by Henry Miller
To Louis Lambert, Will and Thought were living forces, as Balzac says. “The elements of Will and Mind,” says Louis Lambert, “may perhaps be found; but there will always remain beyond apprehension the x against which I once used to struggle. That x is the Word, the Logos. . . . From your bed to the frontiers of the universe there are but two steps: Will and Faith. . . . Facts are nothing; they do not subsist; all that lives of us is the Idea.” He points out that Jesus possessed the gift of Specialism. “He saw each fact in its root and in its results, in the past whence it had its rise, and in the future where it would grow and spread. . . .”
According to Balzac, Louis Lambert had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories. “He had sought for proofs of his theories in the history of great men, whose lives, as set forth by-their biographers, supply very curious particulars as to the operation of the understanding.” The description of Louis which he gives at the time of their parting is altogether that of a man preparing to lead the life of an initiate. “He ate little and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom gravity seems a condition of nature. Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint Theresa and Fénelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. . . . To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. Et Verbum caro factum est seemed a sublime statement intended to express the traditional formula of the Will, the Word and the Act made visible. Christ’s consciousness of His Death—having so perfected His inner Being by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His disciples—and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. . . . He discerned the strongest evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era, which he spoke of as the great era of the Mind.”
There is one more passage, in this connection, which seems to me worthy of attention. After referring to Louis Lambert’s study of the laws of Mind and Will, and their correlations, Balzac says: “Louis Lambert had accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then, had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible. Thus wizards, men possessed, those gifted with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree—the victims of the Middle Ages— became the subject of explanations so natural, that their very simplicity often seemed to me the seal of their truth. The marvellous gifts which the Church of Rome, jealous of all mysteries, punished with the stake, were, in Louis’ opinion, the result of certain affinities between the constituent elements of matter and those of mind, which proceed from the same source.”
The triumph of energy, will and faith in man, the existence of magic and the evidences of the miraculous, the relation of God to man through Desire, the notion of hierarchies in every realm of life, as well as the belief in transmutation, all these manifestations of the spiritual attributes of man, Balzac has summed up in the story of his own life, or rather of the most important years of his life, the period of germination. The period, in other words, when the terrible powers of production were coming into being.
In the Rue Cassini, where he wrote so many of his great works, Balzac is reported to have said to George Sand: “Literature! but my dear lady, literature doesn’t exist! There is life, of which politics and art are part. I am a man who’s alive, that’s all . . . a man living his life, nothing more.” Whereupon he proceeded to forfeit his life through the bondage of work. He wanted to be great (“man must be great or not be at all,” are his words), and he was great, but he died a failure. Perhaps the best justification of his failure is the one he makes himself somewhere. “The man of genius,” he said, “is one who can invariably convert his thoughts into deeds. But the truly outstanding genius does not unremittingly allow this evolution to take place; if he did, he would be the equal of God.”
At the best, it is a poor excuse. Balzac, like Beethoven, seemingly gave the maximum that a man can give, but it was not enough, not for a Balzac! I am not thinking of the forty books he is said to have left unfinished at his death, but of the life he left unlived, of the vision he failed to live by. His life, which is the very symbol of Work, epitomizes the futility of Western life, with its emphasis on doing rather than being; it epitomizes the sterility of even the highest efforts when characterized, as they are in our world, by the divorce between action and belief.
If Louis Lambert’s life may be regarded as a typical example of the crucifixion of genius by the society in which he was born, Balzac’s own life may be regarded as a typical example of the immolation exacted of our superior types through a limited conception of, and a slavish devotion to, art. The criticism of the social structure which Balzac makes, not only in this book but in all his books, is absolutely just. But it is only half the picture. There is a duty which devolves upon every individual, regardless of the state of society into which he is born. Art is only the stepping-stone to another, larger way of life. If the artist himself is not converted by the Word, what hope can there be for the masses who read him? It is not enough to lead the life of an inspired drudge; will and faith, activated by desire, should carry a man beyond such mode of life. I have no respect for Balzac’s herculean labors, nor for his colossal output, nor for his genius, when I realize that his life sputtered out ingloriously. If a man cannot find salvation in himself all his words are futile. The real Balzac died in the mythical person of Louis Lambert whose very name he tells us he disliked.
If the foregoing seems like a contradiction to all that I have written hitherto in this essay I am willing to let it remain a contradiction, for it is this contradiction which must be resolved, and especially by the artist. I cannot conclude without expressing my deep appreciation of Ernst-Robert Curtius’ book, Balzac, from which I have liberally drawn both inspiration and material. This book, which is the most penetrating and comprehensive study of Balzac that I know of, has not enjoyed a great success in France. As in Balzac’s own day, it seems probable that his greatest admirers continue to be foreigners. The canonization and immortalization of the dead, which seems to be the chief characteristic of French culture, has not, despite all the museum work, succeeded in revealing the full measure of Balzac’s genius. The qualities of his mind which were most important the French still pretend to ignore, if not to deprecate and depreciate. The dead are still more honored than the living, and even the dead sometimes fail to receive their due. Nothing is changed since Louis Lambert’s day. Perhaps no other people in the world, occupying the high cultural position which the French do, have mistreated and ignored their men of genius so persistently—unless it be the Greeks whom the French pretend to emulate. The mummification of ideas goes on as before, the forward spirits are crushed, the people, when they have a leader, are delivered over to death. Realism has taken the place of reality, and the true leaders are only discovered after their death.
* This is the most singular distortion, it is interesting to notice, which Balzac makes in recounting the story of his double’s boyhood.
* Later, when describing Louis’ feverish anticipation of a union with the woman he loves, Balzac gives us another rupture with the world, this time the final one.
* (Book of the Golden Precepts)
* From “L’Ame Romantique et le Réve”—Albert Béguin.
* “Le Mysticisme Français du 18e Siècle”—Adolphe Franck.
Cover and title page designed by Alvin Lustig
copyright 1941
by new directions
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Creative Death” was first published in Purpose, London; “The Wisdom of the Heart” and “Seraphita” in The Modern Mystic, London; “Reflections on Writing” and “Into the Future” in Creative Writing, Chicago; “Raimu” and “Tribute to Blaise Cendrars” in the T’ien Hsia Monthly, Shanghai; “Benno, the Wild Man from Borneo” and “The Enormous Womb” in The Booster, Paris; “The Absolute Collective” in The Criterion, London; “The Eye of Paris” in Globe, Minneapolis; “The Cosmological Eye” in Transition, Paris; “Mademoiselle Claude” in Americans Abroad, Paris (ed. by Peter Neagoe); “Balzac and His Double” in Twice a Year, New York.
First published as ND Paperbook No. 94 in 1966, then reprinted as ndp1349 in 2016
eISBN: 9780811222365
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin by New Directions Publishing Corporation 80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011