by Henry Miller
Meanwhile Blanche was sitting in a little room in a squalid Massachusetts town; she was hypnotized by a sheet of blank writing paper soaked with tears. The pen rested in her hand, waiting for the tears to dry. She could not hear him screaming his love ... he was so far away now, and the earth was so full of groans and wailing.
That night, when Dion Moloch reached his cheerless lodging, his brain was afire. He was determined to put an end to his vagabond days, to leave off the foolish role he had chosen, and strike out in deeper, unknown waters. He spoke aloud to himself. “What has my life amounted to? What am I living for?” He went on muttering to himself with clenched fists. “Do something—no matter how mad, no matter how terrible! Say something to the world: answer life with life. Strike out. . . free yourself from the clutches of a comfortable existence. . . .”
It was imperative to tell his thoughts to someone. With feverish energy he sat down and put his crazy thoughts on paper. He addressed them to his wife.
“Dear Victoria,” he scribbled. “What have you done to me? I am naked and lost in a forest of pines. My heart is an Easter morning. What terrible, beautiful things are happening to me inside! Black rivulets of pain are pouring from the open wounds in my heart which your love cauterized only a few hours ago. This world is my world, my stamping-ground. I must run free, mad-hearted, bellowing with pain and ecstasy, charging with lowered horns, ripping up the barricades that hem me in and stifle me. I must have room to expand . . . vast, silent spaces to charge in so that my voice may be heard to the outermost limits and shake the unseen walls of this cruel universe. I must do something, dear Blanche, dear Victoria. ... No longer can I go on as a cog in a wheel. Let me implore you to help, to save me from this daily degradation.
“Only now it has dawned on me what life can hold. I feel all life rising up in me, shouting Hallelujah!
“It is I, your husband, writing this. Not Johannes. Yes, I read your inscription on the flyleaf . . . “Something vomited by a storm in late winter.” I prefer, however, to think of page 39, on which it is written:
“ ‘Ah, Love turns the heart of man into a garden of fungus, a luxuriant and shameless garden wherein mysterious and immodest toadstools raise their heads.’ ”
18
A GAUNT BARE OAK WITH BLACK-AND-PURPLE BOUGHS threw a bold grotesque shadow on a neighboring wall. Moloch thought of chesspieces he had seen in the museum, rugged Yakut figures with horses like that crazy shadow.
He had returned to his room after posting the letter to his wife and was now gazing idly out of the window wondering how to while away the tedium of the brief interval before bedtime. The profound silence weighed on him and drove his thoughts into strange realms. He thought, for instance, of the austere and vicarious devotions of the monks in the Buddhist lamaseries in the Himalayas, where for centuries it has been the custom of these recluses to get up in the middle of the night and pray for all who sleep so that men and women all over the world, when they awake in the morning, may be purified and begin the day with thoughts that are pure, kind, and brave. He thought, too, of that ill-fated genius Gauguin, who in the midst of his career had been reduced to the ignominy of pasting advertisements on the walls of the Gare du Nord. Gauguin had once said: “The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life.” Very well, then, was he prepared to go ahead and break his neck in order to affirm the dignity of life.
The dignity of life! The majesty of the phrase invoked a consciousness of suggestions forever denied the vehicle of words. The words were like a filament separating the palpable from the impalpable. They created the image of a sensuous world, a world beyond all expression or analysis, neither of the intellect wholly, nor of the senses.
He was seized with an inexplicable and overwhelming desire to rush down to the waterfront, to get down on his knees under the dilapidated elevator structure whose splintered limbs dangled and groped for the cold waters of the river. He wanted that very instant to be translated to the spot so that he might look above him, in dazzled awe, at the somber fretwork of the Brooklyn Bridge, that airy Titan’s span over which a profilerous cortege shuttles with muffled scraping and the sizzling drone of an ocean of Vichy. He wanted to see the bridge lights flaring with cold luminosity, shedding fantastic naphtha gleams on the swollen tidewater deep below.
Time and again, in midnight mood, he had stolen down to the water’s edge to throw open his nerves and arteries to the brutal splendid of this shadowy nocturne. Now, in his mind’s eye, for a transient, fractional interval (during which a world may be born and die again), it loomed before him, bulk and shadow, a serrated cardboard megalith floating in eerie phantasmal configuration. Towers of steel and masonry arose—sea-forms glistering in moonfire and spume, shaking off through crest and spire their sea-trove of chrysoprase, chalcedony, sardonyx. A torpid, myriad-shaped dream demon wriggling in sea-foam and star-shimmer, spouting twisted gouts of blood and mud up into the blue-black vault above.
And in the midst of this seizure his mind suddenly raced back and presented him with the image of Hari Das lying on the freight siding, his beautiful brown body cold and stiff, pumped full of embalming fluid. The cold immobile lips had once boasted: “My highest pride consists in not-standing-on-solid-earth; the principle of my philosophy is the ultimate principle of the universe, which is NO-Principle. ... I boast of my system being fluid, gaseous, capable of evaporating.”
Golly, how Hari once could laugh! What ever made it possible for a man to laugh so heartily? He recalled a story he had told Hari once—it was about a corpse. It seems the undertaker had undressed the corpse, but forgot to remove the socks. Fancy shoveling a man under with a dirty pair of socks! Perhaps they had laid Hari out—he was only a nigger—without placing a clean silk hankerchief in his breast pocket. . . .
Midnight. The last act of The Cherry Orchard for Fulton Ferry. Battered hulks snoozing in velvet slips. Done with the sea, inviting corruption. The ferryhouse, crumbling in the shadows, more grim, more ghastly than Caesar’s gutted corpse.
Farther on, up the quay, the Troubador lolls. She is just in from Curaçao, ten thousand bags of coffee in her hold. Her bottom is painted crimson, and about her tremulous white belly is an azure band. Hawsers and cables fix her gleaming prow to coppered stanchions that dot the pier and quay. Whirling constellations of stevedores transporting the odorous freight to the belching maws of warehouses a stone’s throw away. Perched eerily above the vomit-hold, checkers are busily engaged working out the arithmetic of commerce. Queues of abbreviated motor trucks straggle through the blue calcium light over slithery, splintered planks. The wharf is alive with cranes, hand winches, bales, stumbling figures in blue denim, fat-bellied tuns, derricks, masts, and yardarms. A swirling, gurgling, full-crested tide leaves the mossy flanks of the wharves with glistering plashes of cabbage-green water. Bracing odors of tar and seaweed iodize the lungs. The Troubador squeals and grunts as she rubs the dock-timber like a boar in rut. Impervious and aloof, defaming the screaming silence of midnight flaps the Union Jack, wharf rat’s symbol of power and greed.
Moloch’s turquoise gigue of thoughts is stabbed by the pompom puffs of a locomotive. From far-off places come mysterious bursts of song that match the delirium of stone on the opposite shore. His vagrant fancies oscillate between the phantom horizons of the British Empire and the condition of his existence, which more than ever now appears like a tremulous causeway linking dream to dream. His soliloquies are squeezed through primitive angles of mast and boom, only to be flattened against monstrous skeletons of steel and concrete, plastered with false faces. A pleasant sensation invades the pit of his stomach as he watches the fling and sag of the Troubador. The water gives out rich, juicy sounds—better than an all-day sucker. The flooded stream rushes by, fuming and spuming, pushing and surging toward the sea.... Here one comes to rest, even as by the waters of Babylon. Here golden argosies are moored—great, shambling vessels, cheap as Woolworth baubles—their entrails steaming with rancid stoker-flesh. Sho
ving off in the morning for Valparaiso, Singapore, Sumatra, Rangoon, and Mozambique . . . And yonder, rising still and bright in the night, the slim, myriad-chinked palaces of the money-grubbers. Tremendous towers of vertigo that pierce the womb of night.
More than all the glamorous, ineluctable truths of the world beyond is the ineffable charm of somnolescence. The low, age-old edifices squatting at the water’s edge were wrapped in thick, palpable gloom. Their stately desuetude, their sententious philosophic repose—all this mortuary splendor captivated and enthralled him. He felt that he was being carried away on a wistful catafalque to a purple-black, deeply poetic death. Frog-toots and sirens by the great black throat of the river.
“If one could only get away!”
He is tortured by imaginary fears of tomorrow. Midnight wears a surtout that conceals the bestial acromegaly of age. . . .
Leaving the docks behind, Moloch sauntered through a high-walled street that drops like a canyon below the terraces of Columbia Heights. The silence here was more ominous, more intense. It was a splendid place to get dirked. He walked gingerly in the middle of the street, fascinated by the queer iron stars on the sepulchral walls of the warehouses. Opposite the warehouses were tumbledown shanties and a string of boarded saloons.
Time was when the doors swung lightly, and hobnailed boots ground the yellow sawdust like pollen. Schooners brimming with suds left sparkling saucer-rings on the smooth, mahogany-stained bars. Hairy-chested apes, burned in the Red Sea to an eggplant glaze, used to dip their bristling mustaches in the cool, soapy foam. Their sinews flexed with snakelike ease, and the air was burnt with their foul, fornicating oaths.
Alas, those days have been confined and deodorized. The sweetish stench of wassail has evaporated like sweat. There are no good old drunken bums to slobber over anymore. The waterfront is as clean as a hound’s tooth, and as morose as the grave. It is as safe here now as a patent medicine.
Drearily Dion Moloch turned away from this deserted street once stuccoed with saloons and crazy jerries. Above him were the dreary mansions of the rich. Within, sheltered from the fever and storm of life, were the brittle bones that were still too proud to betake themselves to the cemetery, where they belonged.
Looking down over a magical flight of steps at this fugitive backyard of Brooklyn, Dion Moloch cast his eyes once more over the rubble of shards heaped before him.
What was it, this grand view from the terrace? What did it reveal? A dump heap littered with rusty can openers, broken-down baby carriages, discarded tin bathtubs, greasy window shades, antiquated trunks, wheelbarrows, sewer pipes, copper boilers, nutmeg graters, and—animal crackers that had been partially nibbled.
* Editor’s note: A line of text is missing from the only known existing manuscript.