The Devil at Large (6 page)

Henry is retracing his steps as an artist here, telling us exactly what happened between his early, unsuccessful efforts at writing fiction, and
Tropic of Cancer:
he let go of literature. It reminds me of Colette’s advice to the young Georges Simenon: “Now go and take out the poetry.”

Good advice. A writer is born at the moment when his true voice of authority merges at white heat with the subject he was born to chronicle. Literature falls away and what remains is life—raw, pulsating life: “A gob of spit in the face of Art.”

For the truth is that every generation, every writer, must rediscover nature. Literary conventions tend to ossify over time, and what was once new becomes old. It takes a brave new voice to rediscover real life buried under decades of literary dust. In unburying himself, Henry unburied twentieth-century literature.

What was it about Paris in 1930 that enabled Henry Miller to find his voice? And what was it about New York that prevented it?

The New York Henry left when he settled in Paris in March 1930 was nowhere as fraught as the New York of today, but it still bore certain similarities to it. In New York it was a dishonor to be an unknown writer; in Paris one could write
écrivain
on one’s passport and hold one’s head high. In Paris it was assumed (it still is) that an author had to have time, leisure, talk, solitude, stimulation. In New York it was, and still is, assumed that unless you fill up your time with appointments, you are a bum. More than that (and more important, particularly for Henry) was the American attitude toward the vagabond artist—an attitude that unfortunately persists to our day. “In Europe,” as his friend the photographer Brassaï says in his book on Henry Miller, “poverty is only bad luck, a minor unhappiness; in the United States, it represents a moral fault, a dishonor that society cannot pardon.”

To be a poor artist in America is thus doubly unforgivable. To be an artist in America is to be a criminal (its criminality only pardoned by writing bestsellers or selling one’s paintings at outrageous prices to rich collectors and thus feeding the obsolete war machine with tax blood). But to be poor
and
an artist: this is un-American.

Which of us has not felt this disapproval, this American rejection of the dreamer? “Poets have to dream,” says Saul Bellow, “and dreaming in America is no cinch.”

In the last few years we have seen a dramatic replay of these attitudes in the debates over censorship and the National Endowment for the Arts. Our essential mistrust of dreamers leads us to cripple them with restrictions of all sorts. We seem not to understand that the basic riches of our country—wealth and emotional health—come from our creative spirit. Even with Japanese conglomerates buying our movie companies, even with statistics that prove our movies, music, television shows, and inventions are our biggest exports in real dollar terms, we still honor the money counters and money changers over the inventors and dreamers who give them something to count and change.

This is a deep-seated American obsession, and one whose historical genesis we must explore in retracing Henry Miller’s steps. It comes, of course, out of puritan-ism’s assumption that the dream life and imagination are suspect. And it results in a love-hate relationship with sexuality—a violent alternation between fascination and disgust which I call sexomania/sexophobia. We must understand how Henry was buffeted by these powerful forces and how he fled to Europe to be reborn.

“It was the scorn which ultimately Miller could not stand,” says Brassaï. “It was the scorn that he wanted to escape. Madness and suicide threatened him.”

“Nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America,” Miller writes in
Tropic of Capricorn.

Miller’s life as a protagonist, as a mythic hero—or antihero—is intimately related to this struggle between puritanism and the life of the dreamer. Henry made a religion of art (as did his disciples). In doing this he was following in the footsteps of Whitman, his model of the American writer.

There are at least two Millers in the books and articles that have been written about Henry. One is the real, historical Henry Miller, born in 1891 in New York, died in 1980 in Los Angeles—a character full of contradictions. The other is Miller the mythic hero or antihero, whose hegira is emblematic of the hegira of the American artist.

Constrained by puritanism, provoked by a society in which dreaming is no cinch, Miller the antihero creates a way for an American—or anyone—to be an artist, and in doing so makes a path for all of us. One is continually struck by the interplay between these two Millers, but my interest is principally in the Miller who leads the way for a creator—particularly a creator who comes from a culture where creativity itself is suspect. Since I long ago gave up the Ph.D. program for the life of a professional author, I approach Miller with a writer’s rather than a scholar’s point of view. Like many storytellers, Henry was an outrageous self-mythifier and critics have pointed out the disparities between “the truth” of his life and the grandiosity of his fictions. He tells the same story differently on every occasion, they complain.

My point of view is necessarily different. In tracing the steps of another writer, I have empathy for the creative process itself and an understanding of its difficulties. I
expect
a writer to “lie” in order to get at a deeper truth. I take for granted that imaginative writing exaggerates and rearranges “facts” in the name of a higher fiction. I also understand how hard it is to survive one’s own fame.

Henry’s writing is often misunderstood precisely because of the ways it parallels—yet deviates from—his own life. Since he uses the name “Henry Miller” for his fictive protagonists, readers are thrown even more astray. This is a fate I know well because it has also been my own. Though I have called my heroines by different names, the parallels between my life and the mythic lives I lead in my novels have often had the effect of leading my self-appointed judges to attack me personally. Henry was one of the first to see this parallel between our fates, and as a result was enormously kind to me. Curiously enough, it fell in part to Henry to rescue my first novel from the obscurity that might otherwise have claimed it. And since I believe in the universal law by which circles get completed, I find it not at all odd that it falls in part to me to puzzle out the many contradictions of his posthumous reputation.

A large part of the problem Miller presents to the literary critic comes from his perception of the chaos of life and his passionate need to reflect that chaos in his books. Henry Miller is the poet of what Umberto Eco calls
the chaosmos.
When he writes, he is in touch with pure desire—the desire to be one with the primal flux of creation, the desire to be as creative as a god.

I like desire. In desiring things no one is wounded, deranged nor exploited. Creation is pure desire. One possesses nothing, one creates, one lets go. One is beyond what he does. One is no longer a slave. It’s an affair between oneself and God. When one is truly rendered naked everything is done without effort. There is no recompense—the effort, the deed itself suffices. Deed is desire and desire deed. A complete circle.

How to write a coherent book about such a primal force? It is not easy, as all Miller’s biographers attest. Clearly Henry Miller did not
want
to be the subject of a biography and he spread confusion even as he scattered clues. He knew he had told many tales that were not true and he was nervous that someone might catch him in his lies. A good example of Henry’s ambivalent relation to the truth is the way he hated his pal Brassaï’s rather accurate portrait of him in
Grandeur Nature
, a book not yet translated into English, perhaps because Henry despised it so. He felt he had adequately chronicled his own life in his books, and wherever there was some fictionalization that did not correspond to the “facts” (in which, anyway, he did not believe), he was more than happy to provide chronologies, interviews, conversations that elucidated the truth,
his
truth, for his rapt listeners. (Some of these “documents” also contain plenty of fiction.) He was an artesian writer, so overflowing with stories and ideas that to this day he still defeats bibliographers and biographers. Whenever you think you have read all the essential Miller, another pamphlet, brochure, treasure trove of letters, watercolor or print turns up with more Henry, ever more Henry. He embodied in both his writing and his life the paradigm of the writer as the giver of gifts, the voyager into the underworld who comes back with a boon for humankind.

Ironically, Henry Miller is best known for his worst writing—the boastfully graphic sexual scenes in the
Tropics
,
Quiet Days in Clichy
, and
Sexus.
These finally interest me less than the transcendentalism of
The Colossus of Maroussi
, his spiritual travel book about Greece. For me
Maroussi
is his central work and it stands squarely in the American transcendental tradition. It has a kind of perfection and purity that you can find in books like
Walden.
And yet, paradoxically, without the scandal surrounding the “sexual” writings, Miller would perhaps not be known at all.

That Miller was a transcendentalist in the indigenous American tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman he himself apparently knew. He referred to Whitman as an ancestor and influence. (He also regarded
Maroussi
as his best book.) He was a mystic in the way of Thomas Merton and Lao-tzu, seeing in ordinary life the way into the extraordinary. Like many liberators who seek first to liberate themselves, he saw in sex one path of self-liberation—a way out of the body through the body. In this, he is not so different from Whitman or from Colette.

He was always seeking “life more abundant” as he says at the end of
The Colossus of Maroussi.
Sex was one path toward abundance. Travel, another. Conversation, letter-writing, and painting were still others. He saw the world in terms of abundance rather than scarcity, and it often seems that this distinction is the most critical one of all where writers are concerned. Writers tend toward either free flow or toward agonized laconicism—Henry Miller being at one extreme and Samuel Beckett at the other.

Henry Miller was as great a conversationalist as he was a writer. He was the primeval author, in the primeval cave, telling stories to keep the tribe awake and alive, safe from the saber-toothed tigers outside. Like any shaman, he worked in a variety of forms: voice, watercolor, the photographs he posed for, the documentaries he conspired in. In many ways, he anticipates Cindy Sherman, Art Spiegelman, and other postmodernist artists, using his own photographic or painted persona to create his own oeuvre. In other ways he is like Picasso, inventing and reinventing himself in different media and inventing and reinventing his wives and his muses in many of the different characters that appear in his books. All of them are Woman or Muse, just as Henry himself, the autobiographical protagonist who bears his name, is Everyman. To speak of him as the real historical Henry Miller is a mistake, for had he not elevated his life above mere autobiography and made it emblematic nobody would be interested in it but himself and perhaps a few enemies, relatives, friends.

Because Henry Miller became his own protagonist, the appreciation of his work is further confused. Always, when a writer is transformed this way, it makes the assessment of the work more problematic, for some will inevitably see him as a villain and in reaction others will plump for him as hero. We have seen both these responses to Miller in recent years and it is doubtful that either view has been accurate.

This transformation is what all artists seek: to become like mythic heroes—Prometheus, Achilles, Odysseus, Alcestis, Athena—so that we mortals can see our fates reflected in their journeys as we do in the journeys described in ancient myths.

But Henry is not a hero to all. Many see him as a villain. His fate has not been so different from de Sade’s: either canonized by cultists or burned at the stake by puritans, either hailed by hippies seeking a hip father figure or dismissed by literary Anglophiles who would prefer that American literature consisted only of Henry James.

Things are not so simple. Our apprehension of Miller, as of de Sade, implicates our entire apprehension of sexuality, our notions of sexual politics, as well as our notions of what constitutes literature. That is why he is such a pivotal and important figure.

“Life is that which flows …” said one of Miller’s Paris roommates, Michael Fraenkel, in an essay about the composition of
The Tropic of Cancer.
The paradox for every creative artist is that life flows and art must stand still. But it must stand still like the hummingbird, as Miller would say. It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art.

Miller’s art is always bursting the boundaries of form as we know it. It strains beyond the frame of the picture. This is partly its subject, and it also accounts for the difficulty a form-ridden commentator has with it.

Postmodernists have already discovered Miller as the artist of the future. But the artist who is ahead of his time never has an easy job making a living
in
his time. Witness Vincent van Gogh. And Emily Dickinson. And Walt Whitman. Miller is an artist of similar protean and prophetic gifts. If he has to date received little serious literary consideration, it is because he cannot be formally categorized. But rather than seeing this as a fault—as many of his detractors do—I see it as his very subject matter. Henry’s “message” was the message of all the Zen masters and mystics: that there is no stability, only flux. “The angel is my watermark!” he writes in
Black Spring.

Henry Miller’s recent biographers try, willy-nilly, to fit him into preexisting patterns; and when they fail, they blame
him.
But Henry’s very message is that life is formless, and that creativity partakes of the divine chaos. He struggles with this paradox in every book.