The Devil at Large (22 page)

It is a fallacy of our benighted publishing industry that numbers and sales figures predict the “importance” of books. The truth is that many of the most significant books of our time were either printed in tiny first editions by hitherto unheard of presses—
Ulysses
appeared in 1922 in an edition of 750 copies—or not printed at all until many decades after their composition, like Anaïs Nin’s diaries. The millions of copies of
Scarlett
, the so-called sequel to
Gone with the Wind
, and Danielle Steele’s old wives’ tales, will have vanished into the landfill when Miller’s banned, smuggled books are still being read. Life is short, art is long, and freedom of the press moves forward like the light from vanished stars. Often the author is not around to enjoy the fruits of creation. No wonder the most important discipline the writer must cultivate is detachment.

Perhaps this was why, when Miller finally found himself famous for books written years earlier, he did not quite believe he had entered the realm of the kosher literary gent, and continued to publish with tiny presses and to live at the margins of “official” literary culture. Official literary culture had never been kind to him, had never understood him or granted him the barest livelihood from his work, even during his most productive years, and he truly felt he did not belong with its supposed worthies.

This must also account for much of the distressing unevenness of Henry’s work. He never received any useful, practical criticism or enjoyed any nurturing editorial relationships. He was either an embattled, rejected author or the object of cult adulation. In order to continue working, he was forced to take a fuck-everything attitude toward the literary world. Either that, or slit his throat. He
had
to be defiant. As late as 1975, Henry said to me: “I read the literary pages and my name is never mentioned, it seems.” (Even today a quick check of major universities and colleges, including Columbia, UCLA, Reed, Bennington, and Barnard, reveal no courses in Miller, and no Miller titles show up even in survey courses.)

It was Henry’s fate to change the culture from underground, as it were, and never to be given official credit for doing so until well after he was dead. He vacillated between defiance and detachment, and had little trust in the advice given to him about his writing, even when it came from beloved friends.

Larry Durrell didn’t like
Sexus
any better than I do. He cabled Henry that it would completely ruin his reputation and that he should withdraw it from publication. Henry flatly refused to do so, and even forgave Durrell the slur on his work. When Durrell wrote to Henry “what on earth possessed you to leave so much twaddle in?” Henry calmly replied:

Larry, I can never go back on what I’ve written. If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.

It is possible that Henry might have felt this way even if he had encountered a caring editor whom he felt he could trust, but I wonder whether his narcissism would have permitted an editor to function. It was not in the cards for Henry to be able to trust anyone, because his best work was so far ahead of its time—and his worst work, as with many writers, was horrendous self-parody. Henry wrote the only way he knew how—out of a blind, brute desire to get it all down. The next stage—the shaping and honing and selecting—was in a sense denied him, because he had no choice but to write headlong and pell-mell. His fear of not writing at all was too great. He was creating a new level of honesty in his work and sometimes grace went with it, as in
Maroussi
, and sometimes grace went out the window, as in
Sexus.
What mattered to Henry was not grace but truth: he was so afraid of the silences and indecisions of his early career that he published too much sloppy, repetitive, unedited work.

I think time will prove his unmethodical method just. Even
Sexus
,
Nexus
, and
Plexus
, my least favorite Miller books, have wonderful moments. But I also think it is unfortunate that Henry, perhaps because he was forever embattled, had to choose between truth and grace. Is grace, perhaps the province of the serene?

We think too little of the conditions artists need in order to make the best possible use of their creativity. We expect our most talented people to blossom despite all odds.

Most of Lepska’s and Henry’s quarrels were over child rearing. Henry was indulgent, and to him Lepska was a Germanic (she was in fact Polish) disciplinarian like his mother. They parted in 1951. The next year Henry fell in love with Eve McClure, a woman many of his friends considered the best for him of all his wives. Eve was an artist, and she and Henry met by letter and by book, as Henry was to meet so many people in his life. Eve’s admiration of his work, her beauty, her willingness to take care of him and Val and Tony, made her, for a while, the perfect wife. Lepska had decamped with a biophysicist who came to visit Big Sur—and in time Eve was to decamp as well. Henry and all his contradictions cannot have been easy to live with. His books were open, but he was often closed to his wives. He was intimate with everyone but the women he loved—perhaps with the exception of Anaïs, whose secret was her unavailability.

During Henry’s relationship with Eve (who was twenty-eight to his sixty when they met), his fortunes as a writer finally began to change from cult status to superstardom. And Eve was there as his helpmate during this transition. They began to live together in Big Sur on April Fool’s Day, 1952, and left for a seven-month tour of Europe on December 29, 1952. They arrived in Paris on New Year’s Eve, to find Henry enormously famous. He was suddenly a target for paparazzi, adulated for books that had been written decades ago but had only recently captured the attention of the public as scandalous bestsellers—a curious fate for any writer. One is at once gratified by recognition and bitter that it did not come when it was most needed.

After the fifties, Henry was never really a poor man again. But by then his best work was behind him. The money he had been unable to collect from Girodias in the late 1940s was eventually replaced by royalties on the French editions of some of his early books. From then on, Henry was continually reprinted in France, in Germany, in Japan—everywhere but at home. As soon as he had money he tried to share it with everyone.

Georges Belmont reports that when he arrived in Paris with Eve, the first thing he said was: “
Do you need money, Georges? I have plenty.
” He couldn’t wait to get rid of it. His inner abundance was such that he believed that the more he gave away, the more he actually had. Many people claim to believe this; few live by it.

Henry always said that censorship had the opposite effect the authorities decreed. And this was surely true in his case. The Paris novels of the thirties had been selling steadily all over the world, but it was his being prosecuted for “pornography” that would finally make Henry world-famous—for all the wrong reasons.

First, there had been
L’Affaire Miller
in 1946, when a Frenchman named Daniel Parker sued Henry’s publisher, insisting he suppress the French version of
Tropic of Capricorn
on the grounds that it was pornography. A group of distinguished French intellectuals led by Maurice Nadeau sprang to Henry’s defense, caused a stir, and in the process made Henry a household word and a bestselling author in France. Then, in 1949,
Sexus
was published in France and banned as pornography without benefit of intellectual protest from the likes of Sartre, Gide, and Camus.

Henry defended himself pretty well. Here’s one story—as he told it to me in California in 1975:

I was in France on a visit there and I’m informed one day that I must go to court in the Palais du Justice—do you know where that is? And this is a court like we don’t have. It’s a preparatory court before the trial and in this preparatory thing there’s only a judge there with a clerk taking the notes and you and your lawyer, and you have the freedom to tell the judge everything you want about the thing. How he should look at it, what you think, and so on. You can speak your mind freely, you understand, he will ask questions too. And so I went through that. Incidentally, I was so excited, you know, nervous, that I pissed in my pants. I asked my lawyer, “Can’t I go to the can? I have to go.” He said, “Just do it in your pants.” Yeah! And it went all over the floor, you know? The judge must have seen it and I had to go on with the whole thing. The good thing was the clerk sitting at a separate little table while the judge was on the dais at another desk, talking down to me. I’m sitting down below. And the clerk is always regarding me. When the judge asked me a question this little clerk watches me closely. I’m aware that he’s hanging on my words. So the thing is just about over and the judge says, “Oh yes, now Mr. Miller, one more question. And I want you to take your time answering it. I want to ask you, do you honestly believe now … do you honestly in your own heart and soul believe that a writer has the right to say anything he likes in a book?” And I knew this was a great moment so I didn’t answer that. I was pondering it, pondering it, but I knew right away what I was going to say and the clerk is watching me like a rabbit. And finally I look up at the judge and I say, “Your Honor, I really do think that an author has the right to say whatever he likes.” And the clerk judge comes down and I stand up, he greets me, puts his arms around me, kisses me on each cheek and he says, “
Would that France had more men like you.
” And then he says you know, of course, that you’re in honorable company, don’t you know … François Villon, de Maupassant, he mentioned a whole string of writers, do you see? Isn’t that marvelous?

I try to piece this very Henryish narrative together with what I know about the history of the censorship of Henry’s books. Is he talking about
Sexus
? Or had he conflated the
Sexus
case with another of the many obscenity prosecutions he suffered? It appears that the only obscenity prosecution in which Henry was actually summoned to appear occurred in Brooklyn in 1962. But his books were always being banned somewhere in the world and Henry must have dreamed of judges.

The story Henry told me is therefore another example of Henry’s mythmaking. It may contain some garbled recollections of the
Sexus
banning in Paris, but it has all the ingredients of a typical Henry story: a protagonist, an antagonist, a moral. And the protagonist calls himself “Henry Miller,” but the historical coordinates are among the missing. Or at least among the woolly.

Also note the conjunction of abstract ideas and quotidian details! He talks about free expression while pissing on the floor! This is typically Henry: a classic purity, as he said in
Black Spring
, where dung is dung and angels are angels. Also, it’s a terrific story. Especially the peeing in the pants and the kiss from the judge. That Henry would construct such stories gives us further insight into his books. Henry was the hero of his own life. His pants were damp. His cheeks were wet. But what’s a hero for?

Henry’s long trip to Europe with Eve in 1953 was one of the great times of his life, despite his distress at finding Europe so changed since his expatriate decade. He visited old haunts. In Paris he saw Man Ray, Brassaï, Belmont, Léger. And he went to Wells, England, where his old pal Alfred Perlès now lived with his wife, Anne. Eventually Henry and Eve returned to California and he married Eve in 1953.

Henry was a marriage addict, though once married he had a tendency to become cut off emotionally from his wives. He was happiest in pursuit, in courtship, in anticipating the delights of bonding, and always somewhat prone to move away from the intimacy of the bond itself. He had made his great bond early in life to a mother who, he claimed, never showed any affection for him. And he tended to become uncomfortable with closeness. Once the lover of his dreams was installed as a mate, he fled.

Psychoanalysis would perhaps have changed this pattern, had Henry wanted to change it strongly enough. So much of his writing about men and women was triggered by—and was a retelling of—the tempestuous relationship with June, that one feels he needed this central conflict in his life, that it was essential to his creativity.

One often sees this pattern in the lives of writers, who, of course, merely document the human condition: a pivotal unhappy relationship that recapitulates the pivotal unhappy relationship of childhood, and a creative life wedded to the past, to the constant winding and unwinding of this same ball of yarn. The oedipal struggle, disguised in a new relationship, is played out endlessly, even to the edge of doom. This was certainly the case with Henry. It seems never to have been resolved until, long after Louise Nieting Miller’s death, Henry reinvented her as the loving mother of his dreams, the mother he encounters in paradise in “Mother, China, and the World Beyond” in
Sextet.

It was in the fifties that all Henry’s stories started to come full circle: Barbara, his first child, came back to him; June, his second wife, became his correspondent; Lauretta, his retarded sister, became his ward after his mother’s death of cancer in 1956, and Louise’s death itself consolidated his position as the head of the family and provider of stability for all the others.

This was an odd position for Henry to find himself in, since in many ways he remained childlike all his life. It is this childlike quality that accounts for the naïf wondrousness of his watercolors and for the open-heartedness of many of his essays on watercolor painting, places, and people. It also accounts for the openness of his response to new people in his life, which continued up to his death.

It is important to see just how responsible Henry could be. After his mother’s death, he saw to it that his sister Lauretta was eventually moved to a home in California. He saw to it that June was minimally looked after (by his fans James and Annette Kar Baxter). He was reunited with Barbara, and eventually, in his will, made her equal legatee with Val and Tony.