by Henry Miller
Mrs. Skolsky looked nonplused. She was not accustomed to hearing people talk that way about their friends.
But he spoke of you so warmly, she said.
It makes no difference, I replied. He’s impervious, obtuse … thick-skinned, that’s the word.
Very well … if you say so, Mr. Miller. She backed away.
I have no friends any more, I said. I’ve killed them all off.
She gave a little gasp.
He doesn’t mean it quite that way, said Mona.
I’m sure he can’t, said Mrs. Skolsky. It sounds dreadful.
It’s the truth, like it or not. I’m a thoroughly unsocial individual, Mrs. Skolsky.
I don’t believe you, she replied. Nor would Mr. Essen.
He’ll find out one day. Not that I dislike him, you understand.
No, I don’t understand, said Mrs. Skolsky.
Neither do I, said I, and I began to laugh.
There’s a bit of the devil in you, said Mrs. Skolsky. Isn’t that so, Mrs. Miller?
Maybe, said Mona. He’s not always easy to understand.
I think I understand him, said Mrs. Skolsky. I think he’s ashamed of himself for being so good, so honest, so sincere—and so loyal to his friends. She turned to me. Really, Mr. Miller, you’re the friendliest human being I ever knew. I don’t care what you say about yourself—I’ll think what I please … When you’ve unpacked come down and have dinner with me, won’t you, the two of you?
You see, I said, when she had retreated, how difficult it is to make people accept the truth.
You like to shock people, Val. There’s always truth in what you say, but you have to make it unpalatable.
Well, I don’t think she’ll let MacGregor bother us any more, that’s one good thing.
He’ll follow you to your grave, said Mona.
Wouldn’t it be queer if we were to run into him in Paris?
Don’t say that, Val! The thought of it is enough to spoil our trip.
If that guy ever gets her to Paris he’ll rape her. Right now he can’t even lay a hand on her backside…
Let’s forget about them, will you, Val? It gives me the creeps to think of them.
But it was impossible to forget them. All through the dinner we talked about them. And that night I had a dream about them, about meeting them in Paris. In the dream Guelda looked and behaved like a cocotte, spoke French like a native, and was making poor MacGregor’s life unbearable with her lascivious ways. I wanted a wife, he lamented, Not a whore! Reform her, will you, Hen? he pleaded. I took her to a priest, to be shrived, but as things turned out we found ourselves in a whorehouse and Guelda, the number one girl, was in such demand that we couldn’t get a squeak out of her. Finally she took the priest upstairs with her, whereupon the Madame of the whorehouse threw her out, stark naked, with a towel in one hand and a bar of soap in the other.
Only a few weeks now and the novel would be finished. Pop already had a publisher in mind for it, a friend of his whom he had known in the old country. He was determined to find a legitimate publisher for it or do it himself, according to Mona. The bugger was feeling good these days; he was making money hand over fist on the stock market. He was even threatening to go to Europe himself. With Mona, presumably. (Don’t worry, Val, I’ll give him the slip when the time comes. Yes, but what about that money you were to put in the bank? I’ll square that too, don’t worry!)
She never had any doubts or fears where Pop was concerned. It was useless to attempt to guide her, or even make suggestion: she knew far better than I what she could do and what she couldn’t. All I knew of the man was what she told me. I always pictured him as well-dressed, excessively polite, and carrying a wallet bulging with greenbacks. (Menelik the Bountiful.) I never felt sorry for him, either. He was enjoying himself, that was clear. What I did wonder about sometimes was—how could she continue to keep her address secret? To live with an invalid mother is one thing, to keep the whereabouts of this manage a secret quite another. Perhaps Pop suspected the truth—that she was living with a man. What difference could it make to him whether it was an invalid mother or a lover or a husband—as long as she kept her appointments? Perhaps he was tactful enough to help her save face? He was no dope, that was certain … But why would he encourage her to leave for Europe, stay away for months or longer? Here, of course, I had only to do a bit of transposing. When she said Pop would like to see me go to Europe for a while, I had only to turn it around and I could hear her saying—to Pop: I want so much to see Europe again, even if only for a little while. As for publishing the novel, perhaps Pop hadn’t the slightest intention of doing anything, either through his friend, the publisher (if there were such a one) or on his own. Perhaps he fell in with her there to satisfy the lover or husband—or the poor invalid mother. Perhaps he was a better actor than either of us!
Maybe—this was a random thought—maybe there had never passed a word between them about Europe. Maybe she was just determined to get there again, no matter how.
Suddenly Stasia’s image floated before me. Strange, that not a word had ever been received from her! Surely she couldn’t still be wandering about in North Africa. Was she in Paris—waiting? Why not? It was simple enough to have a box at the Post Office, and another box somewhere else, in which to hide the letters which Stasia may have written. Worse than meeting MacGregor and his Guelda in Paris would be to run into Stasia. How stupid of me never to have though of a clandestine correspondence! No wonder everything was running smoothly.
There was only one other possibility: Stasia could have committed suicide. But it would be hard to keep that a secret. A weird creature like Stasia couldn’t do herself in without the story leaking out. Unless, and this was farfetched, they had wandered far into the desert, got lost, and were now nothing but a heap of bones.
No, she was alive, I was certain of it. And if alive, here was another angle. Perhaps she had found some one else in the meantime. A man, this time. Maybe she was already a good housewife. Such things happen now and again.
No, I ruled that out too. Too unlike our Stasia.
Fuck it all! I said to myself. Why worry about such things? To Europe, that’s the thing! So saying I thought of the chestnut trees (all in bloom now, no doubt) and of those little tables (les gueridons) on the crowded terraces of the cafe’s, and of bicycle cops wheeling by in pairs. I thought of the Vespasiennes too. How charming to take a leak outdoors, right on the sidewalk, while peering at all the beautiful dames strolling by … Ought to be studying French … (Ou sont les lavabos?)
If we were to get all that Mona said we would, why not go places … Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Sofia, Bucharest? Why not Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco? I thought of my old Dutch friend who had slipped out of his messenger uniform one evening to go abroad with his American boss … writing me from Sofia, no less, and from the waiting room of the Queen of Roumania, somewhere high up in the Carpathians.
And O’Mara, what had become of him, I wondered? There was one fellow I would dearly love to see again. A friend, what! What a lark to take him to Europe with us, Mona willing. (Impossible, of course.)
My mind was circling, circling. Always, when I was keyed up, when I knew I could do it, could say it, my mind would start wandering in all directions at once. Instead of sitting down to the machine and letting go, I would sit at the desk and think up projects, dream dreams, or just dwell on those I loved, the good times we had had, the things we said and did. (Ho ho! Haw haw!) Or trump up a bit of research which would suddenly assume momentous importance, which must be attended to immediately. Or I would conceive a brilliant chess manoeuvre and, to make certain I wouldn’t forget, I would set up the pieces, shuffle them around, make ready the trap that I planned to set for the first comer. Then, at last ready to tickle the keys, it would suddenly dawn on me that on page so-and-so I made a grievous error, and turning to the page I would discover that whole sentences were out of kiltre, made no sense, or said
exactly the opposite of what I meant. In correcting them the need to elaborate would force me to write pages which later I realized might just as well have been omitted.
Anything to stave off the event. Was it that? Or was it that, in order to write smoothly and steadily, I had to first blow off steam, reduce the power, cool the motor? It always seemed to go better, the writing, when I had reached a lower, less exalted level; to stay on the surface, where it was all foam and whitecaps, was something only the Ancient Mariner could do.
Once I got under wing, once I hit my stride, it was like eating peanuts: one thought induced another. And as my fingers flew, pleasant but utterly extraneous ideas would intrude—without damaging the flow. Such as: This passage is for you, Ulric; I can hear you chuckling in advance. Or, How O’Mara will gobble this up! They accompanied my thoughts, like playful dolphins. I was like a man at the tiller dodging the fish that flew over his head. Sailing along with full sails, the ship precariously tilted but steady on her course, I would salute imaginary passing vessels, wave my shirt in the air, call to the birds, hail the rugged cliffs, praise God for his savin ‘and keepin’ power, and so on. Gogol had his troika, I had my trim Cutter. King of the waterways—while the spell lasted.
Ramming the last pages home, I was already ashore, walking the boulevards of the luminous city, doffing my ht to this one and that, practising my S’il vous plait, monsieur. A votre service, madame. Quelle belle journee, n’est-ce pas? C’est moi qui avais tort. A quoi bon se plaindre, la vie est belle! Et caetera, et caetera. (All in an imaginary suave francais.)
I even indulged myself to the extent of carrying on an imaginary conversation with a Parisian who understood English well enough to follow me. One of those delightful Frenchmen (encountered only in books) who is always interested in a foreigner’s observations, trivial though they may be. We had discovered a mutual interest in Anatole France. (How simple, these liaisons, in the world of reverie!) And I, the pompous idiot, had seized the opening to make mention of a curious Englishman who had also loved France—the country, not the author. Charmed by my reference to a celebrated boulevardier of that delightful epoch, la fin de siecle, my companion insisted on escorting me to the Place Pigalle, in order to point out a rendezvous of the literary lights of that epoch—Le Rat Mort. But monsieur, I am saying, you are too kind. Mais non, monsieur, c’est un privilege. And so on. All this flubdub, this flattery and flanerie under a metallic green sky, the ground strewn with autumn leaves, siphons gleaming on every table—and not a single horse with his tail docked. In short, the perfect Paris, the perfect Frenchman, the perfect day for a post-prandial ambulatory conversation.
Europe, I concluded to myself, my dear, my beloved Europe, deceive me not! Even though you be not all that I now imagine, long for, and desperately need, grant me at least the illusion of enjoying this fair contentment which the mention of your name invites. Let your citizens hold me in contempt, let them despise me, if they will, but give me to hear them converse as I have ever imagined them to. Let me drink of these keen, roving minds which disport only in the universal, intellects trained (from the cradle) to mingle poetry with fact and deed, spirits which kindle at the mention of a nuance, and soar and soar, encompassing the most sublime flights, yet touching everything with wit, with malice, with erudition, with the salt and the spice of the worldly. Do not, O faithful Europe, do not, I beg you, show me the polished surface of a continent devoted to progress. I want to see your ancient, time-worn visage, with its furrows carved by age-long combat in the arena of thought. I want, to see with my own eyes the eagles you have trained to eat from your hand. I come as a pilgrim, a devout pilgrim, who not only believes but knows that the invisible face of the moon is glorious, glorious beyond an imagining. I have seen only the spectral, pitted face of the world which whirls us about. Too well do I know this array of extinct volcanoes, of arid mountain ranges, of airless deserts whose huge cracks distribute themselves like varicose veins over the heart-breaking heartless Void. Accept me, O ancient ones, accept me as a penitent, one not wholly lost but deeply erring, a wanderer who from birth was made to. stray from the sight of his brothers and sisters, his guides, his mentors, his comforters.
There stood Ulric, at the end of my prayer, exactly as he looked that day I met him on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street: the man who had been to Europe, and to Africa too, and in whose eyes the wonder and the magic of it still glowed. He was giving me a blood transfusion, pouring faith and courage into my veins. Hodie mihi, eras tibi! It was there, Europe, waiting for me. It would always be the same, come war, revolution, famine, frost or what. Always a Europe for the soul that hungered. Listening to his words, sucking them in in big draughts, asking myself if it were possible (attainable) for one like me, always dragging behind like a cow’s tail, intoxicated, groping for it like a blind man without his stick, the magnetic force of his words (the Alps, the Apennines, Ravenna, Fiesole, the plains of Hungary, the lie Saint-Louis, Chartres, the Touraine, le Perigord … ) caused a pain to settle in the pit of my stomach, a pain which slowly spelled itself out as a kind of Heimweh, a longing for the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. (Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home.)
Yes, Ulric, that day you planted the seed in me. You walked back to your studio to make more bananas and pine-apples for the Saturday Evening Post and you left me to wander off with a vision. Europe was in my grasp. What matter two years, five years, ten years? It was you who handed me my passport. It was you who awakened the sleeping guide: Heimweh. Hodie tibi, cras mihi.
And as I walked about that afternoon, up one street and down another, I was already saying good-bye to the familiar scenes of horror and ennui, of morbid monotony, of sanitary sterility and loveless love. Passing down Fifth Avenue, cutting through the shoppers and drifters like a wire eel, my contempt and loathing for all that met my eye almost suffocated me. Pray God, I would not have long to endure the sight of these snuffed out Jack-o’-Lanterns, these decrepit New World buildings, these hideous, mournful churches, these parks dotted with pigeons and derelicts. From the street of the tailor shop on down to the Bowery (the course of my ancient walk) I lived again the days of my apprenticeship, and they were like a thousand years of misery, of mishap, of misfortune. A thousand years of alienation. Approaching Cooper Union, ever the low-water mark of my sagging spirits, passages of those books I once wrote in my head came back, like the curled edges of a dream which refuse to flatten out. They would always be flapping there, those curled edges … flapping from the cornices of those dingy shit-brown shanties, those slat-faced saloons, those foul rescue and shelter places where the bleary-eyed codfish-faced bums hung about like lazy flies, and O God, how miserable they looked, how wasted, how blenched, how withered and hollowed out! Yet it was here in this bombed out world that John Cowper Powys had lectured, had sent forth into the soot-laden, stench-filled airs his tidings of the eternal world of the spirit—the spirit of Europe, his Europe, our Europe, the Europe of Sophocles. Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, Ibsen. In this same area other fiery zealots had appeared and addressed the mob, invoking other great names: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Engels, Shelley, Blake. The streets looked the same as ever, worse indeed, breathing less hope, less justice, less beauty, less harmony. Small chance now for a Thoreau to appear, or a Whitman, or a John Brown—or a Robert E. Lee. The man of the masses was coming into his own: a sad, weird-looking creature animated by a central switchboard, capable of saying neither Yes nor No, recognizing neither right nor wrong, but always in step, the lock step, always chanting the Dead March. Good-bye, good-bye! I kept saying, as I marched along. Good-bye to all this! And not a soul responding, not even a pigeon.—Are you deaf, you slumbering maniacs?
I am walking down the middle of civilization, and this is how it is. On the one side culture running like an open sewer; on the other the abattoirs where everything hangs on the hooks, s
plit open, gory, swarming with flies and maggots. The boulevard of life in the twentieth Century. One Arc de Triomphe after another. Robots advancing with the Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Lemmings rushing to the sea. Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war … Hurrah for the Karamazovs! What gay wisdom! Encore un petit effort, si vous voulez etre republicains!
Down the middle of the road. Stepping gingerly amidst the piles of horse manure. What dirt and humbug we have to stumble through! Ah, Harry, Harry! Harry Haller, Harry Heller, Harry Smith, Harry Miller, Harry Harried. Coming, Asmodeus, coming! On two sticks, like a crippled Satan. But laden with medals. Such medals! The Iron Cross, the Victoria Cross, the Croix de guerre … in gold, in silver, in bronze, in iron, in zinc, in wood, in tin … Take your pick!
And poor Jesus had to carry his own cross!
The air grows more pungent. Chatham Square. Good old Chinatown. Below the pavement a honeycomb of booths. Opium dens. Lotus land. Nirvana. Rest in peace, the workers of the world are working. We are all working—to usher in eternity.
Now the Brooklyn Bridge swinging like a lyre between the skyscrapers and Brooklyn Heights. Once again the weary pedestrian wends his way homeward, pockets empty, stomach empty, heart empty. Gorgonzola hobbling along on two burned stumps. The river below, the sea gulls above. And above the gulls the stars invisible. What a glorious day! A walk such as Pomander himself might have enjoyed. Or Anaxagoras. Or that arbiter of perverted taste: Petronius.
The winter of life, as some one should have said, begins at birth. The hardest years are from one to ninety. After that, smooth sailing.
Howeward the swallows fly. Each one carrying in his bill a crumb, a dead twig, a spark of hope. E pluribus unum.
The orchestra pit is rising, all sixty-four players donned in spotless white. Above, the stars are beginning to show through the midnight blue of the domed ceiling. The greatest show on earth is about to be ushered in, complete with trained seals, ventriloquists and aerial acrobats. The master of ceremonies is Uncle Sam himself, that long, lean striped-like-a-zebra humorist who straddles the world with his Baron Munchausen legs and, come wind, hail, snow, frost or dry rot, is ever ready to cry Cock-a doodledoo!