Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Henry Miller

  I had no way of communicating with this Mexican—my Spanish is nil—except by looks and gestures. But that was no handicap. On the contrary, it was a boon. All that any man could wish to communicate with another this “peon” communicated with his eyes. Whenever Gilbert Neiman wished to tell me about “the goodness and the nobility of man,” he would talk about the Mexicans. The Mexican Indians. He seemed to know them from way back. Indeed, his going to Mexico, where he had intended to stay forever, was in the nature of a fulfillment, fulfillment of some beautiful experience which had begun in a previous incarnation. I remember so well how Gilbert, eloquent as could be when it came to Mexico and things Mexican, would suddenly grow speechless, would stutter and stammer, then grow even more eloquently silent, in trying to describe “his friend”—the one and only—Eusebio Celón.

  “You don’t know,” he would say, “you have no idea, you can’t possibly imagine, what these people are like until you go there and live with them.”

  I believed him then, I believe him even more today. All the grace, all the dignity, all the tenderness and loving kindness of the people of these two continents seems to be epitomized in the despised “Indio.”

  And how did my good friend, who was a “wet-back,” naturally, come off after three years of backbreaking labor and little pay in this glorious State of California? Did he accumulate a small fortune (the bait we hold out to them) to bring back to his family below the Rio Grande? Did he save enough, at least, to permit himself a month’s holiday with his loved ones?

  He returned as he came, with a torn shirt and a ragged coat, his pockets empty, his shoes busted, his skin tanned a little deeper from exposure to wind and sun, his spirit unquenchable but bruised, grateful, let us proudly assume, for the poor food he had been handed and for the lousy mattress he had been privileged to sleep on. He had one treasure which he could produce as evidence of the rewards of sweat and toil: a certificate for a cemetery plot which some smart aleck had sold him. How he would return to occupy this plot, at the appointed time, nobody had explained to him. Nobody could. He will never occupy it, we who sold it to him know. His place, gem that he is, is not in the Monterey Cemetery but in the bed of a fevered river, in the ruins of an ancient civilization, in the waste of a scorched earth.

  6.

  It was at Anderson Creek that I completed the essay on Rimbaud,* which was born of an unsuccessful attempt to translate A Season in Hell. It was the beginning of my own third or fourth “Season in Hell,” though at the time I wasn’t fully aware of it. George Leite, from whom I had inherited the shack we occupied at the edge of a cliff, had just published a fragment of this essay in Circle. It was the part dealing with “analogies, affinities, correspondences and repercussions.”

  As every lover of Rimbaud’s work knows, one of the minor annoyances which afflicted him during his sojourn in Abyssinia was the money which he carried in his belt. In one of his letters he writes: “I always carry over 40,000 gold francs about with me in my belt. They weigh about forty pounds, and I am beginning to get dysentery from the load.”

  Returning to America in 1940, with the war in full swing, I was cut off from my French royalties. Jack Kahane, my original publisher (the Obelisk Press), died the day war was declared, leaving an eighteen-year-old son, Maurice, who had absolutely no head for business—so his family and friends thought—to take over. I remember well the cablegram I received from Maurice while on the island of Corfu; it was to the effect that if I would continue to write for the Obelisk Press he would be happy to send me a thousand francs a month regularly. That was a decent sum in those days and I was only too happy to agree.

  Of course I hadn’t the slightest notion then of returning to America. I was planning to remain in Greece, which I already looked upon as home.

  On the heels of this good news from Maurice came the fall of Paris, followed by a complete blackout. I never received the first thousand francs he had intended to send me. As the war dragged on I came to the conclusion that the Obelisk Press had folded up and that Maurice, who had now taken the surname of Girodias, had been killed or else taken prisoner by the Germans. That the G.I.’s were to buy my books as fast as they were thrown on the market was something I never even dreamed of.

  It was during the year 1946 that we lived at Anderson Creek. Ever since my return from Europe I had waged a struggle to keep my head above water. Though we were paying only five dollars a month rent for the hovel we occupied, we were always in debt to the mailman who supplied us with food as well as other necessities. Sometimes we owed him as much as two or three hundred dollars. We never bought any clothes for ourselves; even the baby used castoff things. But we did enjoy good wines, thanks to Norman Mini whose cellar we almost drained. Even the purchase of a cheap second-hand car was out of the question. To go to town, forty-five miles distant, we were obliged to hitchhike. In short, my earnings were just about sufficient to keep a goat alive.

  Anyway, it was a delightful hand-to-mouth situation, relieved only by the thoughtful generosity of fans who divined our need. We might have gone on living like paupers indefinitely. The war in Europe had ended, the one in the East was still flourishing, and the cold war was in the bag, as they say. We had managed to acquire two important items: a stove which didn’t smoke from every crack and crevice and a decent mattress to lie on, the latter a gift from our neighbors, the Mac Collums. Valentine, our infant daughter, was still in her first year and therefore did not need much in the way of food or clothing. Nor did I need a car (as I now do) to dispose of the garbage and refuse which accumulated. The sea was right at our back door, at the foot of a steep precipice. One had to be alert-minded, in dumping the garbage, so as not to throw the baby over the cliff with the garbage. (“Change the water, not the goldfish!”)

  Then one fine foggy day, when all the green in Nature sang out in chlorophyllic glee, there came a letter from Maurice Girodias. The envelope bore the postmark Paris. I looked at the envelope some time before ripping it open.

  The letter was a long one, and as I skimmed through it, rapidly, my eye fell on this—

  FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS

  I threw the letter on the table and began to chuckle. I had read too hastily, I thought. An optical illusion … I lit a cigarette, picked the letter up again, slowly, cautiously, and read it carefully, word for word.

  It was not an optical illusion. In the midst of a long explanation about the difficulties he had encountered in keeping the press alive during the Occupation, in a rapid account of the success my work was meeting with over there, was buried a sentence in which he explicitly stated that he, Maurice Girodias, was holding for me, in accumulated royalties, a sum equivalent to forty thousand dollars.

  I turned the letter over to my wife to read. She nearly fainted. To increase our suspense and agitation, the letter made it all too clear that, under existing circumstances, it was impossible to transfer this fabulous sum to my bank account (I had none) in America. Would I not please come over and get it?

  (“Dear Government,” Ahmed Safa began, “We wish to inform you by the enclosed letter that our house is about to fall down, and that Si Khalil, the repulsive owner, doesn’t want to repair it…. We hope that you will come and take a look at the house so you can see for yourself, but if you can’t, we’ll bring the house to you….”)*

  If I was not able to come, the letter stated, he, Girodias, would endeavor by one means or another to send me a thousand or two thousand dollars per month. He explained that there were always travelers who wanted dollars for francs and vice versa.

  I distinctly recall the panic which seized me at the prospect of receiving a thousand or two thousand dollars per month. “No, not that!” I cried, “I’ll be demoralized!”

  “You could go to France, collect the money, invest it in a house and land, and live there again.”

  “You could buy a yacht and sail around the world.”

  “You could buy up an old castle in the provinces … there are plenty for sal
e, and dirt cheap.”

  These were some of the suggestions my friends promptly made. The one thing I could not do was to go to Paris, collect the money, and bring it home. That was taboo.

  Now money is not one of the things which are conspicuous in my horoscope. When I study it soberly, my destiny, I realize that it is a good one. It decrees, in effect, that I shall always have what I need, and no more. Where money is concerned, I am to dance for it. Soit!

  Such were the thoughts running through my head during the exchange which went on between my wife and myself. However true and sincere the letter sounded, I had a growing suspicion that at bottom it was just a hoax. Cosmococcic flim-flam, in other words. The conviction grew in me that I would never see those forty thousand dollars, neither in specie, coin, bullion, nor script, nor even in zloty or piastres.

  Impulsively I went to the doorway at the edge of the sunken kitchen and, looking out toward the Land of the Rising Sun, I burst out laughing. I laughted so long and so hard that my guts ached. And over and over I repeated: “It’s not for me! It’s not for me!” Then I’d laugh some more. I suppose it was my way of weeping. Between laughs I could hear my mother’s words ringing in my ears. “Why don’t you write something that will sell?”

  “If only he would send me a hundred a month, that would be swell,” I kept saying to myself. A hundred a month—regularly—would have solved our problems. (It would have then. Today no sum is large enough to solve anybody’s problems. The bombs eat up everything.)

  Since it weighed nothing, “my load,” I didn’t get dysentery. But I did suffer nightmares and illusions of grandeur. At times I felt like the deposed hotel porter in The Last Laugh, only instead of lavishing my fortune and my affections on a toilet attendant, I lavished them on my friend Emil or, at times, on Eugene, the poor Russian who had smiled at me from the top of the ladder one black day in the year 1930, when I was at the end of my wits, just having made a futile tour of the outskirts of Paris in search of a crust or a bone to stop the gnawing in my stomach.

  Why I never did go to Paris in search of the fortune that awaited me is a story in itself. Instead, I wrote letters suggesting this, then that, all useless suggestions because, where money is involved, I have only the most impractical ideas. Before I had time to be bored dealing out imaginary checks, there came a devaluation of the franc, followed in short order by another devaluation, an even “healthier” one, if I may say, than the first. These cut my “fortune” to about one third of the original sum. Then Maurice, my publisher, began having trouble with his creditors. He was living high—who wouldn’t?—had bought a house in the country, rented luxurious offices in the rue de la Paix, drank only the best wines, and invented situations, or so it seemed to me, which demanded that he make frequent trips from one end of the continent to the other. But all this was nothing compared to the fatal mistake he made when, at the height of his intoxication, he began “picking the wrong horses.” What possessed him I don’t know, but for some insane reason he proceeded to turn out one book after another which nobody wanted to read. In doing so, he was eating into my fortune—what was left of it. He didn’t mean to, of course. But only pocket-book editors can keep dead horses alive!

  At the lowest ebb there occurred one of those “miracles” which are constantly cropping up in my life and which I have almost grown to rely on when things get really tough. We were still at Anderson Creek, and that hundred a month which I had been willing to settle for was no more forthcoming than the thousand or two thousand a month which Girodias had offered to transmit “in one way or another.” The whole business had taken on the flavor of a bad dream. Something to joke about occasionally. (“Remember when you almost became a millionaire?”)

  One day Jean Wharton, whom I had met during my first days in Big Sur and with whom we had become firm friends, came to visit us. She owned a cozy little house on Partington Ridge, where we had dined with her a number of times. This day, apropos of nothing at all, she calmly asked us if we wouldn’t like to have her house, and the land with it. She thought that we had need of a place like hers, and that our need was greater than hers. After a few more words she went on to say that it seemed to her as if her home really belonged to us.

  We were, of course, dumbfounded, delighted, overwhelmed. We would like nothing better, but, we sadly admitted, we hadn’t a penny. Nor did we know, we hastened to add, when we would have any money worth speaking of. I made it quite clear that we had no resources and no tangible prospects. The best I could hope for, as a now “famous” writer, was to eke out a modest living.

  Her answer to this, and I shall never forget it, was: “You don’t need money. The place is yours, if you want it. You can move in any time. Pay me when your ship comes in.” After a slight pause, she added: “I know the money will come to you—at the right time.”

  On that we sealed the bargain.

  Here I must interrupt to relate what happened a few minutes ago when I was taking a nap. I say “taking a nap,” but more truthfully I mean—when I was trying to take a nap. In lieu of sleep I got messages. This business has been going on ever since I got the happy thought about the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. This noon it was bad, very bad. I could hardly taste the delicious lunch my wife, Eve, had prepared for me. As soon as I had finished lunch, I threw a few sticks of wood on the fire, rolled myself up in a blanket, and prepared to take my usual snooze before resuming work. (The more snoozes I take the more work I do. It pays off.) I closed my eyes, but the messages kept on coming. When they became too insistent, too clamorous, I would open my eyes and call out—“Eve, jot this down on the pad for me, will you? Just say—‘abundance’… ‘pilfering’ … ‘Sandy Hook.’” I thought that in tabbing a few key words I could turn off the current. But it didn’t work. Whole sentences poured in on me. Then paragraphs. Then pages…. It’s a phenomenon that always astounds me, no matter how often it happens. Try to bring it about and you fail miserably. Try to squelch it and you become more victimized.

  Forgive me, but I must go into it further…. The last time it happened was while I was writing Plexus. During the year or so that I was occupied with this work—one of the worst periods, in other respects, that I have ever lived through—the inundation was almost continuous. Huge blocks—particularly the dream partscame to me just as they appear in print and without any effort on my part, except that of equating my own rhythm with that of the mysterious dictator who had me in his thrall. In retrospect I wonder about this period, for the reason that every morning on entering my little studio I had first to quell the surge of anger, disgust and loathing which the daily drama inevitably aroused. Quieting myself as best I could, reproving and admonishing myself aloud, I would sit before the machine—and strike the tuning fork. Bang! Like a sack of coal it would spill out. I could keep it up for three or four hours at a stretch, interrupted only by the arrival of the mailman. At lunch more wrangling. Just sufficient to bring me to the boil. Then back to my desk, where I would again tune in and race on until the next interruption.

  When I had finished the book, a rather long one, I was so keyed up that I confidently expected to write two more books—pronto. However, nothing worked out as I had expected. The world went to smash about me. My own little world, I mean.

  For three years thereafter I was unable to advance more than a page at a time, with long intervals between these spurts. The book which I was endeavoring to write—getting up the courage to write, would be better!—I had been thinking and dreaming about for over twenty-five years. My despair reached such a point that I was almost convinced my writing days were over. To make matters worse, my intimate friends seemed to take pleasure in insinuating that I could write only when things were bad for me. It was true that seemingly I had no longer anything to fight. I was only fighting myself, fighting the venom which I had unconsciously stored up.

  To come back to the Voice…. There was The World of Lawrence, to take another instance. Begun at Clichy, continued in Passy, and abandoned af
ter the writing of some seven to eight hundred pages. A misfire. A flop. Yet what a grand affair it was! Never had I been so possessed. In addition to the finished pages, I piled up a mountain of notes and a staggering heap of citations, taken not only from Lawrence’s writings but from dozens of other writers, all of which I strove unsuccessfully to weave into the book. Then there were the charts and diagrams—the ground plan—with which I decorated the doors and walls of the studio (Villa Seurat), waiting for inspiration to continue the task and praying for a solution to the dilemma in which I found myself.

  It was the “dictation” which got me down. It was like a fire which refused to be extinguished. For months it went on, without let up. I couldn’t take a drink, even standing at a bar, without being forced to whip out pad and pencil. If I ate out, and I usually did, I would fill a small notebook during the course of a meal. If I climbed into bed and made the mistake of switching off the light, it would begin all over again, like the itch. I was that frazzled I could scarcely type a few coherent pages a day. The situation reached the height of the ludicrous when I suddenly realized one day that of everything I had written about the man I could just as well have said the opposite. I had indubitably reached that dead end which lies so artfully hidden in the phrase “the meaning of meaning.”

  That voice! It was while writing the Tropic of Capricorn (in the Villa Seurat) that the real shenanigans took place. My life being rather hectic then—I was living on six levels at once—there would come dry spells lasting for weeks some times. They didn’t bother me, these lulls, because I had a firm grip on the book and an inner certainty that nothing could scotch it. One day, for no accountable reason, unless it was an overdose of riotous living, the dictation commenced. Overjoyed, and also more wary this time (especially about making notes), I would go straight to the black desk which a friend had made for me, and, plugging in all the wires, together with amplifier and callbox, I would yell: “Je t’écoute … Vas-y!” (I’m listening … go to it!) And how it would come! I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing! I had to take it in one fell swoop or risk the penalty: excommunication. The most that was permitted me was the time it took to swallow an aspirin. The John could wait, “it” seemed to think. So could lunch, dinner, or whatever it was I thought necessary or important.