The Devil at Large (15 page)

The four-letter words in
Cancer
distracted everyone but the most diligent from the truth of Miller’s discovery: peace only comes to a mortal creature when he starts to see himself as part of the flow of creation.

The famous last section of
Tropic of Cancer,
where Henry sits watching the Seine and is finally at one with himself, is a clear statement of a man accepting his unity with the cosmos. The river is within him and without him. Knowing that, his course is fixed:

After everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background. Christ, before my eyes there shimmered such a golden peace that only a neurotic could dream of turning his head away. So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me it seemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space—space even more than time.

The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through me—its past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.

Henry and June were sundered by the time
Cancer
came out and they divorced in 1934—by which time Anaïs was the emotional mainstay of Henry’s life.

Tropic of Cancer
lay in limbo for two years, waiting to be published. Henry had met Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press through the agent William Aspenwall Bradley in Paris, and Kahane believed in
Tropic of Cancer.
But as it turned out, he had more admiration than money, and he was frightened of publishing such a dangerous book.
Tropic of Cancer
only appeared after Anaïs Nin underwrote its printing expenses: It cost her 5000 francs. The money was borrowed from another of her smitten lovers, her second psychoanalyst, Otto Rank.

When
Cancer
eventually appeared in 1934, it was priced at an exorbitant fifty francs and had the printed caveat “
Ce livre ne doit pas être exposé en vitrine
” (this book may not be shown in windows) banded around its lurid, crab-festooned cover. To save money, Jack Kahane had let his fourteen-year-old-son, the future Maurice Girodias, design the cover. It shows a woman languishing in the claws of a crab. Girodias, who used his French mother’s name to escape the anti-Semitism of Vichy France, was later to become the founder of Olympia Press and publish such classics as
Lolita
and J. P. Donleavy’s
The Ginger Man.

Lurid cover or not,
Tropic of Cancer
established Henry’s reputation. The responses were slow to come, but Henry was indefatigable in promoting his own work, and eventually Ezra Pound, George Orwell, William Carlos Williams, Aldous Huxley, Edmund Wilson, Blaise Cendrars, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot, and Herbert Read all responded enthusiastically. Contemporary women writers like Kay Boyle and Anaïs Nin also saw the book as a breakthrough and did not fault its depiction of women. (Nin’s criticism of Henry’s view of women would come later.)

How did the publication of
Tropic of Cancer
change Henry’s life? It certainly did not make him financially secure. (He was not to be that until the very end of his life.) But “the last book” consolidated his view of himself as a writer, strengthened his resolve to produce a great oeuvre, and gave him
himself
in a very basic way. It was as if the various parts of his personality finally came together: the passion of the writing seemed to impart a new strength to his soul. He had been reborn through
Tropic of Cancer.
Though much in it was a wildly heightened, surreal version of his life in Paris, though he was never as profligate as the narrator seems to imply, he did blast through to a new vision of life. He made peace with the wild man in himself, with his own mortality and his own sexuality. He was never to be the same afterward.

I want to kiss the man whose passion rushes like lava through a chill intellectual world.

—
ANAÏS NIN,
HENRY AND JUNE

T
HE CREATION OF A
book is a rite of passage for the author even more than for the reader. It is a way of stripping down to the essential being, a self-analysis far more profound than any professionally guided psychoanalysis and a way of remaking oneself spiritually. It is for this act of self-transformation that writers write. And they are fortunate when they recognize this, because such self-transformation is the only truly dependable reward of writing.

After
Cancer,
Henry was released to write other things.
Black Spring
,
a book he originally called
Self-Portrait
, remained “one of my favorite books” as he inscribed my copy in 1974. It is written in a sort of surrealist prose poetry. It is the most exuberant of his books, full of the colors, sounds, and smells of life. It reeks of his joy in Paris.

He was working on
Black Spring
even as he revised (four times at least)
Tropic of Cancer
, wrote endless letters to Anaïs Nin, and nearly lost himself in the book on Lawrence he was destined never to finish.

At this time—between the acceptance of
Cancer
by Jack Kahane in November 1932 and its publication in September 1934—Henry was living with Perlès in Clichy, having a passionate affair with Nin at her house at Louviciennes, on holidays (before her husband arrived) at her mother’s apartment in Paris, at a series of Paris hotels, and elsewhere. The affair blossomed throughout the months of mad writing, the revisions of
Cancer,
Anaïs’s two psychoanalyses, and through all her various writing projects, chief among which was her journal. The sexual current between Anaïs and Henry spurred them both to frenetic literary activity, proving how allied the forces of sexuality and creativity always are.

In August of 1934, Anaïs gave birth to a stillborn girl. Although she made it appear in her first published diary that the child was her husband’s, Anaïs Nin’s last great love, Rupert Pole, revealed to Miller biographer Robert Ferguson that “Anaïs knew the child was Henry’s and should not be brought into the world.”
Incest
, published late in 1992, confirms that the child was indeed Henry’s and that Anaïs deliberately aborted it. She identified with the unborn child and imagined that it would be abandoned as she was by her father. Reading about the abortion, one feels that this event led inexorably to her growing estrangement from Henry. Anaïs told herself that she was making the sacrifice for Henry, the child-man-artist. Such sacrifices never come without repercussions.

A month after that empty birth in September, on the same day
Cancer
was published, Miller moved into 18 Villa Seurat, his first permanent writing home and his base for the next five years in Paris. The studio owned by Michael Fraenkel, rented by Anaïs, and known to Henry from an earlier stay, was the envy of other writers and artists for its skylight, its spaciousness, its artist neighbors (including Chaim Soutine and Salvador Dali). A house can be a confirmation of success to someone who has drifted for a very long time—and 18 Villa Seurat was just that to Henry. At last he felt he was an artist, not a bum. At last he had a published book and a studio to call his own. He fervently hoped that it would be his home with Anaïs.

The Villa Seurat, a sunny impasse in the fourteenth arrondissement, a modest but pleasant section of Paris, was named after Georges Seurat, who had lived and painted there. A little mews of small, brightly colored houses with big studio windows, it still seems inviting and warm, a hospitable place to live. There is no plaque commemorating Henry’s years at Number 18, but perhaps that will come.

Another attraction of the Villa Seurat was Betty Ryan, an artist, then in her twenties, who had the studio under Henry’s and at some point became Henry’s friend and secret love. Betty Ryan was young, pretty, and employed a great cook (always important to Henry). She was a passionate Hellenophile. She claims that she and Henry fell in love talking about the wonders of Greece. Of course this relationship had to be kept secret from Anaïs, with whom Henry was “entangled and indebted.” Anaïs held sway and sometimes Ryan had to go out with Henry “in mufti.” Anaïs, meanwhile, still had a harem of lovers to juggle.

Anaïs did with Henry what many strong women do with the weak men they love: she mothered him. She did not trust him to be strong enough to support her in motherhood and she did not want to bring Henry’s child home to Hugo. Despite some wavering, she maintained her marriage and her deepening affair with Otto Rank, which was also an affair with psychoanalysis.

Anaïs was so important to Henry that he would do nothing to risk her disapproval. When he figured out that monetary support brought with it an unexpressed infantilization and perhaps even contempt, he was devastated. And when she went to New York in the fall of 1935 to help Otto Rank open a psychoanalysis clinic, Henry was wildly jealous. By now Nin made no secret of the fact that she thought Miller was weak, and that she needed time away from him. In the coming years she would even begin to criticize his writing, something she had never done before. The affair with Ryan, known only to Durrell and a few others, is seldom mentioned in connection with the Villa Seurat days. Why is this? Betty Ryan claims she burned her correspondence with Henry after their break. A very private person, she has been slow to confide in Henry’s chroniclers. After three years of inquiries on my part, she finally wrote me of her connection with Henry and responded to my request for an interview. Living with her dog on the island of Andros, Betty Ryan was apparently moved to talk by the spate of books appearing about Miller. She is typical of the women Henry loved in that she is very strong.

The truth is that all the women Henry loved best in his life were strong; they accepted him only on their own terms. Chief among them was Nin. When she took off for New York to work with Otto Rank, she was following her own creative karma, and neither husband or lover could change her mind. Anaïs had an independence in her marriage to Guiler that she would have never possessed with Henry. She remained tied to Guiler all her life, but she always needed at least two men to reenact her oedipal drama.

Nin’s independence both as a wife and as a lover seems beguiling. At first she appears a beacon of liberation for women, but perhaps she was more enslaved to men than most of us. Her freedom came at a very high cost: she was unable to publish her journals freely during her own lifetime. In a way she traduced her art for the sake of her deceptions. She knew that women can have their sexuality as long as they don’t publish it.

I had an amusing encounter with Anaïs Nin once at the Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y in Manhattan, where she was speaking after her edited diaries had begun to appear. At that point I had published one or two volumes of poetry and was writing
Fear of Flying.

“Why did you edit the sexual parts out of your diary, Miss Nin?” I asked from the audience.

“Because I had observed,” she replied coolly, “that whenever a woman revealed her sexual life, she was never again taken seriously as a writer.” Nin was pragmatic. I was passionate and young.

“But that’s precisely why we must do it,” I said, unwittingly predicting my entire career. Nin did not comment further. I remember being disappointed by her lack of candor and thought she was being hypocritical. Now, I see that I was terribly green and brash and she was wise.

She was right, of course: if a woman expresses her sexuality in print, she is
always
exposed to attack. It was a situation she was destined to help change, but only after her death. I was to beard that particular dragon with my very first novel, and in many ways my reputation has never recovered.

In the winter of 1935, Henry, desolate without Anaïs, followed her and Otto Rank to New York. He ever after claimed that he “practiced psychoanalysis.” It’s not clear what he meant by this. After one practice session with Otto Rank, Henry was brash enough to believe he could do it on his own. Maybe he treated patients to his special Millerian philosophy, which was composed of Emerson, Zen, Lao-tzu, Rimbaud, and Lawrence. It was an intoxicating brew even when I knew him, but you couldn’t really call it psychoanalysis.

But the real reason for Henry’s presence in New York was his determination to capture Anaïs from her various men and make her his wife. She would have none of it. She knew Henry too well. Like many men, he was more devoted as a lover than a husband. Early in their relationship, Nin had longed to open herself utterly to him and she
had
contemplated leaving Hugh Guiler for him, but now she was in retreat. Her husband appeared: Henry disappeared. He threw himself into conquering literary New York, meeting e.e. cummings, Nathanael West, and James T. Farrell. He tried to sell
Tropic of Cancer
to Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster without success. He also had hopes of publishing in
The New Yorker
and
Esquire;
both turned him down. Driven back on himself, he finished
Black Spring
—a book filled with the Paris spirit, though completed in New York. The exuberance he had tapped in Paris was now within him, and he would never lose it. But it would take thirty years for publishers in his own country to catch up with him.

If we look at
Black Spring
as a key to this period in Henry’s life, we see that he is integrating the New York of his youth with the Paris of his literary breakthrough. Some of the chapters deal with his early life (“The Fourteenth Ward,” “The Tailor Shop”) and some with present-day Paris “(A Saturday Afternoon” and “Walking Up and Down in China”) but the tone of
Black Spring
is the tone of celebration—the celebration of being free at last, free to write, free to be a man.