by Henry Miller
Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe that it was the same city. And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts it would have been all over. Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, as the world reckons. They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked music and who liked a good time. They liked it so much that sometimes we had to call the ambulance. Like the night Al Burger twisted his knee while showing us one of his stunts. Everybody so happy, so full of music, so lit up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt. We try to carry him to a hospital but it’s too far away and besides, it’s such a good joke, that we drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac. So finally we telephone for help from a police box, and the ambulance comes and the patrol wagon too. They take Al to the hospital and the rest of us to the hoose-gow. And on the way we sing at the top of our lungs. And after we’re bailed out we’re still feeling good and the cops are feeling good too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there’s a cracked piano and we go on singing and playing. All this is like some period B.C. in history which ends not because there’s a war but because even a joint like Ed Bauries’ is not immune to the poison seeping in from the periphery. Because every street is becoming Myrtle Avenue, because emptiness is filling the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Because, after a certain time, you can’t enter a single house throughout the length and breadth of the land and find a man standing on his hands singing. It just ain’t done any more. And there ain’t two pianos going at once anywhere, nor are there two men anywhere willing to play all night just for the fun of it. Two men who can play like Ed Bauries and George Neumiller are hired by the radio or the movies and only a thimbleful of their talent is used and the rest is thrown into the garbage can. Nobody knows, judging from public spectacles, what talent is disposable in the great American continent. Later on, and that’s why I used to sit around on doorsteps in Tin Pan Alley, I would while away the afternoons listening to the professionals mugging it out. That was good too, but it was different. There was no fun in it, it was a perpetual rehearsal to bring in dollars and cents. Any man in America who had an ounce of humour in him was saving it up to put himself across. There were some wonderful nuts among them too, men I’ll never forget, men who left no name behind them, and they were the best we produced. I remember an anonymous performer on the Keith circuit who was probably the craziest man in America, and perhaps he got fifty dollars a week for it. Three times a day, every day in the week, he came out and held the audience spell-bound. He didn’t have an act – he just improvised. He never repeated his jokes or his stunts. He gave himself prodigally, and I don’t think he was a hot fiend either. He was one of those guys who are born in the corncrakes and the energy and the joy in him was so fierce that nothing could contain it. He could play any instrument and dance any step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it out till the bell rang. He was not only satisfied to do his own act but he would help the others out. He would stand in the wings and wait for the right moment to break into the other guy’s act. He was the whole show and it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modern science. They ought to have paid a man like this the wages which the President of the United States receives. They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any disease on the calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him to. This is the type of man which empties the insane asylums. He doesn’t propose a cure – he makes everybody crazy. Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, there is only one other way out – and that is the road we will all take eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that represents this one and only way bears a head with six feces and eight eyes; the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilates what few brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say, because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, the grey matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering. We don’t recognize him yet because he is too close to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name, speaks up. When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes the grey matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull. At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight and ventilating the brains. Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the metaphysical truths of the world and read it. If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist – it is because I want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can-opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again … no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers – and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different. It’s almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you’re trying to throttle all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape. Some cities you don’t even have to pass a night in – just an hour or two is enough to unnerve you. I think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the night with a few addresses that had been given me. I had a brief case under my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was supposed to go under cover of dark and sell the bloody encyclopaedia to some poor devils who wanted to improve themselves. If I had been dropped off at Helsingfors I couldn’t have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets of Bayonne. It wasn’t an American city to me. It wasn’t a city at all, but a huge octopus wriggling in the dark. The first door I came to looked so forbidding I didn’t even bother to knock; I went like that to several addresses before I could summon the courage to knock. The first face I took a look at
frightened the shit out of me. I don’t mean timidity or embarrassment – I mean fear. It was the face of a hod-carrier, an ignorant mick who would as lief fell you with an axe as spit in your eye. I pretended I had the wrong name and hurried on to the next address. Each time the door opened I saw another monster. And then I came at last to a poor simp who really wanted to improve himself and that broke me down. I felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch. I had a devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopaedia. He asked me innocently what then had brought me to his home – and without a minute’s hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopaedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopaedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It’s taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is it … I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretences even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will invite him in and say “why are you doing this?” And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will offer him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death – it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death throws another cog into the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbour, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to earn a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.
I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul’s atavistic struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving green. Hardly a soul in sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I’m over a big gulch spanned by a rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world! How in God’s name I got here and why I’m here I don’t know. How am I going to eat? And if I ate the biggest meal imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad. I don’t know where to go from here. This bridge is the end, the end of me, the end of my known world. This bridge is insanity; there is no reason why it should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I refuse to budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge. Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and where to go. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am – the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafés, drinks, and so forth. It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn’t need a thing. All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing more and more uneasy. What have I to do with all this tobacco? What am I heading into? People everywhere are producing crops and goods for other people – and I am like a ghost sliding between all this unintelligible activity. I want to find some kind of work, but I don’t want to be a part of this thing, this infernal automatic process. I pass through a town and I look at the newspaper telling what is happening in that town and its environs. It seems to me that nothing is happening, that the clock has stopped but that these poor devils are unaware of it. I have a strong intuition, moreover, that there is murder in the air. I can smell it. A few days back I passed the imaginary line which divides the North from the South. I wasn’t aware of it until a darkie came along driving a team; when he gets alongside of me he stands up in his seat and doffs his hat most respectfully. He had snow-white hair and a face of great dignity. That made me fed horrible: it made me realize that there are still slaves. This man had to tip his hat to me – because I was of the white race. Whereas I should have tipped my hat to him! I should have saluted him as a survivor of all the vile tortures the white men have inflicted on the black. I should have tipped my hat first, to let him know that I am not a part of this system, that I am begging forgiveness for all my white brethren who are too ignorant and cruel to make an honest overt gesture. To-day I feel their eyes on me all the time; they watch from behind doors, from behind trees. All very quiet, very peaceful, seemingly. Nigger never say nuthin’. Nigger he hum all time. White man think nigger learn his place. Nigger learn nuthin’. Nigger wait. Nigger watch everything white man do. Nigger no say nuthin’, no sir, no siree. BUT JUST THE SAME THE NIGGER IS KILLING THE WHITE MAN OFF! Every time the nigger looks at a white man he’s putting a dagger through him. It’s not the heat, it’s not the hook worm, it’s not the bad crops that’s killing the South off – it’s the nigger! The nigger is giving off a poison, whether he means to or not. The South is coked and doped with nigger poison.
Pass on … Sitting outside a barber shop by the James River. I’ll be here just ten minutes, while I take a load off my feet. There’s a hotel and a few stores opposite me; it all tails off quickly, ends like it began – for no reason. From the bottom of my soul I pity the poor devils who are born and die here. There is no earthly reason why this place should exist. There is no reason why anybody should cross the street and get himself a shave and haircut, or even a sirloin steak. Men, buy yourselves a gun and kill each other off! Wipe this street out of my mind for ever – it hasn’t an ounce of meaning in it.