Last Days of Henry Miller
That last year he shuffled between his old-fashioned, high-set, walnut-dark bed, the desk at its foot, the Ping-Pong table in the lanai on which he now painted, a more sedentary kind of play for an octogenarian, and the dining table, in fact, a redwood picnic table covered with a cloth. This is where he held court every evening attired in his bathrobe, plaid or blue terry cloth, pajamas, fluffy white bedroom slippers and white socks. He was a tough old bird, rather like a turkey, with his croaky voice, heavily veined, creped hands, parchment-thin skin, wattled throat and indomitable, naked head.
As his body failed him, the eyes, the ears, the bowels, the bladder, the bones, he shrugged his shoulders and with head held high said, “We must accept what comes, don’t you know.” And then he would return to the arduous business of folding the napkin in front of him. The long-fingered, still-graceful hands, bruised and etched with coagulated arteries, slowly smoothing the cloth, folding it in half, in quarters. This accomplished he would labor to roll the napkin up, fitting it, at length and with considerable effort, into the monogrammed silver napkin holder that marked his place at table. One tiny island of control that could still be mastered with great concentration.
The word he used to describe his condition was apocatastasis, a Greek word meaning “restoration” and referring to the eternal round made by the planets which restores a state of being. The word also refers to the doctrine that Satan and all sinners will ultimately be restored to God. Though Henry accepted what was happening to him, there were moments when he flapped his wings in annoyance, an appropriate response for a man who had steadfastly refused to be overcome by anything. “You think for the man of great spirit it [death] should be a graceful thing. A just going to sleep and yet that isn’t necessarily true. It could be awful, ignominious.”
His humble efforts to carry on with his life were at times moving, at times exhausting, at times hysterically funny and at all times immensely and universally human. For Miller was not and never desired to be “somebody” in the sense that today everybody is somebody. Either through their own earned or unearned celebrity or through some vicarious attachment to celebrity. Miller was anybody and everybody, a meat-and-potatoes man, an ordinary bloke according to the literary critic Alfred Kazin, a man who would rather be at peace with himself than a writer according to his friend, the writer Wallace Fowlie. Although, with all due respect to Mr. Fowlie, Miller’s rapprochement with peace was achieved by writing which ordered and transformed the Milleresque chaos into a turbulent and teeming celebration of life on its own terms.
Henry described himself as a plain, down-to-earth, simple man. He was also a genius who, if reincarnated, wanted to come back not a genius but an ordinary man, a horticulturist, as he told me one evening over dinner. No, I was not one of Henry’s “ladies”; I was one of his “cooks,” and Friday was my night chez Miller.
On this particular Friday evening, some six months before he died, I had to awaken him to come to the table. A punctilious man, he was orderly in all his habits. His pens, pencils, and paper in their proper place on his desk, his watercolors, his paintbrushes neatly arranged on the Ping-Pong table, his dinner served at 7:00 p.m. The dedication to list making over the years. The famous, framed lists of places he had been, of places he had not been, lists of favorite foods, lists of favorite piano music, lists of women he had never slept with. Behind that Buddha-like equanimity lurked a Germanic heritage.
Usually he was up waiting for me, but of late he had become so weak that he was no longer able to navigate alone the distance between bedroom and dining room. Debilitated by malnutrition, not an uncommon affliction of old age, and a kind of palsy, possibly caused by petit mal seizures, he was quite frail. His hands trembled, he was paralyzed on one side, deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, so he said, although he regularly commented on what I was wearing down to a pair of green suede cowboy boots I once showed up in. When sight failed him, his sense of smell came to the fore. “I can smell your perfume, Barbara. Hmmmmm. I can barely see anymore but I can still smell.” The full lips gathered into a lopsided grin, exposing teeth that remained remarkably virile.
I roused the slight body that was all but invisible under the satin-covered, down comforter and eased him into the waiting walker. Earlier Charles, a tall black man whom Henry referred to as his “Negro,” had been in to bathe and shave him. This was a daily routine.
At dinner that night he spoke about how he would come back “a man who tends flowers. Not a genius, or a writer, that’s the worst.” Pressed, he elaborated on what writing entailed, his eloquent, age-marked hands raised in decisive exclamation. “It’s a curse. Yes, it’s a flame. It owns you. It has possession over you. You are not master of yourself. You are consumed by this thing. And the books you write. They’re not you. They’re not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It’s terrible. You can never rest. People used to envy me my inspiration. I hate inspiration. It takes you over completely. I could never wait until it passed, and I got rid of it.”
But he never did get rid of it. Of inspiration. Nor did he rid himself of his obsession with woman, with eros, with life itself. Woman, eros, and life were vital to Miller’s sense of himself, imbued with a mystery and a magic which compelled and obsessed and bemused him without letup until June 7, 1980—the day his eternal round was completed.
“I keep my nose to the grindstone,” he said. “Old age is terrible. It’s a disease of the joints. It’s awful when I get up in the morning. I can barely bend over to brush my teeth. It’s only when I get to work solving problems that I forget about it.”
Beset by a multitude of infirmities the last decade of his life, Miller worked as furiously as ever producing several books (among them the three-volume Book of Friends) and hundreds of watercolors. He continued to maintain his voluminous correspondence with the world and entertained a seemingly inexhaustible stream of visitors who ranged from Vietnamese immigrants to celebrities like Ava Gardner, Governor Jerry Brown, and Warren Beatty who was then filming Reds in which Miller appeared in a cameo role. In between were people who came to interview him, academics who came to write about him, and film crews eager to commit to videotape the passing of an era.
Some he performed for, some he insulted, others he beguiled. He had a striking photograph of the young Ava Gardner in his entrance hall which hung next to a framed list of his favorite cock and cunt words. When the lady came to visit in the flesh, Henry overheard her chauffeur asking, as they left, where she wanted to go. According to Miller, she responded, “Anywhere. Just anywhere.” Henry found that a remarkable answer. In August of 1978, Jerry Brown, accompanied by his entire entourage, paid a call at Ocampo Drive. Miller was in one of his wicked moods, being wicked was a pure delight to him, but he was never malicious. He greeted Brown, saying, “You know I think politicians are the scum of the earth, next to evangelists. I can’t stand Billy Graham.” Henry had a way of benignly saying outrageous things. Having said them he would sit back, a cat pawing a mouse, a crooked smile playing expectantly around his lips, waiting for the response his words would elicit.
Old friends came to see him, and there were plenty of new ones as well. I belonged to this latter category as did Brenda Venus, who was the last love of Henry’s life. A beautiful woman, with shining black hair that fell just above her waist and the soft speech of the South, Henry credited her with keeping him alive. “Without her I wouldn’t be able to go on.” Brenda, who admitted to thirty-one, had introduced herself to Henry by way of a manila envelope containing provocative photographs. He was enchanted, and a meeting quickly followed. Brenda was to become the recipient of hundreds of Miller letters (published in 1986 by William Morrow as Dear, Dear Brenda), as had been Anaïs Nin before her. A voluptuous woman, deceptively petite at the same time, Brenda had a sultry, smoky kind of beauty which coexisted with remarkably delicate features. It was as if aspects of both June Miller and Anaïs Nin had been reincarnated in her, and there is no doubt in my mind that God sent this particular Venus to ease Henry along the path to his final destiny.
He wrote Brenda four or five letters a day, and there were many evenings when he would press a batch of these feverish missives into my hand to mail on my way home. He reveled in the pain and pleasure of this, his last affaire de coeur, fretting when Brenda didn’t call or couldn’t come to see him, as miserable as a boy in the clutches of Cupid’s first embrace. He prided himself that he treated her like a queen and often commented with wry bewilderment, “It is only now that I have finally learned how to love a woman. After five wives and when I’m beyond doing anything, now I’ve finally learned how to treat a woman.” Seeing Brenda to the door was one of his gentlemanly, sunset gestures.
Brenda received a goodly number of Henry’s watercolors and lithographs as did the rest of us who were a constant in his life. When he gave a painting, he would apologize at the same time. “In a way I hate to give you this,” he would say. “You’ll have to have it framed and it’s expensive. Do you mind?” He was a generous man and a thoughtful one too. One evening as he was signing a lithograph to give to Charles, he stopped suddenly because he simply couldn’t remember the man’s last name. “You don’t think that sounds condescending, do you? To write ‘To Charles’ without a last name?” Picking up his pen he added “with affection,” and said, “Now, there won’t be any doubt.” He was very fond of Charles, whose last name I never did learn as he was one of the day people and I one of the evening ones. He liked Charles not only because Charles took care of him a few hours every day but, and perhaps more importantly, because Charles was not always smiling at him. Henry hated what he called idolaters, strongly suspected academics, and detested being fussed over in any way.
As a result, there was no permanent help in the household which bumbled along haphazardly day to day. Besides Charles there were a sporadic secretary, the “cooks,” and various itinerant people who slept there for a night or more as they passed through on the way to somewhere else.
The cooks were chosen from a list of people Henry enjoyed conversing with and evolved into a staple of his routine once he became housebound. Always a pragmatic man in practical matters, this is one of the ways Henry stayed plugged into the world. The list was long and the cooks rotated, although a few of us had fixed nights every week, Friday being mine. I was introduced into this system via a telegram from Miller’s son Tony shortly after my first meeting with Henry. Subsequent to a radio program that I wrote and broadcast which was something of an analysis of the work and the man, I received an invitation to dinner from Miller’s secretary. He had listened to a tape of the program and wanted to meet me. I went but not without some trepidation as I had heard he could be very difficult and blunt if he didn’t like someone. As it turned out we had an immediate rapport, and I left thoroughly enchanted but hardly expecting that I would be invited a second time. A week or two later, I received a telegram from the Miller household: “Henry would like to know if you’re available to cook this Saturday evening. Please respond immediately.” His lifelong aversion to the telephone as a means of communication resulted in the legacy of his voluminous and prolix correspondence.
As for the cooks, many of whom were women, but not all, he once had the notion of inviting them to come at the same time to meet one another but decided in the end that it wouldn’t work. “Women get along with women when they’re alone, but when a man is around they are jealous and vie for the attention, don’t you think?”
A modest man, surely the most unaffected, unselfconsious human being I have ever met, Henry resided downstairs in the Pacific Palisades home he had bought in the sixties to house his former wife Lepska (they had divorced in the early fifties), their two children, Tony and Val, and himself. And in later days, although there was a buzzer next to his bed, he refused to use it. When he wanted to summon his secretary or someone else in the house, he would call on the telephone (there were two lines): “This is Henry, you know Henry who lives downstairs.”
Those last few months when Henry began to fail badly, I finally prevailed upon him to let a young man who was a friend of his, Bill Pickerill, move in on a permanent basis. He stubbornly resisted until I finally came up with the idea of telling him Bill had no place to live. This of course wasn’t the case. Only then did he acquiesce, saying, “Well, why didn’t you say so. Bill always has a home with me.”
While Bill brought a semblance of order and regularity to the household, chaos gradually took up residence in Henry’s innermost being. Many of the watercolors he did at this time had the word chaos scribbled across them and were reflective of the inner disquiet that took him backwards and forwards in time. “It’s terrible to lose one’s sight. I’m deaf and now I can’t see. For someone who lives in the intellect it’s awful. I’ve been having hallucinations, apparitions. So real that I sit up in bed and hold out my hand only to realize that I imagined the person. It’s the damnedest thing.”
One morning he awoke hungry and penniless in the Paris streets of the thirties, asking everyone who came into his room if there was any money in his wallet, in theirs, for breakfast as he was famished. While he could no longer read the newspaper, he adamantly maintained the habit of it, holding it more often than not upside down at the breakfast table, refusing to relinquish it or to allow anyone to turn it right side up. Still the news of the day somehow managed to filter through where it metamorphosed into wild, chaotic tales in his dreams. He regaled us all one evening with a story of how he had been blindfolded and abducted from a movie theater by the Iranians earlier in the day. This adventure occurred at the height of the Iranian hostage crisis which ended the Carter presidency.
One of the last watercolors he produced showed the figure of a man looking off to the right, a female figure looking straight ahead and, between the two, a diminutive male figure sketched in blue mimicking the pose of the larger male. Scattered around the painting was the usual Miller iconography: a six-pointed star, squibbles locked into masses of red paint and blurbs of color suggestive of a dove, a fish. Underneath all of this was a four-legged, grimacing beast with the name Sarasota written inside its body. The beast’s teeth were bared in a fierce expression, and I often thought that was how Henry himself actually felt at this time. A beast with bared teeth. Henry said he had no idea what Sarasota meant or referred to. Nor could he relate to the word “void” which also found its way into the late watercolors. When asked over dinner one evening what it meant, he squinted up his eyes, scratched his head in perplexity and said, “I can’t get it. I don’t know what it is.”
One of the dubious benefits of having been a female friend of Henry Miller was and is the raised eyebrows, the insinuations, the questions: “Were you one of his women? Did he talk dirty to you?” As most people have never ventured beyond the Tropic books into the more epiphanic pages of works like The Colossus of Maroussi or Stand Still like the Hummingbird, it is perhaps understandable that these questions were and are preeminent.
We had our obligatory “dirty” talk once only, early on, over a dinner of steamed zucchini, noodles Romanoff, tomatoes Provençale, melon and ice cream. The conversation evolved out of a general one that touched on favorite Miller lovers like Abelard and Héloïse and Tristan and Isolde, on Anaïs Nin, on men and women and their differences. I myself prompted the conversation by reading him a short, erotic story I had recently written which led him into a discussion of how a man likes to take a woman. “Anyway,” he said. “The more bestial, the more exciting. A man likes it standing up against a wall, bent over like an animal. There are times for a man when all he wants is a cunt. Any hole will do—dog, cow, goat. An opening in a fence even. Men want to fuck and get it off; women want to be made love to, to be held.”
He then told a typical Miller story. He had been separated by circumstance from his wife for about ten days (a gentleman in his own way, he didn’t say which one of the five he was referring to). “I was feeling horny,” he said, “as we had a very satisfying sexual relationship.” He claims he was at a county fair where he went into a barn that held all sorts of animals. Climbing up on a box he pulled a goat over so that they were on the same level. In the end he couldn’t go through with it. “I was afraid someone might come in.” Fact or fiction? Who knows. As he wrote in one of the essays in The Wisdom of the Heart, “Fiction and invention are the very fabric of life. The truth is in no way disturbed by the violent perturbations of the spirit.”
Women perplexed Henry, possessors of a mystery that fascinated and eluded him. While he believed in duality and spoke loftily about the difference between eros and agape, it was almost impossible for him to conceive of a woman being capable of pure love. He did not see women as spiritual beings. He remained intrigued to the end that a woman could be simultaneously lascivious and innocent and reminisced about the woman who had once come into his Paris flat, sat down on a chair, lifted her skirt, spread her legs wide and opened herself up for him. “She was so fragile. A jewel, a flower. Delicate. No matter what she did.” He was as captivated by the memory of this experience as he had been nearly half a century earlier when it had occurred.
The traits he admired most in women were sincerity, beauty, and, like his friend Blaise Cendrars, innocence. “Women have to be beautiful. I don’t just mean physically beautiful, but beautiful in their being. They have to have a soul also, you know. I don’t care for beauty raw and nothing behind it. I never did. I was never attracted to that.”
We discussed the notion of innocence more than once. I arguing that purity was a more desirable state than innocence as innocence was a condition devoid of experience, Edenic, whereas purity connoted both experience and wisdom; that no one, man or woman, could or should remain innocent; that ideally innocence evolves into a purity of spirit through the transformation of experience and age. He himself exemplified what I was trying to express. We never resolved this argument, although we returned to it on many occasions, as Henry was loath to part with his romance with innocence. He did agree, however, that to have experience and attempt to remain innocent was costly, saying, “To remain innocent one has to put on blinders and not look to the left or the right.”
He numbered among his idols Nietzsche, Hamsun, Whitman, and Lawrence but was brought up short when asked about goddesses by a German television interviewer. After a long pause, he responded, “The only one would be Héloïse. Do you know what she said to Abelard? And this when she was a Mother Superior and not a young woman anymore. She wrote to him ‘Would that I loved my God as I love thee.’ Can you imagine that. Wonderful.”
Henry’s real passion was for his work. He was also a man who liked himself and venerated life. Why else marry five times and father three children? He believed that art was glorification and that paradise was a creation of the individual mind, available to anyone, anywhere, regardless of the circumstances in which they found themselves. “I guess I do love my work,” he said in talking about Insomnia, one of his favorite books. “I don’t often reread what I’ve done but sometimes when I do I think ‘Did I really do that?’ And then I can’t believe that I did it. Yes, I do love my work. You know if you don’t like yourself, how can you like anyone else? When I look into the mirror I like myself. I love what I see. Even if I look terrible, it doesn’t matter. And it’s not ego I’m speaking of, it’s id. I think everything comes from the id.”
Over years of Friday night dinners I enjoyed Henry’s stories and adventures which he spun out with zest and enthusiasm, laughter, and often bafflement. And I would like to believe that a residue of his individualistic, and in that sense American, wisdom has remained in me, lingering like the aroma of the meals I prepared for him. While he was restricted to a bland diet, I tried to make his meals interesting, flavoring them with fresh herbs and garlic, which is good for high blood pressure among other ailments. Occasionally I would ignore the diet altogether and fix a treat. He loved filet mignon (tournedos), which I served along with mashed potatoes mixed with leek-soaked milk. He was very appreciative of good food and nearly always commented on what he was eating.
When I arrived in the evenings, he enjoyed coming out into the kitchen for a Dubonnet before dinner. While I chopped and stirred, he would sit in his walker and chat with me. “You don’t mind do you? Some people mind, don’t you know. They get all confused.” The conversation was always alive and vibrant, in the kitchen, at the table, meandering over familiar Miller terrain: Lou Andreas Salome, Nietzsche, Madame Blavatsky, Emma Goldman, the absolute, astrology, freedom of the spirit, love, the inaccessibility of truth, fabulating (lying), Anaïs, compromise, unconditional surrender.
While he accepted that truth ultimately lay beyond our mortal grasp, it was still an important concept to him. “Truth is wonderful,” he would say. “It embraces everything and it’s worth it and that from a man who can tell some tall lies. I can’t tell you what it means to me to get letters from all over the world about just that—that I told the truth.”
He had little sympathy with the young who took drugs, became groupies, and generally dropped out; he viewed such behavior as pure escapism. The self-destructive behavior, in particular the use of drugs and alcohol, that is characteristic of so many of the young since the sixties—behavior also characteristic of so many of this century’s best-known American male writers—was antipathetic to Miller. Free of the angst, guilt, and self-doubt that tortured the majority of his contemporaries, Miller’s work was consistently a celebration of the human condition in all of its exigencies. As he said to me in an interview we did for National Public Radio (and subsequently published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1981): “If you’re going to be a whore, be a good whore, a great one. If you’re going to be a saint, be a wonderful saint. Be it! Be it, whatever you are, to the hundredth degree. Whatever it is you are, accept yourself, first of all.”
Another thing that he had no patience with was government support of the artist. He was convinced poverty brought forth great work. “When I wrote the Tropic books I was a desperate man . . . I owe everything to poverty. I wouldn’t have become what I became without it.” There was a time, before he left for Paris, when Miller begged in the streets and nearly became a professional as he put it. Then one night he quit. He was in the habit of walking uptown as the theaters emptied, panhandling the crowd on his way back to Brooklyn. This particular night had not been lucrative and he was on his way home with only a nickel in his pocket for the subway. It was late, and by the time he reached his stop it was pouring rain. He noticed a man in white tie and tails getting off whom he assumed had been to the opera.
When Miller approached him, the man pushed Henry aside rudely and walked on without a word. Then, with his back to Miller, he reached into his pockets and threw a handful of change into the mud-filled gutter. “I was really degraded, humiliated, you know. But there I was down on my hands and knees, picking up the change and wiping the mud off. Right then and there I swore I’d never beg again, and I didn’t. I’ve known it all. Every humiliation, degradation, poverty, starvation.” This perhaps accounts for his dignity. Such experiences, as Nietzsche pointed out, either kill a man or strengthen him.
Henry’s dignity never deserted him. During the final months of his life, he sat at the table with head bowed forward, barely able to lift the fork from plate to mouth, drifting away and then pulling himself back, saying, “Were you talking about me?” He hated to have the conversation pass him by. He had difficulty sitting upright and listed like a ship straining against its moorings in a heavy wind. “Am I leaning to the left? I feel as if I’m going to fall.”
On one occasion he tried to describe his state of mind over the preceding days. With a bewildered expression on his face, he shook his head sadly and said, “It’s been like an adventure. I don’t know where I am, where this place is, what this house is. It’s the damnedest thing.” I explained that it was his house and that I had been there all day, sitting by the pool. (For the past several weeks, since it was evident the end was near at hand, I had spent as much time as possible at the house.)
“The pool,” he asked incredulously, “there’s a swimming pool here?”
“Yes.”
“Were there other people here?”
I named the three or four people who had dropped in during the day.
“That’s all,” he said. “What a shame. Weren’t there others?”
I told him that the pool was his, not a public pool, which surprised him.
“Mine?” he asked.
“Yes, you own it.”
“You don’t say. I own it!”
“Yes and this house too.”
He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands over his head, a familiar, caressing gesture by now, smoothing his nonexistent hair, and said, “Amazing!”
He fell frequently, often rolled out of bed at night, and was a mass of cuts, bruises, and sores. When he was lifted from his walker to his chair at the table he would cry out in pain, yet the ritual of the dinners continued. His words came out garbled, his thoughts fragmented and undecipherable and there were long, impenetrable silences. The “don’t you knows” were few and far between. Often his head would hover motionless an inch or two above his plate. When this happened a collar would be put around his neck, the kind used for whiplash victims, to give him some support. He dropped his fork, and spittle dribbled from his mouth. Somehow he was aware of this and repeatedly tried to raise his napkin to wipe his face. Those hands, they were like nervous, independent beings, agitated creatures in continual, fluttering motion, flitting here and there, lighting on his head, adjusting his hearing aid, smoothing his napkin, rubbing his eyes. He feared he was losing his mind and dictated letters to this effect to Brenda and to his friends Lawrence Durrell and Alfred Perles. “I think I’m going mad. I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”
Nearing the end, a crazy strength coursed through his failing form, the terrible energy of the dying. One night, forgetting he could no longer walk, he managed to get into the bathroom where he closed the door before collapsing. The bathroom, as legendary as his lists and charts and part of the Miller lore, was covered floor to ceiling with photographs of friends, naked women, idols such as Nietzsche and Lawrence and gurus like Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff. When he was found by Bill Pickerill, he was gesticulating and talking to some image on the wall, calling, “Monsieur, Monsieur.” According to Bill, Henry looked up calmly and said, “Oh, Bill, I’m so glad to see you again. How good that you’re passing by just now. I’m having the damnedest time with this guy.”
With all of this transpiring, it wasn’t sad in that house, at that table, in that bathroom. Touching, yes. And moving. And immensely human and funny too. For Henry was a man at peace with himself. He had acted out and lived his beliefs. And when the by now rare “don’t you know” crossed his lips, it was a burst of sunlight bringing tears to the eyes and a clutch of joy to the heart. One evening as he was being rolled off to bed, he noticed my skirt, which was bright red. Reaching forward, blind as he was, he gathered up the hem, stroking the material with his other hand, exclaiming how wonderful it was that I always wore such beautiful clothes.
In May of 1980, one month before Henry died, the Rumanian-born playwright Eugene Ionesco was visiting Los Angeles. I was doing an interview with him for National Public Radio, and in the course of our meetings I mentioned that I knew Miller. Ionesco, eager to meet Henry for whom he had great admiration, asked if I could arrange it.
No two men could have been more different. Ionesco all doubt and despair, fixed on the contradictions, consumed by anguish; Miller, all accepting, preaching surrender, abdication, and a self-created paradise, pure light. Yet they shared a reciprocal esteem for each other’s work. Their starting point was similar; their roads different.
The meeting never occurred. Henry demurred, saying, “Oh, I don’t want him to see me like this, how I am now.” Adding a few minutes later, “If Ionesco could see me now, that’s something he could write a play about.” Instead I took a set of books inscribed to Ionesco from Miller.
When the end came it wasn’t awful, it wasn’t ignominious. It all happened very simply and was just short of a “going to sleep.” Henry died at home in his own bed in the arms of Bill Pickerill on a Saturday afternoon.
I end this memoir with Miller’s own words, words written about Auguste, his clown, in The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder: “Perhaps I have not limned his portrait too clearly. But he exists, if only for the reason that I imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten.”