Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (8 page)

While bearing passive witness to this process Miller began to court a pianist named Beatrice Wickens. Pauline was still in the picture but now very much in its background. Beatrice was about Miller’s own age, whereas Pauline was considerably older, and besides, the younger woman had an active interest in the arts and could discuss with Miller some of the books he was tearing through—Spengler, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, the Greek dramatists, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. For a brief time Miller saw both women, but Pauline clearly belonged to the past and Beatrice to the future.

One thing remained the same in the new relationship, and this was the frantic, acrobatic, improvisational nature of the couple’s lovemaking, as if Miller required this form of aphrodisiac. But there was now as well a new quality and a complication, for Beatrice had had a very traditional
Catholic upbringing and carried within her a profound ambivalence about the pleasures of the body. The more fun she had in one of their torrid encounters, Miller claimed, the deeper her subsequent torment. Nothing could have been more calculated to excite Miller’s anger and ferocious contempt, though at the time he might not have been able to say just why. But for a man who claimed his mother had so early instilled the spirit of rebellion in his heart, all his combative energies were strongly stirred by what he regarded as a pious and ultimately cankered denial of the body and its perfectly natural needs. So here, Beatrice’s post-coital fits of remorse provoked Miller’s most inventive cruelty. Still, they continued to have sex, Miller perhaps perversely spurred on to more incessant demands by the prospect of Beatrice’s anguished tears. What else could they then do but marry? And this they unhappily did in 1917, and then quickly set to work building their respective redoubts, she the shrewish, humiliated wife, and he the feckless, henpecked husband. By the time their daughter Barbara was born in 1919, Miller was staying away from home as much as possible, and when he did venture back, often enough he had in tow one or another of his cronies, a reprise of the situation in his parents’ household.

By then, though, Miller’s father had drifted beyond even that sad state and was sleeping away ever larger stretches
of his days in simple avoidance technique. Remembering this period, his son would eventually describe the old man snoring away in his Morris chair, “dead as a crater,” or—in an even more invidious metaphor—“like a dodo which buries its head in the sand and whistles out of its ass-hole.”
¹³
Clearly, his continuance at the tailor shop had become pointless, and Miller gladly quit for a bewildering succession of temporary jobs, all of which he speedily dropped, much to his wife’s distress and mounting contempt. Nothing suited her Henry—nothing useful at any rate—because by now it had occurred to him that what he really wanted to do was to become a writer.

He had, however, absolutely no idea how this ambition could be realized. Already, he’d turned over half a library, reading through the works of the great. And in the tailor shop he had met an honest-to-god living, working writer, Frank Harris. Reading was fine in its way; certainly a writer must be well read. And Harris’s colorful personality was attractive: it was grand indeed to be able to sail into a tailor shop to be fitted out for a yachting costume. Still, neither reading nor Harris’s literary status showed the way into the actual, solitary act of composing. Maybe it was a matter of the right materials. So he bought pens and a notebook, but they were dead things in his hands. Then somehow he got a monstrous desk out of the tailor shop and into his Brooklyn flat where it squatted, square
in the midst of the living room. Yet when he sat down to it with his proper materials nothing happened. He himself was as dead as a crater, sitting there, staring at the unforgiving blankness of the page. He refused to believe he had nothing to say because for some years now he had been composing in his head dialogue, scenes, character sketches, vignettes as he shuttled to and from his menial jobs. What then was the trick, the hidden spring, the magic formula that would release interior invention, turning thought or conversation into words written on a waiting page?

Maybe he’d been born in the wrong place—Brooklyn, USA—at the wrong time, this soulless modern age of Progress? He asked his old friend Emil this question many times on his visits to Schnellock’s Fiftieth Street studio. He would come bounding up the stairs to the studio, filled with an electric vigor, clad in his studiously shabby army shirt and battered felt hat, brimming with new stories and observations gleaned from his voracious reading. But then, the question: was it merely his bad luck to be only an American instead of a European? Perhaps to find an answer by way of context, he would pump Emil for reminiscences of his time abroad, using Schnellock’s mounted wall map of the Continent as a constant point of reference. But what really riveted him was a large map of Paris.
He studied that as if it were a kind of code he was meant to crack, tracing with his fingers the archaic meander of its streets, the grand arc the river made through the city’s heart.

All of this of course was when it was just the two of them. In the company of others, men with some artistic or intellectual cachet, Miller would be mostly silent, almost mute. It infuriated his host because, better than anyone, Schnellock knew how Miller could talk when the fit was on him. Yet in the presence of these prestigious strangers his old friend seemed cowed, suddenly and quite literally just a Brooklyn boy. In more comfortable company it could be quite different. Then, maybe, something said—the expression of some bit of vanity, a piety, the mindless repetition of a reigning shibboleth—would set him off on verbal flights that transfixed and transformed his listeners with what Schnellock recalled as Miller’s “magnificent life-giving words, words that seemed to restore to us what life had robbed us of. Truth, lies, fantasy, drama, invention”—and a sidesplitting humor so overwhelming it hurt. And there were a very few occasions when Miller could do this in the presence of those strangers he appeared to regard as his betters. On these occasions it was as if he’d suddenly said to himself, “Fuck everything,” and then would “sweep away all barriers and take the company by storm,” as Schnellock put it.

In the aftermath of such a performance Schnellock would find himself besieged with requests for Miller’s address or phone number. How could they get hold of this guy? When was Emil going to invite him back, and couldn’t they please be included? Yet if Schnellock did arrange such an occasion, Miller might well arrive wrapped in an impenetrable silence. After one of these aggravating non-performances and as Emil was berating him, Miller flew into a rage in the course of which and in an apparent reference to the brilliance of his talk and its very occasional nature, he uttered the warning words,
“That’s totem and taboo!”
The proximate reference here, of course, would have been to Freud’s controversial book on exogamy and other taboos of primitive cultures. But what could the retort have meant in this context? It might have meant simply that Miller wasn’t a trained seal, a trick pony who could perform on demand. That would be consistent with his characteristic tendency to work always against the grain, whatever the grain was at a given time or situation. But maybe it meant something more as well. Maybe it meant that Miller himself didn’t really know where the improvised flights came from and wasn’t able to summon them at will. Maybe he was both baffled and troubled, too, by the very unpredictability of this talent. Was it even a talent, or was it instead the recrudescence of that broad strand of craziness in his family line, the taboo of his
tribe? If it was this, no wonder a conversational consideration of it was off limits, both for himself and for his closest friend.

At some point, however, when Miller had spoken to Schnellock again of his helpless thrashings in the literary wilderness—he wanted after all to be a
writer
not some mere street-corner sorcerer—Schnellock told him that the way out for him was to write the same way he talked, an easy enough observation perhaps. But in truth there yawns always a chasmic divide between the lightning quickness of speech and the more meditative act of writing, and few writers can easily bridge it, though many have tried and precisely because the former feels closer to whatever the original inspiration was.
¹⁴

While Miller continued his inevitably amateurish literary gropings, tensions in the household continued to intensify. The huge desk plumped down in the middle of the living room was a constant affront to Beatrice, who saw it as a symbol of Miller’s childish impracticality and his multiple failures as husband, father, and provider. In this context the fact that he was also proving a bust as a writer was almost beside the point. Early in 1920, though, matters changed when he talked his way into a well-paying job as an employment manager at Western Union.

Beatrice could hardly believe it, and Miller could hardly believe it, either, once he understood what the job involved: the heartless, systematic exploitation of the half-crazed starvelings the company employed to deliver its
telegrams. Like the three cultured Jews in the tailor shop’s busheling room, many of the aspirants who appeared before Miller, cap in hand, seemed to him men of some breeding and intelligence. Yet all were now merely meat for the “slaughterhouse” that was modern American capitalism.

At first, he claimed (doubtless with a subsequently applied comic exaggeration) that he accepted every last condition of his employment, asking no questions of his superiors. If on a given morning he received a directive that no cripples be hired, he turned away all cripples. If on another day the word came down that all messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice, he fired them. No more Jews, then no more Jews. But then on the casual remark of a superior something within him snapped. The man had mused aloud that someone ought to write a book about how the company (which Miller styled the “Cosmodemonic Telephone Company”) was providing the necessary breeding ground for a whole new generation of Horatio Algers. To Miller, who saw daily what those breeding grounds actually were, and who had to understand just what it was that he, Henry Miller, was himself involved in, the remark was as cruel as it was stupid. Later, in
Tropic of Capricorn,
he remembered of this moment that what he wanted most to do in life was to utterly destroy the secular myth of Horatio Alger with a book of a very
different sort, one that would reveal the Horatio Alger story as the “dream of a sick America.” There follows a passage that might well have been reminiscent of those sudden and perhaps even unbidden outbursts that so mesmerized the men at Emil Schnellock’s studio, as Miller imagines his anti-Alger figure

mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft.

He had a vacation coming to him, two weeks. He took three, writing an astonishing five thousand or more words a day at Schnellock’s studio until he was finished. He called the book
Clipped Wings,
and from his later references to it and from its few surviving scraps it’s possible the best thing about it may have been its title, a mordant turn on Western Union’s winged logo. Miller’s characters are twelve messengers, all of them deformed angels whose wings have been clipped by the corporation’s exploitation of them. Possibly he had in mind a group portrait such as Edgar Lee Masters had done in
Spoon River Anthology
and Sherwood Anderson in
Winesburg, Ohio.
But everyone
Miller showed the manuscript to disparaged it, some evidently telling him it was so dreadful he should never again think of writing. Many years later, both in print and in filmed interviews, Miller said he himself finally understood just how bad a book it was. Its saving grace, he said, was that the writing of it taught him what it was to fail at something genuinely worth failing at—being an author. This was 1922.

Within a year of that creative failure it was obvious that Miller had suffered a domestic one as well: his marriage was irretrievably wrecked. It had never been a harmonious one, and the arrival of the baby hadn’t improved matters. By now Beatrice was both deeply wounded by his brutal treatment of her and contemptuous of his literary strivings. As for Miller, he no longer made any effort to conceal his flagrant philandering and was rarely at home.

One summer’s night, on the prowl around Times Square and with money in his pocket, he wandered into a taxi-dance hall, danced with one of the girls, and felt his life forever changed. It was.

For that night at least, the dancer was using the name June Mansfield, but like so many in the New World to
which she had come from the Old, she had many others, and despite what speedily developed into an obsessional interest in every least detail of her being, Miller never learned all the ones she had sailed under. Nor was he ever able to penetrate the layered mysteries of her character and her past. He was to spend the following decade trying to decipher her, as if he were some rakish, feverish Cham-pollion to her Rosetta stone—whether she was whore, or angel, or the angel of death. At various moments she was any one of these to him and perhaps all of them at once. In the beginning she was a dark goddess. At the end, he was calling her a “Jewish cunt.” But first and last she was his muse, the personification of that mythic being—beautiful, all-powerful, changeful—who the male artist cannot choose but who instead merely nods in his direction and so inspires the best work that is in him. For Miller, June in one way and another inspired his three finest works, the
Tropics
and
Black Spring.
At the other end of his long career he was still trying to work out for himself what she meant to him, retelling the old stories through the endless pages of
The Rosy Crucifixion,
which Norman Mailer was right about when he called it a giant layer cake that fails to rise.