Sunrise with Seamonsters (37 page)

It was a happy experience, this Christmas ghost story. My children are now too young to read any of my other books, and they have only the vaguest notion of what I do all day. They are proud and pleased when they see my name on a new book, but beyond an acquaintance with the titles they have no idea of what is between the covers. (And I wonder, sometimes with a sense of dread, what they will think at the age of twenty or so, when they chance upon a novel of mine; will it arouse pity, or
admiration, or cause embarrassment?) It struck me that they would not read anything of mine that was not written specifically for them. So, in the spirit of Edward Lear, who gladly turned from one of his Indian watercolors to sketch a cartoon for a young friend, I made another attempt last Christmas.

Their requirements: a London setting; snow; suspense; a happy ending; and "please put a cat in it." I had the setting immediately. There is a church near where we live in which William Blake was married. It is a Georgian church, St. Mary's in Battersea, sited directly on the south bank of the Thames. One of the windows in the church is dedicated to the memory of Benedict Arnold, a useful reminder that one country's traitor is another's patriot-hero. Arnold's bones lie somewhere in the muddy churchyard, and there is also a boat and mooring at the edge of that churchyard. From this dingy precinct of South London you can see clearly the prim pink brick and iron balconies of Chelsea.

"London Snow"—the title, but nothing else, is from a Robert Bridges poem—was a hit with my children, and reading it to them on the three nights preceding Christmas, leaving the hammerstroke for Christmas Eve, was an intense pleasure for me. It was in a way like a rehearsal of the oldest form of fiction, telling this long story on successive nights in the close seclusion of my children's room; it was also an excuse to be alone with them, an invitation to see what my work is and a homemade groping toward an enchantment in producing some of my own ghosts. I felt lucky in being able to share it with them, and I promised that I would do it every year—a new story—for as long as they could stand it.

Purely for my own amusement, I hired the wood-engraver, John Lawrence, to illustrate the text, and decided to print a small edition myself, with the best paper I could lay my hands on, the best printing and binding. It is a limited edition: I will sell enough copies to pay for the publication, and I'll give the rest away as Christmas presents. That is for this year, and the whole enterprise has been immensely satisfying, the result a more grandly produced book than I have ever seen commercially published. Really, a book can be a beautiful thing, given patience, the collaboration of a gifted artist, a little money and a lot of time.

And I suppose the appeal of a Christmas story should not be a riddle. It is the imaginative and civilized celebration of a time of year that is full of mystery—part joy, part fear. It is expressed as an ambiguous epiphany in the last sentence of the best Christmas story ever written, James Joyce's "The Dead": "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

There is a poem entitled "Shitty" by Kingsley Amis in D. J. Enright's
Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse.
Reading it, I was instantly put in mind of Henry Miller, because it is not shocking but bright and funny, less a tone of voice than a startling gesture, the respectable writer clearing his throat and going
ptooey
while you watch. I think we are shockproof as far as coarse language is concerned; now, what alarms us, and rightly, is squalid action, the aristocrat and the boy scout, the traitorous don, the cabinet ministers wheeling and dealing in slag-heaps and ennobling shifty little asset-strippers. Next to these men's deeds, what is Miller's grunting? Anyway, he made it possible—he among others—for us to say exactly what we mean in our own words, and it is enjoyable to hear Mr Amis, grumpily profane, expressing common sentiments in direct language.

When Henry Miller stopped shocking people with his gonadal glow he was no longer taken seriously. But that was a long time coming.
Tropic of Cancer
was published in France in 1934, yet it was almost another thirty years before it was freely available in America and England. The illicitness contributed to his legend and he was forgiven his flatulence. A loophole in French law meant that books in English were not subject to censorship, and Miller's books could be regularly published under the Obelisk Press imprint alongside epics of coprophilia by "Akbar del Piombo."

Miller was a late bloomer—forty-two when his first book appeared—though he claimed that in the 1920s he hawked his prose-poems like Fuller brushes from door to door in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He loved this starving-artist image of himself, the romance of penury and neglect, writing against the odds, whistling in the dark, with his flat cap yanked over his eyes and (he says) muttering "Fuck you, Jack" to curious bystanders.

Anyone who has read Orwell's essay "Inside the Whale" knows how profoundly Miller affected and liberated at least one English temper. He was Orwell's opposite—reckless, amoral, loud, boastful, mendacious, and wholly contemptuous of politics. Orwell praised Miller's vigor and imagination, Miller returned the compliment by saying (in
The Paris Review),
"Though he was a wonderful chap ... in the end I thought him
stupid ... a foolish idealist. A man of principle, as we say. Men of principle bore me..." What was Miller's philosophy? "One has to be a lowbrow," he said, "a bit of a murderer ... ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or bad one."

Typically, he talked through his hat, and apart from the most dubious generalities, didn't have an idea in his head. He claimed to be on the side of joy, freedom, criminality, insanity, ecstasy; he wasn't particular, but neither was Whitman, whom he much resembled. His writing was wild talk, scatological rather than sexual ("I am for obscenity and against pornography"). He was a shouter—a boomer, as they say Down South—and there are not many of those who achieve much in literature. His look, that of a Chinese sage, was misleading. Underneath was a hobo, the sort who sits stinking and dozing in public libraries, who screams abuse (some of it quite original) when he is told to move on, and who cherishes views such as "Civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture."

He is the only hero in his books. Gore Vidal remarked (in a review of
Black Spring)
on how people are constantly saying, "You're wonderful, Henry!" and "How do you do it, Henry?" and never once does someone say, "Did anyone ever tell you you're full of shit, Henry?" Rumbustiousness was his watchword and his ego was all that mattered. From
Tropic of Cancer
to the
Rosy Crucifixion
trilogy it is all Henry Miller, calling attention to himself. He attempted to write about Greece in
The Colossus of Maroussi,
but his cacophonous meditation obscures the ruins. His unfinished book on D. H. Lawrence was crowded with Miller on Life and Sex. In the early forties he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to write a book about America. He was turned down for the fellowship but wrote the book all the same—
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
, cross-country in a purring old car: Miller at large. By then he had just about stopped writing sentences such as "O glabrous world, O glab and glairy—under what moon do you lie cold and gleaming" and turned his attention to American bread, which he found disgusting and full of chemicals.

At the end of that trip he settled in what is certainly one of the most beautiful parts of America, the California promontory known as Big Sur, and wrote
Remember to Remember, The Books in my Life,
and his memoirs of the 'twenties,
Sexus, Plexus
and
Nexus.

In his later years he moved to Los Angeles and found fulfillment playing table tennis with naked Japanese girls, which was one of his versions of paradise. I suspected he was gaga when he championed Erica Jong as a great writer. His judgement had not always been so bad. His literary friendships—Lawrence Durrell, Alfred Perles—were wide-ranging and generous; he was besieged by would-be writers hoping for his bear hug.

I first read him in school, the smuggled
Tropics
and then
The Henry
Miller Reader.
I was shocked and uplifted by what seemed to me great comedy and the rough and tumble of exuberant language. I had never read anything so deflating to pompousness, so manic or irreverent. It loosened something in my adolescent soul and helped me begin to write. I did not know that it was mostly fakery, using words for their sound alone, posturing and booming. It was a tonic, and it was only later that I discovered its ingredients to be piss and vinegar.

Earlier this year, a biography of Miller described that wonderful, hilarious life he claimed he had led to be totally imaginary. His life had been rather dull, he had been hen-pecked, he always did the washing-up. But this makes him, for me, a better writer—perhaps one of our more imaginative novelists instead of a noisy memoirist.

We are lucky to live in an age when books are seldom suppressed or banned—I speak of Britain and America, not Singapore or Paraguay or Iran. For this alone, our debt to Henry Miller is considerable. Walt Whitman wrote, "Unscrew the locks from the doors. Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Miller was not a very subtle carpenter. He kicked that door down, and allowed many writers to pass through.

We live in an age when a book called
Modern Men of Letters
would be as thin as
Great Chinese Comedians
or
Famous Women Composers,
and yet there are exceptions. The finished copies of his biography of Turgenev had just arrived; his essay on Gabriel Garcia Marquez was in the current issue of the
New Statesman;
the previous night the usually punctual
Ten O'Clock News
started fifteen minutes late to allow extra time for the TV adaptation of his story "Blind Love," and that morning the London
Times
had described the author in a review as "truly venerable."

He entered the restaurant in his Russian-style fur hat and was intercepted by waiters and diners—handshakes and salutes, "So good to see you," "Wonderful play"—and as he sat down, a man at a nearby table whispered admiringly to his companions, "Why there's Victor Pritchett!" It was the sort of entrance Chesterton might have stage-managed, but Sir Victor Pritchett takes it in his stride. He doesn't like to be made a fuss of, he writes every day ("it excites me to work hard") and he loathes being called venerable: "It makes one feel rather like a dean, someone who expects to be bowed to—with my hands clasped behind my back and walking very slowly, muttering and moralizing."

At the age of seventy-seven he has a hiker's obvious health, a downright manner, an exuberant curiosity and the sort of twinkle that puts one in mind of a country doctor—that spirit-boosting responsiveness that works cures on malingerers. He looks lovable, he writes with a vigorous flair, bringing insight to appreciation; and he has done so for fifty years—his first book,
Marching Spain,
appeared in 1928. The broadcast of "Blind Love" was a satisfaction. The first time he saw it he wept he was so moved by it. The second time he winced and concluded that the adaptation—not his—wasn't much good. The story, which is almost certainly a masterpiece, was rejected by an American magazine editor who said, "When I see a swimming pool at the beginning of a story I know someone's going to throw himself into it."

Although he has written six novels, four books of literary criticism, six of travel, two volumes of autobiography and two major biographies, the
short story is his real love, as he has demonstrated in eight collections. In his prize-winning memoir,
Midnight Oil,
he described his first attempts to write. Apart from a few years at Alleyn's School he had no formal education. "Out of an old-fashioned conviction about wanting to be a writer," he told me, "I went to Paris in the 'twenties. I didn't know of other writers, though I met Man Ray and I chatted a number of times with him and his mistress. It wasn't until I went to Spain and Ireland that I met writers and serious intellects, and of course by going abroad I completely by-passed the English class system. In Ireland I wasn't bound by any code. You must know the saying—nothing is lower than an Irish aristocrat.' I never missed not having an English education. I used to feel sorry for the Eton-Oxfofd chap—business, friends, golf, the grind. 'God, what a life,' I used to think. 'I suppose he's not going to be a writer—that's hard luck on him.'"

Pritchett is, to my mind, not only the complete man of letters but also the ultimate Londoner, as familiar with club life as with the routine in the outer suburbs of Peckham and Heme Hill. He has seen Yeats and Wells rolling penny pieces down the ballroom bannister of the Savile Club and launching them into the hall outside the snooker room, and schoolchildren in South London in 1910, confronted by their first motorcar, rushing into the street and chanting,

Old iron never rusts!
Solid tires never bust!

In his most famous novel,
Mr Beluncle,
he satirized the émigré lower-middle-class Londoner, and in many of his stories, most notably in the volumes
Blind Love
and
The Camberwell Beauty—
depicted minutely the people of the city, antique dealer, interior decorator, barrow-boy. "Every story causes me agony—trying to find out how to write it," he says. "I can't think. That's the real trouble. I need a piece of paper." His writing, like his reading, is vast: "I read for the pleasure of learning how to write." At the age of sixteen he admired Belloc ("Don't read Conrad, I was told. He writes very bad English and he's a hopeless romantic. Yeats thought very poorly of Shaw and they said Proust was on the way out"), Anatole France, and later Liam O'Flaherty, the Spaniard Pio Baroja ("I liked his terse style") and Chekhov, "though I identified myself unavailingly."