog. He decided to live.

It was no accident that he turned forty in that miraculous year he wrote
Tropic of Cancer.
It is only at forty that
homo adolescens
—the late-maturing man of the modern world—finally comes to grips with the live-or-die imperative that mortality imposes on all of us. Miller’s eternal boyishness—a sort of sexual Peter Pan in Paris—has irritated many who are, in truth, as boyish as he. Readers tend either to passionately identify or passionately denounce. Either they are inspired by his surrender and the freedom it brings or they feel compelled to denounce it.

There is a curious parallel between Henry Miller’s Paris hegira (and his eventual surrender) and the male initiatory ritual Robert Bly describes in
Iron John: A Book About Men.
To become his own man, Bly’s uninitiated boy must go away on the shoulders of the wild man—a shaman covered in animal skins, a Robin Hood-Pan figure, an initiator into male mysteries—and partake of the secrets of the Wild Wood. There, men initiate boys into manhood. There, boys separate from their mothers so that they can eventually love them again—but differently, as grown men, not as children. There, boys gain the confidence, through the detachment from Mother, to become mature.

Henry’s Paris was just such a descent into the wood of the wild man. It was his initiation, his break from Louise and June, his search for (and bonding with) wild men (Perlès, Frankel, Bald) who would help him sever the tie to his powerful mother and to overcome the meekness of his drunken father.

In Paris, Henry finally grew up. That was how he was able to find the voice of
Tropic of Cancer.
Rough, hairy, the voice of the wild man,
Tropic of Cancer
delights even as it disgusts. It is strong meat. It is like drinking sperm.

At night when I look at Boris’ goatee lying on the pillow I get hysterical. O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles. After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum. You can shit arpeggios if you like, or string a zither across your navel. I am fucking you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucked. And if you are afraid of being fucked publicly I will fuck you privately. I will tear off a few hairs from your cunt and paste them on Boris’ chin. I will bite into your clitoris and spit out two franc pieces….

After passages as rough as this, Henry moves into a surreal flow of images:

Indigo sky swept clear of fleecy clouds, gaunt trees infinitely extended, their black boughs gesticulating like a sleepwalker. Somber, spectral trees, their trunks pale as cigar ash. A silence supreme and altogether European. Shutters drawn, shops barred. A red glow here and there to mark a tryst. Brusque the facades, almost forbidding; immaculate except for the splotches of shadow cast by the trees. Passing by the Orangerie I am reminded of another Paris, the Paris of Maugham, of Gauguin, Paris of George Moore. I think of that terrible Spaniard who was then startling the world with his acrobatic leaps from style to style. I think of Spengler and his terrible pronunciamentos, and I wonder if style, style in the grand manner, is done for. I say that my mind is occupied with these thoughts, but it is not true; it is only later, after I have crossed the Seine, after I have put behind me the carnival of lights, that I allow my mind to play with these ideas. For the moment I can think of nothing—except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world. All along the banks the trees lean heavily over the tarnished mirror; when the wind rises and fills them with a rustling murmur they will shed a few tears and shiver as the water swirls by. I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings….

And then, without even a beat, Henry goes from surreal poetry back to cunts:

The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise. Immense,
avec des choses inouïes.
Llona now, she had a cunt. I know because she sent us some hairs from down below. Llona—a wild ass snuffing pleasure out of the wind. On every high hill she played the harlot—and sometimes in telephone booths and toilets. She bought a bed for King Carol and a shaving mug with his initials on it. She lay in Tottenham Court Road with her dress pulled up and fingered herself. She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her …
not one.
Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission. One cunt out of a million, Llona! A laboratory cunt and no litmus paper that could take her color. She was a liar, too, this Llona. She never bought a bed for her King Carol. She crowned him with a whisky bottle and her tongue was full of lice and tomorrows. Poor Carol, he could only curl up inside her and die. She drew a breath and he fell out—like a dead clam.

First flesh, then vision, then flesh again. That is man’s life as Henry sees it.

There is another important element in
Tropic of Cancer
that is always overlooked by its humorless critics—its wild humor. People have gazed so intently at the four-letter words that they have missed the laughs. And they have also missed the source of this humor: the outsideness of the outsider, the laserlike vision of the man or woman who has seen the world and knows that all it amounts to is two lumps of shit in a bidet.

In
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch,
Miller was still buying into literary myth. In
Tropic of Cancer
, he freed himself to see the absurdity of the world stripped of all myth and of all illusion. This totally irreverent angle of vision allows Henry to see things that nobody else would see until decades later.

Russia, for example, in the bloom of communism, he recognizes is just like America in the bloom of capitalism:

They don’t want to see sad faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful, enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to me. I wasn’t born with this kind of enthusiasm.

India, he understands, is threatened not by England, but by America:

India’s enemy is not England, but America. India’s enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

America wants mindless enthusiasm; so does Russia; India, with her great spiritual culture, is about to be dragged into this fake ideal of progress which ends only in the slaughter of wars to end all wars.

Henry rejected belief in progress, belief in war, belief in meliorism. He opened himself to a more primal enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for admitting the light, since “only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is there in the heart.”

All of
Tropic of Cancer
is a digression against death. The artists Miller admires—Matisse, Proust—are those in whom he also sees a great antideath spirit.

In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths.

Because he is “immersed in the very plexus of life,” because he is seeing life with the wild irreverence of one who has abandoned the quiet desperation of the proper breadwinning spouse, the useless anger of the disappointed believer in progress, Miller can cut straight to its core.

And what does he see? That man is a bag of guts, hungering, a chancred prick seeking a diseased cunt; that all human life comes down to shit. And out of shit comes philosophy.

What does he do with this vision of humanity, stripped of illusion? Does he despair, like Celine? Does he invent Utopias and dystopias, like Huxley? No—he laughs a great, hearty Rabelaisian laugh and finds in the rotting matter at the heart of things a spiritual illumination!

And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the
bidet.
What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.