The Devil at Large (18 page)

“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 …