It
is curious how one can adopt stubborn prejudices that extend themselves into
upsetting judgments that one would not otherwise make.
I
am thinking here of a prejudice I developed against Time magazine as I was growing up. Perhaps it came from the fact
that the magazine was so wholeheartedly the tribune of the might of the United
States, against which the lowly citizen of a tiny nation buried in a mighty
ocean far, far away, might more or less
reasonably react unfavourably, I suppose.
Let me be more precise. One of Time magazine’s heroes, if one read it
consistently, was the British writer Lawrence Durrell, and the fact that the
magazine was always fawning over him and his books was enough to put me off
reading them. (I have since tried, and have found myself unable to get through
his novels, although I have enjoyed a book he wrote on Cyprus, one of the most
beautiful places I have ever seen).
The magazine usually remarked that Durrell
was a close friend of Henry Miller. Ipso facto, extending my
prejudice against the magazine, I avoided reading Miller for many decades. And
even to this day I have never read a word of Anais Nin, the oddly multinational
writer whose fame seemed at one point to come mainly from her having had a
passionate love affair with Miller.
Eventually I did read some of
Miller’s shorter works, and enjoyed them a great deal, especially I remember
one called A Devil in Paradise, about
a literary friend from France who was up against it, and who Miller invited to
spend as much time as he liked in Big Sur where
Miller was now installed on the California coast. The man came, and
according to the story, was an infernal pest, impervious to every hint that the
time had come to leave. Maybe because I am myself sensitive almost to a fault
to the fear of overstaying my welcome wherever I may be, even when I have been
invited by a friend, I found his description highly amusing of a situation that
was well known to me in life, and he told it in a wonderful, semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical
style that I hadn’t struck before. I was
able to relate so easily because I’ve never forgotten how some neighbours of
some friends of my wife’s parents, previously unknown to either of us, arrived to stay with us in Winnipeg once, and
left after six weeks in high dudgeon because we had felt the need to suggest the time had come for them to move
on. The worst thing was that we recognized this as perfectly acceptable New
Zealand behaviour at the time, to which we had been slightly prey on arrival
abroad, so we used it for behaviour
modification in ourselves.
It was when I read his first great
work, Tropic of Cancer, that I was
completely blown away, enthralled by its astonishing verbal vigour, its non-linear
shape, its denial of time constraints, it refusal to be intimidated by what
proper people might think of his language, and its immense scope; a work of
great humour, desperate depravity, reckless experimentation, and fearless portrayal of people of all
types, status or attainments. I finished that reading convinced that Miller had
to be the greatest writer currently at work with the English language, and
possibly one of the greatest novelists of all time.
This impression was solidified by an
examination of what his book had to go through just to be allowed to be
read. He wrote it while living an
itinerant life in Paris between 1930 and 1934. But the US customs service
banned it --- I am indebted to Wikipedia for these details ---- and when some
smuggled copies from Paris were sold in New York, lawsuits followed. In 1950
the American Civil Liberties Union tried to import the book, along with its
companion volume Tropic of Capricorn,
but one after another American judges declared the book to be obscene. And so
it went on, a merry dance between publishers, booksellers and authorities, year
after year, court case after court case, the book being memorably described by
one judge as "not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of
putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human
depravity." Finally in 1964, 30 years after its
publication, the Supreme Court, overriding many State judges, declared the book
to be not obscene, but a work of art.
Not only were his works excoriated by
authorities everywhere, but because they couldn’t sell, he failed to make a
living out of them, and was kept alive during his years in Paris by
acquaintances, friends, and lovers. among them Anais Nin. Tropic of Cancer in fact is, among other things, a record of his day-to-day
existence, his constant bumming off people, his waking up every morning
wondering where his food would come from that day, as he struggled to establish
his validity as a writer, alternately disgusted by the behaviour of the people
around him, as well as glorying in all the physical pleasures they offered.
Until I jettisoned most of the books
I had collected when I moved from Ottawa to Montreal in 2012, I had quite a library of Miller
books, most of which I gave to the old folks’ home for their annual book sale.
Among them was a genuine curiosity,
called Opus Pistorum, said to mean,
in Latin, Work of the Miller, a
pornographic work he wrote for a dollar a page, one of a number written by
other writers as well, to fulfil a demand for such works from various Hollywood
personalities. All I remember from the book is that one of its main characters
was making out on as regular basis with both his wife and their daughter, and
the protagonist and his daughter were taking the greatest of pleasure and enjoyment
from their relationship. Thus, even in his lighter moments, Henry Miller was at
work overturning the customary societal abhorrence of the sin that is usually
held to be the only one that is common to all cultures.
You must be wondering what started me
off on this praise of Henry Miller. Well, the fact is, a couple of his slim,
minor works survived my great cleansing en
route from Ottawa to Montreal, and since I hadn’t read either of them, I picked
them up this week, and was again plunged into the glory of his prose. The first
story is called Max and the Phagocytes,
a searing pen portrait of an American down on his luck in Paris, a man, to hear
him tell it, born to suffer, to such an extent that Miller writes of him:
I had grown
so accustomed to Max, to his state of perpetual misfortune, that I began to
accept him as a natural phenomenon: he was a part of the general landscape like
rocks, trees, urinals, brothels, meat markets, flower stalls and so on. There
are thousands of men like Max roaming the streets, but Max was the
personification of all. He was Unemployment,
he was Hunger, he was Misery, he was Woe, he was Despair, he was Defeat, he was
Humiliation. The others I could get rid of by flipping them a coin. Not Max!
Max was something so close to me that it was just impossible to get rid of him.
He was closer to me than a bed-bug. Something under the skin, something in the blood stream. When he talked
I only half-listened. I had only to catch
the opening phrase and I could continue by myself indefinitely, ad infinitum. Everything
he said was true, horribly true.
I
couldn’t help but think of Coleridge, renowned in his day for his habit of
talking to passers-by, clutching them ferociously by a coat-button, Coleridge
so intense on his conversation that they would cut off the button leaving him
to talk on, oblivious to their departure. Thus was born in our language the
word “buttonholing.” Max seemed to be buttonholing Miller.
The next time Max appeared he was wearing
a fancy English-cut suit, several sizes too big for him, but still something
that made him look presentable, until one noticed the “low canvas shoes, dirty and worn, they don’t
go with the suit and the hat.” He tells how he made it to Vienna, where he was
going to start a new life but he found it even worse than Paris. He admitted the
soup kitchens were clean, but what good were clean kitchens when, because of
the smart suit, given to him by someone in Vienna, nobody believes him any
more, and he doesn’t have a sou in his pockets? From force of habit he says his
good shoes are at the cobbler’s and he doesn’t have the money to get them out.
On another occasion, feeling more
friendly Miler takes him home, promising to give him a couple of suits he no
longer wears, introduces him to Boris, another sufferer, who puts him up for a
time. Then he disappears again until a letter arrives.
Dear Miller
and Boris…. it is 3 o’clock in the
morning I cannot sleep I am very nervis,
I am crying and can’t stop ….A long
night of suffering though I am not very hungry but I am afraid of something. I don’t know what is the
matter with me. I talk to myself I can’t control myself. Miller, I don’t want you to help me any more. I want to
talk to you, am I a child? I have no courage, am I losing my reason?
On
and on it goes, Max finding new ways to suffer, Miller listening to his voice as
he reads, half sardonic and cruel, half sympathetic and soft. But overall,
using Max as a subject to write about.
I had read the whole story without
coming across the word phagocyte, which I had never come across before. So I looked it up:
Phagocyte,
type of cell that has the ability to ingest, and sometimes digest, foreign
particles, such as bacteria, carbon, dust, or dye”
Or,
another one:
Phagocytes
are the white blood cells that protect the body by eating (phagocytosing) dirt,
bacteria and dead or dying cells. They are important for fighting infections. They
are also important for becoming immune. Phagocytes are important in all animals
and are very complex in vertebrates. One litre of human blood has about six
billion phagocytes.
So,
as usual with Miller, his story, innocent on the surface, must have had some
higher purpose, vaguely scientific.
The second story in the little book
is called The World of Sex. After
urging the need to be free of the bounds that tie the average North American man
in his attitude to sex, Miller writes:
Nor can I
acknowledge as necessitous or inevitable what now goes on in the name of law
and order, peace and prosperity, freedom and security. Sell it to the
Hottentots! It’s too utterly horrendous for me to swallow. I intend to stake
out my own claim, a tiny one, but my own. Lacking a name for it, I’ll call it pro tem --- .the Land of Fuck. In
this domain, I am the undisputed monarch. Mad as a hatter, perhaps, but only
because 999,999,999,999 others think other than I do. Where others see
celery, roots, kohlrabi,
parsnips and rootabaga, I detect a new
sprout, the germ of a new order.
“What
man’s sex life may be under a new order surpasses my feeble imagination to
describe,” he writes. But he does have a good go at it, his imagination running
wild, before he concludes:
When our
desires are thwarted or suppressed, life becomes mean, ugly, vicious and
death-like. Just as it is, in other words.
After all, the world we inhabit is only the reflected image of our utter
chaos. Our medicine men, our juristic fanatics, all the hair-shirted pedagogues
and mystifiers who dominate the scene would have us believe that to partake of
a societal life, the savage, primitive
being, as they call the natural man, must be hobbled and fettered. Every
creative being knows this is false. Nothing was ever accomplished by cramping,
thwarting, fettering, shackling, one
another. Nor crime nor war, nor lust nor greed, nor malice nor envy are thus
eliminated. All that is effected, in the
name of Society, is the perpetuation if the great lie.
Oh,
I am so envious. I wish I could write like that, so free, so flowing, so
inspiring. And I also wish someone like him had been around to open my mind as
I was growing up. I would have lived a much happier, and more decent life.
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