by Henry Miller
I was just beginning to wonder about the truth of all these statements—lawyer, doctor, legislator, scrivener, song writer—when he began to talk about his inventions. He had made three fortunes, it seems, before he fell into complete disgrace. It was getting pretty thick even for me, and I’m a credulous individual, when presently a chance remark he made about a friend of his, a famous architect in the Middle West, drew a surprising response from Rattner. “He was my buddy in the army,” said Rattner quietly. “Well,” said our friend, “he married my sister.” With this there began a lively exchange of reminiscences between the two of them, leaving not the slightest doubt in my mind that our friend was telling the truth, at least so far as the architect was concerned.
From the architect to the construction of a great house in the center of Texas somewhere was but a step. With the last fortune he made he had bought himself a ranch, married and built himself a fantastic chateau in the middle of nowhere. The drinking was gradually tailing off. He was deeply in love with his wife and looking forward to raising a family. Well, to make a long story short, a friend of his persuaded him to go to Alaska with him on a mining speculation. He left his wife behind because he feared the climate would be too rigorous for her. He was away about a year. When he returned—he had come back without warning, thinking to surprise her—he found her in bed with his best friend. With a whip he drove the two of them out of the house in the dead of night, in a blinding snowstorm, not even giving them a chance to put their clothes on. Then he got the bottle out, of course, and after he had had a few shots he began to smash things up. But the house was so damned big that he soon grew tired of that sport. There was only one way to make a good job of it and that was to put a match to the works, which he did. Then he got in his car and drove off, not bothering to even pack a valise. A few days later, in a distant State, he picked up the newspaper and learned that his friend had been found dead of exposure. Nothing was said about the wife. In fact, he never learned what happened to her from that day since. Shortly after this incident he got in a brawl with a man at a bar and cracked his skull open with a broken bottle. That meant a stretch at hard labor for eighteen months, during which time he made a study of prison conditions and proposed certain reforms to the Governor of the State which were accepted and put into practice.
“I was very popular,” he said. “I have a good voice and I can entertain a bit. I kept them in good spirits while I was there. Later I did another stretch. It doesn’t bother me at all. I can adjust myself to most any conditions. Usually there’s a piano and a billiard table and books—and if you can’t get anything to drink you can always get yourself a little dope. I switch back and forth. What’s the difference? All a man wants is to forget the present. . . .”
“Yes, but can you ever really forget?” Rattner interjected.
“I can! You just give me a piano, a quart of rye and a sociable little joint and I can be just as happy as a man wants to be. You see, I don’t need all the paraphernalia you fellows require. All I carry with me is a toothbrush. If I want a shave I buy one; if I want to change my linen I get new linen; when I’m hungry I eat; when I’m tired I sleep. It doesn’t make much difference to me whether I sleep in a bed or on the ground. If I want to write a story I go to a newspaper office and borrow a machine. If I want to go to Boston all I have to do is show my pass. Any place is home sweet home so long as I can find a place to drink and meet a friendly fellow like myself. I don’t pay taxes and I don’t pay rent. I have no boss, no responsibilities. I don’t vote and I don’t care who’s President or Vice-President. I don’t want to make money and I don’t look for fame or success. What can you offer me that I haven’t got, eh? I’m a free man—are you? And happy. I’m happy because I don’t care what happens. All I want is my quart of whiskey every day—a bottle of forgetfulness, that’s all. My health? I never worry about it. I’m just as strong and healthy as the next man. If there’s anything wrong with me I don’t know it. I might live to be a hundred whereas you guys are probably worrying whether you’ll live to be sixty. There’s only one day—today. If I feel good I write a poem and throw it away the next day. I’m not trying to win any literary prizes—I’m just expressing myself in my own cantankerous way. . . .”
At this point he began to go off the track about his literary ability. His vanity was getting the best of him. When it got to the point where he insisted that I glance at a story he had written for some popular magazine I thought it best to pull him up short. I much preferred to hear about the desperado and the drunkard than the man of letters.
“Look here,” I said, not mincing my words, “you admit that this is all crap, don’t you? Well, I never read crap. What’s the use of showing me that stuff—I don’t doubt that you can write as badly as the next fellow—it doesn’t take genius to do that. What I’m interested in is good writing: I admire genius not success. Now if you have anything that you’re proud of that’s another thing. I’d be glad to read something that you yourself thought well of.”
He gave me a long, down-slanting look. For a few long moments he looked at me that way, silently, scrutinizingly. “I’ll tell you,” he said finally, “there’s just one thing I’ve ever written which I think good—and I’ve never put it down on paper. But I’ve got it up here,” and he tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “If you’d like to hear it I’ll recite it for you. It’s a long poem I wrote one time when I was in Manila. You’ve heard of Morro Castle, haven’t you? All right, it was just outside the walls of Mono Castle that I got the inspiration. I think it’s a great poem. I know it is! I wouldn’t want to see it printed. I wouldn’t want to take money for it. Here it is. . . .”
Without pausing to clear his throat or take a drink he launched into this poem about the sun going down in Manila. He recited it at a rapid pace in a clear musical voice. It was like shooting down the rapids in a light canoe. All around us the conversation had died down; some stood up and moved in close the better to hear him. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end. As I say, it had started off at the velocity of a flood, and it went on and on, image upon image, crescendo upon crescendo, rising and falling in musical cadences. I don’t remember a single line of it, more’s the pity. All I remember is the sensation I had of being borne along on the swollen bosom of a great river through the heart of a tropical zone in which there was a constant fluttering of dazzling plumage, the sheen of wet green leaves, the bending and swaying of lakes of grass, the throbbing midnight blue of sky, the gleam of stars like coruscating jewels, the song of birds intoxicated by God knows what. There was a fever running through the lines, the fever not of a sick man but of an exalted, frenzied creature who had suddenly found his true voice and was trying it out in the dark. It was a voice which issued straight from the heart, a taut, vibrant column of blood which fell upon the car in rhapsodic, thunderous waves. The end was an abatement rather than a cessation, a diminuendo which brought the pounding rhythm to a whisper that prolonged itself far beyond the actual silence in which it finally merged. The voice had ceased to register, but the poem continued to pulsate in the echoing cells of the brain.
He broke the silence which ensued by alluding modestly to his unusual facility for memorizing whatever caught his eye. “I remember everything I read in school,” he said, “from Longfellow and Wordsworth to Ronsard and François Villon. Villon, there’s a fellow after my own heart,” and he launched into a familiar verse in an accent that betrayed he had more than a textbook knowledge of French. “The greatest poets were the Chinese,” he said. ‘They made the little things reveal the greatness of the universe. They were philosophers first and then poets. They lived their poetry. We have nothing to make poetry about, except death and desolation. You can’t make a poem about an automobile or a telephone booth. To begin with, the heart has to be intact. One must be able to believe in something. The values we were taught to respect when we were children are all smashed. We’re not men any more—we’re automatons. We don’t even get any satisfa
ction in killing. The last war killed off our impulses. We don’t respond; we react. We’re the lost legion of the defeated archangels. We’re dangling in chaos and our leaders, blinder than bats, bray like jackasses. You wouldn’t call Mister Roosevelt a great leader, would you? Not if you know your history. A leader has to be inspired by a great vision; he has to lift his people out of the mire with mighty pinions; he has to rouse them from the stupor in which they vegetate like stoats and slugs. You don’t advance the cause of freedom and humanity by leading poor, feeble dreamers to the slaughterhouse. What’s he belly-aching about anyway? Did the Creator appoint him the Saviour of Civilization? When I went over there to fight for Democracy I was just a kid. I didn’t have any great ambitions, neither did I have any desire to kill anybody. I was brought up to believe that the shedding of blood was a crime against God and man. Well, I did what they asked me to, like a good soldier. I murdered every son of a bitch that was trying to murder me. What else could I do? It wasn’t all murder, of course. I had some good times now and then—a different sort of pleasure than I ever figured I would like. In fact, nothing was like what I thought it would be before I went over. You know what those bastards make you into. Why, your own mother wouldn’t recognize you if she saw you taking your pleasure—or crawling in the mud and sticking a bayonet in a man who never did you any harm. I’m telling you, it got so filthy and poisonous I didn’t know who I was any more. I was just a number that lit up like a switchboard when the order came to do this, do that, do the other thing. You couldn’t call me a man—I didn’t have a god-damned bit of feeling left. And I wasn’t an animal because if I had been an animal I’d have had better sense than to get myself into such a mess. Animals kill one another only when they’re hungry. We kill because we’re afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we’d have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong. Today I haven’t got any principles—I’m an outlaw. I have only one ambition left—to get enough booze under my belt every day so as to forget what the world looks like. I never sanctioned this setup. You can’t convince me that I murdered all those Germans in order to bring this unholy mess about. No sir, I refuse to take any part in it. I wash my hands of it. I walk out on it. Now if that makes me a bad citizen why then I’m a bad citizen. So what? Do you suppose if I ran around like a mad dog, begging for a club and a rifle to start murdering all over again, do you suppose that would make me into a good citizen, good enough, what I mean, to vote the straight Democratic ticket? I suppose if I did that I could eat right out of their hand, what? Well, I don’t want to eat out of anybody’s hand. I want to be left alone; I want to dream my dreams, to believe as I once believed, that life is good and beautiful and that men can live with one another in peace and plenty. No son of a bitch on earth can tell me that to make life better you have to first kill a million or ten million men in cold blood. No sir, those bastards haven’t got any heart. I know the Germans are no worse than we are, and by Christ, I know from experience that some of them at least are a damned sight better than the French or the English.
“That schoolteacher we made a President of, he thought he had everything fixed just right, didn’t he? Can you picture him crawling around on the floor at Versailles like an old billygoat, putting up imaginary fences with a blue pencil? What’s the sense of making new boundaries, will you tell me? Why tariffs and taxes and sentry boxes and pillboxes anyway? Why doesn’t England part with some of her unlawful possessions? If the poor people in England can’t make a living when the government possesses the biggest empire that ever was how are they going to make a living when the empire falls to pieces? Why don’t they emigrate to Canada or Africa or Australia?
“There’s another thing I don’t understand. We always assume that we’re in the right, that we have the best government under the sun. How do we know—have we tried the others out? Is everything running so beautifully here that we couldn’t bear the thought of a change? Supposing I honestly believed in Fascism or Communism or polygamy or Mohammedanism or pacifism or any of the things that are now tabu in this country? What would happen to me if I started to open my trap, eh? Why you don’t even dare to protest against being vaccinated, though there’s plenty of evidence to prove that vaccination does more harm than good. Where is this liberty and freedom we boast about? You’re only free if you’re in good odor with your neighbors, and even then it’s not a hell of a lot of rope they give you. If you happen to be broke and out of a job your freedom isn’t worth a button. And if you’re old besides then it’s just plain misery. They’re much kinder to animals and flowers and crazy people. Civilization is a blessing to the unfit and the degenerate—the others it breaks or demoralizes. As far as the comforts of life go I’m better off when I’m in jail than when I’m out. In the one case they take your freedom away and in the other they take your manhood. If you play the game you can have automobiles and town houses and mistresses and pâté de foie gras and all the folde-rol that goes with it. But who wants to play the game? Is it worth it? Did you ever see a millionaire who was happy or who had any self-respect? Did you ever go to Washington and see our lawbreakers—excuse me, I mean lawmakers—in session? There’s a sight for you! If you dressed them in striped dungarees and put them behind the bars with pick and shovel nobody on earth could tell but what they belonged there. Or take that rogues’ gallery of Vice-Presidents. I was standing in front of a drug store not so long ago studying their physiognomies. There never was a meaner, craftier, uglier, more fanatical bunch of human faces ever assembled in one group. And that’s the stuff they make presidents of whenever there’s an assassination. Yes, assassinations. I was sitting in a restaurant the day after the election—up in Maine it was—and the follow next to me was trying to lay a bet with another guy that Roosevelt wouldn’t last the term out. He was laying five to one—but nobody would take him up. The thing that struck me was that the waitress, whom nobody had paid any attention to, suddenly remarked in a quiet tone that ‘we were about due for another assassination.’ Assassinations seem ugly when it’s the President of the United States but there’s plenty of assassinating going on all the time and nobody seems to get very riled up about it. Where I was raised we used to flog a nigger to death just to show a visitor how it’s done. It’s still being done, but not so publicly, I suppose. We improve things by covering them up.
“You take the food they hand us. . . . Of course I haven’t got any taste left, from all the booze I pour down my system. But a man who has any taste buds left must be in a hell of a way eating the slop they hand you in public places. Now they’re discovering that the vitamins are missing. So what do they do? Do they change the diet, change the chef? No, they give you the same rotten slop only they add the necessary vitamins. That’s civilization—always doing things assways. Well, I’ll tell you, I’m so god-damned civilized now that I prefer to take my poison straight. If I had lived what they call a ‘normal’ life I’d be on the dump heap by fifty anyway. I’m forty-eight now and sound as a whistle, always doing just the opposite of what they recommend. If you were to live the way I do for two weeks you’d be in the hospital. So what does it add up to, will you tell me? If I didn’t drink I’d have some other vice—a baby-snatcher, maybe, or a refined Jack-the-Ripper, who knows? And if I didn’t have any vices I’d be just a poor sap, a sucker like millions of others, and where would that get me? Do you think I’d get any satisfaction out of dying in harness, as they say? Not me! I’d rather die in the alcoholic ward among the has-beens and no-goods. At least, if it happens that way, I’ll have the satisfaction of saying that I had only one master—John Barleycorn. You have a thousand masters, perfidious, insidious ones who torment you even in your sleep. I’ve only got one, and to tell the truth he’s more like a friend than a taskmaster. He gets me into some nasty messes, but he never lies to me. He never says ‘freedom, liberty, equality’ or any of that rot. He just says, ‘I will make you so stinking drunk that you won’t know who you are,’ and that’s all I crav
e. Now if Mister Roosevelt or any other politician could make me a promise and keep it I’d have a little respect for him. But who ever heard of a diplomat or a politician keeping his word? It’s like expecting a millionaire to give his fortune away to the men and women he robbed it from. It just ain’t done.”