by Henry Miller
We have reached the point where we do not want to know any longer whose work it is, whose seal is affixed, whose stamp is upon it; what we want, and what at last we are about to get, are individual masterpieces which triumph in such a way as to completely subordinate the accidental artists who are responsible for them. Every man today who is really an artist is trying to kill the artist in himself—and he must, if there is to be any art in the future. We are suffering from a plethora of art. We are art-ridden. Which is to say that instead of a truly personal, truly creative vision of things, we have merely an aesthetic view. Empty as we are, it is impossible for us to look at an object without annexing it to our collection. We have not a single chair, for example, in the sweep and memory of our retina, that does not bear a label; if, for the space of a week, a man working in absolute secrecy were to turn out chairs unique and unrecognizable, the world would go mad. And yet every chair that is brought into existence is howling for recognition as chair, as chair in its own right, unique and perdurable.
I think of chair because among all the objects which Brassai has photographed his chair with the wire legs stands out with a majesty that is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest denomination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and by royalty, by little trot-about whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair which the municipality rents daily to any and every one who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air. A chair with little holes in the seat and wire legs which come to a loop at the bottom. The most unostentatious, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassai chose precisely this insignificant chair and, snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lovely backsides which once graced it, no romanticism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it, no odious comparisons with chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolize it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either. Walking along a path of the Jardin des Tuileries one day he saw this chair standing on the edge of a grating. He saw at once chair, grating, tree, clouds, sun, people. He saw that the chair was as much a part of that fine spring day as the tree, the clouds, the sun, the people. He took it as it was, with its honest little holes, its slender wire legs. Perhaps the Prince of Wales once sat on it, perhaps a holy man, perhaps a leper, perhaps a murderer or an idiot. Who sat on it did not interest Brassai in the least. It was a spring day and the foliage was greening; the earth was in a ferment, the roots convulsed with sap. On such a day, if one is alive, one can well believe that out of the dead body of the earth there will spring forth a race of men immortal in their splendor. On such a day there is visible in the stalest object a promise, a hope, a possibility. Nothing is dead, except in the imagination. Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!
And so on that day, in that glorious hour, the homely, inexpensive chair belonging to the municipality of Paris became the empty throne which is always beseeching the restless spirit of man to end his fear and longing and proclaim the kingdom of man.
UTERINE HUNGER
I WAS BORN too soon. In the seventh month I ripped and clawed my way out of the womb. I fell out on the street head first, with full grown nails, cloven hoofs and a double set of teeth. They swaddled me in cotton wool and shoved me back in an incubator where under glass I enjoyed an artificial birth. It cost a dime to have a look at me, and for the same dime one could also examine the three-legged cow, the embryo with two heads and other interesting monsters. Near by was a shooting gallery. It was in Dreamland, Coney Island.
Exposed to the light too soon I developed hypertrophy of the end organs. I react to color violently. My two months in the incubator were like a prison term. By the time I was handed my birth certificate my criminal instincts were already fully developed. It was only natural that I should become a rebel, an outlaw, a desperado. I blame my parents, I blame society, I blame God. I accuse. I go through life with finger lifted accusingly. I have the prophetic itch. I curse and blaspheme. I tell the bitter truth.
From the very beginning it seems as if the world were an artificial womb, a prison, seems as though everybody and everything were conspiring to pull me back to the womb from which I broke loose too soon. I go through life raw, exposed, twisting, writhing, squirming. The light stabs me like a million needles. I dance such a violent jig inside that my articulation is thrown completely out of gear. I am always turning inside out, to protect myself with my bones. The light whistles through my bones; I glow like a skeleton under the X-ray.
And always I am hungry, voraciously hungry. I am insatiable. It is a hunger on all fronts: alimentary, sexual, spiritual. I don’t eat—I attach myself, like the amoeba, to whatever morsel of food presents itself. Once I have ingested it I split—double, triple, multiple selves floating off in search of fresh morsels of food. It goes on like that ad nauseam. Women—they too seem like morsels of food. After I attach myself to them I devour them. I fuck my way through body, brain and soul, and then I split again. Parthogenic marriage. The women I have loved are only bare bones now—the armature which refused to be masticated, even though I was equipped with a double set of teeth. With ideas the same: I swallowed them boiling hot and scorched my gizzards. What remains is the pure crystalline essence, the atomic structure which refused to pass through the intestines of the brain. It’s like continual fireworks going on in the upper story—an explosion that never comes off.
I suppose I am a reflection of the times, of this feverish agitation, this mad tempo, this inability to hold it in until the germ is ready to blossom. Nothing but short waves, nothing but clash, stridency, a brief meteoric flash and then extinction. Something is struggling to be born, that’s evident. But the toll is frightful—the toll of stillbirths. The walls of the womb are weak, and the weak womb has a tenacious clutch. The clamor inside has the same hysterical pitch as that outside: the born and the unborn are doing the St. Vitus dance. The modern womb is like a rectum full of haemorrhoids; the child has either to be yanked out by the forceps or cut away like an ulcer. Usually the womb is turned inside out, and after that it has to be scraped and cauterized. Then a dose of alum—so that it will shrink back to normalcy. The worst is that this spawn which comes out of the womb stinks of the womb for the rest of its life. And not only that, but a continual turning and twisting, as if they were trying to turn themselves inside out.
As a matter of fact, the world is turning itself inside out. One can see the skeletal bones everywhere, like umbrella ribs lying in the gutter after a violent storm. Everything stands out nakedly—the grinning skeleton for any one who has an eye. The artist who is born of these times is the living symbol of this squirming nakedness. He is looking for meat to cover his bare bones, for a little flesh to hide the blood which was spilled at his birth. He wants to get out of the strait jacket which was slipped over him before he had the strength to raise his arms. He wants to get rid of the blinders which were put over his eyes before he had even a chance to look at the world.
Whatever the artist does now is in short wave lengths—uterine vibrations which are scarcely perceptible. He works in nascent images, straggling to reveal through his colors the hidden form of things. He sees everything in terms of phylogeny and ontogeny. He is incestuous, perverted at the roots. The father is displaced, murdered by the son, because he has not asserted his power over life and death. The mother, like Osiris, searches frantically for the missing genitals.
When the body of life is wasted away there is nothing for it but to take the bare bones to our bosom and hug them and warm them. Life beats through the skeleton in some miraculous way. At the last ditch this which we imagine to be useless and an abomination gets up and walks, gets up and takes on flesh
, gets up and sings. This which we carry around inside us, which took form and substance out of the irreducible elements, is the final inspiration. When we wear away to this we touch the node, the ultimate link between life and death. At that farthest extreme of life which is called death we recover the simplicity of the organic unities.
With the ebb-tide there is no consciousness of anything save atomic structure. At the last point of livingness thought spreads itself so thin that the structural element expresses itself finitely. The chemistry of the mind becomes the alchemy of the spirit. The multiverse is made a universe. Through form significance is restored.
The world is always dying and always coming back to life. Tide and pulse, and with the turn of the tide a touch of mystery. At thought’s deadmost reach the miraculous seeps back and throws a glow over the wan cadaver of despair. The taut, stretched world which the mind inhabited grows smaller and smaller and more and more awe-inspiring. The feeling for life rises as the forms and symbols become illuminated. The stars gather direction in the same way that the foetus moves towards birth. The mystery is never revealed, but with birth attention is focused on creation. Once the sacred character of the body is recognized the cosmos wheels into line. Once the cosmic accent is identified the whole edifice of life bursts into melody.
When the individual is wholly creative, one with destiny, there is neither time nor space, nor birth and death. The god-feeling becomes so intense that everything, organic and inorganic, beats with a divine rhythm. At the moment of supreme individuation, when the identity of all things is sensed and one is at the same time utterly and blissfully alone, the umbilical cord is at last cut. There is neither a longing for the womb nor a longing for the beyond. The sure feeling of eternality. Beyond this there is no evolution, only a perpetual movement from creation to creation. The personality itself becomes a creation. From symbolizing himself in his works man symbolizes himself in his being. At this stage he utters miracles and produces miracles. He speaks in a language so clear that it penetrates the densest matter. The word becomes magic, it produces a contagion. And it is through this miraculous virus that the world is poisoned and dies. It is the miracle of miracles. The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
SERAPHITA
IT HAS BEEN SAID that February 28, 1832, was probably the most important date in Balzac’s life. It was the day that he received his first letter from Madame Hanska, the woman whom after seventeen years of courtship he was to marry, just four months before his death.
From his twenty-first to his twenty-ninth year Balzac wrote forty volumes under various pseudonyms. After the colossal failure of his publishing venture he suddenly came to himself and, resuming the role of writer, which he had thought to drop in order to gain more experience of life, he began to sign his own name to his work. Having tapped the true source of inspiration, he was so overwhelmed with ideas and literary projects that for a couple of years he was scarcely able to cope with his energies. It was a repetition of that singular state—“congestion de lumière,” to use his own expression—which he had experienced when he was returned to his parents by the masters of the College of Vendôme in his fifteenth year; only this time he was paralyzed by the multiplicity of outlets open to him, and not by the struggle to assimilate what he had imbibed. His whole career as a writer, indeed, was a Promethean drama of restitution. Balzac was not only tremendously receptive, as highly sensitized as a photographic plate, but he was also gifted with an extraordinary intuition. He read faces as easily as he read books, and in addition he possessed, as it is said, “every memory.” His was a protean nature, opulent, jovial, expansive, yet also chaste, reserved and secretive. For the extraordinary endowments with which Nature had blessed him he was obliged to pay the penalty of submission. He looked upon himself as a spiritual “exile.” It was a supreme task for him to coordinate his faculties, to establish order out of the chaos which his superabundant nature was constantly creating. His physiological flair was an expression of this obsessive passion “to establish order,” for then as now Europe was in the throes of dissolution. His boast to finish with the pen what Napoleon had begun with the sword signified a deep desire to reveal the significance of the true relationships existing in the world of human society. It was Cuvier rather than Napoleon whom he took as a model.
From the time of his financial set-back, from 1827 to 1836, in short, Balzac lived a life which was in many ways reminiscent of Dostoievski’s lifelong bondage. Indeed, it is during this very period that, in order to stave off his creditors, Dostoievski undertook the translation of Eugenie Grandet. Through excessive suffering and deprivation both Dostoievski and Balzac, destined to become the foremost novelists of the nineteenth century, were permitted to give us glimpses of worlds which no other novelists have yet touched upon, or even imagined. Enslaved by their own passions, chained to the earth by the strongest desires, they nevertheless revealed through their tortured creations the evidences of worlds unseen, unknown, except, as Balzac says, “to those loftier spirits open to faith who can discern Jacob’s mystical stair.” Both of them believed in the dawn of a new world, though frequently accused, by their contemporaries, of being morbid, cynical, pessimistic and immoral.
I am not a devotee of Balzac. For me the Human Comedy is of minor importance. I prefer that other comedy which has been labeled “divine,” in testimony doubtless of our sublime incorrigibility. But without a knowledge of Seraphita, the subject of this essay—possibly also Louis Lambert—there can be no real understanding of Balzac’s life and work. It is the cornerstone of the grand edifice. Seraphita is situated symbolically at the dawn of a new century. “Outside,” says Balzac at the end, “the first summer of the nineteenth century was in all its glory.” Outside, please notice. For Seraphita was conceived in the womb of a new day which only now, a hundred years later, is beginning to make itself clear.
It was in the midst of the most harassed period of his life, in the year 1830, that Balzac took up quarters in the Rue Cassini, “midway,” as he says, “between the Carmelites and the place where they guillotine.” Here were begun the truly herculean labors for which he is celebrated and which undoubtedly cut his life in half, for with anything like a normal rhythm he would have lived a hundred or more. To give some idea of his activities at this period let me state briefly that in 1830 he is credited with seventy publications, in 1831 with seventy-five. Writing to his publisher, Werdet, in 1835, he says: “There is not a single other writer who has done this year what I have done . . . anyone else would have died.” He cites the seven books he has just finished, as well as the political articles he wrote for the Chronique de Paris. The important thing to note, however, is that one of the seven books he refers to was the most unusual book of his whole career, probably one of the most unique books in all literature: Seraphita. How long the actual writing of it took is not known; the first installment of it appeared June 1, 1834, in the Revue de Paris. It appeared, together with Louis Lambert and The Exiles, in book form in December, 1835, the volume itself entitled Le Livre Mystique. The critics, judging it from the three installments of Seraphita which had appeared in the review, condemned it as “an unintelligible work.” However, the first edition of the book was exhausted in ten days, and the second a month later. “Not such bad fortune for an unintelligible work,” Balzac remarked.
Seraphita was written expressly for Madame Hanska with whom, after the receipt of her first letter, he maintained a lifelong correspondence. It was during a trip to Geneva that the book was conceived, and in December of 1833, just three months after his meeting with Madame Hanska, it was begun. It was intended, in Balzac’s own words, “to be a masterpiece such as the world has never seen.” And this it is, despite all its faults, despite the prophecies of the critics, despite the apparent neglect and obloquy into which it has fallen. Balzac himself never doubted its value or uniqueness, as he sometimes did in the case of his other works. Though subsequently included in La Comédie Humai
ne, it really forms part of the Études Philosophiques. In the dedication to Madame Hanska he speaks of it “as one of those balustrades, carved by some artist full of faith, on which the pilgrim leans to meditate on the end of man. . . .” The seven divisions of the book undoubtedly have an occult structure and significance. As narrative it is broken by disquisitions and expositions which, in a lesser work, would be fatal. Inwardly regarded, which is the only way it can be looked at, it is a model of perfection. Balzac said everything he had to say, with swiftness, precision and eloquence. To me it is the style of the last quartets of Beethoven, the will triumphant in its submission.