The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  So far as the creative individual goes life and death are of equal value; it is all a question of counterpoint. What is of vital concern, however, is how and where one meets life—or death. Life can be more deadly than death, and death on the other hand can open up the road to life. It is against the stagnant flux in which we are now drifting that Lawrence appears brilliantly alive. Proust and Joyce, needless to say, appear more representative: they reflect the times. We see in them no revolt: it is surrender, suicide, and the more poignant since it springs from creative sources.

  It is in the examination, then, of these two contemporaries of Lawrence that we see the process all too clearly. In Proust the full flower of psychologism—confession, self-analysis, arrest of living, making of art the final justification, but thereby divorcing art from life. An intestinal conflict in which the artist is immolated. The great retrospective curve back towards the womb: suspension in death, living death, for the purposes of dissection. Pause to question, but no questions forthcoming, the faculty having atrophied. A worship of art for its own sake—not for man. Art, in other words, regarded as a means of salvation, as a redemption from suffering, as a compensation for the terror of living. Art a substitute for life. The literature of flight, of escape, of a neurosis so brilliant that it almost makes one doubt the efficacy of health. Until one casts a glance at that “neurosis of health” of which Nietzsche sings in The Birth of Tragedy.

  In Joyce the soul deterioration may be traced even more definitely, for if Proust may be said to have provided the tomb of art, in Joyce we can witness the full process of decomposition. “Whoso,” says Nietzsche, “not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but also grasps his self in this word, requires no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopenhauer—he smells the putrefaction.” Ulysses is a paean to “the late-city man,” a thanatopsis inspired by the ugly tomb in which the soul of the civilized man lies embalmed. The most astoundingly varied and subtle means of art are herein exploited to glorify the dead city. The story of Ulysses is the story of a lost hero recounting a lost myth; frustrated and forlorn the Janus-faced hero wanders through the labyrinth of the deserted temple, seeking for the holy place but never finding it. Cursing and vilifying the mother who bore him, deifying her as a whore, bashing his brains out with idle conundrums, such is the modern Ulysses. Through the mystery-throngs he weaves his way, a hero lost in a crowd, a poet rejected and despised, a prophet wailing and cursing, covering his body with dung, examining his own excrement, parading his obscenity, lost, lost, a crumbling brain, a dissecting instrument endeavoring to reconstruct the soul. Through his chaos and obscenity, his obsessions and complexes, his perpetual, frantic search for God, Joyce reveals the desperate plight of the modern man who, lashing about in his steel and concrete cage, admits finally that there is no way out.

  In these two exponents of modernity we see the flowering of the Hamlet-Faust myth, that unscotchable snake in the entrails which, for the Greeks, was represented by the Oedipus myth, and for the whole Aryan race by the myth of Prometheus. In Joyce not only is the withered Homeric myth reduced to ashes, but even the Hamlet myth, which had come to supreme expression in Shakespeare, even this vital myth, I say, is pulverized. In Joyce we see the incapacity of the modern man even to doubt: it is the simulacrum of doubt, not its substance, that he gives us. With Proust there is a higher appreciation of doubt, of the inability to act. Proust is more capable of presenting the metaphysical aspect of things, partly because of a tradition so firmly anchored in the Mediterranean culture, and partly because his own schizoid temperament enabled him to examine objectively the evolution of a vital problem from its metaphysical to its psychological aspect. The progression from nerves to insanity, from a tragic confrontation of the duality in man to a pathologic split in the personality, is mirrored in the transition from Proust to Joyce. Where Proust held himself suspended over life in a cataleptic trance, weighing, dissecting, and eventually corroded by the very skepticism he had employed, Joyce had already plunged into the abyss. In Proust there is still a questioning of values; with Joyce there is a denial of all values. With Proust the schizophrenic aspect of his work is not so much the cause as the result of his world-view. With Joyce there is no world-view. Man returns to the primordial elements; he is washed away in a cosmological flux. Parts of him may be thrown up on foreign shores, in alien climes, in some future time. But the whole man, the vital, spiritual ensemble, is dissolved. This is the dissolution of the body and soul, a sort of cellular immortality in which life survives chemically.

  Proust, in his classic retreat from life, is the very symbol of the modern artist—the sick giant who locks himself up in a cork-lined cell to take his brains apart. He is the incarnation of that last and fatal disease: the disease of the mind. In Ulysses Joyce gives us the complete identification of the artist with the tomb in which he buries himself. Ulysses has been spoken of as seeming like “a solid city.” Not so much a solid city, it seems to me, as a dead world city. Just as there is, beneath the hollow dynamism of the city, an appalling weariness, a monotony, a fatigue insuperable, so in the works of Proust and Joyce the same qualities manifest themselves. A perpetual stretching of time and space, an obedience to the law of inertia, as if to atone, or compensate, for the lack of a higher urge. Joyce takes Dublin with its worn-out types; Proust takes the microscopic world of the Faubourg St. Germain, symbol of a dead past. The one wears us out because he spreads himself over such an enormous artificial canvas; the other wears us out by magnifying his thumbnail fossil beyond all sensory recognition. The one uses the city as a universe, the other as an atom. The curtain never falls. Meanwhile the world of living men and women is huddling in the wings clamoring for the stage.

  In these epics everything is of equal prominence, equal value, whether spiritual or material, organic or inorganic, live or abstract. The array and content of these works suggest to the mind the interior of a junk-shop. The effort to parallel space, to devour it, to install oneself in the time process—the very nature of the task is foreboding. The mind runs wild. We have sterility, onanism, logomachy. And—the more colossal the scope of the work the more monstrous the failure!

  Compared to these dead moons how comforting the little works which stick out like brilliant stars! Rimbaud, for example! His Illuminations outweighs a shelf of Proust, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, etc. Times there are, to be sure, when the colossal work compels admiration, when, as with Bach or Dante, it is ordered by an inner plan, by the organic mechanism of faith. Here the work of art assumes the form and dimensions of a cathedral, a veritable tree of life. But with our latter-day exponents of head-culture the great monuments are lying on their sides, they stretch away like huge petrified forests, and the landscape itself becomes nature-morte.

  Though we do, as Edmund Wilson says, “possess Dublin seen, heard, smelt and felt, brooded over, imagined, remembered,” it is, in a profound sense, no possession at all: it is possession through the dead ends of the brain. As a naturalistic canvas Ulysses makes its appeal to the sense of smell only: it gives off a sublime mortuary odor. It is not the reality of nature here, still less the reality of the five senses. It is the sick reality of the mind. And so, if we possess Dublin at all, it is only as a shade wandering through an excavated Troy or Knossus; the historical past juts out in geological strata.

  In referring to Work in Progress Louis Gillet, an admirer of Joyce, says: “One sees how the themes are linked together in this strange symphony; men are, today, as at the beginning of the world, the playthings of nature; they translate their impressions into myths which comprise the fragments of experience, the shreds of reality which are held in the memory. And thus is made a legend, a sort of extratemporal history, formed of the residue of all histories, which one might call (in using a title of Johann Sebastian Bach) a cantata for all time.”

  A noble ring to these words, but absolutely false. This is not how legends are made! The men who are capable of creating an “extratemporal history” are not the
men who create legends. The two are not coeval in time and space. The legend is the soul emerging into form, a singing soul which not only carries hope, but which contains a promise and a fulfillment. In the “extratemporal,” on the other hand, we have a flat expanse, a muddy residue, a sink without limits, without depths, without light and shadow—an abyss into which the soul is plunged and swallowed up. It marks the end of the great trajectory, the tapeworm of history devours itself. If this be legend, it is legend that will never survive, and most certainly never be sung. Already, almost coincidentally with their appearance, we have, as a result of Ulysses and Work in Progress, nothing but dry analyses, archaeological burrowings, geological surveys, laboratory tests of the Word. The commentators, to be sure, have only begun to chew into Joyce. The Germans will finish him! They will make Joyce palatable, understandable, clear as Shakespeare, better than Joyce, better than Shakespeare. Wait! The mystagogues are coming!

  As Gillet has well said—Work in Progress represents “a picture of the flowing reminiscences, of the vain desires, and confused wishes which wander in our sleepy, loosened soul, which comprises the crepuscular life of thought . . .” But who is interested in this language of night? Ulysses was obscure enough. But Work in Progress . . . ? Of Proust at least we may say that his myopia served to render his work exciting, stimulating: it was like seeing the world through the eyes of a horse, or a fly. Joyce’s deformity of vision, on the other hand, is depressing, crippling, dwarfing: it is a defect of the soul, and not an artistic, metaphysical device. Joyce is growing more blind every day—blind in the pineal eye. For passion he is substituting books; for men and women rivers and trees—or wraiths. Life to Joyce, as one of his admirers says, is a mere tautology. Precisely. We have here the clue to the whole symbolism of defeat. And, whether he is interested in history or not, Joyce is the history of our time, of this age which is sliding into darkness. Joyce is the blind Milton of our day. But whereas Milton glorified Satan, Joyce, because his sense of vision has atrophied, merely surrenders to the powers of darkness. Milton was a rebel, a demonic force, a voice that made itself heard. Milton blind, like Beethoven deaf, only grew in power and eloquence; the inner eye, the inner ear, became more attuned to the cosmic rhythm. Joyce, on the other hand, is a blind and deaf soul: his voice rings out over a waste land and the reverberations are nothing but the echoes of a lost soul. Joyce is the lost soul of this soulless world; his interest is not in life, in men and deeds, not in history, not in God, but in the dead dust of books. He is the high priest of the lifeless literature of today. He writes a hieratic script which not even his admirers and disciples can decipher. He is burying himself under an obelisk for whose script there will be no key.

  It is interesting to observe in the works of Proust and Joyce, and of Lawrence as well, how the milieu from which they sprang determined the choice of the protagonist as well as the nature of the disease against which they fought. Joyce, springing from the priest class, makes Bloom, his “average” man or double, the supreme object of ridicule. Proust, springing from the cultured middle class, though himself living only on the fringe of society, tolerated, as it were, makes Charlus, his king figure, a bitter object of ridicule. And Lawrence, springing from the common classes, makes the type Mellors, who appears in a variety of ideal roles, but usually as the man of the soil, his hope of the future—treating him, however, no less unsparingly. All three have idealized in the person of the hero those qualities which they felt themselves to lack supremely.

  Joyce, deriving from the medieval scholar, with the blood of the priest in him, is consumed by his inability to participate in the ordinary, everyday life of human beings. He creates Bloom, the shadow of Odysseus, Bloom the eternal Jew, the symbol of the outcast Irish race whose tragic story is so close to the author’s heart. Bloom is the projected wanderer of Joyce’s inner restlessness, of his dissatisfaction with the world. He is the man who is misunderstood and despised by the world, rejected by the world because he himself rejected the world. It is not so strange as at first blush it may seem that, searching for a counterpart to Daedalus, Joyce chose a Jew; instinctively he selected a type which has always given proof of its ability to arouse the passions and prejudices of the world.

  In giving us Dublin Joyce gave us the scholar-priest’s picture of the world as is. Dirty Dublin! Worse even than London, or Paris. The worst of all possible worlds! In this dirty sink of the world-as-is we have Bloom, the fictive image of the man in the street, crass, sensual, inquisitive but unimaginative—the educated nincompoop hypnotized by the abracadabra of scientific jargon. Molly Bloom the Dublin slut, is an even more successful image of the common run. Molly Bloom is an archetype of the eternal feminine. She is the rejected mother whom the scholar and priest in Joyce had to liquidate. She is the veridic whore of creation. By comparison, Bloom is a comic figure. Like the ordinary man, he is a medal without a reverse. And like the ordinary man, he is most ludicrous when he is being made cocu. It is the most persistent, the most fundamental image of himself which the “average” man retains in this woman’s world of today where his importance is so negligible.

  Charlus, on the other hand, is a colossal figure, and Proust has handled him in colossal fashion. As symbol of the dying world of caste, ideals, manners, etc., Charlus was selected, whether with thought or not, from the forefront of the enemy’s ranks. Proust, we know, was outside that world which he has so minutely described. As a pushing little Jew, he fought or wormed his way inside—and with disastrous results. Always shy, timid, awkward, embarrassed. Always a bit ridiculous. A sort of cultivated Chaplin! And, characteristically, this world which he so ardently desired to join he ended by despising. It is a repetition of the Jew’s eternal fight with an alien world. A perpetual effort to become part of this hostile world and then, because of inability to become assimilated, rejecting it or destroying it. But if it is typical of the mechanism of the Jew, it is no less typical of the artist. And, true artist that he was, thoroughly sincere, Proust chose the best example of that alien world for his hero, Charlus. Did he not, in part, become like that hero himself later on, in his unnatural effort to become assimilated? For Charlus, though he had his counterpart in reality, quite as famous as the fictive creation, Charlus is, nevertheless, the image of the later Proust. He is, indeed, the image of a whole world of aesthetes who have now incorporated under the banner of homosexualism.

  The beautiful figure of the grandmother, and of the mother, the sane, touching, moral atmosphere of the household, so pure and integrated, so thoroughly Jewish, stands opposed to the glamorous, the romantic, alien world of the Gentile which attracts and corrodes. It stands out in sharp contrast to the milieu from which Joyce sprang. Where Joyce leaned on the Catholic Church and its traditional masters of exegesis, thoroughly vitiated by the arid intellectualism of his caste, we have in Proust the austere atmosphere of the Jewish home contaminated by a hostile culture, the most strongly rooted culture left in the Western world—French Hellenism. We have an uneasiness, a maladjustment, a war in the spiritual realm which, projected in the novel, continued throughout his life. Proust was touched only superficially by French culture. His art is eminently un-French. We have only to think of his devout admiration for Ruskin. Ruskin! of all men!

  And so, in describing the decay of his little world, this microcosm which was for him the world, in depicting the disintegration of his hero, Charlus, Proust sets before us the collapse of the outer and the inner world. The battleground of love, which began normally enough with Gilberte, becomes transferred, as in the world today, to that plane of depolarized love wherein the sexes fuse, the world where doubt and jealousy, thrown out of their normal axes, play diabolical roles. Where in Joyce’s world a thoroughly normal obscenity slops over into a slimy, glaucous fluid in which life sticks, in Proust’s world vice, perversion, loss of sex breaks out like a pox and corrodes everything.

  In their analysis and portrayal of disintegration both Proust and Joyce are unequaled, excepting perhaps by
Dostoievski and Petronius. They are both objective in their treatment—technically classic, though romantic at heart. They are naturalists who present the world as they find it, and say nothing about the causes, nor derive from their findings any conclusions. They are defeatists, men who escape from a cruel, hideous, loathsome reality into ART. After writing the last volume, with its memorable treatise on art, Proust goes back to his death-bed to revise the pages on Albertine. This episode is the core and climax of his great work. It forms the arch of that Inferno into which the mature Proust descended. For if, retiring ever deeper into the labyrinth, Proust had cast a glance back at that which he left behind, he must have seen there in the figure of woman that image of himself in which all life was mirrored. It was an image which tantalized him, an image which lied to him from every reflection, because he had penetrated to an underworld in which there were nothing but shadows and distortions. The world he had walked out on was the masculine world in process of dissolution. With Albertine as the clue, with this single thread in his hand which, despite all the anguish and sorrow of knowledge he refuses to let slip, he feels his way along the hollows of the nerves, through a vast, subterranean world of remembered sensations in which he hears the pumping of the heart but knows not whence it comes, or what it is.

  It has been said that Hamlet is the incarnation of doubt, and Othello the incarnation of jealousy, and so they may be, but—the episode of Albertine, reached after an interval of several centuries of deterioration, seems to me a dramaturgic study of doubt and jealousy so infinitely more vast and complex than either Hamlet or Othello that the Shakespearean dramas, by comparison, resemble the feeble sketches which later are to assume the dimensions of a great fresco. This tremendous convulsion of doubt and jealousy which dominates the book is the reflection of that supreme struggle with Fate which characterizes our entire European history. Today we see about us Hamlets and Othellos by the thousands—such Hamlets, such Othellos, as Shakespeare never dreamed of, such as would make him sweat with pride could he turn over in his grave. This theme of doubt and jealousy, to seize upon its most salient aspects only, is in reality only the reverberation of a much greater theme, a theme more complex, more ramified, which has become heightened, or muddied, if you like, in the interval of time between Shakespeare and Proust. Jealousy is the little symbol of that struggle with Fate which is revealed through doubt. The poison of doubt, of introspection, of conscience, of idealism, overflowing into the arena of sex, develops the marvelous bacillus of jealousy which, to be sure, will ever exist, but which in the past, when life ran high, was held in place and served its proper role and function. Doubt and jealousy are those points of resistance on which the great whet their strength, from which they rear their towering structures, their masculine world. When doubt and jealousy run amok it is because the body has been defeated, because the spirit languishes and the soul becomes unloosed. Then it is that the germs work their havoc and men no longer know whether they are devils or angels, nor whether women are to be shunned or worshiped, nor whether homosexuality is a vice or a blessing. Alternating between the most ferocious display of cruelty and the most supine acquiescence we have conflicts, revolutions, holocausts—over trifles, over nothing. The last war, for example. The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul’s death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.