The Devil at Large (12 page)

He began to work at his French, which, to the end, he spoke with a heavy Brooklyn accent. When the weather got wretched in Paris in November, he thought again of going home, but just couldn’t raise the money. He was forced to stay on, to cultivate his friends, his notebooks, his letters—and eventually his luck began to change.

A pivotal event late in 1930 was his meeting with Richard Osborn, who would eventually be his link to Anaïs Nin. Osborn was an upper-class WASP Yale graduate from Connecticut who wanted to be a writer. Generous, crazy, intent on having a good time, Osborn was employed as a lawyer at the Paris office of the National City Bank, where Hugh Guiler, Anaïs Nin’s husband, was also employed, supporting his wife’s elegant bohemian life in Louviciennes. Dick Osborn, who loved bohemians and wanted to be one, impulsively invited Henry to live with him at 2 rue Auguste-Bartholdi, a smallish, pretty street of apartments and little shops not far from the Tour Eiffel and the Champs de Mars. Rue Auguste-Bartholdi still has an authentic turn-of-the-century bar on the corner and looks as it must have done in the thirties. Henry was to find his first happiness in Paris there, on a street named for the creator of the Statue of Liberty!

Given a free place to live, fancier than anything Perlès could offer, Henry could work at ease and walk the streets for inspiration. He went on compulsively reworking the already overworked
Crazy Cock
, but he also began to write some pieces in his newfound voice. The story “Mademoiselle Claude” dates from this time, and it signals the birth of the new Henry Miller. “If Mlle Claude is a whore, then what name shall I find for the other women I know?” he asks. The direct first-person voice is beginning to assert itself.

By the time Henry had been in Paris a year, he was surrounded by friends such as Dick Osborn, Alfred Perlès, and Wambly Bald (who wrote a column,
La Vie Bohème,
for the
Chicago Tribune
and gave Henry his first newspaper publicity). Perlès got Henry work writing articles for the
Tribune
, which gave him some much-needed confidence. He began filling the wall above his desk with huge sprawling charts and diagrams of the unwritten books that teemed in his brain. He was seething with inspiration.

On the last day of 1930, Henry had a near collision with mortality, which must have convinced him of divine protection. His taxi flipped over, but he walked away totally unharmed. Divine protection was to be abundant in the next year of his life—1931 was to prove for Henry what 1819 was for Keats: the
anno mirabilis.

It was in 1931 that Henry began to find intellectual peers: Walter Lowenfels, the poet and critic, as bitter a satirist of America as Henry; and Michael Fraenkel, a publisher, philosopher, and writer. Fraenkel, the inspiration for Boris in
Tropic of Cancer
, believed that all current civilization was a celebration of the power of death. In order to combat this death force, a writer had to work anonymously, creating for the sake of creativity, not for the sake of reputation. Michael Fraenkel had collaborated with Walter Lowenfels on a pamphlet called “Anonymous: The Need for Anonymity,” which expounded this theory, and Henry was very much under its influence for a time.

It is fascinating to me that Henry began
Tropic of Cancer
thinking he would publish the book anonymously. Anonymity is a great liberator—even if one later changes one’s mind and acknowledges the book. I have often tricked myself into writing with candor by promising myself either not to publish or to publish under a pseudonym. Freed of modesty, freed of self-judgment, one can write with maximum passion.

“The cancer of time is eating us away,” Henry declares at the beginning of
Tropic of Cancer.

Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

Clearly the passionate life force of
Tropic of Cancer
was partly provoked into being by Henry’s desire to escape the prison of death. And anonymity was for a time his key.

During this critical period in Henry’s writing life, June was mainly in New York. This was lucky, because Henry was still obsessed with her and she tended to be a difficult muse. During the early stages of the composition of both
Moloch
and
Crazy Cock
, she had demanded of Henry countless revisions to make herself look good. Of course no writer can function that way. With June gone, Henry was at last free to write.

Anaïs Nin came to supply Henry with the acceptance he needed. She became a beneficent mother-surrogate and perhaps his greatest love. Nin’s passionate belief in Henry (not to mention her financial support) made this creative blossoming possible. Her journals, particularly the unexpurgated versions of their liaison,
Henry and June
and
Incest
, describe this period vividly and describe Henry better than he describes himself. Henry’s own books about these Paris years—
Tropic of Cancer
,
Black Spring
, and
Quiet Days in Clichy
—deliberately omit his romance with the married Nin (and Nin’s infatuation with June) and therefore only tell one side of what must have been one of the most extraordinary triangles in literary history.

Henry kept his promise to Anaïs Nin: he would not jeopardize her marriage in print. For a writer whose stock-in-trade was his own odyssey, this was a powerful renunciation and one that demonstrates how much Nin meant to him. Even years later, when their relationship turned hostile, he did not go back on his word.

Because of Henry’s loyalty, we hear of the romance only from Anaïs’s own pen:

I’ve met Henry Miller.

He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult for my D.H. Lawrence book.

When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He’s a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.

Anaïs Nin immediately captures the essence of Henry, the exuberant life force coupled with the dreamy pensiveness:

In the middle of lunch, when we were seriously discussing books, and Richard had sailed off on a long tirade, Henry began to laugh. He said, “I’m not laughing at you, Richard, but I just can’t help myself. I don’t care a bit, not a bit who’s right. I’m too happy. I’m just so happy right this moment with all the colors around me, the wine, the whole moment is so wonderful, so wonderful.” He was laughing almost to tears. He was drunk. I was drunk, too, quite. I felt warm and dizzy and happy.

We talked for hours. Henry said the truest and deepest things, and he has a way of saying “hmmmm” while trailing off on his own introspective journey.

Henry is intrigued and attracted. He wonders if maybe she is “the kind of woman who doesn’t hurt a man”—which indicates how scarred June had left him. Anaïs reports, in
Henry and June
, liking “his fierceness,” but rejects “his desire, pointing at me … like a sword” because, as she says, “for me it can’t be without love.”

A few days later she discovers “that he knows the technique of kissing better than anyone I’ve met,” and her “curiosity for sensuality is stirred.” Yet when he offers his penis to her mouth, she is stricken: “I get up as if struck by a whip.” She claims inexperience, which he immediately disputes. On some level he knows that he is to play Mellors to her Lady Chatterley. After all, they are both lovers of Lawrence and know only too well the roles they will be assigned by fate.

Within days, her husband, Hugo is worried: “You fall in love with people’s minds. I’m going to lose you to Henry.”

Henry’s “animal feeling for life” attracts Anaïs even as she rationalizes that Hugo is “finer than any man I know.” She presents Henry with little gifts—books, money, railway tickets. She longs to give him a home and an income, so he can write.

Bored with Hugo’s tepid sexuality, she is intrigued with animal Henry. He seems the initiator into the life force. Then, all at once, June Mansfield Miller arrives, becoming at once Anaïs’s rival, inamorata, and muse.

Anaïs captured June more vividly than Henry ever did, for Henry’s writing, even at its best, is only ever about Henry. The complete solipsist cannot describe another person. To Anaïs, June is “the most beautiful woman on earth.” She has “a startlingly white face, burning eyes.”

Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her, I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded.

Anaïs Nin falls in love with June “like a man.” She knows that Henry has no choice but to be besotted by her. Now Nin is besotted too.
Henry and June
is a remarkable document because of the vividness of its description of a woman’s emotions while involved in a passionate love triangle:

June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others’ eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it….

A startlingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

Anaïs, June, and Henry begin a strange three-way flirtation, which is also a flirtation with literature—a ménage a trois of three married lovers who lard their relationship with lies. Every betrayal is forgiven if it provokes art, and Anaïs is the most artful dissimulator of all. Even in her notebooks, she seems to be dramatising herself for posterity. And yet she tells the story of a woman’s sexuality more honestly than any writer who ever lived.

Anaïs practiced a sexual freedom which makes that of our own age seem timid. Open to her own bisexuality, adventurous in her open marriage, Anaïs presents herself as the true
pίcara
of sex despite—or perhaps because of—her comfortable alliance with her husband, Hugh Guiler. She admits that she is Donna Giovanna, desperate to seduce and abandon men, to wreak her revenge on a father who abandoned her. Henry was far more at home, whatever his reputation, with serial monogamy in the American fashion.

Henry’s dependency on Anaïs appears to have been far greater than hers on him. For all his fictional boasting of his sexual exploits, his other partners appear to have been casual, sometimes paid, while she was deeply involved with a variety of men, including her husband and her two psychiatrists, René Allendy and Otto Rank. She was also, for a time, incestuously involved with her own father, a period she describes with great vividness in
Incest.
Nowhere before, to my knowledge, has a woman written so candidly of breaking the final oedipal taboo.

Before reading this document, I thought that Anaïs had what might be called the European aristocratic view of sex: now her sexual adventures seem utterly transformed. She was acting out her seduction and abandonment by a powerful, erotic father. And she lived what most women cannot even admit they dream. For all their self-boosting, her unexpurgated diaries constitute one of the landmarks in twentieth-century literature. Both as literary history and as the history of female sexuality, the diaries fulfill Henry’s predictions that they would eventually be seen as one of the great works of our age. Perhaps unwittingly they show how much freer a woman’s sexuality can be than a man’s. While Henry and Hugo pined for Anaïs and wished to possess her, Anaïs was capable of juggling several men with minimal guilt.

In
Henry and June,
she chronicles the immense power June had over Henry. She understood his masochism and how it fired his work:

And what does she do to Henry? She humiliates him, she starves him, she breaks his health, she torments him—and he thrives; he writes his book.

His book. There is more to say about his book. Why was it such an explosion? Why did it change the world?

Early in
Tropic of Cancer
, Henry gives us the key, the secret of its revolutionary charge:

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas,
comme d’habitude.
Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation …

Remember where the world was in 1931 and 1932, when Henry was writing this “last book.” The Great Depression was spreading through America and Europe. The Great War had left a generation of corpses and
mutilés.
Those who were not mutilated in body were mutilated in spirit or in pocketbook. National income had dropped 33 percent in the U.S. between 1929 and 1931. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” was on the airwaves, and the suicide rate was soaring as the employment rate was plummeting. For Henry, down but not out in Paris, the world was just now experiencing what he had been experiencing all along. Art would not suffice. What was needed was something stronger: a revolution in consciousness, the eternal truth that is omitted from books.

What was the nature of this truth? And why did Henry have to relate his picaresque journey through the Paris underworld to illuminate it? Because he had to go to the end of the night in order to explode with the truth he discovered there: that all freedom comes only with total surrender. Henry discovers in Paris that it is only when man has died in the world that he can begin to live in the spirit. When his back is to the wall, he bursts free of repression. At the bottom, he begins his ascent.