Psychological theories are hardly necessary to explain why a man of fifty-three should want to marry an attractive girl of twenty-one: one or two pointers suggest, however, that in marrying someone so young Miller was also making an attempt to start life over again from the beginning. The adolescent experience with Cora Seward, the girl he wanted so badly and never won, had taught him the dangers of putting a woman on a pedestal. From Pauline Chouteau he had learnt the joys of sex, and in Beatrice Wickens he felt he had married a woman who climbed up onto a pedestal of her own accord. June Mansfield had offered him what he thought might be the ideal combination of friend and lover, but his sexual conservatism proved too great in the end, the burden of equality beyond him.
The long relationship with Anais Nin had been in many ways an ideal arrangement, offering sexual pleasure and intellectual and spiritual companionship with none of the burdens and banalities of ordinary personal responsibility. Henry, however, almost in spite of himself, remained addicted to the state of marriage, and without the hope of permanence and eventual respectability that relationship, too, was doomed to failure. With this wealth of experience behind him he might have felt that he had a fair chance of finally getting it right at the age of fifty-three, and it is interesting to note that Lepska, uniquely among the women in his adult life, had the blond, Nordic looks that recall his descriptions of Cora. The death of his father and the serious illness of his mother must also have had a sobering effect on him, and made him realize that time was passing.
Superficially the two did not have a great deal in common. Lepska was an educated, even intellectual woman, according to Huntington Cairns ‘the only female Hegelian I know’. Miller had enjoyed Nin’s intelligence but his aversion to education was getting stronger by the year. What they did share was a lack of spiritual complacency: Henry was still, in his fifties, searching for the unifying theories that would provide a coherent explanation of life, and Lepska, in her adolescence, had passed through a phase of intense religiosity during which her parents had had to restrain her from running away from home to become a nun. From Henry she may have been hoping for guidance, maturity and the essential emotional and intellectual stability which his calm exterior often suggested he possessed, while Henry, famous and thirty years older than his wife, probably hoped that he would be able to control her without too much difficulty, and that this second attempt to settle down and start a family would be a greater success than his earlier one.
In their first year together they lived in the cabin on Partington Ridge, where a daughter, Valentine, was born on November 18th 1945. Early in 1946 the owner of the cabin, Keith Evans, returned from the war and the family had to move to a shack in the old convict settlement at Anderson Creek. The living conditions were primitive, the roof leaked and Lepska had to cook on an old wood-burning stove. However, they invested $100 in necessary repairs, painted the ceilings and walls white and the doors and window sashes blue, and with its bright yellow kitchen the place soon resembled a doll’s house. Neighbours provided them with rugs, chairs, a round table and a phonograph with some records. Varda gave Henry two collages to hang on the walls. ‘Too bad the convicts couldn’t have lived this way!’ he wrote to Schnellock.
There was no local medical care for Lepska and the baby, so Henry was often left alone at the house while she travelled to Berkeley for check-ups. He spent the time breaking coal and sawing wood, in preparation for the rain, and doing water-colours, so besotted by the pleasures of fatherhood that he did little writing that year. Sometimes he walked over to Slate’s hot springs with the family’s laundry. The place functioned as a sort of social club, and he got to know many of the other residents there.
Miller already had numerous friends in Big Sur and the surrounding areas, including an eccentric ‘white witch’ and Christian Scientist named Jean Wharton for whom he developed a particular fondness. She lived in a house on Partington Ridge which he had always admired, and when she decided to move to a smaller house she put it on the market at $6000. There were no takers but, aware of Henry’s liking for the house, she offered it to him and his family. He explained that he could not afford her price, but she let him have it anyway on the understanding that he would pay when he was able to. In February 1947 the family moved in.
The house, a thousand feet or so above the coastal highway that ran along by the Pacific, was one of a dozen or so cottages on the Ridge. It had a small shack at the back which Miller used for a studio, and a run-down garage for the car he still didn’t own. Its connection with the highway was a one-lane dirt track with branches off towards the other dwellings. There were no shops in the area, and the local mailman ran a small grocery business for the residents from his van. This house remained Miller’s home for the next fifteen years. During their second year there Lepska gave birth to their son, Henry Tony.
One reason Henry felt he could now try to settle to a permanent home and a regular way of life was that he had achieved his ambition: he was a famous writer. In the process he had justified to himself in the holy name of Art all those crimes he felt himself guilty of – the disappointment he had caused his family in not taking over the tailor-shop; the desertion of Beatrice and Barbara; the betrayal of June with Anais Nin. The three Paris-written books with which he had achieved this were therapeutic acts of literary violence which had left him free to indulge the milder sides of his character, and his reawakened interest in religious philosophies and the occult increasingly flavours his life and letters throughout the 1940s. Lawrence Durrell, who soon became his only remaining contact in the world of conventional literature, was puzzled and amused by what seemed like an anomalous development in a man who had once seemed so impatient of hypocrisy and humbug, but found an explanation in the belief that it was, after all, a not unnatural reaction to the gross materialism of the American way of life. Certainly there was an element of rejection in Miller’s cultivation of the bizarre and the ridiculed, but his interests in the field of eccentric religions and philosophies had a longer pedigree, stemming from the days of Bob Challacombe and Benjamin Fay Mills, and the attempt as a young man to abandon the corrupt city and return to the soil which brought him to the fruit farm at Chula Vista.
Though he was to revise Sexus in the late 1940s, the original manuscript was written in 1942, and with it he came to the end of his attempts to find some kind of meaning in sex by writing about it. In a sense this had only been part of the larger search for a meaning or a pattern to life which had bothered him since his schooldays. Much of his petty lying, his editing of reality and his enthusiasm for the pretensions of astrology was directed to proving that such order existed, and that the details of his own life demonstrated its existence. In his letter of April 1939 to Huntington Cairns, he claimed: ‘the circle of my philosophical wandering is completed. I am liberated from all metaphysical speculation. The half-way station, so to speak, was Sinnett’s “Esoteric Buddhism”, which I left off reading in the Brooklyn Public Library at the age of twenty-two or three, I imagine – perhaps earlier – and resumed just a year ago here in the Villa Seurat, at the page where I had left off.’1
He received an assignment from Town and Country to review French and English war literature for them in the autumn of 1945 which gave him the chance to read Gertrude Stein, Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome, Vercors, Sartre and Camus’s L’Étranger, among other books. He was glad of the $500 and wrote amusingly of Stein that ‘the woman who has spent forty years of her life in Europe today sounds more than ever like a Midwesterner,’2 but responded most enthusiastically to Claude Houghton’s edifying ‘All Change, Humanity!’ Paradoxically, for someone who always spoke of idealists with contempt, he detested the Warner novel because in it mankind’s ‘new leaders are … represented as men of power instead of men of truth, or peace, or good will’. Though he did continue to read literature, and could see the greatness in Carson McCullers, for example, his taste in reading from this time onwards tends to be for occult or edifying books well outside the mainstream of literature. The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donal Kehoe; Choose Life: the Biblical Call To Revolt by Eric Gutkind; Crisis and Resurrection: A Prognostic of Destiny by Samuel Greiner; A Treatise on White Magic by Alice Bailey and Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca: The Power Within Us by Haniel Long are typical titles he would enthuse over in letters to friends. Such books appealed to the prophetic strain in his character that was first stirred by Walt Whitman’s shamanistic poetry, the philosophical works of Grant Allen and Edward Bellamy’s hugely successful and influential utopian novel of the 1880s, Looking Backward.
Miller’s religious enthusiasms did not sap his business sense, however. When George Leite began experiencing some difficulties in his dealing with the Gotham Book Mart, Miller gave him this advice: ‘Steloff – yes, I know this line of hers! When you want anything out of her, play the spiritual flute, she loves it.’3 In Steloff’s case the spiritual flute meant his own old favourites, Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. A curiosity from this period concerning Blavatsky is the letter Miller wrote to his co-seeker Emil Schnellock about her. Schnellock was now running the Art Department at a college of the University of Virginia and slowly declining into alcoholism. In 1944 Miller wrote him a gentle letter breaking the ‘disillusioning news’ about the Mahatmas of The Secret Doctrine: a book he had recently come across proved beyond doubt that ‘Koot Hoomi’ and ‘Mahatma Morya’ were the Madame’s own inventions and that she had herself forged the written testaments attributed to them on the subject of the existence of other planes of being. By the time of a similar experience in the 1950s, with T.Lobsang Rampa, author of the best-selling The Third Eye, Henry’s faith had become stronger. The news that Rampa was not a Tibetan monk at all but an English plumber from Devon named Cyril Henry Hoskins did not seem to him to compromise the essential truth of the book’s account of a Tibetan upbringing. ‘True or false, it’s a wonderful book’ was his reaction.4
By 1946, Schnellock was writing to Miller about ‘the little band of your followers who knock on my door to see your books and manuscripts – a growing band’.5 Some of these people actually left their homes to come and live near Miller on Big Sur. A typical example was a biochemist from Chicago named Robert Fink, one of the thousands of men who came under the sway of the Tropics while serving in the army. Fink wrote Miller a fan letter, later visited him in person and began supplying him with used clothes and small sums of money. Eventually, in 1949, he and his wife moved out to California where they could help him more efficiently.
The first and, according to Big Sur residents the MacCollums, the best of all the disciples was Emil White, an Austrian who had been captivated by The Cosmological Eye while working at a bookshop in Chicago. One of Miller’s begging circular letters had fallen into his hands and he had begun raising money for Miller in Chicago literary circles and forwarding small sums of around $3 a time – not much, but in those days enough to eat for a week if one were prudent. He was not to know, of course, that Miller was not prudent. After meeting his hero in Chicago, White had to disappear to Alaska for a while to avoid being drafted into the army. They corresponded and, sensing the extent of White’s devotion, Miller urged him to come and live close by. He told him not to worry about money, he would take care of that. This was in 1944, before Miller met Lepska, and as the farce of the celibate relationship with Sevasty Koutsaftis and the mail-order bride June Lancaster showed, Henry was not much good at picking up women on his own. White was a successful womaniser, and Henry had always needed such men in his life, from William Dewar and Joe O’Reagan in New York to Wambly Bald and Alfred Perlès in Paris. ‘I’ll use you as a decoy for cunt in Carmel,’ he told White. ‘You go in and fetch them out to the country.’6
White duly came and moved into a three-room cabin down on the coast-road, a thousand feet below the Ridge, where he operated as a watch-dog for Miller, weeding out the fans from those who only wanted to go up and stare at the monster behind what one newspaper reporter referred to as ‘the cult of sex and anarchy’ which was allegedly taking root in Big Sur. Visitors like D.H.Lawrence’s widow Frieda, with whom Miller was now corresponding, and the daughter of his old friend Blaise Cendrars, who turned up one day in the company of one of his Hollywood movie friends, were waved on up. White otherwise made himself useful by chopping wood for Henry, answering fan mail and doing little odd-jobs. Miller developed a passion for the novels of Herman Hesse at this time, particularly Siddhartha, and he was in the habit of drifting over to Emil’s to be read to from the original German version of the book. As for White, he helped himself royally from the women who turned up looking for the wild man of the Tropics and found instead a doting father and would-be sage who was, as a later visitor, Dylan Thomas, put it, ‘fond of commonplaces’.
White was only the most dedicated of the stream of men who came and went in Miller’s life after he settled on the mountain. Sometimes these were confused souls with personal problems, often connected with alcohol, who enjoyed Henry’s tolerance of their wild behaviour and his attempts to save them from themselves. Others were aspiring writers and artists who hoped that being acquainted with such a man would be both lucky and profitable. One such was an Israeli artist named Bezalel Schatz, who later became Miller’s brother-in-law, with whom he produced a large coffee-table book consisting of an illustrated chapter from Black Spring done by a silk-screen process. Miller rewrote the chapter by hand, trying to reflect the mood of the content by varying his own writing, and the book was sold by subscription at $100 per copy.
There is no sense in supposing that Miller minded being used in this way. A master at self-promotion himself, to him it all seemed quite natural and above board. He was a gifted user of other people and was not above schooling them now and then in the correct way to handle him. ‘You seem to regard a friend as one who does something for you,’ he rebuked Bern Porter once. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to look upon him first and foremost as one whom you do something for.’ Bezalel Schatz was by this definition ‘a tremendous friend. There is nothing he omits or forgets to do for me.’7 Then there were other, less formal relationships, such as the one with the art critic of the New York Evening Sun, whom Miller described as ‘an old man – forget his name – good friend of mine’.8
Many of those who were attracted to Big Sur during the 1940s were nakedly proud of knowing ‘a famous man’. Fink was inclined to boast that ‘Henry Miller is one of my closest friends and a man whom many consider a saint’, while to another correspondent he confided that Miller was ‘only a saint in the sense that he is as nearly complete a human being as the world has ever seen, since maybe Leonardo da Vinci’.9 Miller protested to an outside world of journalists and friends like Durrell that he was certainly not a saint, yet he did little to ridicule the pronouncements of such as Fink.
The appearance of Bern Porter’s The Happy Rock in 1945 only made matters worse. Apparently intended by Porter as something between a festschrift and a fanclub magazine, this collection of essays and sentimental tributes to Henry from friends and admirers came down quickly and heavily on the side of the magazine. A terse refusal to contribute from the poet Kenneth Patchen was its only redeeming feature. Patchen denounced the whole thing as a bandwagon, and with a directness worthy of Miller himself urged the author of Tropic of Cancer to kick the ‘sloppy-eyed nobodies’ (ie the rest of the contributors) off it and drive the wagon down the nearest sewer. ‘For God’s sake, Miller’, he concluded, ‘the important thing is not to be liked by these people!’10 Like the coffee-table book with Schatz, it can only have strengthened the suspicion in certain quarters that Henry was a literary charlatan.
To certain correspondents, notably Wallace Fowlie, Miller claimed that he did not approve of The Happy Rock, that he had known nothing about it and that when he did find out had not wanted to spoil Bern Porter’s fun by forbidding it. However, what he said depended very much on to whom he was writing. Fowlie, a practising Catholic, had became an ikon of purity for Miller, and in writing to him Henry always played ‘the spiritual flute’. It was unthinkable, for example, that he would ever have urged Fowlie to leave his job at Yale to come to California and act as his decoy for ‘cunt in Carmel’. Durrell heard the same protestations of innocent non-involvement from Henry, whereas Schnellock could be trusted to understand every facet of the Miller personality. Schnellock, with his memoir Just A Brooklyn Boy, was the star contributor to The Happy Rock, and in May 1944 Miller wrote urging him to report any attempts Bern Porter might make to edit his contribution. Around this time he was also trying to persuade Schnellock to write his biography, and had plans to travel to England where he hoped to find someone willing to commission such a book. ‘That I collaborated with you will not be mentioned,’ Miller assured him,11 adding that Schnellock’s essay on him was so good that he didn’t want to ‘tamper much with what you wrote’. Despite his ceaseless attempts to get someone to publish Anais Nin’s diaries, the prospect that somebody might actually one day do so was beginning to alarm him, and a biography written by Schnellock, with Henry looking over his shoulder, would be his insurance against the emergence of an unsatisfactory portrait. ‘It will be your version versus Anais – if the diary is ever published,’ he told his old friend.12 Even the title of Porter’s anthology, underscoring the portrait of the writer as Taoist sage, was chosen by Henry. He also took an active interest in the assembly of a book entitled Of, By and About Henry Miller which was published by a bookseller named Oscar Baradinsky from his Alicat Book Shop in Yonkers in 1947. An idea of Miller’s own, for a book of photos featuring ‘HM and “associates”,’ never got off the ground, although something very like it eventually appeared in 1972 as My Life And Times.
So Henry did not kick anybody off his bandwagon, but just let it roll. As far as he was concerned, he was simply enjoying the fruits of promotion, after years of hard work, from the congregation to the pulpit. Hence his use of the word ‘holograph’ when referring to his handwritten letters, and hence also his willingness to sign and send out a ‘holograph’ form letter like the one promoting the 1944 publication of The Angel Is My Watermark, a ‘book’ consisting of an original water colour of his, a photographic copy of ‘An Open Letter To All And Sundry’, the chapter of Black Spring from which the title derived, six black-and-white reproductions of his own paintings and several photographs of himself in the act of painting them. The whole cost $50 and was put out, Henry told potential buyers, ‘in a spirit of homage by friends of Henry for his friends’.
Miller could laugh at many aspects of himself and his reputation, but his status as an artist and a sage were taboo. There is never a hint of irony or self-ridicule on the subject; nor on the subject of the many other minor publishing ventures of this and subsequent periods in which old letters, scraps of notepaper and notebooks were packaged like holy relics for sale to the faithful. The need to be surrounded by fans rather than friends, and to see his name and even his handwriting in print in the smallest of small magazines perhaps indicates the true extent of the lack of self-confidence he felt in himself as a ‘real’ writer and illustrates his psychic need of the whole circus of fame simply in order to go on believing in the reality of what had happened to him. In a letter to Alfred Perlès, written shortly after arriving in Greece in 1939, he described his thoughts as he wandered the streets of Athens: ‘I have many reflections during these promenades, not least of which is that it is altogether phenomenal that I, Henry Miller, should be prowling about these precincts.’13 But why should this be so phenomenal? Such thoughts echo the sense of astonishment with which he found himself at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1928, and long before that even, on his disorientated adolescent trek westward to Chula Vista in 1913. It is an odd attitude, suggesting that his life seemed to him at times a kind of scarcely credible hypothesis that required constant authentication from the outside world in order to prevent the whole thing – life, man and name – from simply vanishing into thin air.
On the domestic front matters were not going well. It became clear almost immediately that Henry and Lepska were not suited. She found him wilful, irresponsible and unreliable, while he chafed under her attempt to bring order and routine into their lives. His many male friends in the region were always a diversion, but life as a family man was once again proving dull. He was therefore pleased to receive a letter late in 1945 from Conrad Moricand, then living in Switzerland whence he had fled during the war. Moricand was the man largely responsible for convincing Henry that the study of astrology was to be taken seriously, and with his circle of artistic and occult friends he remained in Henry’s eyes an impressive and exotic man. Moricand was destitute, and after receiving several more letters Henry offered to help him emigrate to the United States, giving the firm assurance that he would look after him ‘for the rest of his life’. Lepska was opposed to the idea, but Henry talked her into it.
The arrangements took several months to complete, during which time Miller supported Moricand to the tune of $1000, which represented his entire royalties from the sale of his books in America during the preceding six months. When Moricand’s papers were finally in order, Henry paid for his ticket on the plane from Geneva to London, and on the Queen Mary from England to New York. The last leg of the trip, again at Henry’s expense, was the flight to join his hosts in California. This was real altruism: Henry had nothing to gain from Moricand, and only hoped that the experience of life on Big Sur might cure him of his misery.
Moricand arrived early in 1947 and was given Henry’s old writing-room in which to live. One of his first actions was to tack curtains over the windows to keep out the draught. He complained of the cold and left an oil-stove burning all night in his room. The fact that there was no bath tub in the house bothered him, and he did not seem to like children much.
Within weeks of Moricand’s arrival it became obvious that the experiment had failed. Miller was bored and disappointed by a man whom he had never been personally close to, even in Paris. Moreover his nature was such that he disliked talking about personal problems with anyone, and rather than discuss the melancholic disaster that Moricand’s life had become he gave him Zen-like proddings to stop complaining, pull his socks up and be happy. Moricand, alas, was no searching youngster, nor even a robust oldster. He was a sixty-one year old man on the slide, and he felt he had been humiliated by fate. Henry’s suggestion that he pull his weight by teaching French to his two year old daughter did not got down well, and soon Moricand began to hate his host.
Seeing that his own brand of Zen magic was not having much effect on Moricand, Henry one day sent him up to see the white witch, Jean Wharton. Some hours later Moricand returned in disgust, bearing the copy of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health which Wharton had pressed on him. Miller, for whom the word ‘crank’ had no place in his vocabulary, later delved into the book himself and found Mrs Eddy a ‘great soul, filled with a great light’.14
Moricand’s health was poor and deteriorating. From the start of his stay he had been complaining of itches and sores on his legs, and in March Miller agreed to take him to see a specialist at Salinas County Hospital. He booked him into a room at the Serra Hotel in Monterey which cost $4 per day, and continued to support him throughout March and April while he worked to persuade him that it would be in the best interests of all concerned if he returned to France. By the end of May he estimated that the had, since 1945, spent about $3000 on Moricand.
Moricand wanted to go back to Paris as much as Henry wanted him to go, but on certain conditions. One was that Henry would use his influence to get him a job there with the Obelisk Press. Another was that Henry would arrange for him to be paid a lump sum of money from his accumulated French royalties on arrival in Paris. Miller would agree to neither term, and the experiment in philanthropy degenerated into an unpleasant farce which involved both the Swiss and the French consuls in San Francisco before it all fizzled out and Moricand disappeared from his life for good, consumed with hatred for his would-be benefactor and muttering ‘Quel farceur’ between gritted teeth as he left. He was finally deported in 1949 and returned to Paris, where he lived out the last five years of his life in loneliness and poverty. He died on a houseboat, moored on the Seine, which his rich parents had endowed for the use of the Parisian clochards.
‘The whole story deserves a book,’ Miller wrote to Monsieur Bertrand, the French consul, and in due course he produced A Devil In Paradise, written and published two years after Moricand’s death in 1954. Like most of what Miller wrote, the account has its moments of great hilarity and sharp self-insight, but in the end the picture is too one-sided. One begins to suspect character-assassination, and to feel a sneaking desire to hear Moricand’s version of events, as one would like to have heard Wambly Bald’s, or Beatrice Miller’s. In a final thrust at the already dead Moricand, Miller recalls a story he told after supper one day, prefacing the account with a description of how his little daughter snatched a piece of bread from Moricand’s plate and of how Moricand, eyes blazing, at once snatched it back from her. Later on, when the child had gone to bed, Moricand began his tale of an adventure he had in Paris once which began as he followed a woman and her young daughter through the streets. As the tale unfolded, Miller became aware that Moricand was describing the development of his erotic fascination not for the mother but for the daughter. ‘The thought of what was passing through his mind made me shudder,’ he wrote. Mother and daughter booked into a hotel, closely followed by Moricand. Signals pass between the two adults, the mother discreetly leaves the room, Moricand enters and … Miller listens in horror, unable to dismiss from his mind an image, which he has conjured himself, of the child sitting on the bed in a state of innocent disarray and ‘nibbling at a piece of pastry’ as Moricand triumphantly reaches the climax of his story: ‘Je l’ai eue.’15 At this Miller feels his hair stand on end and realizes that he is in the presence of Satan himself. Not even his inspection of Moricand’s collection of pornographic drawings, with its scenes of child rape, nuns masturbating with religious artefacts, tortures, coprophagic orgies and so on apparently prepared him for this. His outrage at Moricand’s story is a unique expression in his writing of disgust at an aspect of human sexual behaviour and, coming at the end of his description of Moricand, the incident creates an atmosphere of complete aversion towards the man which rules out any sense of pity the reader might feel for him. For Miller, all was fair in love, war and literature. Accused later by an admiring critic of moralizing at Moricand’s expense, Miller admitted the charge, and in doing so revealed again the surprisingly deep influence of Lost Horizon on his attempt to become a sage. His gesture in trying to save Moricand, he wrote to Thomas Parkinson, had been ‘perhaps all unintentionally inspired by that film which I saw at least a half-dozen times – ‘The Lost Horizon’. That part particularly where the hero leaves his Paradise in order to save his brother.’16 One might almost hazard a guess that Moricand’s major failing in Miller’s eyes was not his paedophilia, but his resistance to Henry’s charisma.
The major publications of the immediate post-war period were the collection of essays Sunday After The War in 1944, which contained ‘Reunion in Brooklyn’, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare in 1945, and its companion piece Remember to Remember two years later. Remember to Remember bears the subtitle The Air-Conditioned Nightmare Volume Two, though the title piece mostly harks back to happy days in Paris. The pen-portraits of Varda, Beauford Delaney, Jasper Deeter and Abe Rattner are bland, but some of the other pieces are excellent, notably the satirical ‘Astrological Fricasse’ and the fanatically pacifist ‘Murder the Murderer’. Particularly fine is ‘The Staff of Life’, an essay ridiculing the American mania for refined bread and the whole fear of life which underlies it. The ending is a splendid example of the kind of inspired surrealist rant at which Miller excelled.
He also wrote in 1946 the first part of a long essay on Rimbaud for New Directions Year Book number 9. A second part was published in the 1949 Year Book, both under the title ‘When Do Angels Cease to Resemble Themselves?’, though the complete book, as The Time of the Assassins, was not published in English until 1956. Rimbaud became a great favourite of Miller’s once he had managed to overcome the association of the name with Mara Andrews’ enthusiasm and the Henry Street basement. As was frequently the case with Miller’s literary heroes, it was the life as much as the work that inspired him. Rimbaud died in November 1891, the month before Henry was born, and a near-coincidence of this sort hinted at a possible transmigration of souls. He also identified with Rimbaud in his hatred of his mother. What inspired him most of all was the way Rimbaud had apparently succeeded in making a journey all the way through the world of literature and emerged on the other side of it. This was by now his own great dream.
With the assistance of Lepska, he struggled for some time to produce his own translation of Une Saison en Enfer. Typically his ideal for the project would have been a translation done without reference to the original, simply relying on his recall of the mood of the work. Eventually this was abandoned in favour of the study, for which he prepared himself thoroughly by reading most of the extant works on Rimbaud and having three separate horoscopes for his birth drawn up. He also benefited from a conversation with Stephen Spender, whom one of his society admirers, Mrs Ruth DeWitt-Diamant, brought up to see him one day. Spender brought news of a recently-published study of Rimbaud. Miller also corresponded with Wallace Fowlie on the subject. For all this background labour the result was not a factual work, nor yet a critical study, but a spiritual biography, reminiscent in some ways of a book Henry greatly admired, J.W. Sullivan’s Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. What emerges is a description of Rimbaud as a proto-Henry Miller, someone who, in writing his greatest work, ‘stood so clearly revealed to himself that he no longer had need for expression on the level of art’.17 Though a very different piece of work, the Rimbaud essay looks forward to the novella The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder, published in 1948. Both mark a further move in the direction first indicated by The Colossus of Maroussi, away from the violence of the Tropics and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and towards a world in which wisdom rather than literary mastery was the preferred goal.
The Smile At The Foot Of The Ladder was written in response to a request for a text to accompany some drawings from circus life by Fernand Léger. One of Miller’s childhood ambitions had been to be a clown, and among his friends he had always had a reputation for being exactly that, in the circus rather than the Shakespearian sense. Further, two books written by his friend Wallace Fowlie, Clowns and Angels and The Clown’s Grail, had made a considerable impression on him at this time. Miller agreed to the commission.
The clown story is unusual on two counts in Miller’s writing, being a third person narration and being an account of events which are manifestly fictional. Paradoxically the novella seems to offer more insights into Henry Miller than much of his overtly biographical writing. There is a revealing and touching description of the accidental way in which the hero, Auguste, stumbles on the trick which brings him world fame. At a certain point in his act he forgets what he is supposed to be doing next, and while trying to remember the next trick he sits down in the ring at the foot of the ladder and feigns ecstasy. The public roar with laughter, and his name is made. Auguste’s astonishment at the spread of his fame for this stunt, which thereafter becomes the highlight of his act, might well reflect Miller’s own astonishment at the rapid spread of his fame after Tropic of Cancer. The book was, after all, written almost by accident, while he was trying to work out how to turn Crazy Cock into a commercial success. And if Tropic of Cancer is a burlesque novel, it is also a circus novel, childlike in the way Chagall’s paintings of circuses are childlike, but done by a more cynical child. Auguste’s description of the circus and the clown’s rôle in the ring would serve equally well as a description of the world of Tropic of Cancer and its inhabitants:
The life in the arena was a dumb show consisting of falls, slaps, kicks – an endless shuffling and booting about. And it was by means of this disgraceful rigolade that one found favour with the public. The beloved clown! It was his special privilege to reenact the errors, the follies, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself, that was something even the dullest oaf could grasp. Not to understand, when all is clear as daylight; not to catch on, though the trick be repeated a thousand times for you; to grope about like a blind man, when all signs point to the right direction; to insist on opening the wrong door, though it is marked Danger! to walk head on into the mirror, instead of going around it; to look through the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle!18
Presently Auguste tires of his fame and runs away to live a life of anonymity as a circus hand in a small travelling circus. He puts up the tent and mucks out the animals while the averagely-talented Antoine gets an averagely enthusiastic ovation for his clowning each evening. One night he falls ill and Auguste is persuaded to deputize for him. He has what seems to him the happy idea of creating a wonderful new reputation for Antoine by wearing Antoine’s costume and make-up in the ring, but performing with all the talent of the great Auguste. The act is a sensational success, but the plan ends in tragedy: Antoine hears what has happened and dies of a broken heart.
Miller’s enthusiasm was legendary among his friends, but this tale illustrates some of the pitfalls of enthusiasm, and of indulging the desire to change certain things, such as another man’s reputation, which are better left alone. In his own life Miller made this mistake many times, and in portrait essays like ‘The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney’, ‘Varda: The Master Builder’ and ‘A Bodhisattva Artist’ (about the painter Abe Rattner), portraits intended as promotional tributes to little-known artists who also happened to be personal friends, he consistently performed the curious trick of making them all, in the end, essays about Henry Miller. He requisitioned reputations and spoiled them by a generosity of spirit which came close to being patronizing, and a prodigality in the use of superlatives which could only create suspicion in the big world beyond the confines of Miller-friendliness.
Sexus, written early in the 1940s but not published until 1949, was on more familiar ground. The numerous sex scenes in the book made publication in the United States out of the question and it appeared in two volumes in Paris, again published by the Obelisk Press. Two French translations were put out simultaneously by Editions de la Terre de Feu, one expurgated, the other complete. The latter edition was seized by the police almost immediately on publication.
Censorship thus denied the book a public critical reception, and the personal responses he did get were negative. Lawrence Durrell was particularly disappointed. Somewhat to Miller’s annoyance, Durrell insisted on regarding the Greek, American and Rimbaud books as marginalia, and had been keenly looking forward to a book along what he considered Miller’s main, autobiographical line of development. The excerpts from Sexus that appeared in the 1944 collection Sunday After The War augured well, but when he read the full-length work he put their friendship at risk by telling Miller that his book was ‘disgracefully bad’ and that it was liable to ruin his reputation unless he withdrew it immediately and revised it.19 Durrell was in a difficult position, having agreed to three or four invitations to review the book in literary magazines and being unwilling either to slaughter it or to put on the old pal’s act and lie about it.
Miller’s response to Durrell’s letter was remarkably calm. He assured him that his professional criticism had no bearing on their friendship, and even encouraged him to go public with it if he so wished. The disturbance rumbled on for a few letters but presently subsided, with Durrell quickly grabbing at Miller’s suggestion that the root of the problem was that he had perhaps succeeded too well in his attempts to convey the poverty and sterility of his life with June in the 1920s in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village.
Few writers, known or unknown, would have forgiven such an attack on their professional competence from a friend, and in all honesty one has to suspect that this might have been a special dispensation for Durrell and that a similar attack from another quarter would not have been met with such equanimity. No matter: even one such gesture is admirable, and illustrates the unusual pliancy of Miller’s personality, and his unorthodox courage. Another demonstration of this was his consistent and vociferous support for a campaign to secure Céline’s release from prison in Copenhagen, where he was being held on charges of collaborating with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of France. He signed a petition drawn up by an American journalist named Milton Hindus and urged others to do so, and even agitated for a time for the publication in the United States of Céline’s banned Bagatelles pour un massacre, which he persistently referred to as Massacres pour une bagatelle, until he discovered that it was actually an anti-semitic tract.
Miller felt a fierce, protective admiration for Céline. Along with Knut Hamsun, his other great hero among the European moderns, Céline had lived out the consequences of his anti-democratic beliefs in a way that turned his life into a genuine tragedy. Miller’s temperamental – if not artistic – similarity to both writers was great; yet he knew that both of them, in cutting themselves off completely from the despised ‘mob’ and paying the price of its hatred, had displayed a courage which he perhaps wished he possessed himself but knew he did not. ‘The world is full of people who are right,’ Céline wrote to him once. ‘That’s why it’s so NAUSEATING.’ Hamsun had the same horror and suspicion of the righteous, and so did Miller. What prevented him joining them was the quality Anais Nin had noted in him early in their relationship – his desire to be liked by people. What he could do was to remind anyone who might be trying to forget it of the most important fact of all about Céline – that he was ‘terrific – and I don’t care whether he’s a Fascist or a Democrat or a shit-house cleaner. He can write.’20 Two other favourites, Blaise Cendrars and Jean Giono, were also accused of being fascists and generally worthless human beings and dead men as writers after the war, and Miller defended both with a similar intransigence.
Even by his own surreal standards, Miller’s personal economy during the period of his marriage to Lepska was chaotic. In 1948 he was timidly participating in a $5 chain-letter scheme under a false name, wearing cast-off shirts and trousers given to him by a Hollywood tycoon and complaining to the Swiss consul of how he had to buy shirts for Moricand while being unable to afford to treat his wife to the new shoes she so badly needed. Yet at the same time he talks of having spent $3000 on Moricand within the last two years. The explanation for the paradox is that he had discovered, to his considerable astonishment, that he had become a rich man, thanks to the European sales of his Paris trilogy.
Jack Kahane had assured him he would have an income for life from Tropic of Cancer as early as 1937, but the outbreak of war altered the situation dramatically. While Henry was in Greece he received word from Maurice Girodias, Kahane’s eighteen year old son and heir who had taken over the firm after his father’s death in 1939, that he would be sending him the sum of one thousand francs a month for the foreseeable future. With the fall of Paris, that future turned out to be a very short one. Henry never received even a first instalment of these royalties.
Yet Obelisk had continued to trade during the war. Miller’s books turned out to be popular with the German soldiers, and even more popular with the Americans who replaced them when liberation came in 1944. Sales of the books exploded, and French translations of the Tropics and Black Spring in 1945 and 1946 were critical and commercial successes. By December 1945, Miller could write to Durrell that £3000 was waiting for him in Paris, although he was unable to touch it because of restrictions on the export and import of currency.
Throughout 1946, Miller’s main official source of income at Anderson Creek was a $50 monthly allowance that he received from James Laughlin of New Directions, publishers of all his full-length works in America since The Cosmological Eye in 1939. In addition to this he made over $2000 that year from sales of his water-colours. A frugal man might have lived comfortably on such an income, but Henry was not a frugal man. Though the rent at the shack was only $7 a month, he had a family and a Moricand to support, tobacco, wine, food and a million postage stamps to buy. He even owed money to the Big Sur mailman for groceries.
To the surprise of his associates and writers, Maurice Girodias turned out to be an able businessman, and late in 1946 he sent off the 300,000 francs (about $2000) which enabled Henry to buy the house from Jean Wharton and the following year return to Partington Ridge. Even with this money gone he was still worth 4,470,000 francs by the middle of the year, and was desperately trying to think up ways of getting hold of it. Durrell and Perlès sent him a telegram from Scotland urging him to invest in some old chateau before an impending succession of devaluations of the franc wiped his money out, and Anais Nin’s banker husband Hugh Guiler offered him the benefit of his advice. The devaluations duly came, cutting the value of the royalties owing by about a third. Severe currency restrictions continued. Early in 1948 Girodias wrote offering to let him have between $500 and $700 per month if Miller could persuade enough friends visiting France to buy francs for dollars.
Miller wanted his earnings all right – ‘Now struggling with might and main to get my money out of France’21 he told Schnellock – but not enough to make sure he got it. With a little professional help it would have been relatively easy to sort this problem out, but possibly the prospect of having too much money worried him. One of his sustaining articles of faith was that artists should not only be poor but be seen to be poor. They should live in hovels, wear second-hand clothes and write on a battered old typewriter, this being the modern equivalent of a worn-down stub of a pencil. A form of financial anorexia nervosa was the mark of Miller’s authority as rebel, repudiator and sage, and any drastic change in his personal economic position would have presented him with a major identity problem. He had grown fond of himself just as he was. Sudden wealth could only complicate matters. It all left him only nominally a professional writer, with earnings from his six New Directions publications for 1948 and 1949 at $650 per year.
A further drain on his resources was caused by June’s re-entry into his orbit. In the middle of 1947, after a silence of almost fifteen years, Miller received the first of a number of distressing letters from her. In the interim she had married Stratford Corbett, that man ‘considerably your junior’ whom Osborn had reported seeing her with before the Millers’ divorce. Anais’s astrologer had been gravely mistaken in his predictions of a happy life for her. She was separated again, living alone in squalor and poverty in a Clinton Avenue apartment which she called ‘Excrement Hall’. She weighed less than 75 lbs. First news of her plight came in a letter from his old friend Emil Conason in which he described the former taxi-dancer and bohemian queen as a ‘perambulating skeleton’ with ‘gaunt eyes sunk deep into bottomless sockets’. From Esther Elkus, Conason had heard that June was trying to live on $60 a month in an apartment where the rent was $42.50, and had reverted to a state of complete withdrawal from the world. ‘I don’t hope to find you anxious to give of your precious self,’ Conason concluded bitterly, but nevertheless hoped that Henry might send a thousand dollars in trust for her to Esther Elkus. He doubted that he would, however, presuming that Henry would ‘rationalize in your inimitable fashion’ and consign June to the care of his ‘beloved providence’.22
Conason’s letter shows the ambivalence that those closest to Henry were capable of feeling towards him, the way in which they operated with a double image of him as saint and devil. It also shows how little anyone really knew how much June had meant to him. Written seven years after their relationship was over, and after the heat had gone from the affair with Anais Nin, the notebooks Miller kept on his The Air-Conditioned Nightmare journey across America contain a handful of stray references to his second wife which are persuasively personal in their tone. One such reads: ‘Sit here dreaming of June. Where now, little June? Are you happy?’ Another describes his meeting in Mobile, Alabama, with a waitress whose voice was so beautiful that he could only compare it to June’s. Later, in Hollywood, he imagined sending her a telegram telling her he loved her, signed ‘Valentine Valentino’. Miller’s agitated sexual romanticism would continue to try to disprove it for the rest of his life, but such sentiments suggest that his love for June was a real, personal, individual love, and that other and subsequent women never managed to affect him in a comparable way.
He responded quickly to Conason’s letter, began corresponding with June again, sent her small sums of money when he could, diverted debts to her and got a Brooklyn friend, William Allen, to deliver her a winter coat and food parcels. Conason gave her medical assistance, pleased and relieved to find that his old friend was not the super-humanly heartless monster he sometimes appeared to be in his fiction.
Henry and Lepska’s marriage, which seems never to have been happy, came to an end soon enough. Perhaps it never had any chance. One of the great paradoxes about Miller is the way he ceaselessly sang the praises of living in the present yet in his most important writing obsessively revisited the far past – and not, apparently, to lay ghosts there, but to relive the happiness and intensity of former years. Obsessively re-enacting his love for the fictional June in Sexus and then Plexus – which was well under way by 1948 – and with the added complication of the reappearance of the real June in his real life, he did not give the present and its inhabitants, including his own wife, much of a chance.
Another disruptive ghost appeared one day in the summer of 1947 when Anais Nin drove out to see the Millers. The reunion was not a success. She was embarrassed by Henry’s searching for an ease and a warmth which she felt was no longer possible between them, and she noted the tension between him and Lepska, and the way in which he criticized Lepska for her silence. He assumed that Anais was running away from her life in New York and she had to make it clear to him that this was not the case. She cut the visit short, later recording that it marked the end of the intimacy that had once existed between them.
Later Miller described the marriage as seven years during which he was permanently grouchy, irritated, depressed or in a temper.23 Even when he was not working he preferred the company of his children, especially his daughter, whom he doted on, or of his friends, to that of his wife, for a wife could never be a friend. In 1947, over a year before the birth of their son, the couple had considered separating, and a final parting was only a matter of time.
Some of their most frequent arguments concerned discipline. Henry had a work hut away from the house and in A Devil in Paradise, a book which is laced with references to the wretchedness of the marriage, he wrote that Lepska would rebuke him if she found him out strolling when he was supposed to be writing. One of the few positive facts about poor Moricand’s presence in the middle of the cross-fire was that they could use him as a medium through which to address each other in civilized fashion. Lepska must also have been puzzled by the way in which Moricand’s desire for a shirt of his own took precedence over her need for a new pair of shoes. The pathological horror of discipline bred in Miller by his childhood struggles with his mother had never left him, and he refused to discipline the children. He would prefer to have given them the kind of upbringing and education he once outlined to a horrified Beatrice for Barbara, which was in substance an education that consisted entirely in following one’s nose through life. His journey towards anti-intellectualism was well-nigh complete by this time. As a politician his world-view had never been simpler: what he longed for was ‘a world-wide revolution…but against all the damn governments that exist.’24 It was his ability to externalize his problems, or perhaps simply to forget about them, in such passionate and satisfying flights of violent verbal fancy that stood him in good stead when Lepska eventually did leave him, in June 1951, for a Romanian biophysicist with a PhD who had been staying as a guest of their neighbours. With her departure, the experiment of trying to live a normal family life came to an end for good.
1 ‘the page where I had left off,’ letter to Huntington Cairns, April 30th 1939.
2 ‘like a Midwesterner,’ Town and Country magazine, August 1945, p68.
3 ‘the spiritual flute, she loves it,’ letter to George Leite, June 14th 1945.
4 ‘True or false, it’s a wonderful book,’ letter to Roger Bloom, March 17th 1958.
5 ‘a growing band,’ Emil Schnellock to Henry Miller, 1946.
6 ‘and fetch them out to the country,’ undated letter to Emil White.
7 ‘omits or forgets to do for me,’ letter to Walker Winslow, marked ‘Sunday morning’.
8 ‘good friend of mine,’ letter to Oscar Baradinsky, January 1946.
9 ‘maybe Leonardo da Vinci,’ Robert Fink, in a letter of August 3rd 1963.
10 ‘not to be liked by these people,’ The Happy Rock, p124.
11 ‘will not be mentioned,’ letter to Schnellock, 1943.
12 ‘your version versus Anais,’ letter to Schnellock, May 10th 1944.
13 ‘prowling about these precincts,’ letter to Alfred Perlés, October 30th 1939.
14 ‘a “great soul, filled with a great light”,’ Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymous Bosch, p360.
15 ‘the climax of his story, “Je l’ai eue”.’ Ibid p363.
16 ‘in order to save his brother,’ letter to Thomas Parkinson, July 30th 1958.
17 ‘expression on the level of art,’ The Time of the Assassins, p43.
18 ‘the wrong end of a rifle, a loaded rifle!’ The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, p29.
19 ‘withdrew it immediately and revised it,’ The Durrell–Miller Letters 1935–1980, p233.
20 ‘He can write,’ letter to Emil White, Hollywood, Saturday 1942.
21 ‘my money out of France,’ letter to Schnellock, July 4th 1947.
22 ‘beloved providence,’ undated letter from Emil Conason to Henry Miller.
23 ‘irritated, depressed or in a temper,’ The Durrell–Miller Letters 1935–1980, p261.
24 ‘the damn governments that exist,’ letter to Frank Dobo, April 14th 1948.