The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  The interval between the moment of passing the girl and the first glimpse of the long-awaited ideal street, which I had searched for in all my dreams and never found, was of the same flavor and substance as those anticipatory moments in the deep dream when it seems as if no power on earth can hinder the fulfillment of desire. The whole character of such dreams lies in the fact that once the road has been taken the end is always certain. As I walked past the row of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth I saw what man is seldom given to see—the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world. Just one block long, dimly lit, shunned by respectable citizens, ignored by the whole United States—a tiny community of foreign souls living apart from the great world, pursuing their own humble ways and asking nothing more of their neighbors than tolerance. As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same: the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive. Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only have I known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. As a boy, knowing nothing of the great life outside, this ambiance of the little world, the holy, cellular life of the microcosm, must have penetrated deep. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth? When my feet began to itch, when I became restless in my own soul, I thought it was the larger world, the world outside, calling to me, beseeching me to find a bigger and greater place for myself. I expanded in all directions. I tried to embrace not only this world but the worlds beyond. Suddenly, just when I thought myself emancipated, I found myself thrust back into the little circle from which I had fled. I say “the little circle,” meaning not only the old neighborhood, not only the city of my birth, but the whole United States. As I have explained elsewhere, Greece, tiny though it appears on the map, was the biggest world I have ever entered. Greece for me was the home which we all long to find. As a country it offered me everything I craved. And yet, at the behest of the American consul in Athens, I consented to return. I accepted the American consul’s intervention as the bidding of fate. In doing so I perhaps converted what is called blind fate into something destined. Only the future will tell if this be so. At any rate, I came back to the narrow, circumscribed world from which I had escaped. And in coming back I not only found everything the same, but even more so. How often since my return have I thought of Nijinsky who was so thoughtlessly awakened from his trance! What must he think of this world on which he had deliberately turned his back in order to avoid becoming insane like the rest of us! Do you suppose he feels thankful to his specious benefactors? Will he stay awake and toss fitfully in his sleep, as we do, or will he choose to close his eyes again and feast only upon that which he knows to be true and beautiful?

  The other day, in the office of a newspaper, I saw in big letters over the door: “Write the things which thou hast seen and the things which are.” I was startled to see this exhortation, which I have religiously and unwittingly followed all my life, blazing from the walls of a great daily. I had forgotten that there were such words recorded in Revelation. The things which are! One could ponder over that phrase forever. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the things which are are eternal. I come back to that little community, that dream world, in which I was raised. In microcosm it is a picture of that macrocosm which we call the world. To me it is a world asleep, a world in which the dream is imprisoned. If for a moment there is an awakening the dream, vaguely recalled, is speedily forgotten. This trance, which continues twenty-four hours of the day, is only slightly disturbed by wars and revolutions. Life goes on, as we say, but smothered, damped down, hidden away in the vegetative fibers of our being. Real awareness comes intermittently, in brief flashes of a second’s duration. The man who can hold it for a minute, relatively speaking, inevitably changes the whole trend of the world. In the span of ten or twenty thousand years a few widely isolated individuals have striven to break the deadlock, shatter the trance, as it were. Their efforts, if we look at the present state of the world superficially, seem to have been ineffectual. And yet the example which their lives afford us points conclusively to one thing, that the real drama of man on earth is concerned with Reality and not with the creation of civilizations which permit the great mass of men to snore more or less blissfully. A man who had the slightest awareness of what he was doing could not possibly put his finger to the trigger of a gun, much less co-operate in the making of such an instrument. A man who wanted to live would not waste even a fraction of a moment in the invention, creation and perpetuation of instruments of death. Men are more or less reconciled to the thought of death, but they also know that it is not necessary to kill one another. They know it intermittently, just as they know other things which they conveniently proceed to forget when there is danger of having their sleep disturbed. To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in. But man refuses to stay awake because if he did he would be obliged to become something other than he now is, and the thought of that is apparently too painful for him to endure. If man were to come to grips with his real nature, if he were to discover his real heritage, he would become so exalted, or else so frightened, that he would find it impossible to go to sleep again. To live would be a perpetual challenge to create. But the very thought of a possible swift and endless metamorphosis terrifies him. He sleeps now, not comfortably to be sure, but certainly more and more obstinately, in the womb of a creation whose only need of verification is his own awakening. In this state of sublime suspense time and space have become meaningless concepts. Already they have merged to form another concept which, in his stupor, he is as yet unable to formulate or elucidate. But whatever the role that man is to play in it, the universe, of that we may be certain, is not asleep. Should man refuse to accept his role there are other planets, other stars, other suns waiting to go forward with the experiment. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.

  In our sleep we have discovered how to exterminate one another. To abandon this pleasant pursuit merely to sleep more soundly, more peacefully, would be of no value. We must awaken—or pass out of the picture. There is no alarm clock which man can invent to do the trick. To set the alarm is a joke. The clock itself is an evidence of wrong thinking. What does it matter what time you get up if it is only to walk in your sleep?

  Now extinction seems like true bliss. The long trance has dulled us to everything which is alive and awake. Forward! cry the defenders of the great sleep. Forward to death! But on the last day the dead will be summoned from their graves; they will be made to take up the life eternal. To postpone the eternal is impossible. Everything else we may do or fail to do, but eternity has nothing to do with time, nor sleep, nor failure, nor death. Murder is postponement. And war is murder, whether it be glorified by the righteous or not. I speak of the things which are, not because they are of the moment but because they always have been and always will be. The life which every one dreams of, and which no one has the courage to lead, can have no existence in the present. The present is only a gateway between past and future. When we awaken we will dispense with the fiction of the bridge which never existed. We will pass from dream to reality with eyes wide open. We will get our bearings instantly, without the aid of instruments. We will not need to fly around the earth in order to find the paradise which
is at our feet. When we stop killing—not only actually, but in our hearts—we will begin to live, and not until then.

  I believe that it is now possible for me to have my being anywhere on earth. I regard the entire world as my home. I inhabit the earth, not a particular portion of it labeled America, France, Germany or Russia. I owe allegiance to mankind, not to a particular country, race or people. I answer to God and not to the Chief Executive, whoever he may happen to be. I am here on earth to work out my own private destiny. My destiny is linked with that of every other living creature inhabiting this planet—perhaps with those on other planets too, who knows? I refuse to jeopardize my destiny by regarding life within the narrow rules which are now laid down to circumscribe it. I dissent from the current view of things as regards murder, as regards religion, as regards society, as regards our well-being. I will try to live my life in accordance with the vision I have of things eternal. I say “Peace to you all!” and if you don’t find it, it’s because you haven’t looked for it.

  MAX

  (FROM MAX AND THE WHITE PHAGOCYTES)

  Max came into my life during the early days in the Villa Seurat—1934–’35, I think, or possibly 1936–’37. I have portrayed him just as he was, mercilessly perhaps, and symbolically too, no doubt. Many people ask me what happened to him subsequently. I have no idea. I presume he was killed by the Germans when they overran France.

  Naturally, he was not the first of his kind whom I had encountered in my years of vagabondage. One has only to reflect on my four and a half years in the service of the telegraph company, on the thousands of derelicts whom it was my good fortune to come in contact with there. I say “good fortune” because it was from the despised and neglected ones that I learned about life, about God, and about the futility of “doing good.”

  There are some people whom you call immediately by their first name. Max is one of them. There are people to whom you feel immediately attracted, not because you like them, but because you detest them. You detest them so heartily that your curiosity is aroused; you come back to them again and again to study them, to arouse in yourself a feeling of compassion which is really absent. You do things for them, not because you feel any sympathy for them, but because their suffering is incomprehensible to you.

  I remember the evening Max stopped me on the boulevard. I remember the feeling of repugnance which his face, his whole manner inspired. I was hurrying along, on my way to the cinema, when this sad Jewish face suddenly blocks my way. He asked me for a light or something—whatever it was it was only an excuse, I knew. I knew immediately that he was going to pour out a tale of woe, and I didn’t want to hear it. I was curt and brusque, almost insulting; but that didn’t matter, he stuck there, his face almost glued to mine, and clung like a leech. Without waiting to hear his story I offered some change, hoping that he would be disgusted and walk off. But no, he refused to be offended; he clung to me like a leech.

  From that evening on it almost seems as if Max were dogging my steps. The first few times I ran into him I put it down to sheer coincidence. Gradually, however, I became suspicious. Stepping out of an evening I would ask myself instinctively—“where now? are you sure Max won’t be there?” If I were going for a stroll I would pick an absolutely strange neighborhood, one that Max would never dream of frequenting. I knew that he had to maintain a more or less fixed itinerary—the grand boulevards, Montparnasse, Montmartre, wherever the tourists were apt to congregate. Towards the end of the evening Max would disappear from my mind completely. Strolling home, along an accustomed route, I would be entirely oblivious of Max. Then, sure as fate, probably within a stone’s throw of my hotel, out he’d pop. It was weird. He’d always bob up head on, as it were, and how he got there suddenly like that I never could figure out. Always I’d see him coming towards me with the same expression, a mask which I felt he had clapped on expressly for me. The mask of sorrow, of woe, of misery, lit up by a little wax taper which he carried inside him, a sort of holy, unctuous light that he had stolen from the synagogue. I always knew what his first words would be and I would laugh as he uttered them, a laugh which he always interpreted as a sign of friendliness.

  “How are you, Miller!” he would say, just as though we hadn’t seen each other for years. And with this how are you the smile which he had clapped on would broaden and then, quite suddenly, as though he had put a snuffer over the little wax taper inside him, it would go out. With this would come another familiar phrase—“Miller, do you know what has happened to me since I saw you?” I knew very well that nothing had happened in the interim. But I knew also, from experience, that soon we would be sitting down somewhere to enjoy the experience of pretending that something had happened in the interim. Even though he had done nothing but walk his legs off, in the interim, that would be something new that had happened to him. If the weather had been warm, or if it had been cold, that would be something that had happened to him. Or if he had managed to get a day’s work that too would be something. Everything that happened to him was of a bad nature. It couldn’t be otherwise. He lived in the expectation that things would grow worse, and of course they always did.

  I had grown so accustomed to Max, to his state of perpetual misfortune, that I began to accept him as a natural phenomenon: he was a part of the general landscape, like rocks, trees, urinals, brothels, meat markets, flower stalls, and so on. There are thousands of men like Max roaming the streets, but Max was the personification of all. He was Unemployment, he was Hunger, he was Misery, he was Woe, he was Despair, he was Defeat, he was Humiliation. The others I could get rid of by flipping them a coin. Not Max! Max was something so close to me that it was just impossible to get rid of him. He was closer to me than a bed-bug. Something under the skin, something in the blood stream. When he talked I only half-listened. I had only to catch the opening phrase and I could continue by myself, indefinitely, ad infinitum. Everything he said was true, horribly true. Sometimes I felt that the only way to make known this truth would be to put Max flat on his back on the sidewalk and leave him there spouting out his horrible truths. And what would happen, should I do that? Nothing. Nothing. People have a way of making cute little detours, of stuffing their ears. People don’t want to hear these truths. They can’t hear them, for the reason that they’re all talking to themselves in the same way. The only difference is that Max said them aloud, and saying them aloud he made them seem objective, as though he, Max, were only the instrument to reveal the naked truth. He had gotten so far beyond suffering that he had become suffering itself. It was terrifying to listen to him because he, Max, had disappeared, had been swallowed up by his suffering.

  It’s easier to take a man as a symbol than as a fact. Max to me was a symbol of the world, of a condition of the world which is unalterable. Nothing will change it. Nothing! Silly to think of laying Max out on the sidewalk. It would be like saying to people—“Don’t you see?” See what? The world? Sure they see. The world! That’s what they’re trying to escape, trying not to see. Every time Max approached me I had this feeling of having the whole world on my hands, of having it right under my nose. The best thing for you, Max, I often thought to myself as I sat listening to him, is to blow your brains out. Destroy yourself! That’s the only solution. But you can’t get rid of the world so easily. Max is infinite. You would have to kill off every man, woman and child, every tree, rock, house, plant, beast, star. Max is in the blood. He’s a disease.

  I’m talking all the time about Max as about something in the past. I’m talking about the man I knew a year or so ago, before he went to Vienna—the Max I ran out on, the Max I left flat. The last note I had from him was a desperate plea to bring “medicaments.” He wrote that he was ill and that they were going to throw him out of the hotel. I remember reading his note and laughing over the broken English. I didn’t doubt for a minute that everything he said was true. But I had made up my mind not to lift a finger. I was hoping to Christ he would croak and not bother me any more. When a week had pass
ed, and no further word from him, I felt relieved. I hoped he had realized that it was useless to expect anything more of me. And supposing he had died? It made no difference to me either way—I wanted to be left alone.

  When it seemed as if I had really shaken him off for good and all I began to think of writing about him. There were moments when I was almost tempted to look him up, in order to corroborate certain impressions which I intended to exploit. I felt so strongly about it that I was on the point several times of paying him to come to see me. That last note of his, about the “medicaments,” how I regretted having given it away! With that note in my hands I felt I could bring Max to life again. It’s strange now, when I think about it, because everything Max had ever said was deeply engraved in my memory . . . I suppose I wasn’t ready to write the story then.