The Henry Miller Reader

by Lawrence Durrell

  A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there—that of the pulse, the heartbeat. Even in the seemingly stagnant waters of the journal the flux and reflux is evident. It is there in the whole of the work as much as in each fragment. Looked at in its entirety, especially for example in such a work as that of Anaïs Nin’s, this cosmic pulsation corresponds to the death and rebirth of the individual. Life assumes the aspect of a labyrinth into which the seeker is plunged. She goes in unconsciously to slay her old self. One might say, as in this case, that the disintegration of the self had come about through a shock. It would not matter much what had produced the disintegration; the important thing is that at a given moment she passed into a state of two-ness. The old self, which had been attached to the father who abandoned her and the loss of whom created an insoluble conflict in her, found itself confronted with a nascent other self which seems to lead her further and further into darkness and confusion. The diary, which is the story of her retreat from the world into the chaos of regeneration, pictures the labyrinthine struggle waged by these conflicting selves. Sinking into the obscure regions of her soul she seems to draw the world down over her head and with it the people she meets and the relationships engendered by her meetings. The illusion of submergence, of darkness and stagnation, is brought about by the ceaseless observation and analysis which goes on in the pages of the diary. The hatches are down, the sky shut out. Everything—nature, human beings, events, relationships—is brought below to be dissected and digested. It is a devouring process in which the ego becomes a stupendous red maw. The language itself is clear, painfully clear. It is the scorching light of the intellect locked away in a cave. Nothing which this mind comes in contact with is allowed to go undigested. The result is harrowing and hallucinating. We move with the author through her labyrinthine world like a knife making an incision into the flesh. It is a surgical operation upon a world of flesh and blood, a Caesarian operation performed by the embryo with its own private scissors and cleaver.

  Let me make a parenthetical remark here. This diary is written absolutely without malice. The psychologist may remark of this that the pain inflicted upon her by the loss of her father was so great as to render her incapable of causing pain to others. In a sense this is true, but it is a limited view of the matter. My own feeling is rather that we have in this diary the direct, naked thrust which is of the essence of the great tragic dramas of the Greeks. Racine, Corneille, Molière may indulge in malice—not the Greek dramatists. The difference lies in the attitude towards Fate. The warfare is not with men but with the gods. Similarly, in the case of Anaïs Nin’s journal: the war is with herself, with God as the sole witness. The diary was written not for the eyes of others, but for the eye of God. She has no malice any more than she has the desire to cheat or to lie. To lie in a diary is the height of absurdity. One would have to be really insane to do that. Her concern is not with others, except as they may reveal to her something about herself. Though the way is tortuous the direction is always the same, always inward, further inward, towards the heart of the self. Every encounter is a preparation for the final encounter, the confrontation with the real Self. To indulge in malice would be to swerve from the ordained path, to waste a precious moment in the pursuit of her ideal. She moves onward inexorably, as the gods move in the Greek dramas, on towards the realization of her destiny.

  There is a very significant fact attached to the origin of this diary and that is that it was begun in artistic fashion. By that I do not mean that it was done with the skill of an artist, with the conscious use of a technique; no, but it was begun as something to be read by some one else, as something to influence some one else. In that sense as an artist. Begun during the voyage to a foreign land, the diary is a silent communion with the father who has deserted her, a gift which she intends to send him from their new home, a gift of love which she hopes will reunite them. Two days later the war breaks out. By what seems almost like a conspiracy of fate the father and child are kept apart for many years. In the legends which treat of this theme it happens, as in this case, that the meeting takes place when the daughter has come of age.

  And so, in the very beginning of her diary, the child behaves precisely like the artist who, through the medium of his expression, sets about to conquer the world which has denied him. Thinking originally to woo and enchant the father by the testimony of her grief, thwarted in all her attempts to recover him, she begins little by little to regard the separation as a punishment for her own inadequacy. The difference which had marked her out as a child, and which had already brought down upon her the father’s ire, becomes more accentuated. The diary becomes the confession of her inability to make herself worthy of this lost father who has become for her the very paragon of perfection.

  In the very earliest pages of the diary this conflict between the old, inadequate self which was attached to the father and the budding, unknown self which she was creating manifests itself. It is a struggle between the real and the ideal, the annihilating struggle which for most people is carried on fruitlessly to the end of their lives and the significance of which they never learn. Scarcely two years after the diary is begun comes the following passage:

  “Quand aucun bruit ne se fait entendre, quand la nuit a recouvert de son sombre paletot la grande ville dont elle me cache l’éclat trompeur, alors il me semble entendre une voix mystérieuse qui me parle; je suppose qu’elle vient de moi-même car elle pense comme moi . . . Il me semble que je cherche quelque chose, je ne sais pas quoi, mais quand mon esprit libre dégage des griffes puissantes de ce mortel ennemi, le Monde, il me semble que je trouve ce que je voulais. Serait-ce l’oubli? le silence? Je ne sais, mais cette même voix, quand je crois être seule, me parle. Je ne puis comprendre ce qu’elle dit mais je me dis que l’on ne peut jamais être seule et oubliée dans le monde. Car je nomme cette voix: Mon Génie: mauvais ou bon, je ne puis savoir . . .”

  Even more striking is a passage in the same volume which begins: “Dans ma vie terrestre rien n’est changé . . .” After recounting the petty incidents which go to make up her earthly life, she adds, but:

  “Dans la vie que je mène dans l’infini cela est différent. Là, tout est bonheur et douceur, car c’est un rêve. Là, il n’y a pas d’école aux sombres classes, mais il y a Dieu. Là, il n’y a pas de chaise vide dans la famille, qui est toujours au complet. Là, il n’y a pas de bruit, mais de la solitude qui donne la paix. Là, il n’y a pas d’inquiétude pour l’avenir, car c’est un autre rêve. Là, il n’y a pas de larmes, car c’est un sourire. Voilà l’infini où je vis, car je vis deux fois. Quand je mourrai sur la terre, il arrivera, comme il arrive a deux lumières allumées à la fois, quand l’une s’éteint l’autre rallume, et celà avec plus de force. Je m’éteindrai sur la terre, mais je me rallumerai dans l’infini . . .”

  She speaks of herself mockingly at times as “une étoilique”—a word which she has invented, and why not, since as she says, we have the word lunatique. Why not “étoilique”? “Today,” she writes, “I described very poorly le pays des merveilles où mon esprit était. Je volais dans ce pays lointain où rien n’est impossible. Hier je suis revenue, à la réalité, à la tristesse. Il me semble que je tombais d’une grande splendeur à une triste misère.”

  One thinks inevitably of the manifestoes of the Surrealists, of their unquenchable thirst for the marvelous, and that phrase of Breton’s, so significant of the dreamer, the visionary: “we should conduct ourselves as though we were really in the world!” It may seem absurd to couple the utterances of the Surrealists with the writings of a child of thirteen, but there is a great deal which they have in common and there is also a point of departure which is even more important. The pursuit of the marvelous is at bottom nothing but the sure instinct of the poet speaking and it manifests itself everywhere in all epochs, in all
conditions of life, in all forms of expression. But this marvelous pursuit of the marvelous, if not understood, can also act as a thwarting force, can become a thing of evil, crushing the individual in the toils of the Absolute. It can become as negative and destructive a force as the yearning for God. When I said a while back that the child had begun her great work in the spirit of an artist I was trying to emphasize the fact that, like the artist, the problem which beset her was to conquer the world. In the process of making herself fit to meet her father again (because to her the world was personified in the Father) she was unwittingly making herself an artist, that is, a self-dependent creature for whom a father would no longer be necessary. When she does encounter him again, after a lapse of almost twenty years, she is a full-fledged being, a creature fashioned after her own image. The meeting serves to make her realize that she has emancipated herself; more indeed, for to her amazement and dismay she also realizes that she has no more need of the one she was seeking. The significance of her heroic struggle with herself now reveals itself symbolically. That which was beyond her, which had dominated and tortured her, which possessed her, one might say, no longer exists. She is de-possessed and free at last to live her own life.

  Throughout the diary the amazing thing is this intuitive awareness of the symbolic nature of her role. It is this which illuminates the most trivial remarks, the most trivial incidents she records. In reality there is nothing trivial throughout the whole record; everything is saturated with a purpose and significance which gradually becomes clear as the confession progresses. Similarly there is nothing chaotic about the work, although at first glance it may give that impression. The fifty volumes are crammed with human figures, incidents, voyages, books read and commented upon, reveries, metaphysical speculations, the dramas in which she is enveloped, her daily work, her preoccupation with the welfare of others, in short with a thousand and one things which go to make up her life. It is a great pageant of the times patiently and humbly delineated by one who considered herself as nothing, by one who has almost completely effaced herself in the effort to arrive at a true understanding of life. It is in this sense again that the human document rivals the work of art, or in times such as ours, replaces the work of art. For, in a profound sense, this is the work of art which never gets written—because the artist whose task it is to create it never gets born. We have here, instead of the consciously or technically finished work (which today seems to us more than ever empty and illusory), the unfinished symphony which achieves consummation because each line is pregnant with a soul struggle. The conflict with the world takes place within. It matters little, for the artist’s purpose, whether the world be the size of a pinhead or an incommensurable universe. But there must be a world! And this world, whether real or imaginary, can only be created out of despair and anguish. For the artist there is no other world. Even if it be unrecognizable, this world which is created out of sorrow and deprivation is true and vital, and eventually it expropriates the “other” world in which the ordinary mortal lives and dies. It is the world in which the artist has his being, and it is in the revelation of his undying self that art takes its stance. Once this is apprehended there can be no question of monotony or fatigue, of chaos or irrelevance. We move amidst boundless horizons in a perpetual state of awe and humility. We enter, with the author, into unknown worlds and we share with the latter all the pain, beauty, terror and illumination which exploration entails.

  Of the truly great authors no one has ever complained that they over-elaborated. On the contrary, we usually bemoan the fact that there is nothing further left us to read. And so we turn back to what we have and we reread, and as we reread we discover marvels which previously we had ignored. We go back to them again and again, as to inexhaustible wells of wisdom and delight. Almost invariably, it is curious to note, these authors of whom I speak are observed to be precisely those who have given us more than the others. They claim us precisely because we sense in them an unquenchable flame. Nothing they wrote seems to us insignificant—not even their notes, their jottings, not even the designs which they scribbled unconsciously in the margins of their copybooks. Whereas with the meager spirits everything seems superfluous, themselves as well as the works they have given us.

  At the bottom of this relentless spirit of elaboration is care—Sorgen. The diarist in particular is obsessed with the notion that everything must be preserved. And this again is born out of a sense of destiny. Not only, as with the ordinary artist, is there the tyrannical desire to immortalize one’s self, but there is also the idea of immortalizing the world in which the diarist lives and has his being. Everything must be recorded because everything must be preserved. In the diary of Anaïs Nin there is a kind of desperation, almost like that of a shipwrecked sailor thrown up on a desert island. From the flotsam and jetsam of her wrecked life the author struggles to create anew. It is a heart-breaking effort to recover a lost world. It is not, as some might imagine, a deliberate retreat from the world; it is an involuntary separation from the world. Every one experiences this feeling in more or less degree. Every one, whether consciously or unconsciously, is trying to recover the luxurious, effortless sense of security which he knew in the womb. Those who are able to realize themselves do actually achieve this state; not by a blind, unconscious yearning for the uterine condition, but by transforming the world in which they live into a veritable womb. It is this which seems to have terrified Aldous Huxley, for example, when standing before El Greco’s painting, The Dream of Philip 2nd. Mr. Huxley was terrified by the prospect of a world converted into a fish-gut. But El Greco must have been supremely happy inside his fish-gut world, and the proof of his contentment, his ease, his satisfaction, is the world-feeling which his pictures create in the mind of the spectator. Standing before his paintings one realizes that this is a world! One realizes also that it is a world dominated by vision. It is no longer a man looking at the world, but a man inside his own world ceaselessly reconstructing it in terms of the light within. That it is a world englobed, that El Greco seems to Aldous Huxley, for example, much like a Jonah in the belly of the whale, is precisely the comforting thing about El Greco’s vision. The lack of a boundless infinity, which seems so to disturb Mr. Huxley, is on the contrary, a most beneficent state of affairs. Every one who has assisted at the creation of a world, any one who has made a world of his own, realizes that it is precisely the fact that his world has definite limits which is what is good about it. One has to first lose himself to discover the world of his own, the world which, because it is rigidly limited, permits the only true condition of freedom.

  Which brings us back to the labyrinth and the descent into the womb, into the night of primordial chaos in which “knowledge is refunded into ignorance.” This laborious descent into the infernal regions is really the initiation for the final descent into the eternal darkness of death. He who goes down into the labyrinth must first strip himself of all possessions, as well as of prejudices, notions, ideals, ideas, and so on. He must return into the womb naked as the day he was born, with only the core of his future self, as it were. No one, of course, offers himself up to this experience unless he is harried by vision. The vision is first and foremost, always. And this vision is like the voice of conscience itself. It is a double vision, as we well know. One sees forwards and backwards with equal clarity. But one does not see what is directly under the nose; one does not see the world which is immediately about. This blindness to the everyday, to the normal or abnormal circumstances of life, is the distinguishing feature of the restless visionary. The eyes, which are unusually endowed, have to be trained to see with normal vision. Superficially this sort of individual seems to be concerned only with what is going on about him; the daily communion with the diary seems at first blush to be nothing more than a transcription of this normal, trivial, everyday life. And yet nothing can be further from the truth. The fact is that this extraordinary cataloguing of events, objects, impressions, ideas, etc. is only a keyboard exercise, as
it were, to attain the faculty of seeing what is so glibly recorded. Actually, of course, few people in this world see what is going on about them. Nobody really sees until he understands, until he can create a pattern into which the helter-skelter of passing events fits and makes a significance. And for this sort of vision a personal death is required. One has to be able to see first with the eyes of a Martian, or a Neptunian. One has to have this extraordinary vision, this clairvoyance, to be able to take in the multiplicity of things with ordinary eyes. Nobody sees with his eyes alone; we see with our souls. And this problem of putting the soul into the eye is the whole problem of a diarist such as Anaïs Nin. The whole vast diary, regarded from this angle, assumes the nature of the record of a second birth. It is the story of death and transfiguration.