THOUGHTS FROM AN UNQUIET MIND VIII

Henry Miller’s swing across the United States as recorded in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare served the purpose of providing him with more reserves of ammunition for his expanding arsenal. He goes all-out for what appeals to him and denigrates with vicious venom what he detests. In this sense he is a far cry from being a philosopher, for the latter tries to understand what he dislikes. Although the book is not his best, it is certainly a typical piece of Millerography.

Miller was once told that the Indians were biding their time, awaiting the day when the palefaces would either destroy themselves or be exterminated by some irrepressible force. That day may not be far off and Miller, who clapped his hands with joy when the thought was first suggested to him, is probably laughing up his shroud-sleeve at this very moment. Over forty years ago, he was looking forward to the time when these much abused savages would push those who usurped their land back into the sea, and now it appears that with more pollution, terrorism and nuclear war in the forefront of the paleface agenda there will be little if anything left for these marvelous avengers to push into the sea.

Henry Miller had the utmost admiration for John Cooper Powys and tells how he made a pilgrimage to the great Welshman’s home. I myself have just finished Powys’ Confessions and am ready to echo Miller’s hosanna. Powys’ negative-positive attitude both stylistically and philosophically fits snugly into Miller’s temperament. Powys combined his atheism with a sensual love of life. All through Confessions he is self-derogatory, dwelling at great lengths on his clumsiness in most areas of civilized living. His love of deserts and seashores, of bleakness in general in contrast to his disdain for lush greenery, mountains and crowded metropolises becomes a sort of preparation for death. This in turn leaves him with a more calm, harmonious attitude concerning mortality than even the most deeply religious people feel. Free will exists only on the surface of life, he insists, and consequently our individual variations ultimately count for nothing. It is strictly a deterministic world we live in which is highly organized and yet not under the direction of any super-brain. Religion, he says, and especially the Roman Catholic brand, is the work of an entrancing art but no more capable of dealing with divine truths than any other human institution. Powys, of course, was a skeptic to the marrow and aims his barbs most ruthlessly at his own indulgences, which make him all the more convincing.

He claims he lives his own life completely on the surface taking a sensualist’s delight in everything he touches. He writes with an honest straight-forward verve that puts one in mind of Miller. Like Miller he is also a people’s philosopher. Although he is normally bubbling over with words and constantly excites the reader’s interest with his rambling thoughts, he is not the sensitive poet his brother Llewellyn is. He is really a materialist at heart even though in his so-called surface scheme of life he prefers to remain property-less. This latter preference includes even books, despite his confession that he lives under the exclusive domination of literature. He admits that for himself the printed word is an escape hatch and that poetry and philosophy transfigure the world for him. Living on the surface and possessing little passion for the reflections of life through his special mirror, he leans toward annihilation and thus a vision of death with weary satisfaction, although, as if to contradict his own profession, he recently, at the time of his writing, celebrated his 90th birthday. Miller once called him one of the happiest men on the face of the earth, and this is understandable since his philosophic incredulousness will not permit him to take anything too seriously. He neither broods nor sulks because whatever it is that might cause him to slip into such a mood is quickly relegated to the private cellar of universal indifference. He has a strong antipathy for pain in others and refuses to eat meat, not because he objects to killing animals but because of the crude suffering inflicted on them by the method in which they are slaughtered.

I have been reading tidbits of Miller for years but only now am getting my teeth into The Tropic of Cancer. It is the same Miller all over again. Sometimes he bores you and sometimes he hits you like a billy-club on the crown of the skull. The pace is rapid. He never seems to want to stand still for very long. It is almost as if he had a fear of probing too deeply in one direction. The impression is often that of a flying visit to the world in the midst of a mid-air somersault. In other words, if he held your attention too long with a description or analysis of one particular item the somersaulting world would soon land right-side up and there would be nothing more for his great god gusto to comment on.

Miller describes life in the cesspools of civilization and compels you to believe that despite the muck and oozing filth it is the only authentic level on which human society can be judged. He passes the derelicts and bums sleeping in the doorways of the Paris streets and cries, “After two-thousand years of Christianity!” The enemy is not the Robber Baron, the thieving politician or even the professional gangster, but the masses of happy, contented pedestrians filling our urban hovels and who exist in a paper-mache world that has no more connection with the real world than Bugs Bunny has with the life of a real cottontail. The greatest achievement of the mechanized boom which has ennobled our lives has been to guarantee a continued status of tranquility.

Miller is one of the great liberators. He is Moses leading the children of Israel across the Red Sea. Writers of the future will surely feel their indebtedness to him more than to any of his contemporaries. His work is a supreme manifestation of the new autobiographical craze Emerson predicted more than a hundred and fifty years ago: “These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies–captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really experience and how to record truth truly.” Miller foresaw his own mission as a gate-crasher egged on by Emerson’s prophecy, which he quotes on the title page of The Tropic of Cancer.

In mentioning the liberating influence of Miller, I give no hint of the broadness of its application. Confining myself to the ingrown angst felt only by a writer in relation to his writing, I was doing H.M. a gross disservice. The liberation is literary, certainly, and this is where it will first be felt, but more important are the farther reaching ramifications which will, or should at least, give a much needed housecleaning to the taboo clustered psyche of the tainted reader as well as writer. The ideal future, misty and clouded as it is with its elusive goals constantly sliding beyond the grasp of our vision, more than likely has something to do with man liberating himself from his artificial restraints. To live in harmony with nature should be our aim in life. To believe that evil per se does not exist is not only a good starting point but probably the only starting point that can put us on the right track.

Miller brushes lightly against an idea that I find particularly appealing. He says that a man from a distance can be stomached without causing indigestion, but move closer to him and all that is ugly and odoriferous about him becomes disgustingly apparent. The truth is that man is only completely digestible when he is surrounded by lots of space. What is the solution to nine-tenths of our problems today? Let’s get everyone out into the open, away from the metropolitan anthills and into the country. Then all intra-human squabbles will melt more quickly than a six-inch snowfall suddenly exposed to an August sun at high noon. Yet maybe the slate is so crowded with the human chalk of mumbo jumbo that our only hope for the present is that some kind of power above will come along and wipe it clean so that we can start all over again. While considering this thought one might begin to wonder whether man is not deluding himself by measuring his existence in terms of progress. Progress to where?

I prefer Sisyphus as the symbol of human endeavor. The ladder which we are climbing has a greased rung at the top and on those few occasions when we have reached it, the Athens of Pericles, Augustus’ Rome and Elizabeth’s England, we have promptly slid right off and after hitting the ground, though slightly dazed and bruised, immediately rose to our feet and started back up again. It has been irrefutably demonstrated ad infinitum that man has a short memory, so short in fact that the greased top rung seems always to have been knocked out of his mind by the impact of the fall.

Carl Sandburg did not go too far astray when he wrote, “The people, yes.” Though the plodding may go on for hundreds, perhaps thousands of centuries, there must be an end to it all when wearied and exhausted by his incalculable exertions the great god cat gobbles up his mousy playthings once and for all. Thus ultimately it will be, The people, no! “When the smashup comes, as now seems inevitable” according to Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, so that in another poem when Sandburg rushed in with “only the rats’ footprints” he will have to be regarded as a better prophet if not a better poet.

In a later collection of essays, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, Miller howls down any possibility of Western Civilization surviving. Anyone with half a vision can see the handwriting defacing the wall. Where do we go from here? Nowhere, for there is no place left for us to go. As Miller insists, why shout warnings into our brethrens’ ears since the most eloquent forebodings ever sounded have been pouring into his Eustachian tubes for the past hundred and fifty years, and he has paid not the slightest attention to them. Few men have ever shown any interest whatsoever in the voices of wisdom. These few who have been moved to compassion for those who will suffer from the approaching terror have attempted to pass the word down at a time when salvation was still possible. But today (when Miller was still alive) our minds are too deeply embedded in our commitment to evil to suddenly swing around in a reverse direction. Perhaps the man of wisdom is not as easily vilified or even laughed at as he once was because every sane person in our age of anxiety can feel the breath of chaos on the back of his neck. The philosopher is already being recognized as a prophet, a man who said, “I told you so.” Yet the merry march towards the dragon’s mouth continues unabated.

This is Miller’s theme, the inevitable reward of a godless society. All that is worth salvation is the world of nature and a few individual men who are still able to live within the limited area of social truth.

Black Spring has its divinely inspired moments. The book is really a series of autobiographical essays. Considering the present predicament of the world, I think Miller offers a fitting comment even though it was written many years ago, when he says, “I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night setting in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.”

Black Spring is brought to a conclusion with a crescendo. Miller’s flow of words becomes a deluge of insanity, yet an insanity that is artistically manipulated even if its inspiration is largely intuitive. If ever I have any doubts about his standing among the Elysium sodality, I need only turn to his peak passages to reassure myself. His incessant chatter excites rather than wearies the reader. He can be compared to his contemporary Thomas Wolfe, for both authors gush out the same philosophic flow of words, accumulating upon the same dinosaurian framework, but Miller is a far cleverer word-wielder even though he lacks the emotional and dramatic depth which distinguishes the author of Look Homeward Angel and Time and the River from other important American novelists. Miller was born about ten years before Wolfe, yet I believe they both wrote their best works at about the same time.

Miller died at 88 of a circulatory ailment. The body is dead but the work is still very much alive and will be, hopefully, for many, many centuries to come. Apropos of this stupendous stud (in life as well as in his writings) this master of the poetic prose of fucking, as Norman Mailer suggests in his introduction to Genius and Lust, in a TV interview the grandfatherly Miller was all smiles like a contented child as he reiterated his continuing lack of repentance over what some of his more prurient critics have called his “sexual aberations.”

Print This Article