Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Henry Miller

  It was about this time that the little mothers all became interested in the dance. Some went in for singing too. Very fine. Commendable, as we say. But what about the children? Were they also taught to sing and dance? Not a bit. That would come later, when they were old enough to be sent to the ballet class or whatever the fad might be which the little mothers deemed indispensable in the cultural advancement of their progeny. The mothers were too busy at the moment cultivating their own latent talents.

  There came a day when I taught Val her first song. We were marching home through the woods; I had hoisted her on my shoulders to save her weary little legs. Suddenly she asked me to sing. “What would you like?” I said, and then I gave her that feeble joke of Abraham Lincoln about knowing only two songs: one was “Yankee Doodle,” the other wasn’t.

  “Sing it!” she begged.

  I did, and with a vengeance. She joined in. By the time we arrived home she knew the verse by heart. I was supremely delighted. We had to sing it over and over, naturally. It was Yankee Doodle this and Yankee Doodle that. Yankee Doodle dandy and the Devil take the hindmost!

  Moricand took not the slightest interest in such diversions. “Poor Miller!” he probably said to himself, meaning what a ridiculous figure I could cut.

  Poor Val! How it cut me when, endeavoring to have a few words with him, she would get for rebuff: “I speak no English.”

  At table she annoyed him incessantly with her silly chatter, which I found delicious, and her poor table manners.

  “She ought to be disciplined,” he would say. “It’s not good for a child to receive so much attention.”

  My wife, being of the same mind, would chime in like a clock. She would bemoan the fact that I frustrated all her efforts in this direction, would make it appear that I took a diabolical pleasure in seeing the child misbehave. She could not admit, naturally, that her own spirit was of cast iron, that discipline was her only recourse.

  “He believes in freedom,” she would say, making the idea of freedom sound like utter rubbish.

  To which Moricand would rejoin: “Yes, the American child is a little barbarian. In Europe the child knows its place. Here the child rules.”

  All too true, alas! And yet…. What he forgot to add is what every intelligent European knows, what he himself knew only too well and had admitted many times, namely, that in Europe, especially his Europe, the child becomes an adult long before his time, that he is disciplined to death, that he is given an education which is not only “barbarous” but cruel, crazy, stultifying, that stern, disciplinary measures may make well-behaved children but seldom emancipated adults. He forgot, moreover, to say what his own childhood had been like, to explain what discipline, good manners, refinement, education had done for him.

  To exculpate himself in my eyes he would wind up by explaining to my wife that I was a born anarchist, that my sense of freedom was a peculiarly personal one, that the very idea of discipline was abhorrent to my nature. I was a rebel and an outlaw, a spiritual freak, so to say. My function in life was to create disturbance. Adding very soberly that there was need for such as me. Then, as if carried away, he would proceed to rectifiy the picture. It was also a fact, he had to admit, that I was too good, too kind, too gentle, too patient, too indulgent, too forbearing, too forgiving. As if this balanced the violence, the ruthlessness, the recklessness, the treachery of my essential being. At this point he might even say that I was capable of understanding discipline, since, as he put it, my ability to write was based on the strictest kind of self-discipline.

  “C’est un être bien compliqué,” he would conclude. “Fortunately, I understand him. I know him inside out.” With this he would press his thumb against the table top, as if squashing a louse. That was me under his thumb, the anomaly which he had studied, analyzed, dissected, and could interpret when occasion demanded.

  Often an evening that began auspiciously would end in an involved discussion of our domestic problems, something which I abhorred but which wives seem to enjoy, particularly when they have a sympathetic listener. Since I had long resigned myself to the futility of arriving at any understanding with my wife through discussion—I might as well have talked to a stone wall—I limited my participation to rectifying falsehoods and distortions of fact. For the most part I presented an adamant silence. Quite aware that there are always two sides to the picture, poor Moricand would struggle to shift the discussion to more fundamental grounds.

  “One gets nowhere with a type like Miller,” he would say to my wife. “He does not think in the way you and I do. He thinks in circular fashion. He has no logic, no sense of measure, he is contemptuous of reason and common sense.”

  He would then proceed to describe to her her virtues and defects, in order to demonstrate why we could never see eye to eye, she and I. “But I understand you both. I can act as arbiter. I know how to put the puzzle together.”

  As a matter of fact, he was quite correct in this. He proved to be a most excellent referee. In his presence, what might have ended in explosions ended only in tears or mute perplexity. Often, when I prayed that he would grow weary and take leave of us for the night, I could sense my wife doing the very opposite. Her only chance of talking with me, or at me, was in his presence. Alone we were either at one another’s throats or giving each other the silence. Moricand often succeeded in lifting these furious and prolonged arguments, which had become routine, to another level; he helped us, momentarily at least, to isolate our thoughts, survey them dispassionately, examine them from other angles, free them of their obsessive nature. It was on such occasions that he made good use of his astrological wisdom, for nothing can be more cool and objective, more soothing and staying to the victim of emotion, than the astrological picture of his plight.

  Not every evening was spent in argument and discussion, to be sure. The best evenings were those in which we gave him free rein. After all, the monologue was his forte. If by chance we touched on the subject of painting—he had begun life as a painter—we were sure to be richly rewarded for hearing him out. Many of the now celebrated figures in French art he had known intimately. Some he had befriended in his days of opulence. His anecdotes concerning what I choose to call the golden period—the two or three decades leading up to the appearance of les Fauves—were delicious in the sense that a rich meal is delicious. They were always spiced with uncanny observations that did not lack a certain diabolical charm. For me this period was fraught with vital interest. I had always felt that I was born twenty or thirty years too late, always regretted that I had not first visited Europe (and remained there) as a young man. Seen it before the First World War, I mean. What would I not give to have been the comrade or bosom friend of such figures as Apollinaire, Douanier Rousseau, George Moore, Max Jacob, Vlaminck, Utrillo, Derain, Cendrars, Gauguin, Modigliani, Cingria, Picabia, Maurice Magre, Léon Daudet, and such like. How much greater would have been the thrill to cycle along the Seine, cross and recross her bridges, race through towns like Bougival, Châtou, Argenteuil, Marly-le-roi, Puteaux, Rambouillet, Issy-les-Moulineaux and similar environs circa 1910 rather than the year 1932 or 1933! What a difference it would have made to see Paris from the top of a horse-drawn omnibus at the age of twenty-one! Or to view the grands boulevards as a flâneur in the period made famous by the Impressionists!

  Moricand could summon all the splendor and misery of this epoch at will. He could induce that “nostalgie de Paris” which Carco is so adept at, which Aragon, Léon-Paul Fargue, Daudet, Duhamel and so many French writers have given us time and again. It needed only the mention of a street name, a crazy monument, a restaurant or cabaret which exists no more, to start the wheels turning. His evocations were even more piquant to me because he had seen it all through the eyes of a snob. However much he had participated, he had never suffered as did the men he spoke of. His sufferings were to come only when those who had not been killed in the war or committed suicide or gone insane had become famous. Did he ever imagine in his days of o
pulence, I wonder, that the time would come when he would be obliged to beg his poor friend Max Jacob for a few sous—Max who had renounced the world and was living like an ascetic? A terrible thing to come down in the world when your old friends are rising on the horizon like stars, when the world itself, once a playground, has become a shabby carnival, a cemetery of dreams and illusions.

  How he loathed the Republic and all it represented! Whenever he made mention of the French Revolution it was as if he were face to face with evil itself. Like Nostradamus, he dated the deterioration, the blight, the downfall from the day le peuple—la canaille, in other words—took over. It is strange, now that I come to think of it, that he never once spoke of Gilles de Rais. Any more than he ever spoke of Ramakrishna, Milarepa, or St. Francis. Napoleon, yes. Bismarck, yes. Voltaire, yes. Villon, yes. And Pythagoras, of course. The whole Alexandrian world was as familiar and vivid to him as if he had known it in a previous incarnation. The Manichean world of thought was also a reality to him. Of Zoroastrian teachings he dwelt by predilection on that aspect which proclaims “the reality of evil.” Possibly he also believed that Ormuzd would eventually prevail over Ahriman, but if so it was an eventuality only realizable in a distant future, a future so distant as to render all speculation about it, or even hope in it, futile. No, the reality of evil was undoubtedly the strongest conviction he held. He was so aware of it, indeed, that he could enjoy nothing to the full; actively or passively he was always exorcising the evil spirits which pervade every phase, rung and sphere of life.

  One evening, when we had touched on things close to his heart, he asked me suddenly if I had lost all interest in astrology. “You never mention it any more,” he said.

  “True,” I replied. “I don’t see what it would serve me to pursue it further. I was never interested in it the way you are. For me it was just another language to learn, another keyboard to manipulate. It’s only the poetic aspect of anything which really interests me. In the ultimate there is only one language—the language of truth. It matters little how we arrive at it.”

  I forget what his reply to this was precisely, only that it conveyed a veiled reproach for my continued interest in Oriental thought. I was too absorbed in abstract speculations, he hinted. Too Germanic, possibly. The astrologic approach was a corrective I stood in need of. It would help to integrate, orient, and organize much in me that was flou and chaotic. There was always a danger, with a type like me, of becoming either a saint or a fanatic.

  “Not a lunatic, eh?”

  “Jamais!”

  “But something of a fool! Is that it?”

  His answer was—Yes and No. I had a strong religious strain, a metaphysical bent. There was more than a touch of the Crusader in me. I was both humble and arrogant, a penitent and an Inquisitioner. And so on.

  “And you think a deeper knowledge of astrology would help overcome these tendencies?”

  “I would not put it exactly like that,” he said. “I would say simply that it would help you to see more clearly … see into the nature of your problems.”

  “But I have no problems,” I replied. “Unless they are cosmological ones. I am at peace with myself—and with the world. It’s true, I don’t get along with my wife. But neither did Socrates, for that matter. Or….”

  He stopped me.

  “All right,” I said, “tell me this—what has astrology done for you? Has it enabled you to correct your defects? Has it helped you to adjust to the world? Has it given you peace and joy? Why do you scratch yourself like a madman?”

  The look he gave me was enough to tell me that I had hit below the belt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you know that I’m often rude and direct for a good reason. I don’t mean to belittle you or make fun of you. But here’s what I would like to know. Answer me straight! What is the most important—peace and joy or wisdom? If to know less would make you a happier man, which would you choose?”

  I might have known his answer. It was that we have no choice in such matters.

  I violently disagreed. “Perhaps,” said I, “I am still very much of an American. That is to say, naive, optimistic, gullible. Perhaps all I gained from the fruitful years I spent in France was a strengthening and deepening of my own inner spirit. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles. Any deprivation I suffered was my own doing. I blame nobody but myself for my woes and afflictions, for my shortcomings, for my transgressions. What you believe I might have learned through a deeper knowledge of astrology I learned through experience of life. I made all the mistakes that it is possible for a man to make—and I paid the penalty. I am that much richer, that much wiser, that much happier, if I may say so, than if I had found through study or through discipline how to avoid the snares and pitfalls in my path…. Astrology deals in potentialities, does it not? I am not interested in the potential man. I am interested in what a man actualizes—or realizes—of his potential being. And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am not. God is. The world is. Man is. We are. The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m a fanatic about it, if you like. And what is astrology? What has it to do with reality? Something, to be sure. So has astronomy, so has biology, so has mathematics, so has music, so has literature; and so have the cows in the field and the flowers and the weeds, and the manure that brings them back to life. In some moods some things seem more important than others. Some things have value, others don’t, we say. Everything is important and of value. Look at it that way and I’ll accept your astrology….”

  “You’re in one of your moods again,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “I know it,” I replied. “Just be patient with me. You’ll have your turn…. Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things. We know too much—and too little. It’s the intellect which gets us into trouble. Not our intelligence. That we can never have enough of. But I get weary of listening to specialists, weary of listening to the man with one string to his fiddle. I don’t deny the validity of astrology. What I object to is becoming enslaved to any one point of view. Of course there are affinities, analogies, correspondences, a heavenly rhythm and an earthly rhythm … as above, so below. It would all be crazy if it weren’t so. But knowing it, accepting it, why not forget it? I mean, make it a living part of one’s life, something absorbed, assimilated and distributed through every pore of one’s being, and thus forgotten, altered, utilized in the spirit and the service of life. I abhor people who have to filter everything through the one language they know, whether it be astrology, religion, yoga, politics, economics or what. The one thing about this universe of ours which intrigues me, which makes me realize that it is divine and beyond all knowing, is that it lends itself so easily to any and all interpretations. Everything we formulate about it is correct and incorrect at the same time. It includes our truths and our errors. And, whatever we think about the universe in no way alters it….

  “Let me get back to where I started. We all have different lives to lead. We all want to make conditions as smooth and harmonious for ourselves as possible. We all want to extract the full measure of life. Must we go to books and teachers, to science, religion, philosophy, must we know so much—and so little!—to take the path? Can we not become fully awake and aware without the torture we put ourselves through?”

  “Life is nothing but a Calvary,” he said. “Not even a knowledge of astrology can alter that stern fact.”

  “What about the exceptions? Surely…”

  “There are no exceptions,” he replied. “Everyone, even the most enlightened, has his private griefs and torments.
Life is perpetual struggle, and struggle entails sorrow and suffering. And suffering gives us strength and character.”

  “For what? To what end?”

  “The better to endure life’s burdens.”

  “What a woeful picture! It’s like training for a contest in which one knows in advance he will be defeated.”

  “There is such a thing as renunciation,” he said.

  “But is it a solution?”

  “For some Yes, for others No. Sometimes one has no choice.”

  “In your honest opinion, do we ever really have what is called choice?”

  He thought a moment before answering.

  “Yes, I believe we do have a measure of choice, but much less than people think. Within the limits of our destiny we are free to choose. It is here precisely that astrology is of great importance: when you realize the conditions under which you have come into the world, which astrology makes clear, you do not choose the unchooseable.”

  “The lives of great men,” said I, “would seem to tell us the opposite.”