The Devil at Large (20 page)

As a paradigm of the plight of the creative artist in America, Miller’s life is nothing short of terrifying. Always rejected by both the literary establishment and the literary antiestablishment, broke until he was a relatively elderly man, he had no choice but to live on the margins and like it. Had he been a chronic depressive, he probably would not have survived. But Henry’s great good luck was his temperament—“always merry and bright,” as he said—and he went on writing for the sheer joy of it.

So Henry “the failure” was in fact the greatest success. If climbing one’s own mountain against all odds is the mark of spiritual success, Miller was a dazzling success. His tenacity is exemplary. And no one needs tenacity more than an American writer who cannot cut his conscience to the taste of the times—that is, any writer of value.

When
Maroussi
was turned down almost everywhere, when his short pieces could find no home in magazines, Miller asked his new literary agent, John Slocum of Russell and Volkening, what on earth
would
sell in America? Desperate to be read in his native land, Henry needed to know this. Slocum canvassed the publishers, who all seemed to want Miller, the returned expat, to write a book on America.

What a coincidence! He had been thinking of a book on America for a while, and in his head had called it
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
The book, as he envisioned it, would have fifty chapters, with illustrations by his artist friend Abe Rattner, and would be based on notebooks he’d keep on a trip across the United States.

But Doubleday, the contracting publisher, didn’t see it his way. They didn’t want an illustrated book—too expensive to produce. And they didn’t want to give Henry enough money to do the tour of the United States. They wanted a guarantee of no pornography and advanced him $500 for the book, the trip, the whole project.

It was scarcely enough to cover half his expenses, traveling modestly. But Henry had things to say about America that had to find expression, and
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
was fated to be written.

His timing, as usual, could not have been worse. When Henry finished
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
on Christmas Day, 1941, he had in his hand a broadside attack on America just in time for America’s entry into World War II. He knew that the book would not only never be accepted for publication, but might get him locked up as a traitor like the Japanese-Americans who were currently being interned in camps. It was hardly a propitious moment to publish rough truths about America.

Henry and Rattner made their 250,000 mile car trip through America between October 1940 and October 1941. “A year wasted!” Miller wrote of that period. But the book is far from a waste, even though
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
would not be published till 1945 in hardcover, not till 1970 in paperback. Miller revised it in 1944 at Big Sur. Read today, it is an amazing prophecy of things to come. It is almost as though Miller foresaw the eighties turning nineties: “We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor.”

The American passion for materialism and the treadmill of mediocrity it creates is anatomized:

The most terrible thing about America is that there is no escape from the treadmill which we have created. There isn’t one fearless champion of truth in the publishing world, not one film company devoted to art instead of profits. We have no theatre worth the name…. We have no music worth talking about except what the Negro has given us, and scarcely a handful of writers who might be called creative.

Miller saw through to the heart of American hypocrisy—saw it was a country founded on misplaced theories of freedom that had allowed all its ideals to become nothing more than “the biggest profits for the boss, the utmost servitude for the workers….”

But Miller saved his most scathing barbs for the treatment of the American artist:

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold … is debased … the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal …

“I feel at home everywhere, except in my native land,” Miller told a Hungarian friend, a recent émigré to New York:

America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
reads like a page out of our own times. It predicts the utter debasement of art and literature to forms of commerce. And
The Nightmare Notebook
, Henry’s notebook during the trip, which was later published with his and Rattner’s watercolors, is full of life and insight into Miller’s way of thinking—his list-making, his search for the secret of life, his search for an America he could love—under all that hate.

It is typical of writers to burn with the next book while finishing the book on the desk. Even as Henry wrote
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
, he chafed about his
next
book, which he had been carrying in his heart for ten years:
The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, Nexus, Plexus),
his final settlement of the debt to June. He had only begun the story in
Capricorn
, he felt. Now he must tell it all.

What is this drive to write? Surely not for fame or money—which are far more easily gained in less disciplined, less lonely pursuits—but in search of that ecstasy one feels while in the trance of creation, that unity with self, with heart, with Mother. It becomes more necessary than life. It is meditation, balm, release.

“Writing is an act of healing,” says the novelist and critic Doris Grumbach. Every real writer feels this. The fate of the book is almost irrelevant. And thank goddess for that, because the energy to write is needed long before the applause (more likely rotten tomatoes or mute indifference) comes along.

To write is to live in a time warp between creation and response. The labor of writing must be borne long before the reaction, if any. Often, as in Miller’s case, the true response is many decades off.

Henry was still imagining himself in love with June on
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
trip. He says as much in his
Nightmare Notebook:
“Where are you sitting now? … I love you!” he writes in an imaginary telegram to June from Hollywood. And he signs himself: “Valentine Valentino.” He was determined to embark on a great Proustian saga that would make sense of his great love and finally release him from it. But first he had to settle down and find a home, and this time it was the West that would call him.

During the
Nightmare
journey, Henry had become fascinated with Hollywood, which was, in that period, a haven for writers, artists, European émigrés. “A Hollywood conception of Hollywood,” he wrote in the notebook. “Familiar faces—from Paris, Vienna, Cracow, Berlin. Everybody is here. Looks lousy. But the sky is bright. One hopes …”

Miller hoped to find work on the film gravy-train, though he was soon to prove as unsuited for that as for other forms of knuckling under to bosses. Besides, his reputation had preceded him to Los Angeles. Women expected him to be a goatish stud and Hollywood businessmen thought he would be too pure an
artiste
to sell out and become just another schmuck with an Underwood.

They were both right and wrong. Henry was still a romantic about women and servicing “Hollywood wives” was not his idea of romance. He was not about to become a Hollywood writer-for-hire, either. His temperament couldn’t have been less suited. And his skills as a dramatist were all reserved for his own life.

But painting, miraculously, saved him.

During the lean years in Hollywood, between 1942 and 1943, when Miller was shacking up in Beverly Glen with his friends Margaret and Gilbert Neiman and striking out as a potential Hollywood hack, he turned to watercolor painting, which he had loved since the twenties when Emil Schnellock first gave him lessons.

Henry had seen many of the best painters at work, and he himself had the innate freedom of the artist. When he wrote, he worked; when he painted, he played—and everyone could see the joy in the results. Joy was to rescue him once again. In 1942, in Los Angeles, Henry painted for love, not money. He followed his bliss and his bliss always provided for him.

A trip to an art-supply store in Westwood put him in touch with Attilio Bowinkel, a dealer in painters’ supplies, who gave him materials and then displayed the resultant watercolors in his window. When they were snatched up by Arthur Freed, the MGM producer and art collector, Henry was so elated that he began to paint as demonically as he once had written. When the Neimans moved to Colorado, Henry turned their Beverly Glen cottage into a studio and eventually into a gallery where he sold his own work.

This beggar-artist was opening his palms to the heavens, and the heavens were answering. In 1943, he wrote his famous “open letter to all and sundry,” asking for handouts of cash and clothes. The letter was published in
The New Republic
and caused a stir. Even today, people remember it—either with disapproval or amusement.

Henry was an ironic beggar:

Anyone wishing to encourage the watercolor mania would do well to send me paper, brushes and tubes, of which I am always in need. I would also be grateful for old clothes, shirts, socks, etc. I am 5 foot 8 inches tall, weigh 150 pounds, 15½ neck, 38 inch chest, 32 inch waist, hat and shoes both size 7½
.
Love corduroys.

The New Republic
called Henry “one of the most interesting figures on the American literary scene” (though apparently they didn’t find him interesting enough to showcase his work). His fame was as a character, not a writer—and to some extent this remains true even today.

Perhaps it is Henry’s view of money that makes him seem so odd. He had no pride about money because he had ceased to accept the American view that poverty is moral turpitude. When he did have money, he shared it with everyone. When he had none, he expected others to share with him. He was generous as only one who does not believe in material things can be. Giving it all away was his religion. As the sages predict, it always came back.

Some Miller “experts” claim the myriad limited editions of his essays and books were made with hope of gain—but nothing could be farther from the truth. Anyone who has made beautifully printed books and pamphlets knows that the process is painstaking and far from economically remunerative. One does it for the love of hot type on rag bond, the desire to blend various senses: sight, touch, and the music of words.

A writer and a painter who came out of the same Paris that produced Picasso, the surrealists, the small presses of Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare & Co.), Harry Crosby (Black Sun), and Nancy Cunard (Hours), Henry truly cared for the look of books—the synesthesia of books—in a way that was obsolete in publishing even then. There is a great American tradition of self-publishing that goes back to Whitman and before. Henry was aware of this tradition, and aware that he was part of it. That some of the books, letters, lists, and watercolors have become collectors’ items is serendipitous. The American writer who “sells out” hardly does so through limited editions. In fact, when Henry was finally offered a screenwriting contract from MGM in 1943, he refused it, preferring to live by his watercolors, with the angel as his watermark.

In this he knew himself well. He would have been incapable of dealing with the psychological situation of the Hollywood writer-for-hire, the constant rewrites at the behest of the “suits,” the constant attempt to second-guess a fickle public, the committee decisions, the fear, the chronic covering of one’s rear. Henry must have sensed he’d never be able to stand it. And he was right.

But he needed to settle down, have a home, a woman, a place to write, and in 1943 security still eluded him. He wanted to get on with writing his trilogy about his tumultuous romance with June, and for that he needed a calm life. (The irony of writing is that the most tumultuous books require the most regular lives.) He had been rebuffed by two young women he had recently become infatuated with; his watercolor income, which had started like a downpour, had suddenly dried up; and he had no hope of a permanent home. He was feeling his age and, like many writers, he began dreaming of a paradise for artists—and of a patron to free him to create. Everything he needed was given to him.

An anonymous donor set up a modest trust fund for him, much of which, characteristically, he immediately gave to Anaïs Nin and others. He then found his next earthly paradise in Big Sur. After that, he found the woman who was to give him the greatest gifts of his later years: his daughter Valentine and his son, Tony.

Henry came to Big Sur initially because of Jean Varda, the sculptor, but stayed because of the sky, the birds, the fog, the mountains. As he wrote to Anaïs Nin:

I have a sort of Paradise here, as to scenery, but the work involved is almost too much. I live up a steep road, over a mile long, away from the highway. Three times a week the food and mail arrives, and I drag it up with the last ounce of energy in me. Coming down to get it, I feel elated. Always I think I am in the Andes, the view so magnificent.

Henry found in Big Sur a landscape to which his soul responded. “It is a region where extremes meet, a region where one is conscious of weather, of space, of grandeur, and of eloquent silence,” Henry writes in
Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.
This was his place to contemplate eternity, the next stop on his spiritual journey after Greece. “And who can say when this region will once again be covered by the waters of the deep?” he asked.

Henry settled here, between earth and sky, between time and eternity, to make the next stage of his journey. “Here the redwood made its last stand … [Big Sur has] the look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity.”