The Devil at Large (9 page)

Henry’s cowboy and gold-rush dreams did not materialize. He wound up picking fruit in Chula Vista. Eventually Henry returned to New York and announced to his mother that he was going to marry Pauline. His mother flew into an insane rage and threatened him with a knife. Henry tried to placate her by finally agreeing to help out in the family shop, though he had no interest in tailoring. It was there that he learned not to tailor, but to write.

I wrote long literary and humorous letters to my friends, which were really disguised essays on everything. Wrote out of boredom, because I was not interested in my father’s business. During this period the first thing I remember writing, as a piece of writing in itself, was a long essay on Nietzsche’s “Anti-Christ.”

Letters remained the chief literary product of Henry’s life. His mind seemed most at ease in the epistolary form, where he could range over the wide assortment of things that mattered to him, without worrying about his nemesis—form—but only about content. Had Henry lived in another age, he might never have attempted novels.

During the period of Henry’s literary apprenticeship in the tailor shop, America was preparing for war. The United States would not break its isolationism for some three years, but the world was in a state of tumultuous change as the Europeans fought “over there.” Women would not get the vote until 1920, but they were already pressing for changes in their status. Feminism was much discussed in Henry’s youth, though it was destined to ebb and flow for another half century before women really organized to give themselves direct access to the political process.

For Henry as a young man, the lack of reliable contraception was horrific and ever present. His passionate live-in relationship with Pauline Chouteau was already on the wane when she became pregnant with his child and aborted it. He came home to find a bloody five-month-old fetus in a drawer and Pauline collapsed on the bed. Torn between his moral obligation and an equally pressing desire to escape her, he chose escape—as he would many times in his life. Once again, his solution was to fall in love. He met a pretty young brunette who shared another of his lifelong passions, playing the piano. Pauline’s days were numbered.

This newest excuse for escape was Beatrice Sylvas Wickens, a girl from Brooklyn whom, in 1917, Henry was to make his first (legal) wife:

From about the age of ten I had been playing the piano. Soon after I joined my father I fell in love with a woman who was my piano teacher. I had been teaching the piano myself, to eke out a little spare money from about the age of 17 on. Now I became serious about it and thought I might possibly become a concert pianist. I married the woman and that finished it. From the day we hitched up it was a running battle. In a year or two I dropped the piano for good, which I have regretted ever since.

Henry adored the pursuit and conquest of Beatrice, a good girl of whom his mother could approve, but it was only the war that convinced him to marry. He had fled the tailor shop and Pauline’s house to work briefly in Washington before the selective service claimed him. It was his draft notice that cemented his resolve to take Beatrice as his wife.

Once married, he found to his dismay that he was again living with his mother: Beatrice, critical and disapproving, sneered at his ambition to write as much as Louise had, and like her, tried to get him into the “real world” of work.

But Henry seemed unable to hold a job. Once he married Beatrice he gamely tried an astonishing variety of gigs—from streetcar conductor to indexer to mail-order catalog compiler. Nothing held his interest; he was clearly not meant to be anyone’s employee. He would invariably be fired for scribbling or reading philosophy on company time. Growing disillusioned with work and the ball-and-chain of marriage, Henry wrote (in
The Black Cat
magazine at a penny a word):

the single truth about marriage is that it is a disillusion…. It only takes about three days of matrimony to open a man’s eyes …

It was one of his first pieces to be published.

Since Henry always married as a quick fix, he was always quickly disillusioned. His marriage to Beatrice deteriorated sexually, romantically, musically, financially. The pressure of a baby (his first daughter, Barbara, born in 1919) didn’t help, nor did Henry’s dalliance with his mother-in-law the previous year.

On a belated and definitely odd honeymoon that Henry and Beatrice took at Beatrice’s mother’s house in Delaware the year after his marriage to Beatrice, Beatrice’s mother supposedly seduced Henry in her bathtub. Mother-in-law and son-in-law made love all summer, practically under the noses of their mates.

Only after Barbara was born did Beatrice confront Henry with this incestuous infidelity. She’d apparently known about it all along. The marital war escalated. Beatrice was determined to make Henry into a proper bread-winning spouse and Henry was just as determined to resist.

The dalliance with Beatrice’s mother is another example of Henry’s mythmaking. He tells of this affair so vividly in
Sexus
and
The World of Sex
that it appears to be biographical truth. But what if it was only a might-have-been affair, born of Henry’s rich imagination? What if it was intended to “explain” his growing estrangement from Beatrice?

People do lie to themselves and to the world in order to live, and writers are inclined to use their books to “explain” the failures of their lives. Beatrice’s mother probably turned him on.
Ergo:
a love affair was born. But, like his meeting with Emma Goldman, it may have happened only in his imagination.

In 1920, the Miller family tailor shop finally failed and even though Henry no longer worked there, this was a liberation of sorts. Propelled by Beatrice and fatherhood, Henry took the job at Western Union that was to prove so fateful in his literary career. Even the way he got the job was to prove fateful. At first he couldn’t even get hired as a messenger.

The story of his employment at the “Cosmodemonic Telegraphic Company,” as Henry tells it in
Tropic of Capricorn
, is the literary analogue of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
or Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times.
Here is modern man on the speeded-up assembly line of life—frantic, maddened, moving at a thousand frames per minute.

Henry’s account of the world of work in New York circa 1920 (he began at Western Union in 1920 and left in 1924) is truly hallucinogenic:

The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration. I was up against the whole system of American labor, which is rotten at both ends…. I had a bird’s eye view of the whole American society. It was like a page out of the telephone book. Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense. But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano. You could see the whole American life—economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically. It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock…

The facts were these: Henry had applied for a messenger job and been refused. That got his dander up. He didn’t want to be a wage slave, but having been refused a job any slob would get, he was mightily pissed off. He took his pique, his rage, his rhetoric in hand and marched into the management headquarters of the company that would ever after be known as “the Cosmodemonic.” It was a historic moment—like Byron arriving in Venice, or Colette following Willy to Paris: literature was about to be born of this encounter between place and person.

… [T]hey had rejected
me,
Henry V. Miller, a competent superior individual who has asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it.

So, in the morning, he put on his best clothes and “hotfooted it to the main offices of the telegraph company” up to the empyrean aeries of management, high above the tip of Manhattan.

Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.

Henry had stumbled into shit—and, as the proverb predicts, into good luck. The “Cosmodemonic” happened to be worried about their hiring policies. They saw a weakness in their own system—and Henry’s rhetoric convinced them that he was just the man to save them.

Refused as a messenger, he was hired at several times the salary as one of the employment managers and as a sort of company spy. This was his first taste of real power and his first taste of the pleasures of playing Robin Hood—a game that he would continue all the days of his life. For Henry had a Robin Hood-like concept of money. He was as generous as a guest at a potlatch and just as confusing to the average mercantile mind:

In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and lectured for having “too big a heart.” I never had any money in my pocket but I used other people’s money freely. As long as I was the boss I had credit. I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my linen, my books, everything that was superfluous. If I had had the power, I would have given the company away to the poor buggers …

In this passage from
Tropic of Capricorn,
Henry sounds like an early Christian or a nineteenth-century communal Utopian:

I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I’ll never see it again. Men are poor everywhere—they always have been and they always will be. And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it it can become a conflagration. I was constantly urged not to be too lenient, not to be too sentimental, not to be too charitable. Be firm! Be hard! they cautioned me. Fuck that! … If I had had real power, instead of being the fifth wheel on a wagon, God knows what I could have accomplished. I could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraphic Company of North America as a base to bring all humanity to God …

Miller’s tone is hyperbolic. But he is telling the absolute truth here. His truth. And he
would
find a way to use the Cosmodemonic to bring all humanity to God, though he would not find it yet. Still, he was on his way.

His brain boiled and his marriage deteriorated. He was
engaged
at the telegraph company if not entirely happy—and being engaged is the closest thing we mortals know to happiness. To have our energies used—this is the beginning of bliss.

Henry says he never slept during his years at the Cosmodemonic. And that he never stopped whirling like a dervish. Certainly when one reads his account in
Tropic of Capricorn
, one feels an almost Keystone Kops syncopation and a sense of Jazz-Age energy. What turmoil! What madness! Henry was soaking up experience like a sponge. He was “saturated with humanity.” He was “waiting for a breathing space” when he could write it all down.

Until then he had been a writer without a subject. He knew he had plenty to say, but how to frame it in human experience? He had the drive to write, but no stories to tell. His life had yet to catch up with his ambitions.

It was at the Cosmodemonic that life presented Henry with his first real subject matter: the messengers themselves.

Every novelist must start with empathy and with a great curiosity about people. In many ways, those qualities are even more important than language—important as language is.

Henry was fascinated with people—with the nuts, the clowns, the destitute refuse of life. At the Cosmodemonic, he saw them all, the misery of humanity:

… the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening.

What got Henry going on his first real attempt at a book,
Clipped Wings
, in 1922, was an offhand remark made by the vice president of the Cosmodemonic that somebody ought to write “a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers.”

“I’ll give you an Horatio Alger book,” Henry thought, “just you wait!”

I entered the Western Union as personnel manager in 1920 and left towards the end of 1924. About 1922, I think it was, I wrote my first book, while on a three-week vacation. I forget the title I gave it, but it was about twelve messengers whom I had studied. The ms was over 75,000 words long and I did it in the three weeks and nearly killed myself doing it. (My second wife probably has the manuscript, but I don’t know where she is and she probably wouldn’t surrender it, or has destroyed it, along with a lot of other manuscripts I wrote while with her—and all the water colors I made then too—and my library of over a thousand books, and my wonderful unabridged dictionary, which I miss more than anything—more than my wife!)

Clipped Wings
owes its inspiration to many factors and the Horatio Alger remark is only one of them. Henry had turned thirty in 1921—an age when most would-be writers start to feel the pressure of time at their backs. He had read Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
, which, above all, had inspired him to believe that he could transform his own autobiographical odyssey into fiction. And he was in that desperate shit-or-get-off-the-pot mood which turns a would-be into a writer.

In March 1922, Henry methodically set out to write the book that would prove once and for all he was a writer.