The Devil at Large (16 page)

In one of my favorite pieces, “A Saturday Afternoon,” Henry describes a ride on a bicycle, stopping to pee at a urinal and what a man thinks while the wheels roll and the bladder empties. His mind flows over the books in his life, from Rabelais to
Robinson Crusoe.
He ruminates on writing. He understands that all writers’ blocks are about fear of criticism.

Begin!
That’s the principal thing. Supposing her nose is not aquiline? Supposing it’s a celestial nose? What difference? When a portrait commences badly it’s because you’re not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you. Take Van Norden—he’s another case. He has been trying for two months to get started with his novel. Each time I meet him he has a new opening for his book. It never gets beyond the opening. Yesterday he said: “You see what my problem’s like. It isn’t just a question of how to begin: the first line decides the cast of the whole book. Now here’s a start I made the other day: Dante wrote a poem about a place called H_____. H-dash, because I don’t want any trouble with the censor.”

Think of a book opening with H-dash! A little private hell which mustn’t offend the censors! I notice that when Whitman starts a poem he writes: “I, Walt, in my 37th year and in perfect health! … I am afoot with my vision…. I dote on myself…. Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding…. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs…. Here or henceforward it is all the same to me…. I exist as I am, that is enough….”

With Walt it is always Saturday afternoon.

In
Black Spring
, Henry writes like a man recently freed to write, like a man to whom life is suddenly joyous: “I am delirious because I am dying so fast,” he proclaims. “I am riding in full sunlight, a man impervious to all but the phenomena of light.” And when he stops rolling on his “racing wheel” to take a pee, “it is all gravy, even the urinal.”

As I stand there looking up at the house fronts a demure young woman leans out of a window to watch me. How many times have I stood thus in this smiling, gracious world, the sun splashing over me and the birds twittering crazily, and found a woman looking down at me from an open window, her smile crumbling into soft little bits which the birds gather in their beaks and deposit sometimes at the base of a urinal where the water gurgles melodiously and man comes along with his fly open and pours the steaming contents of his bladder over the dissolving crumbs. Standing thus, with heart and fly and bladder open, I seem to recall every urinal I ever stepped into—all the most pleasant sensations, all the most luxurious memories, as if my brain were a huge divan smothered with cushions and my life one long snooze on a hot, drowsy afternoon. I do not find it so strange that America placed a urinal in the center of the Paris exhibit at Chicago. I think it belongs there and I think it is a tribute which the French should appreciate. True, there was no need to fly the tricolor above it.
Un peu trop fort, ça!
And yet, how is a Frenchman to know that one of the first things which strikes the eye of the American visitor, which thrills him, warms him to the very gizzard, is this ubiquitous urinal? How is a Frenchman to know that what impresses the American in looking at a
pissotière,
or a
vespasienne,
or whatever you choose to call it, is the fact that he is in the midst of a people who admit to the necessity of peeing now and then and who know also that to piss one has to use a pisser and that if it is not done publicly it will be done privately and that it is no more incongruous to piss, in the street than underground where some old derelict can watch you to see that you commit no nuisance.

I am a man who pisses largely and frequently, which they say is a sign of great mental activity. However it be, I know that I am in distress when I walk the streets of New York. Wondering constantly where the next stop will be and if I can hold out that long. And while in winter, when you are broke and hungry, it is fine to stop off for a few minutes in a warm underground comfort station, when spring comes it is quite a different matter. One likes to piss in sunlight, among human beings who watch and smile down at you. And while the female squatting down to empty her bladder in a china bowl may not be a sight to relish, no man with any feeling can deny that the sight of the male standing behind a tin strip and looking out on the throng with that contented, easy, vacant smile, that lone, reminiscent, pleasurable look in his eye, is a good thing. To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.

Henry’s mind rolls on, from
pissoirs
to books read in toilets, from the King James Bible to Rabelais building the walls of Paris with cunts, from dung to angels and back again. He calls for “a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels.”

A classic purity, then—and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts.
Real banquets!
Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human bones—whilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting
Hallelujah!

Without salt, we are unpreserved. Without obscenity, there is no divinity. Henry embraces dung so he can have angels.

It is this exultant acceptance of all life that he celebrates in
Black Spring.
Its mood is lighter than
Cancer
though it continues many of
Cancer
’s themes. It urges surrender and acceptance. This “message” still offends the Miller antagonist, while those who understand his spirit recognize that it is this very acceptance that is the essence of his greatness.

“The great writers are the ones who don’t judge,” says novelist, journalist, and screenwriter David Black, one of our most sensitive contemporary interpreters of America’s love-hate relationship with sexuality.

Black understands that it is Miller’s all-embracing worldview that makes him unique:

I discovered Miller late. Through Mailer I read Miller. I think Miller is the world-class American twentieth-century writer, the greatest. He has more life in him than anyone. Does he work all the time? No. But when I read him writing about Brooklyn, burlesque shows, different neighborhoods, a sense of life comes through in Miller. The man is filled with love of humanity. Reading Miller is closest in artistic experience to the pornographic carvings in India … They were showing all of life in this art.

Black Spring
shows Miller’s philosophy of acceptance more than any other book. It is full of the joy of being human. With Paris in his blood and bones, Miller can even make sense of and come to terms with his crazy family, the family that caused him such grief:

However,
always merry and bright!
If it was before the war and the thermometer down to zero or below, if it happened to be Thanksgiving Day, or New Year’s or a birthday, or just any old excuse to get together, then off we’d trot, the whole family, to join the other freaks who made up the living family tree. It always seemed astounding to me how jolly they were in our family despite the calamities that were always threatening. Jolly in spite of everything. There was cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, ne’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet fever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders—and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia. The morgue and the insane asylum. The merry crew and the table loaded with good things—with red cabbage and green spinach, with roast pork and turkey and sauerkraut, with kartoffelklösze and sour black gravy, with radishes and celery, with stuffed goose and peas and carrots, with beautiful white cauliflower, with apple sauce and figs from Smyrna, with bananas big as a blackjack, with cinnamon cake and Streussel Küchen, with chocolate layer cake and nuts, all kinds of nuts, walnuts, butternuts, almonds, pecans, hickory nuts, with lager beer and bottled beer, with white wines and red, with champagne, kummel, malaga, port, with schnapps, with fiery cheeses, with dull, innocent store cheese, with flat Holland cheeses, with limburger and schmierkäse, with homemade wines, elderberry wine, with cider, hard and sweet, with rice pudding and tapioca, with roast chestnuts, mandarins, olives, pickles, with red caviar and black, with smoked sturgeon, with lemon meringue pie, with lady fingers and chocolate eclairs, with macaroons and cream puffs, with black cigars and long thin stogies, with Bull Durham and Long Tom and meerschaums, with corncobs and toothpicks, wooden toothpicks which gave you gum boils the day after, and napkins a yard wide with your initials stitched in the corner, and a blazing coal fire and the windows steaming, everything in the world before your eyes except a finger bowl.

In this passage, Miller has finally accepted his family, accepted both their nourishment and their starvation of being, accepted their death-dealing and life-giving qualities, as part of one gestalt.

No one can equal Miller in evoking the physical side of life—food, hunger, illness, health—but always he breaks through the physical to the spiritual. They are intertwined, indivisible. Henry does not say people must always be happy and free of suffering. He does not expect to have no ugly feelings or violent thoughts. He accepts all the extremes of life—the rape fantasies and the murderous thoughts as well as tenderness and affection—and his acceptance gives the reader the gift of
self
-acceptance.

Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge…. Is this the world, this walking up and down, these buildings that are lit up, the men and women passing me? I watch their lips moving, the lips of the men and women passing me. What are they talking about—some of them so earnestly? I hate seeing people so deadly serious when I myself am suffering worse than any of them.
One
life! and there are millions and millions of lives to be lived. So far I haven’t had a thing to say about my own life. Not a thing. Must be I haven’t got the guts. Ought to go back to the subway, grab a Jane and rape her in the street. Ought to go back to Mr. Thorndike in the morning and spit in his face. Ought to stand on Times Square with my pecker in my hand and piss in the gutter. Ought to grab a revolver and fire point-blank into the crowd. The old man’s leading the life of Reilly. He and his bosom pals. And I’m walking up and down, turning green with hate and envy. And when I turn in the old woman’ll be sobbing fit to break her heart. Can’t sleep nights listening to her. I hate her too for sobbing that way. The one robs me, the other punishes me. How can I go into her and comfort her when what I most want to do is to break her heart?

Such admissions soften our hearts rather than harden them. Henry is one of us: he cannot control his fantasies.

Those who have condemned Miller have confused the word with the deed. Henry is not a rapist: he is a man honestly confronting the
imaginary
rapist in himself. In truth, his message is not so different from Freud’s: let the unconscious bubble into consciousness and freedom will be the result. If we censor him, we are really censoring our humanity. It is only by admitting to our own murderous thoughts that we can be free of them, and only by exploring the whole range of our sexuality that we can understand its dark pull on our lives. Censorship is not the answer. Acceptance is.

There was little chance of above-ground publication for
Tropic of Cancer
or
Black Spring.
American publishing was still controlled by the Hicklin rule, a 1868 British judicial interpretation of obscenity as anything that might “corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” U.S. Customs personnel regularly seized and destroyed all literature deemed obscene under this definition—including James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
until Judge Wolsey exempted it in 1934, pronouncing it too “emetic” to encourage lustful thoughts.

Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press could never have published
Tropic of Cancer
in French either (for French obscenity laws were equally strict), but potentially “obscene” books could be published in France if they were in English and thus unavailable to corrupt the incorruptible French. Obelisk Press owed its very existence to this loophole. In his native country, however, Henry was a writer
non grata.
He was too sensitive to rejection to bear this for long, and after an unpromising attempt to crack the American literary establishment, he sailed back to Paris in May of 1935, soon after Anaïs Nin and her husband had returned.

He settled again into 18 Villa Seurat and focused on trying to make himself famous. People who knew him at this period describe the Villa Seurat as a kind of Warholesque “Factory,” with Miller writing, writing, writing and sending copies of his underground book to critics and authors all over the world. He was determined to make his reputation by sheer force of will (and postage).

Meanwhile, he was also working on
The World of Lawrence
(he would struggle with it through the forties), on
Max and the White Phagocytes,
on
Money and How It Gets That Way,
on
Aller Retour New York
(an account of his recent trip to New York, which showed him again how America misused its artists), and on letters to Anaïs Nin, Michael Fraenkel, and many others.