Henry had already had his first experience of sex by the time he met Pauline Chouteau, and a wretched one it was too. With another youth he had gone looking for excitement in the area known as the German Village, behind the Metropolitan Opera House, where they had been solicited by two prostitutes. By the end of the evening he had lost not only his virginity but his wallet, and picked up a mild case of gonorrhoea. This may have alarmed him, but in those days a dose of clap was considered a badge of manhood, and he was able to boast of the experience to his male colleagues at the office. He even repeated the experiment the following summer at a French brothel near the Herald Square Theatre.
Pauline was not a professional, however, and his relationship with her was the first serious sexual relationship of his life. To supplement his wage at the Atlas Portland Cement Company he had been giving piano lessons in the evening for 30 cents an hour, and Pauline was a friend of the mother of one of his pupils, a woman named Louise Ashley. Pauline, a thirty-two year old divorcee, lived on Sumpter, the same street as Louise, and was often at the house when Henry gave his lesson. He got into the habit of walking her home afterwards to her flat. To begin with it was Louise who flirted with him, but he didn’t welcome her advances because he was nervous of her lover, a tough black man named Edward Perry who ran a bicycle shop at 21 Sumpter and used to maintain Henry’s bike. Henry’s interest vanished completely after Pauline confided to him that Louise had syphilis.
Pauline was born in Phoebus, Virginia, in 1877. At the age of seventeen she gave birth to an illegitimate son, George, whom she took with her when she moved to New York. George adopted the name Wilson, after his father, and his mother also used the name occasionally. Later she had a liaison with an army bandsman named Chouteau, and after this broke up she continued to call herself Chouteau – pronouncing it ‘Shooter’ – though it seems even her lover’s use of the name was informal: the Chouteau family is prominent in St Louis, Missouri, and its thorough genealogical records contain no reference either to her or her army bandsman. A suggested explanation is that it was at one time common practice among working-class people to assume names with an aristocratic ring to them.*
To Henry, Pauline seemed a beautiful woman, with a ‘sad, wistful beauty, like a thing that had been used too roughly’1 and large, sorrowful eyes which he called ‘Armenian eyes’. She was a stylish dresser and Henry was proud to be seen in her company. They began going out together, to the cinema and the theatre, for walks in the Botanic Garden, then on day trips to Coney Island to hear the bandstand concerts in Luna Park. For a while their relationship was that of companions; the fifteen-year difference in age between them seemed to Henry to preclude sex, and in the event it was Pauline who seduced him. The experience gave him a shock and his first reaction was that there must be no repetition.2 There were immediate repetitions, however, and before he quite knew what had happened they were a couple.
Henry was not a particularly handsome youth, but his face was sensual, with large lips and a strong, broad nose, and he had an attractive, rumbling voice. He was also friendly and cheerful, a sympathetic listener and, in virtue of his enthusiasm for cycling and sports, fit and strong. To the divorced and lonely Pauline he seemed to have a great deal to offer, and she gave herself freely to him. She had no other lovers, and he was in the first flush of youth. As he recalled later: ‘We were both hungry for it. We fucked our heads off.’
Apart from themselves, no one was pleased at this turn of events. Louise Miller in particular was hostile to the relationship. She may not have liked it much when her son grew up and began showing an interest in other women, but Cora Seward had at least been young, and Germanic, and if Henry had ever managed to marry her, Louise would soon have got used to the idea. Pauline, however, with her grown-up son, and a best friend who lived with a black man, was a wholly unacceptable proposition.
The affair also opened up a gap between Henry and his friends. After leaving school, a dozen or so boys had banded together in a group which they called the Xerxes Society. This was really only a more formal continuation of an earlier gang known as the Deep Thinkers, in sly honour of the silent and rather stupid youth whom they had elected as their president. The Xerxes Society had its own badge and ritual handshake; but the name probably had more to do with a pun on ‘exercises’ than the legendary King of Persia, for the whole enterprise was only marginally more serious than the Deep Thinkers. The boys organized dances, went cycling together, attended wrestling matches at Coney Island, as well as boxing matches, or ‘theatrical entertainments’ as they were then legally known. They also followed the other major sporting events of the day like the six-day bike races at Madison Square Gardens. Now and then Henry tried to introduce an intellectual side to their activities, such as debates on religious and social issues, but without much luck. For most of them, the main idea was just to meet girls. They were a fairly conservative bunch of boys, and they expressed open disapproval when Henry presently took up with someone who was so very much more than a girl. Though Henry remained close to a couple of them – William Dewar and George Wright – he was drifting away from his other boyhood friends, and the affair with Pauline gave him his first real taste of being an outsider.
Henry and Pauline did have some supporters as a couple. Henry greatly admired an athletic youth named Ray Wetzler who worked with him at the cement company, and invited him to one of the dances organized by the Xerxes Society. Pauline was with him that night, and he was flattered when Ray Wetzler congratulated him at work next day on his taste in women. Another admirer was a man named Lou Considine who lived downstairs from Pauline on Sumpter. Considine was a middle-aged man to whom she must have seemed young, and he always treated her with deference and courtesy. Henry had begun spending a lot of time at Pauline’s flat, where he took over some of her caretaking duties like putting out the rubbish, raking the boiler and carrying out the ash cans in the morning, and he struck up a good relationship with Considine. They talked about books and writers, and played chess together. Considine fulfilled a role as intellectual mentor which Henry’s own father was unable to play. ‘My Guide’, he called him once, ‘my Comforter, my Bright Green Wind’.3
Pauline was an uneducated woman, a gentle and undemanding companion, and their domestic life on evenings together at Sumpter had a peace and an ease which Miller’s problems with women later in life led him to recall with wistful fondness. However, for all their good times together, Henry never quite managed to shake off the deep mood of uncertainty in which he had entered the relationship. The violence of his sexual feelings was, to begin with, overwhelming, shaming and frightening. It is unlikely that he received any kind of sexual education from his drunken father and his cold mother, and he was an easy prey to contemporary theories about sexual emission being debilitating for young men. For a while he tried to shame himself into moderation by making a note in his diary each time he and Pauline made love, but it was always too often, and he soon abandoned the check in alarm and disgust.
Instead he practised a driven athleticism with which he hoped to counteract the ill-effects of his sex life. He rose early each morning and cycled the six miles from Prospect Park to Coney Island, and sometimes took a swim in the sea before riding home again. Regularly every evening he went through the routines devised by Eugene Sandow, the leading professional Hercules of the period, in his physical fitness course. Henry was an energetic youth, however, and it took a lot to tire him out.
Other aspects of the relationship disturbed him. He felt that in becoming the lover of a woman, particularly an older woman, he had automatically assumed a binding moral responsibility towards her. Yet as soon as the pleasures of sex became commonplace, he found himself tormented by the age difference between them. He would double their years and visualise himself in his mid thirties, with Pauline approaching fifty. All the small, close-up signs of age he saw in her reminded him constantly of the problem. Her hair had once been red. Now she used peroxide on it and the sight of the discoloured roots, and of the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, was depressing and shaming. An early association between death and sex arose in him, and in speaking of her to his friends he began referring to her as ‘the widow’.
His job as a filing clerk was tedious, and Pauline’s lack of intellectual curiosity began to bore him too. He always took something to read with him as he rode the elevated line from Brooklyn Bridge over to the financial district – Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship maybe, or one of the little literary magazines like The Dail, Simplicissimus or The Little Review – but even at work there was no-one with whom to share his interests. He enjoyed the company of the other workers in the Broad Street office, but it was the same sort of horse-play he shared with the Xerxes boys.
What made everything worse was that his romantic longing for Cora Seward continued unabated, heightened even. She was a guest at his twenty-first birthday party at 622 Decatur Street on December 26th 1912, and as Louise Miller was in charge of the arrangements it is reasonable to suppose that Pauline was not. The guests drank punch, and Henry danced with Cora. His parents gave him a meerschaum pipe as a present which might have made him look old and mature but could not make him feel that way. Later he recalled his twenty-first year as one of the least enjoyable of his life.
His great problem was that he still had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Idling on a bench in Union Square one day, his eye fell on an advertisement for the services of a phrenologist. He went along and paid a dollar to have the bumps on his head felt and be told that he had all the makings of an architect, or maybe a good corporation lawyer.4 It wasn’t really what he wanted to hear. He was looking around for ways to escape Pauline and thought of becoming a student again. He discussed the idea with his parents and they agreed to provide him with enough money to enrol at Cornell. He took the money but never went, hiding out at Pauline’s house and frittering it away. When he finally plucked up the courage to go back home again, with the money all gone, his mother only said: ‘I know all about it, Henry. We won’t talk about it.’ At last, in the spring of 1913, he stirred himself enough to make the break.
In his essays and autobiographical novels Miller often told the same story at least twice, though rarely in the same way. A feature of his literary reminiscing is the ease with which he switches between the parallel universes of his past to provide superficially quite different sets of motives to account for the same course of action. He can work hard to convince his readers that the reason he went to California in 1913 was to try to start a new life for himself and Pauline, away from everyone who knew them in New York, and that he intended to send for her to join him once he had found the right place; on another page and in another book he can turn around and tell the story from a completely different angle that makes it appear to have had little to do with Pauline at all. Though in the end the different reasons usually connect somewhere along the line, this approach to autobiography has a way of making his life seem like an ever-changing hypothesis, a draft for a novel which is under continual revision and which might possibly be available in a final version one day – if the author can finally make up his mind what happened and why – but it probably won’t be.
Though his primary reason for leaving New York for California in the spring of 1913 must indeed have been to escape the relationship with Pauline, he entertained with great seriousness a whole set of other motives only very indirectly connected with his love-affair. These constitute the first real signs of the spiritual quest which was to preoccupy him for the remainder of his life, a driven but formless pursuit of religion revealing the many striking links between the turn of the century zeitgeist which shaped his search, and the eclectic ‘New Age’ phenomena of the late twentieth century.
His mentor in this field was a youth named Bob Challacombe, the half-brother of Henry’s Xerxes companion, William Dewar. The two brothers had been separated shortly after Bob’s birth, and he had been raised in California. They were different types, William a worldly youth, clever and cynical and good with girls, his brother more interested in the spiritual side of life. There was some uncertainty about who Bob’s real father was, and he arrived in New York from California in 1912, and lived with Dewar and his family for a while to try to solve the riddle. Dewar had no time for his half-brother. He called him a ‘real skin-flint’ who ‘talked on a superior plane’, but Henry liked him at once. He found the quest for the ‘real father’ pleasingly exotic, and in his disappointment with his own father’s averageness and unintellectuality probably identified with it. Soon he considered Bob ‘a fellow that next to myself I like better than anyone in this wide world’.5
Henry’s attendance at Sunday School as a small boy had been largely a social matter, something that gave him the chance to thud on a drum in the Boy’s Brigade. Since his family was not religious, he grew up with no focus for his strong religious instincts. It made him an easy target for some of the many eccentric philosophical cults which flourished around the turn of the century. The Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters were among the most successful of these, both profiting from an atmosphere of hostility to Calvinism and Rationalism. Old Thought was pessimistic, dwelling on sin, pain and suffering and offering the darkly stoical view of life Henry associated with his mother. New Thought associated itself with the idea of light, assumed the goodness of the natural man, and insisted that human beings had the capacity to transcend their own limitations. There were numerous other movements besides these, including – especially after Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909 – the first stirrings of interest in psychoanalysis, which later picked up many converts from among the New Thoughters; Elwood Worcester’s Emanuel Movement had also attracted many adherents with its combination of scientific medical theory and religious ritual. One of the most popular of the cults was the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel H.S. Olcott to promote Madame Blavatsky’s detailed revelations of the septenary structure of the universe, and the presence in Tibet of a secret brotherhood of Mahatmas who concerned themselves with the spiritual development of individuals in search of personal experience of the divine.
Bob Challacombe had much to tell Henry about these movements. Back home in California he had been a member of the local branch of the Theosophical Society at Point Loma. Latterly, however, he had developed an enthusiasm for the teaching of a former Evangelist preacher named Benjamin Fay Mills, who had left the orthodox church in 1897 on account of his liberal views to found a new religious organization which he called the ‘Los Angeles Fellowship’. Between 1903 and 1915, Mills travelled the United States delivering lectures on philosophy, psychology and sociology designed to promote the work of the Fellowship. When he arrived in New York in 1912, Challacombe took Henry along to hear him.
Henry was deeply impressed by Mills, but the full course of lectures was more than he could afford. Mills was moved by his enthusiasm, however, and agreed to let Henry attend the lectures free if he would pass the plate at the end of each session. Later Miller recognized that these lectures were ‘probably very bad’, but that what Mills had to offer was ‘the only thing of its nature obtainable in my American environment’.6 ‘I clutched at him as a drowning man clutches at a straw,’ he wrote. ‘I needed the interior serenity and poise which he gave me to fight my sexual battle.’ Henry felt that through Mills he ‘recognized for the first time the mystic side of my nature’.7
Challacombe came along at just the right time for Henry. Under the influence of Stanley Borowski he had been going through a dispiriting phase of ‘passionate atheism’. By kindling his instincts for mysticism, Challacombe was the first to show him that the way to escape the banality and many of the unpleasant responsibilities of everyday life was by dramatizing and elevating personal conflicts to a higher plane. Between them, Challacombe and Mills put the business with Pauline on an idealistic footing. ‘Their reasons are in accord with my own,’ Henry wrote later. ‘They do not represent my motives as selfish, but as the highest good, and such-like. I require the right, the justificatory motive. And they supply it.’8 A passage in Miller’s autobiographical novel, Tropic of Capricorn, suggests that Henry and Bob Challacombe even planned and discussed Henry’s trip west as a spiritual rite of passage. Miller recalls how, stranded and homesick in an Arizona desert town, he began to address his thoughts to Challacombe (‘Roy Hamilton’) back home in Brooklyn:
I feel so terribly deceived and I begin to weep. It is dark now and I stand at the end of a street, where the desert begins, and I weep like a fool. Which me is this weeping? Why it is the new little me which had begun to germinate back in Brooklyn and which is now in the midst of a vast desert and doomed to perish. Now, Roy Hamilton, I need you! I need you for one moment, just one little moment, while I am falling apart. I need you because I was not quite ready to do what I have done. And do I not remember your telling me that it was unnecessary to make the trip, but to do it if I must?9
Discussing the incident elsewhere, however, Miller played down the spiritual aspect and claimed that he had travelled west on the advice of an oculist who assured him that the outdoor life in a warm climate would relieve him of the need to wear glasses for the rest of his life; and to a French biographer he stressed the decisive rôle played in his decision by his encounter with Teddy Roosevelt’s enormously popular book The Strenuous Life which promoted an ideal of rugged asceticism to young American males. Whatever the relative importance of these factors on his plans, the quest aspect of the trip loomed large in Henry’s mind at the outset, and he chose the Los Angeles area as his destination because Fay Mills had a brother there whom he intended to visit. Somewhere along the line, however, this seems to have faded out, to be replaced by a concentration on a more Jack London-like approach, and soon after arriving in California he found himself working on a cattle ranch outside San Pedro. This proved to be the first of several such casual jobs.
Most of his time was spent on a lemon grove in Otay, near Chula Vista, where he was given the job of collecting the branches pruned from the lemon trees, loading them onto a sled pulled by a jackass, then burning them all in a big pile. One of his tasks was to curry-comb the asses in the morning. It was hardly more exciting than the office job at Atlas, and he disliked it intensely. His eyebrows were singed, his lips cracked, and his office-worker’s hands were torn and cut by the branches.10
He might perhaps have been bullied by the other men, but his naivety and friendly openness saved him. Instead they made a pet of him, encouraging him to entertain them with tall stories about New York, the subways, skyscrapers, nightclubs and women. He was not his mother’s Little Henry here, nor his Pauline’s ‘Harry’, nor Sunny Jim, which his father called him in honour of the athletic boy who leapt the fence on the front of the Force Flakes cereal packets. After the fashion of work-gangs everywhere, he was known simply as ‘Yorkie’, from his place of origin. ‘I was such a city boy,’ he recalled, ‘a sissy compared with all those other men. But you know they treated me very well. They could have been a mean bunch of guys but they took a liking to me.’11
He could never remember himself how long the stay lasted and once suggested six months, which may have been a generous estimate. He felt homesick, missed Pauline, and wrote long letters telling her he wished he was back in her arms. Soon he was looking round for a way to leave and return to Brooklyn without losing face among his workmates. The chance came in an unexpected way.
His stay on the West Coast coincided with the height of a violent debate in the area on the subject of freedom of speech. Nearby San Diego in particular had developed a tradition that allowed considerable freedom in public speaking, and socialists, anarchists and the militant trade-unionists of the IWW often held open-air meetings there. In a wave of fear inspired by the revolutionary oratory of some of these speakers, a backlash developed, and the local authorities passed resolutions which put severe limitations on freedom of speech. A series of deliberate breaches of the new ruling were arranged, and in the rioting that followed eighty-four radicals were thrown into jail. Vigilante mobs ruled the streets. It was against the background of this atmosphere that Henry and a friend from the citrus grove named Bill Parr travelled to San Diego one day with the intention of visiting a Mexican whorehouse. On the way they passed a poster advertising a lecture on European literature to be delivered in town by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Henry decided he would rather hear her speak than go to the whorehouse, and he and Bill Parr went their separate ways.12
The lecture had a salutary effect on him, and afterwards he went forward to greet Emma’s consort, Ben Reitman, from whom he bought two books, Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ and Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. On account of the dangerous atmosphere in the area, Reitman cross-examined Henry carefully before letting him have the books, fearing that he might be an agent provocateur. Here was further proof for Henry of the explosive social power of the word, written or spoken. On his way back to camp he thought hard about his life, and suddenly it dawned on him that he was not a cowboy and a plain man at all, but a reader of books, a thinker, a discusser, a complex and pleasingly-corrupted big-city boy, and he made up his mind to go home at once. Shamelessly anxious for the good opinion of others – though it is hard to imagine that the labourers in the lemon grove cared one way or another why the branch-burner was leaving – he gave instructions in one of his letters to Pauline that she was to send him a telegram in his father’s name saying that his mother was dying and he was to come home at once.
This was Henry’s own account of how his West Coast adventure came to an end in 1913. He was so open about his fabulating that to mention it seems almost pedantic, but Emma Goldman did not lecture in San Diego that year. She and Ben Reitman were in town but there was a riot and she was prevented from speaking by vigilantes. Though she tried again in May the following year, it was not until 1915 that she was finally able to deliver her long-postponed lecture on Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. In a letter to a friend in April 1939 Miller referred to Stirner’s book as ‘the book that set me off years ago, when I was in California –the book I bought from Emma Goldman at a lecture in San Pedro or San Diego’. Certainly he had a strong streak of solipsism in him, but surely not so strong that he would have failed to notice a riot going on around him. Clearly, San Pedro was the venue. Maybe he got mixed up, or maybe he was lying. Lying came easily to him, as the telegram hoax shows. Hearing Emma Goldman lecture undoubtedly had a great effect on him, and his instincts as a mythmaker would be to make as much out of the occasion as possible. This whole California episode of his life is steeped in the kind of woozy imprecision in which he thrived as an autobiographer, and if he says it all began one day when he was on his way to a whorehouse with a cowboy named Bill Parr from Butte, Montana, then the best we can do is nod our heads and wait to hear the next instalment.
Pauline was pleased and perhaps not too surprised to see her Harry back again. She gave him a ‘hot welcome’,13 though he had to do his flies up quickly when her lodger, Tex the motorman, walked into the room unannounced. When the initial relief at being back on home ground was over, however, Henry had to face the fact that, after his failure to start an affair with Cora, his inability to end one with Pauline constituted a second decisive defeat in love, and the cause of his defeat was once again his own lack of decision and passivity. In a mood of perverse and preposterous irritation he thereupon ‘surrendered to Pauline completely, convinced that it was hopeless to evade my destiny’:14
Nothing matters now, nothing but to live out this relationship which appears a hopeless enigma. I become in the eyes of those about me a saint and a martyr. I became at once extraordinarily good and extraordinarily satanic. I feel justified in doing anything, be it evil or good … I turn my strength into spiritual conquests.15
This new kind of fetter in which he was held was his first experience of the combination of sex and guilt. Pauline had been a wonderful mistress to him, and through her he had been spared many of the farcical and unhappy mishaps that adolescent boys often have to endure before they are able to relax and enjoy their sex-lives. She was an open and natural woman, able to laugh and have fun without indulging in neurotic problems. But it was sex, not love; and company, not friendship. Worst of all, he felt sorry for her. Her son George had contracted tuberculosis, and as part of his saintliness Henry got himself into debt in order to help Pauline meet her medical expenses. Desperately anxious to avoid hurting her, he harmed them both by staying with her out of pity, knowing all the while that by his own standards of intense romanticism he was betraying love.
By the time he returned from California, Cora Seward was married. He met her once in the street and she invited him in to look around her new home. The apartment turned out to be in a block just behind Pauline’s – he could see Pauline’s flat from her windows. As they came to the bedroom, Cora pointed to the big double bed and in foolish embarrassment said ‘This is where we sleep’. ‘With these words’, he wrote, ‘it was as if an iron curtain fell between us.’16
Miller comforted himself by looking from the window of Pauline’s flat across to Cora’s, soulful and remote, puzzling Pauline, who can have had no idea of the intensity of his feelings for Cora. She became pregnant with his child, and while they were still working on the difficult and dangerous business of finding a doctor willing to carry out an abortion, Henry took her to hear a concert at Luna Park. Quite by chance Cora was there too. The thought of what she might think if she saw Henry walking hand in hand with his pregnant ‘older woman’ humiliated him, and he tried, unsuccessfully and ungallantly, to smuggle Pauline away before Cora could catch sight of them. Cora was the dream, Pauline the reality, ‘the other one’, the succubus:
Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was that brought me back, but now as I walk towards her and see the look in her eyes I don’t know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half-weeping, half-laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don’t love you! Can’t she hear me screaming it? I don’t love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can’t do it….17
Yet already Miller seems to have discovered the trick of detaching himself from his misery and deriving a masochistic enjoyment from his suffering, watching himself as he looked forlornly across the yards to Cora’s windows, thinking of himself as romantic and soulful, like the hero of a tragic love-story. His campaign of ‘spiritual conquests’ had also provided him with a number of ways of cutting himself off from Pauline on their evenings together. He rented a cheap upright piano which he kept at her flat and practised on it for hours, hoping and dreaming that he might one day become good enough to be a concert pianist. He buried himself in chess problems, and became ever more deeply involved with the world of books. ‘What good is all that reading going to do you?’ Pauline would ask, and he would shake his head and reply, ‘I don’t know. I just like to read.’
In his twenty-third year, Henry was coming under increasing pressure from his family to settle down and join his father’s firm on a full-time basis. He still had not the slightest idea what he really wanted to do, but he was fairly certain he did not want to be a tailor. Finding himself forced to make a decision he acted impulsively and put his name down for a four-year course at Watson L. Savage’s newly-opened School for Physical Education on Columbus Circle, with the aim of becoming a qualified gymnasium instructor. There was a logic in this, given his interest in sport and the regime of physical culture he had been following since his adolescence, but as events turned out he was no more fated to be a gym teacher than he was a cowboy. The factor which decided his future for him was the ever-declining relationship between his mother and father.
One of the reasons he spent so much time at Pauline’s was that her company was in many ways the lesser of two evils. The atmosphere at home at Decatur Street was bad. His father was not thriving under the pressures of running his own business, and his social drinking with clients, potential clients and friends had got out of hand. He regularly came home drunk, and he and Louise indulged in frequent and degrading brawls in front of their children.18 Sometimes Henry would have to separate them physically. One night his father came home drunk with a friend and insisted that his friend be allowed to stay overnight. Louise was furious, and Henry never forgot the sight of their visitor on his knees to her in the morning, begging her for a forgiveness she would not grant. On another occasion the couple began to row as they were doing the washing-up together. Suddenly his mother slapped his father hard across the face with her wet hand. Henry senior responded calmly, telling Louise that he would leave her if she ever did it again.
At night, as Henry lay in his hall bedroom, he would hear his mother threatening to kill her husband because of his drinking; and when Henry senior stayed out until the small hours Louise would wake her son and tell him to call the police to go out looking for him. Henry survived these dispiriting scenes, but at the time, and for some years afterwards, he suffered from a nervous disorder which constricted his throat at meal times and caused him to feel that the was choking on his food. He did what he could to bring his parents together, and on their wedding anniversary each year treated them to a piano recital, playing popular favourites such as The Orange Blossom Waltz, The Midnight Fire Alarm, The Burning of Rome, Poet and Peasant and The Chariot Race. On their Silver Wedding Day he bought them a recording of John McCormack’s Mother Macree; but such moments of shared enjoyment in the family were rare.
As he got older, Henry saw his father’s drinking as the retreat of a warm-hearted, generous and easy-going soul from the nagging of a pushing and joyless wife. At the time, however, his sympathies were with Louise, and he seems to have shared the weary contempt in which she held his father. Once Henry senior caught his son reading Balzac’s The Wild Ass’ Skin, and misunderstanding the allusion to an ‘ass’ confiscated the book. Later in life Henry had a connoisseur’s affectionate appreciation for such mistakes, and as his anti-intellectualism grew he might even have wished himself capable of them; but as a young man it made him wince. In certain moods of disgusted despair it seemed to him that the best for all concerned would be for his father to kill himself and leave his insurance money to Louise. Lauretta, who was mimetic in her feeble-mindedness, also sided with her mother.
Things might have been different had the business at 5 West 31st Street been a success, but despite occasional periods of relative prosperity, such as that in 1912 which had provided the money for Henry’s abortive attempt to go to Cornell, the business struggled all the way. A number of times Louise had to dip into her own savings to help the firm out, and it was obvious that unless something was done both father and firm would soon go under.
Guilt had become, by default, the most powerful motive force in Henry’s life. Louise knew this, and she knew that the accumulating failures of her son’s adolescence gave her a powerful emotional lever to use on him. After the City College fiasco there was the Cornell fiasco, his subsequent poor work record, his absurd attempt to leave home, and above all his craven relationship with a divorced woman in her late thirties. On the unpromising grounds that in making love to Pauline he had assumed ‘a tremendous moral obligation towards her’ and was ‘guilty of violation and must pay the penalty’,19 he had once told his mother he intended to marry her. At this Louise ‘blazed forth with incredible violence, taking the carving knife and actually threatening to kill me’, according to one of several descriptions of the incident he later recorded. Under the circumstances it was hard for Henry to resist when Louise began to exert real pressure on him to forget about becoming a gymnasium instructor and to begin full-time work at the tailor-shop, addressing himself seriously to the task of fulfilling his destiny as his father’s successor in the business. She framed her appeal with care, avoiding undue concentration on her own – and his father’s – wishes in the matter, focussing instead on the intimate problem of his father’s drunkenness: there were now periods when Henry senior was drunk for days on end, so drunk that he was not always able to find his way back to the office after lunch.
Put like that, it was Henry’s clear duty to save his father from himself, and after just two months at the Savage School he abandoned the course and agreed to join the firm and become a tailor. His parents were delighted. Straightaway his father had the stationery printed: Henry Miller and Son, Tailors and Importers, Madison Square 1199, 5 West 31st Street. In the top right-hand corner was the legend ‘Opposite Hotel Wolcott’, whose bar was the cause of so much of the trouble.
The garment industry in New York had been through many changes since the emergence of high-class tailoring as a profession after the Civil War. The years immediately following the Civil War had seen the establishment of a number of small businesses in New York, most of them run by German immigrants, catering to a small but wealthy clientèle. By the 1880s and 1890s these businesses were just becoming established when Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia began arriving in New York in large numbers. Many of the new arrivals were people with the same traditions in clothes-making as the Germans, and the subsequent competition led to a restructuring of the industry. After the turn of the century a typical tailor’s shop might consist of a group of five or six tailors working under the same roof in a loose alliance in which each preserved their individuality and kept their own list of customers while employing the same pool of journeyman tailors. This was the arrangement at Henry Miller senior’s shop. He shared it with five other tailors – a Frenchman named Wemlinger, Rente, Metz and Erwin the Germans, and an American named Chase. The boss-tailor might have the status, but it was often the case that the journeyman tailors earned more money than their employers, and with the exception of Metz, the Millers’ great rival, none of the bosses in the shop were affluent.
Henry was already familiar with many aspects of his new life. As a young child he used to spend hours watching his grandfather Nieting dreamily pressing the seams of suits and coats with a hot iron in the house on Driggs Avenue. Sometimes, for fun, he used to cut out paper patterns of suits which he would lay on his father’s bed as a surprise for him when he came home from work. In the days before drinking took the upper hand, his father would set up a big cutting-board down in the coal cellar at home, and work on after dinner in the evening. When the family went on summer holidays together they travelled only as far as Rockaway Beach so that his father could continue to commute to work. Later, as a boy of twelve or fourteen, Henry junior would be sent out with packages of clothes to deliver on Saturdays.
His duties now – apart from expanding his knowledge of the world of alpaca sleeve linings, soft-rolled lapels, bastings, vicunas, flap pockets, silk waistcoats and braided cutaways–included familiarizing himself with the accounting, selling and social side of the business. One of his regular tasks was to try to claim on outstanding bills. Another, which he seems to have hit upon himself, was to drum up trade by going from door to door locally with a package of samples to display to prospective customers. He would try his luck at, among other places, the American Express, and the Woolworth Building on Broadway. Since an important part of his later career as a writer involved the difficult business of selling his personality, this was a useful first experience of persuading people to buy something they did not actually realize they wanted, as well as providing valuable insights into the special pleasures of being rebuffed and rejected. His line of approach was pleasingly naive: he would simply go up to prospective customers and ask if they were interested in clothes. An elderly gentleman surprised him one day by replying: ‘Why yes, seeing as I’m obliged to wear them.’
As anticipated, much of his time was spent in the business of minding his father. Henry senior would generally stroll over the road to the bar of the Wolcott at about ten in the morning, easing along until it was time for lunch at about twelve. The meal itself might last until four or five in the afternoon, and then it was back to the shop in time to switch out the lights. If his father were too drunk, or had wandered too far from the Wolcott, Henry would have to go out to look for him. Often they lunched together. Henry senior wanted his son to grow up and take over the business, and he would invite Henry to join him and his cronies at the Wolcott so that he would get the hang of the social side of the life. Understandably, however, Miller was practically teetotal at the time, and though he enjoyed the food at the Wolcott he never drank anything but water with it.
What hurt him most was the humiliation his father suffered because of his drinking, and the way in which this humiliation reflected on him. It pained him to be at the shop with the cutter and the workers from the busheling room at the back, where the suits were finished and pressed, when his father turned up at the end of another quiet day in his dirty straw hat, drunkenly informal, friendly, vacuous, wiping his moustache, ‘nonchalant-like, reckless, devil may care, in his little boss-tailor way’,20 and to have to listen as he called up a few of his customers on the phone, speaking to them with the ‘slightly defective lisp of the half-drunk man’.
One of their oldest and best customers was a lawyer named Corbett. Corbett knew that young Henry could not serve him properly, and he disliked Jews so intensely that he refused to be measured by Berg the cutter either. Instead he would humiliate Henry by obliging him to telephone the bar at the Wolcott with instructions for his father to return to the office immediately. On one occasion, after a French salesman in a bar called his father a drunken bum, Henry’s self-control cracked.21 He attacked the man and nearly throttled him before he was pulled away by others in the bar.
The humiliations he suffered on account of his father’s drinking took root in Henry. It was a period of ‘bitter estrangement’ between father and son during which they ‘communicated in monosyllables’. He felt that he had become a martyr for his mother’s sake, having ‘sacrificed my whole career to make her happy, to protect her from my father whose life is destroying her’.22 Soon he developed ways of compensating for the disappointments and frustrations of his life. When he got sick of watching his father kowtow to rich customers, and of thinking of Pauline and how he could never escape her, he would relieve himself by writing long, ‘sarcastic, vituperative letters, just this side of libel’ to send to the firm’s most hopeless debtors. Later he added the refinement of mysterious and threatening telegrams which were despatched for delivery to the victims at midnight. The ploy illuminates a harsh, ruthless side of his personality, the feeling that someone – anyone – had to pay for the suffering he underwent, for the fact that life seemed nothing but a senseless and cruel farce. Clearly he had a natural talent for violent, abusive language; but no writer really likes to acknowledge such a talent in his youth, and for many years he resisted the evidence of these dunning letters of his.
Almost in spite of himself, however, Henry enjoyed his time at the tailor-shop. These were the years of his real education, after the disappointments of school and college. One of his finest pieces of writing is the descriptive essay The Tailor Shop, which conveys wonderfully the club-like atmosphere that could overtake the place when the raconteurs among the visiting cloth salesman got going with their stories and jokes. One of Henry’s favourites among these was a man he calls Fred Pattee whose skill in using irony to sabotage the defeats and futilities of everyday life he greatly admired. Pattee was a literate and cultured man who had acquired a taste for Heine and Schubert without losing his respect for the humour and mystery of the fart, and from characters like this he learnt that there was more to culture than just a refined accent and good manners.
He also derived pleasure and stimulation from the company of Chaimowitz, Bunchek and Rubin, who worked in the busheling room, and especially of Berg the cutter, a sympathetic Jewish immigrant who graciously listened to the youth’s accounts of his latest reading adventures – Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution – and in return broadened Henry’s horizon with tales from the ghettos of his native Poland and the folklore of the Jewish people. One of the busheling room workers was an opera fan who would sing selections from Pagliacci or Boris Godunov when in the mood. Miller, who combined in equal parts the gifts of enthusiasm and overstatement, recalled that this man had ‘probably a greater voice than Caruso’. It was from these workers that he developed his taste for the passionate melancholy of Jewish music, and in particular the singing of the cantor Gerson Sirota.23
The tailor-shop was situated not far from the theatre district, and many of its customers were well-known figures from the world of acting. Henry’s father developed drinking friendships with several of them, and was flattered by the company of a Brooklyn legend like Corse Payton – a man who rejoiced in the title ‘America’s Best Bad Actor’ – the elegant matinée idol Julian L’Estrange and John Barrymore senior, already a well-known stage performer on the verge of a long and successful career in films. Henry shared his father’s fascination with the famous and was proud of the fact that he had a nodding acquaintance with other contemporary ‘names’ who patronized the shop, even if they were not always customers of Henry Miller and Son. The dramatist, actor and producer David Belasco was one of Erwin’s clients, but he allowed Henry to help him on and off with his trousers; another well-known patron was the artist Boardman Robinson, then a cartoonist for the Greenwich Village magazine The Masses.
Some customers were of practical use to Henry. Through a photographer named Pach who had connections with the Metropolitan Opera he was able to get free admittance to concerts there and at Carnegie Hall, and heard recitals by some of the greatest names among contemporary piano virtuosi, artists like Paderewski, Alfred Cortot, and Prokofiev. Though he still vaguely entertained hopes of becoming a concert pianist himself one day, literature was playing an increasingly important rôle in his life. He had read a couple of books about pianos, including Montagu O’Reilly‘s two curious titles Pianos of Sympathy and Who Has Been Tampering with These Pianos?, but was getting at least as much out of the serious works of some of his American contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Waldo Frank, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Frank Norris. Further, his horizon had been dramatically extended by his encounter with Emma Goldman to include the outstanding writers in modern European literature. Though he does not list it in The Books In My Life, he seems to have read her book The Social Significance of Modern Drama, published in Boston in 1914, and used it as a reference book and guide during this period of his life. Here he came across discussions of the work and thought of Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Maeterlinck, Rostand, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Yeats, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky and Andreyev.
The political and philosophical slant Goldman gave to her promotion of all literature communicated itself to Henry, and is perhaps one reason why literature and philosophy never became clearly distinct branches of letters for him. Above all, perhaps, it accounts for his enthusiasm for anarchism. On the recommendation of her writings and lectures (she lectured frequently in New York during this period) he discovered the idealism of Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin’s theory that a viable social order will emerge of its own accord if people are left alone to do as they wish, follow their nature and discover what truly pleases them is an expression of substantially the same kind of limitless faith in human nature that Miller was to promote throughout his writing life. He also read Bakunin and the Bostonian Benjamin J.Tucker, editor of the weekly Liberty, the most influential voice in individual anarchism in the United States at the time, was another source of inspiration. Along with the vaguely oriental mysticism of Madame Blavatsky to which Challacombe had introduced him, Henry’s readings in anarchism were a decisive formative influence during these years.
Henry read indiscriminately and widely during his adolescence; even so, one suspects him of exaggerating his precocity. Excluding the field of sex, there is no area in which we are quite so free to lie as in boasting of our prowess as readers, and Henry took full advantage of the ultimate inscrutability of both the sex-life and the reading life in creating his myth of himself. The tendency is evident in an interview he gave late in life to a French journalist in which he not only claimed to have read the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu at the tender age of seventeen, but in doing so specifically asked his interviewer to be astonished: ‘In Brooklyn, I ask you! It’s incredible. Me reading Lao Tzu in the middle of that crazy family!’24 The precocity is belied by the wistful regret expressed in Sexus that at thirty-three he had yet to encounter the book: ‘Had I been intelligent enough to have read that most illustrious and most elliptical piece of ancient wisdom I would have been spared a great many woes.’25 In fact he almost certainly did not read the Tao Te Ching until he was in Paris in his forties. This naked desire to impress inclines one to look sceptically at the claim made in a letter to a professor that in his boyhood he had read ‘what other boys read, such as Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, and American writers too, especially the poets, practically all of them, up to a certain period. Include Ambrose Bierce, Lafcadio Hearn, Frank Norris, Dreiser, Anderson, Ben Hecht, many, many others’ and that ‘while in my teens, I believe, I read Petronius, Rabelais, Pierre Louys, Rémy de Gourmont, Jules Laforgue, Maeterlink, Pierre Loti, to mention a few. Nearly all of them very important to me. As were the Greek tragedies, the Restoration dramatists, and the 19th century dramatists of most European countries.’26
Whether the claims are true or not, the definite impression that emerges from such listing is of someone who prefers quantity to quality. It is also hard to believe that the Greek tragedies and the Restoration dramatists can have meant much to someone who left college in disgust at eighteen because he was made to read Spenser’s Faerie Queene. One is on safer ground with a name that does not figure on this list, that of Frank Harris, another of the tailor-shop’s famous customers. The Greenwich Village notable and charlatan Guido Bruno, Harris’ assistant on Pearson’s magazine at the time, brought Harris along with him to the Millers’ shop one day in 1916 so that Harris could pick something suitable for a yachting trip. He began to laugh when Henry senior suggested a material with broad stripes, saying that it would have been more appropriate for someone appearing in a minstrel show. Eventually, however, he found something to his liking. While he was being fitted in the back room, where the staff were amazed to discover that he wore no underclothes, he entertained them with monologues on three of his favourite subjects – Jesus, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare. Harris was a famous writer at the time, the author of a much-praised book on Shakespeare, and in his capacity as editor of Pearson’s an exciting and controversial figure who had taken a consistently anti-British line after the outbreak of the 1914–18 war, with the result that the magazine had twice been seized by the authorities. The combination of literature and rebellion was impressive and attractive to Henry, as was Harris’ informal manner with the cutters. In The Books In My Life Miller lists fourteen titles of books by Harris, including The Bomb, Harris’ 1908 novel based on the anarchist bomb outrage in the Chicago Haymarket, and the Stories of Jesus the Christ. The association between sexual boasting and an occasional messiah-complex in the writings of both men suggests that it was the bold versatility of Harris’ personality rather than his literary skills that impressed Henry. A man who could interpret, as Harris did, the biblical words ‘much shall be forgiven her for she loved much’ as a clear indication that Jesus had ‘surely been in the stews’ was a man close to Miller’s own heart.27 Meeting Harris meant a lot to Henry, and he always fondly called it his ‘first contact with a great writer’.28 At the time, however, he was not quite sure what to make of him, and in a letter to a friend related that he had ‘mixed feelings regarding him. Like him immensely but can’t see his greatness. Am I near-sighted?’29
A more respectable literary influence was that of John Cowper Powys, the Welsh poet, novelist, essayist and lecturer. Powys settled in America in 1914, the same year as Harris, and quickly established a reputation as a touring lecturer. After the mysticism of Challacombe and Mills, the politicized literary preaching of Emma Goldman and the rascally polemic of Frank Harris, Powys had a more purely literary influence on Miller’s development – although Powys too considered himself as much a philosopher as a writer. In 1916, Powys held a series of lectures on great Russian writers at the Hudson Theatre, 139 West 44th Street, just a dozen blocks north of the tailor-shop, where he spoke on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Andreyev and Artzybashev. Henry heard the lectures, and was smitten. ‘Do you know where I have had to run for any satisfaction for my disgust?’ he wrote in 1916. ‘To Russian authors. There is a grim reality about their writing that appeases me.’30 Powys’s lectures contributed to a cult of Russia and the ‘Slavic soul’ which was noticeable during this period, originating among the bohemians of Greenwich Village in a reverence for Nijinsky and Dostoevsky. Miller was not yet a Greenwich Villager, but he had seen Nijinsky dance, and was deeply impressed by the intensity of Russian artists, finding in them an exhilarating contrast to the drabness of American materialism. Besides promoting Dostoevsky, Powys wrote and spoke frequently about Rabelais and Walt Whitman, both of whom were great favourites of Miller’s. ‘All the authors I was then passionate about were the authors he was writing and lecturing about. He was like an oracle to me,’ Miller recalled.31
Powys the lecturer had the same effect on Henry as Emma Goldman. Both created a delirium in him, though of a different kind:
Powys, needless to say, had his own select luminaries whom he raved about. I use the word ‘raved’ advisedly. I had never before heard anyone rave in public, particularly about authors, thinkers, philosophers. Emma Goldman, equally inspired on the platform, and often Sibylline in utterance, gave nevertheless the impression of radiating from an intellectual center. Warm and emotional though she was, the fire she gave off was an electrical one. Powys fulminated with the fire and smoke of the soul, or the depths which cradle the soul. Literature for him was like manna from above. He pierced the veil time and time again.32
On a technical level, Powys’s baroque style of writing impressed him, and readers of Powys’s Autobiography are bound to be struck by the similarities with the style Miller adopted for his writing after the 1940s, with its taste for inversion, exotic words, and occasional semi-biblical formulations. Powys also had elements of the same quantitative approach to the world of literature that Miller had. In 1916 he published a list of his One Hundred Best Books.
While hiding out at Pauline’s and living off the money intended to see him through Cornell, Henry had made his first halting and unsuccessful attempts to write in the drab little kitchen of her flat. On returning from California he made a further attempt, perhaps hoping to get a Jack London story out of his experiences in the citrus groves; but this proved equally disheartening. In the beginning, perhaps, these earliest literary efforts were only tactical manoeuvres in the general attempt to withdraw from Pauline into a private world of ‘spiritual conquests’. Presently, however, it must have occurred to Henry that he was getting so much from the world of books that he ought to think seriously about becoming a writer himself. It was an unusual but not unheard-of idea in the circles in which he moved. Bob Challacombe wrote verse, and Henry’s childhood friend Stanley Borowski had grown up wanting to be a writer. Stanley had moved away from Brooklyn in his teens, but one way of passing the time at the tailor-shop which Henry discovered was to write long letters of literary appreciation and criticism of the books he was reading to Stanley, and this way they had managed to keep in touch. Coming from a Polish background, it must have seemed natural to Stanley to choose Joseph Conrad as his literary idol. Similarly the strong, lifelong attachment Henry felt for the poetry and personality of Walt Whitman may well have had its roots in a simple sense of identification based on the fact that Whitman was from Brooklyn, and proud of it. Whitman was one of the handful of writers who exercised real, traceable influence on Miller’s writing. Like Henry’s other early heroes, he was a cross between a writer, a philosopher and a prophet, someone for whom the spiritual content of the work was more important than its aesthetic qualities. The aspects of his poetry that particularly appealed to Henry are obvious enough in the light of Henry’s own performance as a published writer in later life – the emotional, ‘plain man’ stance; the aesthetic which insists that ‘who touches the book touches the man’; the religious ecstasy; the rough, wild, emotional humanitarianism; the man with a powerful sense of the importance of his feminine sides; the challenging and notorious writer whose personal honesty gets him into trouble with the authorities; the writer who changes people’s lives; and the fierce social critic, whose criticism is tempered by an equally fierce patriotism which insists on the superiority of the local, American greatness of the Wallabout Martyrs over the greatness of the heroes of remote antiquity. Sanctioning his enjoyment of Whitman as poet and thinker, Miller had the example of mentors like Benjamin Fay Mills, whose Walt Whitman: the Man and his Message he read; Emma Goldman, who idolized the poet and valued particularly his ‘extraordinary sensitiveness to the nature of woman conditioned in the fact that he had considerable femininity in him’; and the enthusiasm for Whitman’s verse of John Cowper Powys.
The first piece of writing that Henry produced with the conscious hope that it would be read by others was an essay on Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, written during one of the long, idle days at the tailor-shop. The essay has not survived, nor has the journal he kept in which he noted down, besides the intimate details of his life with Pauline, his reactions to public events like the death of Jack London in 1916 (‘the news of his death really pained me, so much so that I got out my dairy to register my thoughts about it’). By his own account, anyway, most of the writing he did at this period was in his own head. Going to work he would take the elevated line from Brooklyn across the bridge each day, get off at Delancey Street and walk the rest of the way to 5th Avenue and 31st Street, all the while planning the books and plays he was going to write when he got the time, when he had the talent, when he was ready, when the weather was better, when the pencil was sharper, when the pages were all numbered and after he’d cleaned his shoes. Some writers run into a block once they’ve said all they had to say, but Henry had the block even before he started. He described his troubles to a friend:
I have had the devil’s own torments lately from imagining that I have something in me to give to the world. I can’t quite believe that I am capable of writing anything worthwhile and yet, for the life of me, I can’t repress the desire to put my thoughts on paper. Have had some notions of writing a play, but I have such outlandish stuff to dole out that I am almost afraid to begin. If there is one thing worse than having an artistic temperament, it is thinking you have one.33
He felt that in working in his father’s business he was ‘living in a narrow sphere’. Yet for someone who was ‘only a tailor’, his adolescent sense of isolated arrogance was healthily large. ‘From using my own powers of observation, I am able to form some judgment of the masses that surround me and I can truthfully say that I loathe them throughgoughly (sic). Their own sheer stupidity will be the death of them,’ was how he expressed it. In the same letter he claims that he is ‘no longer capable of railing against the capitalists and the politicians as I did several years ago. What bothers me now is the fact that there is no material from which to make men nowadays.’ Interestingly, he expressly observes that he does not believe that ‘the system is responsible for everything’, showing that he had in his early twenties the same cheering faith in the importance of the individual that invests practically all the best writing of his later years.
In 1916, when he wrote the above letter to Charles Keeler, a poet, author and later Founder and Managing Director of something called the Cosmic Society, Henry Miller and Son, Tailors and Importers, were going through one of their better spells. Keeler was a former customer, and Miller’s letter mixes metaphysics with news of the goings-on in the shop. Besides the upturn in trade, Henry could report that his father was ‘going through a sort of regeneration, having cut out the booze for the last eight or nine months’. In fact, they were doing so well that Henry had allowed Guido Bruno to swindle him out of $200. As this was the equivalent of eight times the monthly wage he had been getting at the Atlas Portland Cement Company, it indicates not only how well the firm was doing but that Henry’s later references to the poverty of his early manhood, when he had to queue for a ticket at the Metropolitan ‘usually on an empty stomach’,34 and try to write among the pots and pans of Pauline’s kitchen ‘with a little broken pencil’ were just romantic fantasies, and certainly had no bearing on his failure to make an early start as a writer.35
By this time Henry had reached his full height of 5 feet 8 inches. His hair had turned darker, and much of it was already gone. He wore glasses, weighed just over 10 stone, had a 38 inch chest and a 32 inch waist and his hat and shoes were both size 7 to 7½. He was the boss’s son and he dressed correctly in suit, shirt and tie, the suit being often a good quality hand-me-down from his father. He kept busy, had many friends, frequently rode his bike, went to the theatre, the opera, the concert hall, read a lot, played the piano, played chess, listened to gramophone records, tried to write, and slept with a woman he didn’t love. The campaign of ‘spiritual conquests’ had not worked: when he closed the piano lid, packed away the books and the chessmen and lifted his head, Pauline was still there. Her lodger, Tex the tramdriver, whom Miller called the ‘star-boarder’ because he had a regular job and paid his rent promptly, was a pleasant enough man, but he was not a reader or a talker, and Henry could not use him to ease the burden of life with Pauline. Accordingly he took a step he was to take over and again in his life, and persuaded one of his friends to move in with them.
Joe O’Reagan had had a genuinely hard upbringing. He had been raised in an orphanage and then travelled the world with the American army. Henry met him shortly after he was discharged at a lakeside village in New Jersey where the Millers were on holiday. Another friend of Henry’s named Bill Woodruff was staying with them for a few days. Woodruff and O’Reagan were workmates and at Woodruff’s invitation O’Reagan came out to visit them. Henry’s private opinion of Woodruff was that he was something of a weed, but O’Reagan impressed him at once as a tough, manly, athletic young man. He had had little formal education, but was intelligent and a good raconteur. Being shy and oversensitive with girls himself, Henry always admired men who were not, and he thrilled to Joe’s tales of army life and of sexual adventures with Japanese whores, soon making an idol of him. By the time Joe moved in at Pauline’s, he and Henry had become close friends.
O’Reagan saw his role in the household rather differently from the motorman Tex, and as soon as he moved in he set about trying to seduce Pauline while Henry was out at work. She was reduced to tears by his advances and reported them to Henry. Henry found it difficult to care and even defended Joe. He had begun suffering occasionally from impotence as a consequence of his disinterest in Pauline, and may even have half-hoped that Joe would take her off his hands for good. Probably as a result of Pauline’s upset, Joe soon left on his travels again; but he would return to play an oddly similar role in relations between Miller and women on two future occasions.
Eventually, sometime in 1915, the death-knell of the relationship between Henry and Pauline was sounded. Henry was at a wedding with William Dewar when Dewar introduced him to a young woman named Beatrice Sylvas Wickens. Beatrice, with her dark hair and dark eyes, had the distinctly non-Germanic type of looks that Miller was to fall for again and again in his life. She was a professional musician and, according to Dewar, a ‘brilliant concert pianist’, while Henry, for all his practising, was ‘no Franz Liszt’ although he ‘did play well in a popular sort of way’. She was a cultured, strong-minded woman, just twenty-three years old, a type of whom his mother could approve. Their mutual interest in music gave them something to talk about, and before they parted Henry asked Beatrice if she would be willing to give him piano lessons.
1 ‘a thing that had been used too roughly,’ Black Spring notebook.
2 ‘told himself that it wouldn’t recur,’ Henry and June by Anais Nin, p263.
3 ‘my Bright Green Wind,’ The Books In My Life, p127.
4 ‘maybe a good corporation lawyer,’ preface to Sidney Omarr’s Henry Miller’s World of Urania and My Life and Times, p188.
5 ‘than anyone in this wide world,’ letter to Charles Keeler, December 9th 1916.
6 ‘the only thing of its nature obtainable in my American environment,’ Saga of the Streets, section on B.F. Mills.
7 ‘mystic side of my nature,’ Ibid.
8 ‘And they supply it,’ Ibid.
9 ‘unnecessary to make the trip,’ Tropic of Capricorn, p138.
10 ‘hands were torn and cut by the branches,’ Reflections, editor Twinka Thiebaud, p23.
11 ‘they took a liking to me,’ Reflections, p23.
12 on their way to a Mexican whorehouse,’ My Life and Times, p190.
13 ‘hot welcome,’ June notebook, section entitled ‘Pauline Fiasco’.
14 ‘hopeless to evade my destiny,’ Saga of the Streets.
15 ‘I turn my strength into spiritual conquests.’ Ibid.
16 ‘This is where we sleep,’ Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, p49.
17 ‘am tongue-tied. I can’t do it …’ Tropic of Capricorn, p308.
18 ‘He regularly came home drunk,’My Life and Times, p193.
19 ‘violation and must pay the penalty,’ Saga of the Streets.
20 ‘his little boss tailor way,’ Black Spring notebook.
21 ‘his father a drunken bum, Reflections, p21.
22 ‘my father whose life is destroying her,’ Saga of the Streets.
23 ‘Caruso,’ My Life and Times, p195.
24 ‘reading Lao Tzu in the middle of that crazy family!’ Face to Face with Henry Miller, Conversations with Georges Belmont, p41.
25 ‘wistful regret expressed in Sexus,’ Sexus, p61.
26 ‘19th century dramatists of most European countries,’ Letter to William Gordon, August 17th 1966.
27 ‘Miller’s own heart,’ Frank Harris by Philippa Pullar, p347.
28 ‘first contact with a great writer,’ My Life and Times, biographical appendix.
29 ‘see his greatness. Am I near-sighted?’ Letter to Charles Keeler, December 9th 1916.
30 ‘a grim reality about their writing that appeases me,’ Ibid.
31 ‘He was like an oracle to me,’ The Books In My Life, p135.
32 ‘He pierced the veil time and time again.’ Ibid, p 137.
33 ‘worse than having an artistic temperament, it is thinking you have one,’ letter to Charles Keeler, December 9th 1916.
34 ‘usually on an empty stomach,’ The Book of Friends, p134.
35 ‘his failure to make an early start as a writer,’ My Life and Times, p187.
* Her given name was probably Laura May. Miller specifies that at one time her address was 366 Decatur Street. A search of the 1915 Census for that address turns up Laura May, a white housewife aged 38, as head of a household consisting of herself and her son George V. Wilson, aged 21, a salesman.