The Devil at Large (7 page)

Ironically, we live in an age when literary biography is more read than literature. Writers’ lives tend to have more commercial viability than their own books. In his most fertile time, Henry Miller could never have been published by a mainstream New York publisher, yet in his centennial year several vied to bring out books
about
him. I suspect that if
Tropic of Cancer
came upon us today, it would still have trouble finding a publisher despite our much vaunted (but essentially fake) “sexual revolution.” Yet Miller the protagonist continues to inspire books and films.

What is it that we find in the lives of writers—particularly nonconformist writers—that thrills us, makes us identify? The story of a person inventing himself? The story of a person finding personal freedom in an age of corporate and totalitarian conformity? Has the myth of the nonconformist writer hitting the open road become a substitute for the initiatory ritual Robert Bly and others claim our society lacks? Why else do so many novels and movies about writers strike a resonant chord in readers who are not writers?

Surely there is no more toilsome, self-flagellating profession than that of author. Ingrown toenails, Henry called us. Voltaire said, “The only reward to be expected for the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.” But the average nonwriter seems to see in authorship a relaxing, hedonistic profession, affording ample time for travel, dalliance, and debauchery, an aristocratic profession carried out in dreamily scenic places, with lovely members of the opposite sex in attendance. The average nonwriter sees the writer as someone who has made ordinary life heroic.

Contrary to popular myth, authors lead “a sort of life” (the phrase is Graham Greene’s), imprisoned behind a desk. Painful solitude is required for the cultivation of literature, and even a bad book requires that one be good at cutting oneself off from other human beings in order to write it. A writer’s most ecstatic hours occur alone, yet the myth of hedonism persists. And the fact is that many writers ruin themselves trying to live up to it. Or maybe it is true that in a world where busy-ness and business drown out every spiritual pursuit, the writer’s solitude is the most envied pleasure of all. “A sort of life” it may be, but vastly preferable to the kind of empty busy-ness that characterizes most people’s lives.

Miller was a happy man (for this he was and is also hated). He was generous and free of envy. Though he sometimes boasts of idleness in his books (as he boasts of lechery), he was, in truth, never idle. He was such a scribomaniac that even when he lived in the same house as Lawrence Durrell they often exchanged letters. For most of his life, Henry wrote literally dozens of letters a day to people he could have easily engaged in conversation—and did. The writing process, in short, was essential. As it is to all real writers, writing was life and breath to him. He put out words as a tree puts out leaves.

So we come to the paradox of biography—especially the biography of a writer who amply chronicled his own life in many forms. (“Biography is one of the new terrors of death,” said Dr. John Arbuthnot, the poet Alexander Pope’s friend. And in 1891, in his
The Critic as Artist
, Oscar Wilde wrote, “Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the autobiography.”) Who can chart the events in a person’s life with accuracy and without distortion? No one. Not even the person himself. That is why biographies must be rewritten for every age, for every new wrinkle in the Zeitgeist. That is why biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

With a writer who has already mined his own life in letters, in novels, in paintings, and in films, the biographical problem becomes even more vexing. Even the most seemingly autobiographical writer changes, heightens, and rearranges “fact” to make his fictions. It is naive to read his stories literally, but it is equally unsatisfactory to read them as if they had no connection whatsoever to his life.

I hope I can make peace with all these paradoxes by writing about Henry Miller in the same spirit that he first wrote to me in 1974—with complete candor and no hidden agenda. It will not be the last word on Henry Miller, but the only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.

I was meant to be the sort of individual that … [is] born on the 25th day of December … and so was Jesus Christ…. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration…. Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat. “Always dragging behind like a cow’s tail”—that’s how she characterized me. But is it my fault that she held me inside her until the hour had passed?

—
HENRY MILLER,
TROPIC OF CAPRICORN

A
SSUMING THAT YOU KNOW
as little about Henry Miller as I did when I first heard from him in 1974, I am going to give you the crash course in Miller that I wish someone had given me. This will not be a true biography, for several voluminous biographies of Miller have appeared in the last few years (and new information is constantly emerging as Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries are released), but a writer’s take on another writer, with just enough detail to prepare you to read (or reread) Miller with greater understanding.

Perhaps you are like me when I first heard from Henry: you’ve read only
Tropic of Cancer
, and maybe not even the whole book. It’s possible you only flipped through for the “good parts.” In Henry’s case, this can be totally misleading. I want to give you an overview of Henry’s life so that you can read his books with pleasure and grapple with the issues they raise.

Notwithstanding Henry’s protestations about not wanting a biography or a biographer, he seems always to have been documenting his own life, leaving the most minutely detailed histories in letters. This antlike attention to detail belies his feigned
sprezzatura.
Even as Henry protests
No biographies, please!
he leaves careful (and misleading) recitals of his life. Indeed Henry seemed always to be looking backward from the future, accounting for himself to twenty-first-century biographers.

How did Henry Miller find the courage to be a writer? A large part of the answer can be found in the bitterness of his mother’s milk. Born in the Yorkville section of Manhattan at 12:17
P.M.
on December 26, 1891, Henry was the son of Louise Nieting Miller and Heinrich Miller, both first generation German-Americans. It was one day after Christmas, a fact Henry always regretted, since he would have liked the distinction of sharing Christ’s birthday. Such coincidences meant much to him, as did astrology, so it is important to add that he was a Capricorn, and that Pluto and Neptune were the planets that influenced his nativity.

Capricorns are said to be tenacious (“I was born with a cussed streak in me,” Henry says) and true to form, “they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb.” Elsewhere, he blames his mother’s “clutching womb” as the reason for his missing, by one day, the Messiah’s birthday. But clearly there was something in his Capricorn tenacity that made him very happy to stay there. Happiness in the womb is a state he refers to often, from his earliest writing to his latest. One feels that he almost
remembers
the womb, so lovingly does he refer to it:

The ninth year of my life is approaching and with it the end of my first Paradise on earth. No, the second Paradise. My first was in my mother’s womb, where I fought to remain forever, but the forceps finally prevailed. It was a marvelous period in the womb and I shall never forget it. I had
almost
everything one could ask for—
except friends.

And a life without friends is no life, however, snug and secure it may be.

Marvelous period or not, Henry also attacks his mother for holding him “in her grip like an octopus.” This is typical of Henry Miller both as writer and man: he always tells the same story from at least two opposite points of view.

In the first year of his life, Henry moved to Brooklyn from Yorkville and ever after referred to himself as “just a Brooklyn boy.” The family lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, at a time when Brooklyn was still a separate city from New York, as it had been in Whitman’s time.

The family spoke German at home, and as a baby, Heinrich was the darling of his parents and his maternal grandfather, Valentin Nieting, who lived with them. Valentin Nieting was a tailor who was then working at home, often assisting Henry’s father. He had trained in Savile Row and spoke sonorous English, which Henry admired. His grandson also admired him for being a socialist and trade unionist while his own father, Heinrich senior, was a “Boss Tailor.” Such were the myths of Henry’s childhood. Henry’s maternal grandmother had been confined to an insane asylum when his mother was a child. The family story was that she was “taken away.” Louise’s strong sense of order, the iron hand with which she ruled her men, may have been a reaction to the chaos of her early life.

Henry’s only sister, Lauretta Anna, came into the world on July 11, 1895, so Henry was a pampered only child for four years. Even when competition came in the form of a sibling, the sibling was a girl—and retarded. Henry’s mother must have been devastated.

By all Henry’s accounts, Louise was a harridan, and Heinrich
père
a dreamy alcoholic. In today’s psychobabble, we would call Henry Miller’s family “dysfunctional.” His mother goaded him into achievement, and his father, a wonderful raconteur and hopeless drunk, set the example of spinning webs with words that Henry was to emulate all his life.

But it was Henry’s mother who spurred both the writer and the rebel in him.

“My mother was a first-class bitch,” Henry said to Twinka Thiebaud.

She tried to scold and shame me into respectability…. What she didn’t realize was she was creating a very restless, angry person. When finally I found the courage to write about what I’d been storing up for years, it came pouring out into one long relentless tirade. Beginning with the earliest memories of my mother, I had saved up enough hatred, enough anger, to fill a hundred books.

Henry’s recollections of his mother—Louise Nieting Miller—are almost always about her Prussianness: her oppression of him, of his father, and of his retarded younger sister. According to Henry, his mother beat Lauretta for the “crime” of being retarded; she screamed at his father for being drunk; she hid Henry’s typewriter in a closet because she was so embarrassed to have a son who wanted to be anything as shiftless as a writer. She was a woman given to random rages who must have been frustrated by the difficulties of her marriage. It’s not hard to empathize with Louise and take, with many grains of salt, her son’s violent depictions of her. But to the boy Henry she must have been terrifying, larger than life. How many writers escape into the world of words to find a haven from the uncontrollable world of childhood? The pattern is so common as to seem to be a general rule.

Miller’s idealization of women as love objects and his simultaneous need to strip them brutally naked in his novels is usually traced to his troubled relationship with his mother. But if we look at the dynamics more carefully we see that he was also a very good little boy, who must have worshiped his very strong and domineering mother and who was whiplashed between the opposing poles of her personality.

He even seemed to know this about himself, for in his book on Rimbaud,
The Time of the Assassins
, this astonishing passage appears:

… [O]ne is still bound to the mother. All one’s rebellion was but dust in the eye, the frantic attempt to conceal this bondage. Men of this stamp are always against their native land—impossible to be otherwise. Enslavement is the great bugaboo, whether it be to country, church or society. Their lives are spent in breaking fetters, but the secret bondage gnaws at their vitals and gives them no rest. They must come to terms with the mother before they can rid themselves of the obsession of fetters. “Outside! Forever outside! Sitting on the doorstep of the mother’s womb.” … It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved …

Henry’s longing for the sweetness of his mother’s womb followed him all the days of his life. So did his anger at being cast out. In his letters to the critic and professor Wallace Fowlie in the 1940s, he says that Rimbaud was most important to him for helping him recognize his mother-fixation. So we know he came to accept this truth about himself. Still, he could not control his alternation between dependency and rage.

Always, Henry required a muse-mother-lover figure in order to write. First it was his second wife, June, then Anaïs Nin, whom he often credited with the greatest flowering of his creativity. Nin’s recent book,
Incest
(1992), shows how extraordinarily close their connection was and how much each became the other’s double, lover, and muse. The violence of his depiction of women, which Kate Millett so meticulously analyzes, is a secret tribute to the immense power women had over him. His essay “The Enormous Womb” could have been the title of the book of his life. Henry saw in Rimbaud what he saw in himself:

And what is the nature of this secret? I can only say that it has to do with the mothers. I feel that it was the same with Lawrence and with Rimbaud.

Men with domineering mothers (Miller, Mailer, Lawrence) are likely to become prisoners of sex who seek to break their chains with violent words. Under these violent words is often a quivering romanticism. “He has the German sentimentality and romanticism about women,” Anaïs Nin said of Miller in
Henry and June.
“Sex is
love
to him.” How can we reconcile this observation with the pop image of Miller the fuckabout misogynist?