The Devil at Large (10 page)

I wrote it straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought he must say everything all at once—in one book—and collapse afterwards. I didn’t know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless.

Henry’s honesty about this first literary effort as he recounts it over a decade later is touching. Anyone who has ever attempted to write will recognize the ring of truth in it:

Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad,
terrible
, as they said, was only natural. I was attempting at the start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted to say the last word at the beginning. It was absurd and pathetic. It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood.

Many people have found in Miller’s writing just this honesty. He knew what it was to fail, to be desperate, to hit bottom. “Had I succeeded, I would have been a monster,” Henry says. “You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual.”

The way Henry worked on this first book is telling. It shows the drivenness of the writer in him. More perspiration than inspiration, more pastiche than poetry, but when it was done he knew once and for all that he could sit down and actually finish a book.

Tropic of Capricorn
, though written in the thirties, is more understandable if it is seen against the background of 1920s New York. This was the Jazz Age, the age of bobbed hair and bobbed skirts, discarded corsets and the introduction of Trojans. Free love was in the air. Margaret Sanger was on the march. Speakeasies were serving drinks called “Between the Sheets” and modern women were learning to drink, smoke, and make love. Henry had married Beatrice before all hell broke loose and now he was getting restless.

Seven years with Pauline, seven years with Beatrice, and Henry was again ready to shed a skin. It was always a woman who took him to the next level in his life. And the woman was always a muse.

My career began with hitching up with my second wife. I wrote two novels while with her, and God knows how many short stories and articles and essays and crazy undefinable things which belong to my own private Dada period. The first novel I called “Moloch”, the second “Crazy Cock.” The first around 100,000 words; the second longer still, but completely revised when I got to Paris, and reduced ultimately to less than 300 pages, and ruined.

Henry’s most enduring muse, June Edith Smith, was a dark, beautiful Jewish femme fatale—he called her Rebecca in some love letters—with a great gift for theatricality and chaos. When Henry met her in 1923, June was working as a taxi dancer—a five-cents-a-dance girl—in a Broadway dance palace, one of those places that proscribed, and yet clearly invited, “dirty dancing.” Henry promptly disregarded the rules and fell madly in love. He fell as much for June’s talk as for her walk, for her mind as for her body; he was utterly bewitched and besotted.

His marriage to Beatrice was doomed, but Henry had found his first great heroine. June gave Henry the courage to quit his job and start writing in earnest. In 1924 he divorced Beatrice and married June. Again, Henry was escaping from responsibility, and the guilt about leaving his daughter and wife tortured him for years.

Henry’s marriage to June was full of passion, madness, and faithlessness, and perhaps that was why it nourished Henry’s fiction for the rest of his life. For much of the time June openly carried on passionate affairs with women and permitted a succession of rich married men to support her (and therefore Henry). For his part, Henry eventually took up with Anaïs Nin, who was also for a time madly infatuated with June. Nevertheless, the chaos of this marriage provided Henry with something he never found again in a wife. What was it? June had the same myth-making ability as Henry. Neither of them knew the difference between fact and fiction. Being with his psychological double proved to be powerful magic.

With June, Henry wrote his first real novels,
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch
(unpublished until 1991 and 1992), ran a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, painted and exhibited watercolors, and first toured Europe in 1928, whetting his appetite for the expatriate decade to come.

If Henry’s relationship with his mother was the incubation of the writer, the marriage to June was the hatching of the egg. Henry could not make himself into an antihero without simultaneously making June his antiheroine. By the time June and Henry split in 1933,
Tropic of Cancer
, written in Paris, was ready to burst forth into the world.

What happened to Henry when he met June? He fell in love in a way he had never experienced before, and never expected to again. “The whole being was concentrated in the face,” he writes of June in
Tropic of Capricorn.
“I could have put it beside me on a pillow at night and made love to it.”

And June could
talk.
Crazy, dramatic, a reader, June spoke of characters in books as if they were alive; she identified with them as Henry did. She talked about Strindberg’s heroines as she wove the facts and falsehoods of her life into one shimmering web. She was more than just a femme fatale. She was mythic—Venus, Lilith, earth goddess. Henry mentions his favorite word “womb” repeatedly in the hallucinatory last section of
Tropic of Capricorn
where he recounts meeting “Mara” (one of his first names for June).

“She’s America on foot, winged and sexed,” he says, identifying Mara/June with the continent he must conquer to become himself and an American writer. “Amurrica, fur or no fur, shoes or no shoes. Amurrica C.O.D.” And Henry is quaking. “One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this,” he says.

What is astounding about his introduction of this muse in
Tropic of Capricorn
is his understanding that through June he will find himself, that only through such transforming love can a man’s soul, a writer’s soul, be born. And whatever Henry’s feminist detractors may have said, June is not merely an isolated organ to him. June is a weaver of fantasy and an artist like himself. She also believes in him as an artist. That, primarily is what attracts him.

That—and the craziness.

Has anyone ever written about the propensity writers have to fall in love with crazy people? My own first love was a brilliant schizophrenic. F. Scott Fitzgerald linked his life with Zelda, finding her more compelling than other, calmer, women. Henry married June knowing that she could not distinguish fiction from reality, reality from fiction. She had “no boundaries,” we would say today. And, having no boundaries, she opened up his art.

The trancelike state the writer needs to tap the unconscious is one that borderline or psychotic people find comes easily to them. Such people are
like
artists in being able to invent fantasy worlds, but they are unlike artists in not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. We are caught up in the web of living with their inventions—and disaster ensues.

This was the pattern with June. Her rhapsodic belief in Henry helped him become a writer, but her inability to live in the real world nearly drove him mad. “She put him through the tortures of hell, but he was masochistic enough to enjoy it,” said Alfred Perlès in
My Friend, Henry Miller.

Henry and June commenced a chaotic life that was to take him from Brooklyn to Paris, from would-be to published author. Madly in love with hypnotic June in Jazz-Age New York, Henry clearly believed he could do anything—open a bootleg joint and get rich, write the great American novel and get famous. Did Henry live to write about it, or did he write to survive his life? No writer ever knows for sure.

June and Henry first toured Europe in 1928 (the year that Amelia Earhart flew the Atlantic), making a kind of bohemian grand tour before the Wall Street crash changed the world. Their relationship was tumultuous always—and always she tortured him with other lovers, particularly women. In the Greenwich Village of the twenties it was suddenly chic to be gay—and June was nothing if not a modern woman of fashion.

In 1930, Henry traveled to Europe without June (she remained in New York to support them with her various liaisons) and embarked upon what was to become the most fecund and joyous period of his life. The early months were desperate and threatened by starvation, but after a year or so of living by his wits, Henry’s gift for friendship saved him and he found himself surrounded by “boon companions,” lovers, and friends. By 1931 Miller was released (or released himself) to write
Tropic of Cancer
, the book that forever changed the way American literature would be written. The Brooklyn boy was about to be born again in Paris.

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books….

—
HENRY MILLER,
TROPIC OF CANCER

H
ENRY MILLER WENT TO
Paris in March 1930, hoping to find the freedom to become a writer.

He had always felt constricted in New York, hemmed in because it was his native city and his relatives lived there, hemmed in because of his failed marriage and abandoned child, hemmed in because in New York not to produce money is to be a bum, since New York (the most yang city on earth) measures everyone and everything by the ability to generate money. The artist requires idleness—right-brain dream time. And while idleness is possible in New York, guilt-free idleness is not. Busyness and business are the gods of New York, and art needs other gods: ease, idleness, the ability to receive life as it flows.

Henry Miller’s early novels
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock
, written in New York, show a man at war with his surroundings, trying to make the uncompromising asphalt bloom. In Paris he frees his unconscious to dream, his voice to sing, and his body to lead him in recording all the things previously left out of books.

The voice Henry Miller discovers in Paris is full of the exuberance of escape:

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other. Nobody
dies
here….

Why does the American artist feel that nobody dies in Europe when obviously this is not true? What the expatriate artist feels in Europe is a spiritual rebirth: the old self dies; the new self feels immortal.

I have had this feeling myself, writing in Italy—
my
chosen place—and I have argued with myself about it, much as Miller did. Europe for the American writer means the proximity of culture, a perpetual
wanderjahr,
a place where one’s family skeletons do not rattle in closets (only
other
people’s family skeletons do that). Even in the new Europe, one does not have to justify being a writer or artist with bestsellerdom or a prestigious gallery. The pursuit itself is honored—and sex, not money, is in the air.

Exile is necessary to many writers who come from puritanical cultures. Joyce is another example. One cannot imagine him writing
Ulysses
in Dublin. He had to leave Ireland to see it clearly. This is partly because of the simple need to remove oneself from the X-ray eyes of family in order to discover and utilize one’s gifts. But for the American writer it also means a necessary escape from bourgeois values, from those people who assume that “making a living” is the same as making a life. Henry Miller had to go to Paris to escape the ghost of his father’s tailor shop and the hallucinatory Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company. It was that simple.

Why Paris? Because for Miller’s generation and the generation before his, Paris was midwife to the arts. Henry Miller had to dream of Paris. Any would-be would.

What was Paris like when he arrived? If you were a novelist trying to create the Paris of 1930, what details would you pick to distinguish it from the Paris of today? The life of a city, as anyone who has tried to recreate another era knows, dwells in its plumbing and transport, its food and drink, its cafes and theaters and the hours it keeps.

I always think of it as the Paris of
petits bleus
or
pneumatiques
—those instant communiqués, the faxes of their time—that crisscrossed the city in vacuum tubes. It was a city of bicycles, of buses, of all-night cafés, of refugees from everywhere in the world. It was a city in which certain districts, Montparnasse, for example, resembled an endless carnival. People who lived in Paris in those years remember its extraordinary Rabelaisian gaiety. Far more than New York, it was a city that never slept, and a stroll on the night boulevard was always an adventure.

Paris in 1930 was utterly hospitable to the artist with no money.

Here is Georges Belmont (one of Henry’s French translators and later mine) speaking about the Montparnasse of 1930:

In Montparnasse, particularly, you had plenty of those people who had absolutely no money, like Henry, and you could sit at a table, have a café crème, and stay there for the whole evening. Nobody would throw you out. Even at five, they wouldn’t expel you but people would go finally because they were exhausted. At La Coupole, for instance, there was dancing upstairs with jazz and downstairs there were different corners. There was the chess corner, the writers’ and painters’ corner. You could see Chagall, and Foujita with his famous lover, Kiki de Montparnasse—a remarkable woman. I met her later when she was Robert Desnos’s mistress. She was very beautiful, small, and had a marvelous face, round with big eyes, a humorous face. From time to time I saw Picasso in La Coupole and plenty of others…. People met and spent hours together, discussing ideas.