by Henry Miller
O’Mara’s eyes were twinkling. Go on, he urged, it sounds good even though I don’t know what the hell it all means.
But it’s simple, I said. Now look—take me, for instance. Did you ever think how lucky you were to find me? I’m not your father, but I’m a damned good brother to you. Do I ever ask you any embarrassing questions when you hand me money? Do I urge you to look for a job? Do I say anything if you lie in bed all day?
What’s the meaning of all this? demanded Mona, amused in spite of herself.
You know very well what I’m talking about, I replied. He needs affection.
We all do, said Mona.
We don’t need a thing, said I. Not really. We’re lucky, all three of us. We eat every day, we sleep well, we read the books we want to read, we go to a show now and then … and we have one another. A father? What do we need a father for? Listen, that dream I had settled everything—for me. I don’t even need a bike. If I can have a dream ride now and then, O.K.! It’s better than the real thing. In dream you never puncture a tire; if you do, it doesn’t matter a straw. You can ride all day and all night without getting exhausted. Ted was right. One has to learn to dream it off … If I hadn’t had that dream I wouldn’t have met that guy McFarland to-day. Oh, I haven’t told you about that, have I? Well, never mind, some other time. The point is I was offered a chance to write—for a new magazine. A chance to travel, too…
You never told me a thing about it, said Mona, all ears now. I want to hear…
Oh, it sounded good, said I, but the chances are it would turn out be another flop.
I don’t understand, she persisted. What were you to write for him?
The story of my life, no less.
Well … ?
I don’t think I can do it. Not like he wanted me to, at any rate.
You’re crazy, said O’Mara.
You’re going to turn it down? said Mona, completely mystified by my attitude.
I’ll think it over first.
I don’t understand you at all, said O’Mara. Here you’ve got the chance of a lifetime and you … why, a man like McFarland could make you famous overnight.
I know, I said, but that’s just what I’m afraid of. I’m not ready for success yet. Or rather I don’t want that kind of success. Between you and me—I’m going to be damned honest with you—I don’t know how to write. Not yet! I realized that immediately he made me the offer to write the damned serial. It’s going to take a long time before I know how to say what I want to say. Maybe I’ll never learn. And let me tell you another thing while I’m at it … I don’t want any jobs between times … neither publicity jobs nor newspaper jobs nor any kind of job. All I ask is to dawdle along in my own way. I keep telling you people I know what I’m doing. I mean it. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but it’s my way. I can’t navigate any other way, do you understand?
O’Mara said nothing, but I sensed he was sympathetic. Mona, of course, was overjoyed. She thought I had underrated myself but she was terribly pleased that I wasn’t going to take a job. Once again she repeated what she had always been telling me: I want you to do as you please, Val. I don’t want you to think about anything but your work. I don’t care if it takes ten years or twenty years. I don’t care if you never succeed. Just write!
If what takes ten years? asked MacGregor, returning just in time to catch the tail end.
To become a writer, I said, giving him a good-natured grin.
You’re still talking about that? Forget it! You’re a writer now, Henry, only nobody knows it but you. Have you finished eating? I’ve got to go somewhere. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drop you off at the house.
We cleared out in a hurry. He was always in a hurry, MacGregor, even to attend a poker game, as it turned out. A bad habit, he said, half to himself. I never win either. If I really had something to do I suppose I’d get over such nonsense. It’s just a way of killing time.
Why do you have to kill time? I asked. Couldn’t you hang on with us? You could kill time just as well by chewing the fat. If you must kill time, I mean.
That’s true, he answered soberly, I never thought of that. I don’t know, I’ve got to be on the go all the time. It’s a weakness.
Do you ever read a book any more?
He laughed. I guess not, Henry. I’m waiting for you to write some. Maybe then I’ll read again. He lit a cigarette. Oh, now and then I do pick up a book, he confessed rather sheepishly, but it’s never a good one. I’ve lost all sense of taste. I read a few lines to send myself to sleep, that’s the truth of it, Henry. I can no more read Dostoievsky now, or Thomas Mann, or Hardy, than I can cook a meal. I haven’t the patience … nor the interest. You get stale grinding away in an office. Remember, Hen, how I used to study when we were kids? Jesus, I had ambition then. I was going to burn up the world, wasn’t I? Now … aw well … it doesn’t matter a damn. In our racket nobody gives a shit whether you’ve read Dostoievsky or not. The important thing is—can you win the case? You don’t require much intelligence to win a case, let me tell you that. If you’re really clever, you manage to stay out of court. You let somebody else do the dirty work. Yeah, it’s the old story, Henry. I get sick of harping on it. Nobody should take up law who wants to keep his hands clean. If he does he’ll starve…. You know, I’m always twitting you about being a lazy son of a bitch. I guess I envy you. You always seem to be having a good time. You have a good time even when you’re starving to death. I never have a good time. Not any more. Why I ever got married I don’t know. To make some one else miserable, I suppose. It’s amazing the way I gripe. No matter what she does for me it’s wrong. I do nothing but bawl the shit out of her.
Oh come, I said, to egg him on, you’re not as bad as all that.
Ain’t I, though? You should live with me for a few days. Listen, I’m so god-damned ornery I can’t even live with myself—how do you like that?
Why don’t you cut your throat? I said, giving him a broad smile. Really, when things get that bad, there’s no alternative.
You’re telling me? he cried. I have it out with myself every day. Yes sir—and he banged the wheel emphatically—every day of my life I ask myself whether I should go on living or not.
The trouble is you’re not serious, I said. You only have to ask yourself that question once and you know.
You’re wrong, Henry! It’s not as easy as all that, he remonstrated. I wish it were. I wish I could toss a coin and have done with it.
That’s no way to settle it, I said.
I know, Henry, I know. But you know me! Remember the old days? Christ, I couldn’t even decide whether to take a crap or not. He laughed in spite of himself. Have you noticed, as you get older things seem to take care of themselves. You don’t debate what to do every step of the way. You just grouse.
We were pulling up to the door. He lingered over the farewell. Remember, Henry, he said, feathering the gas pedal, if you get stuck there’s always a job for you at Randall, Randall and Randall’s. Twenty a week regular … Why don’t you look me up once in a while? Don’t make me run after you all the time!
4
I feel in myself a life so luminous, says Louis Lambert, that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral. This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as the merry whirl, the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this int
erior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. Today it is often hard for me to remember when or where I made this or that utterance, to remember whether I actually said it somewhere or whether I intended to say it some time or other. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you’ve already written in your head. That delicious experience with which every one is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams—I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation—this experience often happens to me in waking moments. How often I rack my brains to think where it was I made use of a certain thought, a certain situation, a certain character! Frantically I wonder if it occurred in some manuscript thoughtlessly destroyed. And then, when I’ve forgotten all about it, suddenly it dawns on me that it is one of the perpetual themes which I carry about inside me, which I am writing in the air, which I have written hundreds of times already, but never set down on paper. I make a note to write it out at the first opportunity, so as to be done with it, so as to bury it once and for all. I make the note—and I forget it with alacrity … It’s as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody.
It was this inner turmoil which my friends detected in my comportment. And it was the lack of it, in my writings, which they deplored. I almost felt sorry for them. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This perversity always voiced itself thus: Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.
They meant not my friends alone but the world.
Once in a great while I came across a being whom I felt I could give myself to completely. Alas, these beings existed only in books. They were worse than dead to me—they had never existed except in imagination. Ah, what dialogues I conducted with kindred, ghostly spirits! Soul-searching colloquies, of which not a line has ever been recorded. Indeed, these excrimin-ations, as I chose to style them, defied recording. They were carried on in a language that does not exist, a language so simple, so direct, so transparent, that words were useless. It was not a silent language either, as is often used in communication with higher beings. It was a language of clamor and tumult—the heart’s clamor, the heart’s tumult. But noiseless. If it were Dostoievsky whom I summoned, it was the complete Dostoievsky, that is to say, the man who wrote the novels, diaries and letters we know, plus the man we also know by what he left unsaid, unwritten. It was type and archetype speaking, so to say. Always full, resonant, veridic; always the unimpeachable sort of music which one credits him with, whether audible or inaudible, whether recorded or unrecorded. A language which could emanate only from Dostoievsky.
After such indescribably tumultuous communions I often sat down to the machine thinking that the moment had at last arrived. Now I can say it! I would tell myself. And I would sit there, mute, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux. I might sit that way for hours, completely rapt, completely oblivious to everything about me. And then, startled out of the trance by some unexpected sound or intrusion, I would wake’ with a start, look at the blank paper, and slowly, painfully tap out a sentence, or perhaps only a phrase. Whereupon I would sit and stare at these words as if they had been written by some unknown hand. Usually somebody arrived to break the spell. If it were Mona, she would of course burst in enthusiastically (seeing me sitting there at the machine) and beg me to let her glance at what I had written. Sometimes, still half-drugged, I would sit there like an automaton while she stared at the sentence, or the little phrase. To her bewildered queries I would answer in a hollow, empty voice, as if I were far away, speaking through a microphone. Other times I would spring out of it like a Jack-in-the-box, hand her a wopping lie (that I had concealed the other pages, for instance), and begin raving like a lunatic. Then I could really talk a blue streak! It was as if I were reading from a book. All to convince her—and even more myself!—that I had been deep in work, deep in thought, deep in creation. Dismayed, she would apologize profusely for having interrupted me at the wrong moment. And I would accept her apology lightly, airily, as though to say—What matter? There’s more where that came from … I have only to turn it on or off … I’m a prestidigitator, I am. And from the lie I would make truth. I’d spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the live-long day was creation. With this of course went considerable clowning. I not only invented the characters and events, I acted them out. And poor Mona exclaiming: Are you really putting all that into the story? or the book? (Neither of us, in such moments, ever specified what book.) When the word book sprang up it was always assumed that it was the book, that is to say, the one I would soon o get started on—or else it was the one I was writing secretly, which I would show her only when finished. (She always acted as if she were certain this secret travail was going on. She even pretended that she had searched everywhere for the script during my periods of absence.) In this sort of atmosphere it was not at all unusual, therefore, that reference be made occasionally to certain chapters, or certain passages, chapters and passages which never existed, to be sure, but which were taken for granted and which, no doubt, had a greater reality (for us) than if they were in black and white. Mona would sometimes indulge in this kind of talk in the presence of a third person, which, led, of course, to fantastic and often most embarrassing situations. If it were Ulric who happened to be listening in, there was nothing to worry about. He had a way of entering into the game which was not only gallant but stimulating. He knew how to rectify a bad slip in a humorous and fortifying way. For example, he might have forgotten for a moment that we were employing the present tense and begun using the future tense. (I know you will write a book like that some day!) A moment later, realizing his error he would add: I didn’t mean will write—I meant the book you ore writing—and very obviously writing, too, because nobody on God’s earth could talk the way you do about something in which he wasn’t deeply engrossed. Perhaps I’m being too explicit—forgive me, won’t you? At such junctures we all enjoyed the relief of letting go. We would indeed laugh uproariously. Ulric’s laughter was always the heartiest—and the dirtiest, if I may put it that way. Ho! Ho! he seemed to laugh, but aren’t we all wonderful liars! I’m not doing so bad myself, by golly. If I stay with you people long enough I won’t even know I’m lying any more. Ho Ho Ho! Haw Haw! Ha Ha! Hee Hee! And he would slap his thighs and roll his eyes like a darkie, ending with a smacking of the lips and a mute request for a wee bit of schnapps … With other friends it didn’t go so well. They were too inclined to ask impertinent questions, as Mona put it. Or else they grew fidgety and uncomfortable, made frantic efforts to get back to terra fir ma. Kronski, like Ulric, was one who knew how to play the game. He did it somewhat differently from Ulric, but it seemed to satisfy Mona. She could trust him. That’s how she put it to herself, I felt. The trouble with Kronski was that he played the game too well. He was not content to be a mere accomplice, he wanted to improvise as well. This zeal of his, which was not altogether diabolical, led to some weird discussions—discussions about the progress of the mythical book, to be sure. The critical moment always announced itself by a salvo of hysterical laughter—from Mona. It meant that she didn’t know where she was any more. As for myself, I made little or no effort to keep up with the others, it being no concern of mine what went on in this realm of make believe. All I felt called upon to do was to keep a straight face and pretend that everything was kosher. I would laugh when I felt like it, or
make criticism and correction, but under no circumstances, neither by word, gesture or implication did I let on that it was just a game…
Strange little episodes were constantly occurring to prevent our life from becoming monotonously smooth. Sometimes they happened one, two, three, like firecrackers going off.
To begin with, there was the sudden and mysterious disappearance of our love letters, which had been hidden away in a big paper shopping bag at the bottom of the wardrobe. It took us a week or more to discover that the woman who cleaned house for us occasionally had thrown the bag in the rubbish. Mona almost collapsed when she heard the news. We’ve simply got to find them! she insisted. But how? The rubbish man had already made the rounds. Even supposing we could find the place where he had dumped them, they would by now be buried under a mountain of refuse. However, to satisfy her, I inquired where the disposal dump was located. O’Mara offered to accompany me to the place. It was way the hell and gone, somewhere in the Flatlands, I believe, or else near Canarsie—a Godforsaken spot over which hung a thick pall of smoke. We endeavored to find precisely the spot where the man had dumped that day’s rubbish. An insane task, to be sure. But I had explained the whole situation to the driver and by sheer force of will aroused in his brute conscience a spark of interest. He did his damnedest to remember, but it was hopeless. We got busy, O’Mara and I, and with rather elegant looking canes began poking things around. We uncovered everything under the sun but the missing love letters. O’Mara had all he could do to dissuade me from bringing home a sackful of odds and ends. For himself he had found a handsome pipe-case, though what he intended to do with it I don’t know, as he never smoked a pipe. I had to content myself with a bone-handled pocket knife the blades of which were so rusty they wouldn’t open. I also pocketed a bill for a tombstone, from the directors of Woodlawn Cemetery.
Mona took the loss of the letters tragically. She looked upon the incident as a bad omen. (Years later, when I read what happened to Balzac in connection with the beloved Madame Hanska’s letters, I relived this episode vividly.)