The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  The children were getting hysterical.

  “‘Now you’re talking sensible,’ said the grizzly bear. Incidentally, the grizzly bear had a strong father complex. He didn’t like the flesh of little girls unless well done. It was fortunate, indeed, for little Goldilocks that the grizzly bear felt this way about little girls, because the other two bears were ravenously hungry, and besides, they had no complexes whatever. Anyway, while the grizzly bear stirred the fire and added more logs, Goldilocks knelt in the platter and said her prayers. She looked more beautiful than ever now, and if the bears had been human they would not have eaten her alive, they would have consecrated her to the Virgin Mary. But a bear is always a bear, and these were no exception to the rule. So when the flames were giving off just the right heat, the three bears took little Goldilocks and flung her onto the burning logs. In five minutes she was roasted to a crisp, hair and all. Then they put her back on the platter and carved her into big chunks. For the grizzly bear a great big chunk; for the polar bear a medium-sized chunk, and for Teddy bear, the cute little thing, a nice little tenderloin steak. My, but it tasted good. They ate every bit of her—teeth, hair, toenails, bones and kidneys. The platter was so clean you could have seen your face in it. There wasn’t even a drop of gravy left. ‘And now,’ said the grizzly bear, ‘we’ll see what she brought in that lunch basket. I’d just love to have a piece of acorn pie.’ They opened the basket and, sure enough, there were three pieces of acorn pie. The big piece was very big, the middlin’ piece was about medium, and the little piece was just a tiny, wee little snack. ‘Yum yum!’ sighed the Teddy bear, licking his chops. ‘Acorn pie! What did I tell you?’ growled the grizzly bear. The polar bear had stuffed his mouth so full he could only grunt. When they had downed the last mouthful the polar bear looked around and, just as pleasant as could be, he said: ‘Now wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a bottle of schnapps in that basket!’ Immediately the three of them began pawing the basket, looking for that delicious bottle of schnapps . . .”

  “Do we get any schnapps, Mommy?” cried the little girl.

  “It’s ginger snaps, you dope!” yelled the boy.

  “Well, at the bottom of the basket, wrapped in a wet napkin, they finally found the bottle of schnapps. It was from Utrecht, Holland, year 1926. To the three bears, however, it was just a bottle of schnapps. Now bears, as you know, never use corkscrews, so it was quite a job to get the cork out . . .”

  “You’re wandering,” said MacGregor.

  “That’s what you think,” I said. “Just hold your horses.”

  “Try to finish it by midnight,” he rejoined.

  “Much sooner than that, don’t worry. If you interrupt again, though, I will lose the thread.”

  “Now this bottle,” I resumed, “was a very unusual bottle of schnapps. It had magic properties. When each bear in turn had taken a good swig, their heads began to spin. Yet, the more they drank, the more there was left to drink. They got dizzier and dizzier, groggier and groggier, thirstier and thirstier. Finally the polar bear said: ‘I’m going to drink it down to the last drop,’ and, holding the bottle between his two paws, he poured it down his gullet. He drank and drank, and finally he did come to the last drop. He was lying on the floor, drunk as a pope; the bottle upside down, the neck half-way down his throat. As I say, he had just swallowed the very last drop. Had he put the bottle down, it would have refilled itself. But he didn’t. He continued to hold it upside down, getting the last drop out of that very last drop. And then a miraculous thing took place. Suddenly, little Goldilocks came alive, clothes and all, just as she always was. She was doing a jig on the polar bear’s stomach. When she began to sing, the three bears grew so frightened that they fainted away, first the grizzly bear, then the polar bear, and then the Teddy bear . . .”

  The little girl clapped her hands with delight.

  “And now we’re coming to the end of the story. The rain had stopped, the sky was bright and clear, the birds were singing, just as always. Little Goldilocks suddenly remembered that she had promised to be home for dinner. She gathered up her basket, looked around to make sure she had forgotten nothing, and started for the door. Suddenly she thought of the cow-bell. ‘It would be fun to ring it just once more,’ she said to herself. And with that, she climbed onto the stool, the one that was just right, and she rang with all her might. She rang it once, twice, three times—and then she fled as fast as her little legs would carry her. Outside, the little fellow with the dunce cap was waiting for her. ‘Quick, get on my back!’ he ordered. ‘We’ll make double time that way.’ Goldilocks hopped on and away they raced, up dell and down dell, over the golden meadows, through the silvery brooks. When they had raced this way for about three hours, the little man said: ‘I’m getting weary, I’m going to put you down.’ And he deposited her right there, at the edge of the woods. ‘Bear to the left,’ he said, ‘and you can’t miss it.’ He was off again, just as mysteriously as he had come . . .”

  “Is that the end?” piped the boy, somewhat disappointed.

  “No,” I said, “not quite. Now listen . . . Goldilocks did as she was told, bearing always to the left. In a very few minutes she was standing in front of her own door.

  “‘Why, Goldilocks,’ said her mother, ‘what great big eyes you have!’

  “‘All the better to eat you up!’ said Goldilocks.

  “‘Why, Goldilocks,’ cried her father, ‘and where in hell did you put my bottle of schnapps?’

  “‘I gave it to the three bears,’ said Goldilocks dutifully.

  “‘Goldilocks, you’re telling me a fib,’ said her father threateningly.

  “‘I’m not either,’ Goldilocks replied. ‘It’s the God’s truth.’ Suddenly she remembered what she had read in the big book, about sin and how Jesus came to wipe away all sin. ‘Father,’ she said, kneeling before him reverently, ‘I believe I’ve committed a sin.’

  “‘Worse than that,’ said her father, reaching for the strap, ‘you’ve committed larceny.’ And without another word he began to belt and flay her. ‘I don’t mind your visiting the three bears in the woods,’ he said, as he plied the strap. ‘I don’t mind a little fib now and then. But what I do mind is not to have a wee drop of schnapps when my throat is sore and parched.’ He flayed her and belted her until Goldilocks was just a mass of welts and bruises. ‘And now,’ he said, putting in an extra lick for the finish, ‘I’m going to give you a treat. I’m going to tell you the story of the three bears—or what happened to my bottle of schnapps.’

  “And that, my dear children, is the end.”

  AUTOMOTIVE PASSACAGLIA

  (FROM THE AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE)

  On the eve of starting on the nightmare trip around America I met a representative of Doubleday at a bar and the next day I went to his office, signed a contract and received an advance of several hundred dollars. I was to write whatever I pleased but no pornography or obscenity. After I had submitted a few chapters of the book I was informed that it was not their cup of tea. I was rather relieved because I hadn’t really wanted to be published by a big publisher.

  A number of chapters were written en route, i.e., while lying up in some hole of a town waiting for the rain to stop or waiting for money to continue the trip. The better part of it was done in Beverly Glen while living with Gilbert and Margaret Neiman.

  While cruising about I filled two large dummies with notes. After the book was printed—I had sold the notebooks meanwhile in order to keep alive—I realized that there were many things I hadn’t told about. There was enough unused material, in short, to fill another book. Some of this became incorporated in Remember to Remember, but only a fraction.

  The important thing to know is that all the bad things I said about America are only too true. One has only to open the daily paper to find corroboration. And the end is not in sight. It will get worse as time goes on.

  I feel like doing a little passacaglia now about things automotive. Ever since I decid
ed to sell the car she’s been running beautifully. The damned thing behaves like a flirtatious woman.

  Back in Albuquerque, where I met that automotive expert Hugh Dutter, everything was going wrong with her. Sometimes I think it was all the fault of the tail wind that swept me along through Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle. Did I mention the episode with the drunk who tried to run me into a ditch? He almost had me convinced that I had lost my generator. I was a bit ashamed, of course, to ask people if my generator were gone, as he said, but every time I had a chance to open up a conversation with a garage man I would work him round to the subject of generators, hoping first of all that he would show me where the damned thing was hidden, and second that he would tell me whether or not a car could function without one. I had just a vague idea that the generator had something to do with the battery. Perhaps it hasn’t, but that’s my notion of it still.

  The thing I enjoy about visiting garage men is that one contradicts the other. It’s very much as in medicine, or the field of criticism in literature. Just when you believe you have the answer you find that you’re mistaken. A little man will tinker with your machinery for an hour and blushingly ask you for a dime, and whether he’s done the correct thing or not the car runs, whereas the big service stations will lay her up in dry dock for a few days, break her down into molecules and atoms, and then like as not she’ll run a few miles and collapse.

  There’s one thing I’d like to advise any one thinking of making a transcontinental journey: see that you have a jack, a monkey wrench and a jimmy. You’ll probably find that the wrench won’t fit the nuts but that doesn’t matter; while you’re pretending to fiddle around with it some one will stop and lend you a helping hand. I had to get stuck in the middle of a swamp in Louisiana before I realized that I had no tools. It took me a half hour to realize that if there were any they would be hidden under the front seat. And if a man promises you that he will stop at the next town and send some one to haul you don’t believe him. Ask the next man and the next man and the next man. Keep a steady relay going or you’ll sit by the roadside till doomsday. And never say that you have no tools—it sounds suspicious, as though you had stolen the car. Say you lost them, or that they were stolen from you in Chicago. Another thing—if you’ve just had your front wheels packed don’t take it for granted that the wheels are on tight. Stop at the next station and ask to have the lugs tightened, then you’ll be sure your front wheels won’t roll off in the middle of the night. Take it for granted that nobody, not even a genius, can guarantee that your car won’t fall apart five minutes after he’s examined it. A car is even more delicate than a Swiss watch. And a lot more diabolical, if you know what I mean.

  If you don’t know much about cars it’s only natural to want to take it to a big service station when something goes wrong. A great mistake, of course, but it’s better to learn by experience than by hearsay. How are you to know that the little man who looks like a putterer may be a wizard?

  Anyway, you go to the service station. And immediately you come smack up against a man dressed in a butcher’s smock, a man with a pad in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, looking very professional and alert, a man who never fully assures you that the car will be perfect when they get through with it but who intimates that the service will be impeccable, of the very highest caliber, and that sort of thing. They all have something of the surgeon about them, these entrepreneurs of the automobile industry. You see, they seem to imply, you’ve come to us only at the last ditch; we can’t perform miracles, but we’ve had twenty or thirty years’ experience and can furnish the best of references. And, just as with the surgeon, you have the feeling when you entrust the car to his immaculate hands, that he is going to telephone you in the middle of the night, after the engine has been taken apart and the bearings are lying all about, and tell you that there’s something even more drastically wrong with the car than he had at first suspected. Something serious, what! It starts with a case of bad lungs and ends up with a removal of the appendix, gall bladder, liver and testicles. The bill is always indisputably correct and of a figure no less than formidable. Everything is itemized, except the quality of the foreman’s brains. Instinctively you put it safely away in order to produce it at the next hospital when the car breaks down again; you want to be able to prove that you knew what was wrong with the car all along.

  After you’ve had a few experiences of this sort you get wary, that is if you’re slow to catch on, as I am. After you stay in a town a while and get acquainted, feel that you are among friends, you throw out a feeler; you learn that just around the corner from the big service station there’s a little fellow (his place is always in the rear of some other place and therefore hard to find) who’s a wizard at fixing things and asks some ridiculously low sum for his services. They’ll tell you that he treats everybody that way, even those with “foreign” license plates.

  Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in Albuquerque, thanks to the friendship I struck up with Dr. Peters who is a great surgeon and a bon vivant as well. One day, not having anything better to do—one of those days when you call up telephone numbers or else go to have your teeth cleaned—one day, as I say, in the midst of a downpour I decided to consult the master mind, the painless Parker of the automotive world: Hugh Dutter. There was nothing very seriously wrong—just a constant high fever. The men at the service station didn’t attach much importance to it—they attributed it to the altitude, the age of the car and so on. I suppose there was nothing more that they could repair or replace. But when on a cold, rainy day a car runs a temperature of 170 to 180 there must be something wrong, so I reasoned. If she was running that high at five thousand feet what would she run at seven thousand or ten thousand?

  I stood in the doorway of the repair shop for almost an hour waiting for Dutter to return. He had gone to have a bite with some friends, never dreaming that there would be any customers waiting for him in such a downpour. His assistant, who was from Kansas, regaled me with stories about fording flooded streams back in Kansas. He spoke as though people had nothing better to do when it rained than practice these dangerous maneuvers with their tin Lizzies. Once he said a bus got caught in the head waters of a creek, keeled over, was washed downstream and never found again. He liked rain—it made him homesick.

  Presently Dutter arrived. I had to wait until he went to a shelf and arranged some accessories. After I had sheepishly explained my troubles he leisurely scratched his head and without even looking in the direction of the engine he said: “Well, there could be a lot of reasons for her heating up on you that way. Have you had your radiator boiled out?”

  I told him I had—back in Johnson City, Tennessee.

  “How long ago was that?” he said.

  “Just a few months back.”

  “I see. I thought you were going to say a few years ago.”

  The car was still standing outside in the rain. “Don’t you want to look her over?” I said, fearing that he might lose interest in the case.

  “You might bring her in,” he said. “No harm in taking a look. Nine times out of ten it’s the radiator. Maybe they didn’t do a good job for you back in Cleveland.”

  “Johnson City!” I corrected.

  “Well, wherever it was.” He ordered his assistant to drive her in.

  I could see he wasn’t very enthusiastic about the job: it wasn’t as though I had brought him a bursting gall bladder or a pair of elephantine legs. I thought to myself—better leave him alone with it for a while; maybe when he begins to putter around he’ll work up a little interest. So I excused myself and went off to get a bite.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said.

  “That’s all right, don’t hurry,” he answered. “It may take hours to find out what’s wrong with her.”

  I had a Chop Suey and on the way back I loitered a bit in order to give him time to arrive at a correct diagnosis. To kill a little time I stopped in at the Chamber of Commerce and inquired about the condition of
the roads going to Mesa Verde. I learned that in New Mexico you can tell nothing about the condition of the roads by consulting the map. For one thing the road map doesn’t say how much you may be obliged to pay if you get stuck in deep clay and have to be hauled fifty or seventy-five miles. And between gravel and graded roads there’s a world of difference. At the Automobile Club in New York I remember the fellow taking a greasy red pencil and tracing a route for me backwards while answering two telephones and cashing a check.

  “Mesa Verde won’t be officially open until about the middle of May,” said the fellow. “I wouldn’t risk it yet. If we get a warm rain there’s no telling what will happen.”

  I decided to go to Arizona, unless I had an attack of chilblains. I was a little disappointed though to miss seeing Shiprock and Aztec.

  When I got back to the garage I found Dutter bending over the engine; he had his ear to the motor, like a doctor examining a weak lung. From the vital parts there dangled an electric bulb attached to a long wire. The electric bulb always reassures me. It means business. Anyway, he was down in the guts of the thing and getting somewhere—so it looked.

  “Found out what’s wrong yet?” I ventured to inquire timidly.

  “No,” he said, burying his wrist in a mess of intricate whirring thingamajigs which looked like the authentic automotive part of the automobile. It was the first time I had ever seen what makes a car go. It was rather beautiful, in a mechanical way. Reminded me of a steam calliope playing Chopin in a tub of grease.

  “She wasn’t timing right,” said Dutter, twisting his neck around to look at me but, like the skillful surgeon, still operating with his deft right hand. “I knew that much before I even looked at her. That’ll heat a car up quicker’n anything.” And he began explaining to me from deep down in the bowels of the car how the timing worked. As I remember it now an eight cylinder car fires 2, 3, 5, 7 with one cam and 3, 4, 6, 8 with the other. I may be wrong on the figures but the word cam is what interested me. It’s a beautiful word and when he tried to point it out to me I liked it still better—the cam. It has a down-to-earth quality about it, like piston and gear. Even an ignoramus like myself knows that piston, just from the sound of the word, means something that has to do with the driving force, that it’s intimately connected with the locomotion of the vehicle. I still have to see a piston per se, but I believe in pistons even though I should never have the chance to see one cold and isolate.