The Devil at Large (11 page)

It is easy to see why this Paris was so much more congenial to Henry than the New York he had fled—a New York dominated by the crash of 1929, and the decade of mad optimism about business that had preceded it. Here Henry’s inability to keep a job, about which he always had guilt feelings, was the precursor of art. Henry was enough of his mother’s son to wonder whether he was a genius or a ne’er-do-well. In Paris, at least, that question was settled.

Even Georges Belmont (known in those days as Pelorson), a good boy from the Ecole Normale Superiéure, fled both the Sorbonne and the intellectual life and went instead to Montparnasse.

Montparnasse got particularly interesting late. It was after eleven that the
real
things began. You had the kind of people who didn’t care if they got up at twelve—who had absolutely no positive reason to get up at six o’clock or seven o’clock to go to work. And it’s very difficult to capture this—there was
life
, there was
movement
, all the time.

Despite the economic collapse, there were plenty of Americans in Paris “and the Americans were still jolly,” according to Georges. They continued to act as if they were on holiday. “They were important because they still had money and they liked to spend it.”

Paris was also the center of sin. Opposite La Coupole was the Select, a gathering place for homosexuals of both sexes. And there was a kind of tolerance there still unknown in New York. In fact it was the sort of place where one was embarrassed to be straight. Again, in Georges’s description:

It was a kind of zoo. Lots of people didn’t
dare
enter the place because they didn’t feel at ease. I had a very good homosexual friend whom I had known at school, so I was accepted. My friend lived with one of the queens of the lesbians in Paris—and they were in love. They never
made
love—but they were in love and they were both terribly jealous. Once I saw a marriage there. Two men got married. One was dressed in a long, white gown, a crown of orange flowers, a veil, everything. They exchanged rings, received a religious blessing from a pseudo-priest. That was the essence of Montparnasse in those days.

“Montparnasse in those days.” A different sense of time. The contrast between the New York of
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch
and the Paris of
Tropic of Cancer
is just this. And it is this different sense of time that creates freedom. Paris breathes freedom into Henry and Henry responds by breathing it into his prose.

I think few of us in the world of the nineties are aware of how much we have lost now that such leisure has gone. Most of us are imprisoned in our own schedules, our days broken into half-hour fragments like the rulings in our Filofaxes. It is almost as if our notebooks rule us, rather than us ruling them. The life of the cafés, of talk, of walk, of leisure, of
dolce far niente
seems an indulgence to us, as does reading, dreaming, sleeping. There are “successful” people in our world who boast of how little sleep they get, who compete at being busy. But the truth is that all creativity takes idleness; when we lose it, we lose our ability to invent the next phase of problem-solving for the human race.

There was a vast difference between prewar and postwar days in Paris. World War I had turned Europe upside down and left an unparalleled despair in the writers and intellectuals who flocked to Paris in its wake. Inner and outer weather had changed—as had fashions. Bowler hats, celluloid collars, gas lamps, and horses had disappeared. Women had finally been liberated from whalebone and now wore comfortable clothes—what would later be called a unisex look. The Jazz Age had liberated both bodies and minds.

Now, suddenly, the boom atmosphere of twenties’ Paris was gone, and with it the superfluity of parasites (designers, art dealers, courtesans) who live on the reverberations of boom.

The change between 1928 and 1930 was abrupt—suddenly hard times arrived. But, as the metamorphosis from the fat 1980s to the lean 1990s in our own era has shown us, this can happen breathlessly fast.

Paris in 1930 was a city on the edge of an abyss. There would soon be thirty million unemployed in the world (four million in Germany alone) and by 1933 the planet would have a new would-be master in Adolf Hitler. But for Henry, who had been poor and dishonored in America, poverty with honor in Paris felt like release. Freedom breathes through the prose of
Tropic of Cancer
—the story of a man learning how to breathe. Or, as he describes it in one of his remarkable letters to his friend Emil Schnellock, “The Paris book: first person, uncensored, formless—fuck everything!”

Henry found his exuberant new voice, the voice of
Tropic of Cancer
, primarily in his letters to Emil Schnellock, his painter pal from his old Brooklyn neighborhood who lent him the ten dollars that was in his pocket when he sailed to Europe in 1930. Henry’s
Letters to Emil
(collected and edited in 1989 by George Wickes) constitute an amazing record of how a writer discovers his sound. The transition from the tortured prose of the two fledgling books to the explosive simplicity of
Tropic of Cancer
is all there. We hear the explosion. We see the contrail streak across the sky.

Henry Miller’s writing odyssey is an object lesson for anyone who wants to learn to be a writer. How do you go from self-consciousness to unself-consciousness? How do you come to sound on paper as natural as you sound in speech?
Crazy Cock
and
Moloch
will show you the first parts of a journey.
Tropic of Cancer
is the destination.

In between come
Letters to Emil.
These letters are crucial because they are written to someone who accepts Henry completely and with whom he can be wholly himself. In them, he tests the voice that will revolutionize the world in
Tropic of Cancer.
It is the voice of the New York writer revolting against New York. And it is the voice of the weary
pίcaro
—weary of flopping from pillar to post:

Two years of vagabondage has taken a lot out of me. Given me a lot, too, but I need a little peace now, a little security in which to work. In fact, I ought to stop living for a long while and just work. I’m sick of gathering experiences. There’ll be a lot to tell when I get back to New York. Enough for many a wintry night. But immediately I think of N.Y. I get frightened. I hate the thought of seeing that grim skyline, the crowds, the sad Jewish faces, the automats, the dollars so hard to get, the swell cars, the beautiful clothes, the efficient businessmen, the doll faces, the cheap movies, the hullabaloo, the grind, the noise, the dirt, the vacuity and sterility, the death of everything sensitive …

Emil gave Henry the strength to embrace his freedom:

I will explode in the Paris book. The hell with form, style, expression and all those pseudo-paramount things which beguile the critics. I want to get myself across this time—and direct as a knife-thrust.

Emil freed Henry by being the perfect audience:

You see, Emil, this book (which I call, tentatively, “The Last Book”) is like that beautiful big valise of yours, of stout leather, that expands or collapses, that you throw things into pell-mell regardless of whether they are starched or pressed or stained or not stained…. I’ve gotten over the idea of writing literature, if you can understand what I mean by that…. Almost from the day I arrived I sensed something different in the air, in my air…. New York always gave me a sinking feeling when I came back…. Paris is smiling—she welcomes you without distinction of race, creed or color. Her vegetables look brighter, her women gayer, her workers more industrious, her cops more intelligent. She is aged but not careworn. The roofs are so wonderful—all those fucking chimney pots, the black of them, the slanting studio windows, the walls with their traces of rooms which no longer exist, the bridges, each one like a poem…. Well, it’s like my home now, though I remain a foreigner and always will be. But whenever I make a journey, it will always be Paris that I want to think of coming back to—not New York. New York belongs in a finished past, a past like some evil dream….

Brassaï also records the transformation that came over Miller in Paris: “In France, his brow smoothed out, he became happy, smiling. An irrepressible optimism irradiated his whole being.”

This optimism, among other things, creates the unique sound of
Tropic of Cancer:

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to
want
to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Compare this open, direct song to the reader with the fustiness of
Crazy Cock
, which Miller began in New York in the late twenties as
Lovely Lesbians.
The voice of Miller in
Crazy Cock
is third person, stilted, dusty. Henry appears to be ventriloquising a Literary Voice—with a capital
L.

The writer who invented first person, present tense exuberance for the twentieth century is writing in the third person! And it doesn’t suit him. It makes him use words like “wondrous,” “totteringly,” “blabberingly,” and “abashed.” Here is Henry the Victorian, the reader of Marie Corelli, writing in a pastiche of Victorian romance and Dreiserian realism.

But
Crazy Cock
is fascinating for what it tells us about Henry’s literary roots. Henry Miller was born heir to the Victorian age—even in the seventies, when I knew him, he used to rave to me about Marie Corelli—and
Crazy Cock
shows us what Henry had to overcome to find his writer’s voice:

More wondrous than ever was her beauty now. Like a mask long withheld. Mask or mask of a mask? mask or prism? Protective or deflective? Fragments of questions racing through his mind whilst he arranged harmoniously the disharmony of her being….

Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him, peering at him from behind the mask. And all the riddles that had perplexed and tormented him fell away. A rapport such as the living establish with the dying. Like a queen advancing to her throne she approached. He rose totteringly, his limbs quaking. In his heart there was a tumult. A wave of gratitude, and abasement, engulfed him. A desire seized him to fling himself on his knees, to thank her blabberingly for deigning to notice him.

Blabberingly indeed.

That blabbering voice was the one Henry brought to Paris. What he came home with was the sound of his native speech rediscovered.

How did this transformation occur? Can we trace the steps?

When Henry first arrived in Europe in February 1930, on the
American Banker
, he debarked in London. By mutual consent, he had left June, who had promised to send him money, in New York. He endured a grim, dreary time in London, staying in the cheapest digs he could find, walking the streets, and exploring the British Museum. He caught the boat train for Paris the moment some cash arrived from June at American Express.

As he said to Emil, he was at the time “thirty-eight, poor and unknown.” He had the carbons of
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock
with him; clearly he had still not given up hope on these early hopeless works. He had better clothes than he’d ever need in Bohemian Paris—clothes from his father, the failed master tailor—which in time he would have no choice but to sell. And he was cut off from friends and family for the first time in his middle-aged but still unfledged life.

He stayed in a series of cheap Left Bank hotels, marked up his maps of Paris, and walked the streets, looking for literary echoes. His final destination was always the American Express office at 11 rue Scribe, and always there was the desperate hope of news and money from June. Paris was feeding Henry’s heart, but not his stomach. As March turned to April, he had received no more cash from June—only promises. He was on the point of utter destitution when Alfred Perlès, an Austrian writer who worked at the
Chicago Tribune
(and whom he had met in Paris in 1928 with June and the “lovely lesbian” Jean Kronski) turned up. Perlès was to become Henry’s master of revels. He immediately invited Henry to share his modest room for a time, and began to teach him how to live by his wits. Perlès—or Fred or Alf or Joey as Henry called him—was to be an important friend for the rest of Henry’s life, but he was never as important as during those early days when Henry was destitute in a new country, lonely for June yet also glad to be rid of her.

“Only get desperate enough and everything will turn out well” was Henry’s Paris mantra. And he proved it true.
Tropic of Cancer
could not be written until Henry let go of literature, of New York, of all his ties to the tailor shop and his mother. It was to be “the last book,” a book by “the last man on earth,” a book to end all books. And it still feels that way.

Henry lived with Perlès in various cheap hotels, even slept in cinemas at times. He ran into an Indian messenger from the Cosmodemonic who gave him a job as houseman, which became a funny episode in
Cancer.
He hocked his beautifully tailored suits, the last vestiges of his patrimony; he cadged money and drinks from other expatriates. Finally, when June arrived on the
Majestic
in September 1930, Henry was so overwrought that he missed meeting her boat train. They went back to the Hôtel de Paris (where they had stayed in 1928) and for a short time were blissfully reunited. June promised everything, as usual, but it soon became obvious that she had really come with the hope of landing a movie job. Henry had written to her about meeting a woman director, Germaine Dulac, who might employ her, and June, ever the spinner of daydreams, had taken Henry’s promises literally. When the dreams did not materialize, Henry and June began to battle hideously again. In a month or so, June sailed back to New York on borrowed money. Henry very nearly went with her, but once that impulse passed, he felt freed by her departure.