By the time I caught up with him he seemed to have lived the proverbial nine lives of a cat. Knowing him superficially, one would be inclined to say he had wasted his life. He had written a few books in German, but whether they had been published or not no one knew. He was always vague about that past anyway, except when he was drunk, and then he would expand for a whole evening over a detail which he felt in the mood to embellish. He never threw out chunks of his life, just these unrelated details which he knew how to elaborate with the skill and cunning of a criminal lawyer. The truth is, he had led so many lives, had assumed so many identities, had acted so many parts, that to give any hint of totality would have meant reconstructing a jig-saw puzzle. He was as bewildering to himself, to be honest, as he was to others. His secret life was not his private life, for he had no private life. He lived continually en marge. He was “limitrophe,” one of his favorite words, to everything, but he was not limitrophe to himself. In the first book he wrote in French (Sentiments Limitrophes) there were microscopic revelations of his youth which verged on the hallucinatory. A passage which reveals how he came alive at the age of nine (on his native heath, the Schmelz) is a masterly piece of cortical dissection. One feels at this point in the narrative, which is an autobiography aux faits divers, that he was close to being endowed with a soul. But a few pages later he loses himself again and the soul remains in limbo.
Close association over a period of years with a man of his type has its rewards as well as its drawbacks. Looking back on those years with Fred I can think only of the good which resulted from our alliance. For it was an alliance even more than a friendship, if I may put it that way. We were allied to meet the future which every day presented its hydra-headed threat of annihilation. We got to believe, after a time, that there was no situation we could not meet and overcome. Often we must have seemed more like confederates than friends.
In everything he was the clown, even in making love. He could make me laugh when I was boiling with rage. I don’t seem to recall a single day in which we did not laugh heartily, often until the tears came to our eyes. The three principal questions we put to each other every time we met were: 1.) Is there food? 2.) Was it a good lay? 3.) Are you writing? Everything centered around these three exigencies. It was the writing which concerned us most, but we always behaved as though the other two were more important. Writing was a constant, like the weather. But food and lays were quixotic: one could never be sure of either. Money, when we had it, we shared to the last penny. There was no question whom it belonged to. “Is there any dough?” we would ask, just as we would ask, “Is there food?” It was or it wasn’t, that was all there was to it. Our friendship began on this note and it remained thus till we separated. It’s such a simple, efficacious way of living, I wonder it isn’t tried out on a universal scale.
There were three possessions he clung to, despite all the pawning and liquidating of the dark days: his typewriter, his watch and his fountain pen. Each was of the finest make, and he took care of them as an engineer would take care of his locomotive. He said they were gifts, gifts from women he had loved. Maybe they were. I know he treasured them. The typewriter was the easiest thing for him to part with, temporarily, of course. For a time it seemed as though it were in the hock shop more than chez nous. It was a good thing, he used to say. It forced him to write with the pen. The pen was a Parker pen, the finest I had ever seen. If you asked to use it, he would unscrew the top before handing it to you. That was his little way of saying, “Be gentle with it!” The watch he seldom carried about with him. It hung on a nail over his work table. It kept perfect time.
When he sat down to work these three articles were always present. They were his talismen. He couldn’t write with another machine or another pen. Later, when he acquired an alarm clock, he still wound his watch regularly. He always looked to it for the time, not to the alarm clock. When he changed residence, which was fairly frequent, he always disposed of some precious relic which he had been holding on to for years. He enjoyed being forced to move. It meant reducing his baggage, because all he allowed himself was one valise. Everything had to get in that valise or be discarded. The things he clung to were souvenirs—a post card from an old friend, a photo of an old love, a pen knife picked up at the flea market. Always the trifles. He would throw away a sweater or a pair of pants to make room for his favorite books. Of course I always rescued the things I knew he didn’t want to get rid of. I would steal back to his room and make a bundle of them; a few days later I would show up and hand them to him. The expression on his face then was like that of a child recovering an old toy. He would actually weep with joy. To prove, though, that he really didn’t need them he would dig out some precious object and make me a present of it. It was like saying, “All right, I’ll keep the sweater (or the pants), since you insist on it, but here’s my valuable camera. I really have no use for it any more.” Whatever the gift, I was hardly likely to have any use for it either, but I would accept it as though it were a royal gift. In a sentimental mood he would sometimes offer me his fountain pen—the typewriter I couldn’t use because it had a French keyboard. The watch I accepted several times.
Having a job on the newspaper, he had only a few hours in the afternoon to give to his writing. In order not to worry himself about how much or how little he was accomplishing, he made it a rule to write just two pages a day, no more. He would stop in the middle of a sentence if it were the bottom of that second page. He always seemed extremely cheerful to have accomplished this much. “Two pages a day, 365 days in the year, that makes 730,” he would say. “If I can do 250 in a year I’ll be satisfied. I’m not writing a roman fleuve.” He had sense enough to know that, with the best intentions in the world, one seldom has the moral courage to write every day of the week. He made allowance for bad days: vile moods, hang-overs, fresh lays, unexpected visits, and so on. Even if the interruption lasted a week he would never try to write more than the two pages he had fixed as his stint. “It’s good not to exhaust yourself,” he would say chirpingly. “It leaves you fresh the next day.” “But don’t you feel like going on, don’t you feel like writing six or seven pages sometimes?” I would ask. He would grin. “Sure I do, but I restrain myself.” And then he would quote me a Chinese proverb about the master knowing how to refrain from working miracles. In his breast-pocket, of course, he always carried a notebook. At work he no doubt made notes with that flawless Parker pen of his, or continued where he had left off (bottom of page two).
It was characteristic of him to create the impression that everything was easy. Even writing. “Don’t try too hard,” that was his motto. In other words, “Easy does it.” If you intruded upon him while he was at work he showed no irritation whatever. On the contrary, he would get up smiling, invite you to stay and chat with him. Always imperturbable, as though nothing could really interrupt what he was doing or thinking. At the same time he was discreet about intruding on the other person. Unless he was moody. Then he would burst in on me, or any one, and say: “You’ve got to drop what you’re doing, I want to talk to you. Let’s go somewhere and have a drink, eh? I can’t work today. You shouldn’t work either, it’s too beautiful, life is too short.” Or perhaps he had just taken a fancy to a girl and he needed some money. “You’ve got to help me find some dough,” he would say, “I promised to meet her at 5:30 sharp. It’s important.” That meant I would have to go out and hit somebody up. I knew plenty of Americans, so he said, and Americans always had money hidden away. “Don’t be shy about it,” he would say. “Get a hundred francs while you’re at it, or three hundred. Pay day will be here soon.”
On pay day we were always most broke, it seemed. Everything went for debts. We would allow ourselves one good meal and trust in Providence to carry us through till the next pay day. We had to pay these little debts or there would be no more credit. But over a meal sometimes we would get a little high and decide to let it all ride. We would have our fling and wonder how to make up for it on the mor
row. Often a stranger would turn up in the nick of time, one of those old friends from America who wanted to see the sights. We always handled the money for these visitors from America “so that they wouldn’t be cheated.” Thus, in addition to borrowing a bit, we would put aside a little extra on the sly.
Now and then an old friend of his would turn up, some one he had known in Italy, Yugoslavia, Prague, Berlin, Majorca, Morocco. Only then would one realize that the amazing tales he seemed to invent when drunk had a basis in fact. He was not one to boast of his travels or adventures. Usually he was shy and discreet about his personal experiences; only when drunk would he reveal choice morsels of the past. And then it was as though he were talking about some one else, some one he had known and identified himself with.
One day an Austrian friend turned up from God knows where. He was in a bad state morally and physically. Over a good meal he confessed that he was wanted by the police. We kept him in hiding for about two months, allowing him to go out of the house only at night when accompanied by Fred or myself. It was quite a wonderful period for the three of us. Not only did I get an insight into Fred’s past but I got an insight into my own past. We were living then in Clichy, not very far from Céline’s famous clinic. There was a cemetery a few blocks from the house to which we repaired in the evenings, always with one eye open for an agent.
After a time Erich, our guest, grew tired of reading and begged for something to do. I was at that time deep in Proust. I had marked off whole pages of Albertine Disparue which he eagerly agreed to copy for me on the typewriter. Every day there was a fresh pile of script lying on my work table. I can never forget how grateful he was for my giving him this task to perform. Nearing the end, and observing that he had become thoroughly absorbed in the text, I invited him to give me his observations viva voce. I was so fascinated by his elaborate analyses of the passages selected that finally I persuaded him to go over the excerpts and make detailed annotations. At first he suspected that I was stringing him along, but when I had convinced him of the importance of his contribution his gratitude knew no bounds. He went to it like a ferret, pursuing every imaginable thread which would amplify the problem significantly. To see him work one would think he had received a commission from Gallimard. He worked more diligently and painstakingly than Proust himself, it seemed to me. All to prove that he really was capable of doing an honest day’s work.
I can’t remember any period of my life when the time flew more quickly than it did at Clichy. The acquisition of two bicycles worked a complete metamorphosis in our routine. Everything was planned so as not to interfere with our afternoon rides. At four on the dot Fred would have finished his two pages. I can see him now, in the courtyard, oiling and polishing his machine. He gave it the same loving care that he bestowed on his typewriter. He had every gadget that could be tacked on to it, including a speedometer. Sometimes he would sleep only three or four hours in order to take a long spin, to Versailles or St. Germain-en-Laye, for example. When the Tour de France was on we would go to the movies every night in order to follow the progress of the race. When the six-day races came to the Vel d’Hiv we were there, ready to stay up all night.
Once in a while we dropped in at the Medrano. When my friend Renaud came up from Dijon we even ventured to go to the Bal Tabarin and the Moulin Rouge, places we loathed. The cinema was the principal source of relaxation, however. What I shall always remember about the cinema is the excellent meal we stowed away before entering the place. A meal and then a few leisurely moments at a bar, over a café arrosé de rhum. Then a quick hop to the nearest pissotière amidst the hum of traffic and the stir of idle throngs. During the entr’acte another dash to the bistro, another visit to the urinal. Waiting for the curtain to go up we munched a peanut bar or lapped up an Eskimo. Simple pleasures, asinine, it seemed sometimes. On the way home a conversation begun in the street would often continue until dawn. Sometimes, just before dawn, we would cook ourselves a meal, polish off a couple of bottles of wine, and then, ready to hit the hay, would curse the birds for making such a racket.
Some of the more scabrous episodes belonging to this idyllic period I have recorded in Quiet Days in Clichy and “Mara-Marignan,” texts which are unfortunately unpublishable in England or America. It is strange that I always think of this period as “quiet days.” They were anything but quiet, those days. Yet never did I accomplish more. I worked on three or four books at once. I was seething with ideas. The Avenue Anatole France on which we lived was anything but picturesque; it resembled a monotonous stretch of upper Park Avenue, New York. Perhaps our ebullience was due to the fact that for the first time in many a year we were enjoying what might be called a relative security. For the first time in ages I had a permanent address, for about a year.
My eye falls on Le Quatuor en Ré Majeur on the shelf by my elbow. I open it at random, musing on this droll companion of other days. In a few lines he gives a portrait of himself. It seems extremely apposite after the above . . . “Je suis timide et d’humeur inégale,” the passage begins. “Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betrübt. De brusques accès de mélancolie et d’effrayants élans de joie alternent en moi, sans transition aucune. Le cynisme n’est pas mon fort. Si je m’en sers quand même, comme tout à l’heure, par exemple, c’est précisement parceque je suis timide, parceque je crains le ridicule. Toujours prêt à fondre en larmes, j’éprouve le besoin de tourner en dérision mes sentiments le plus nobles. Une espèce de masochisme, sans doute.
“Et puis, il y a autre chose aussi qui explique mes velléites d’arrogance: je sais que tout à l’heure, je vais être obligé de me dégonfler; alors, pour mieux me dégonfer, je me gonfle d’abord; me gonfle de culot factice, de forfanterie, tellement ma couardise sentimentale et naturelle me dégoute de moi-même. Et comme ma sentimentalité porte surtout sur les femmes et sur l’amour, c’est sur ces sujets que ma hablerie artificielle s’acharne le plus furieusement.”
During all these years of intimate association we were always fully conscious of the fact that we were enjoying life to the hilt. We knew there could not be anything better than what we were experiencing every day of our lives. We felicitated one another on it frequently. For the world in general I rather think that the ten years preceding the war were not particularly joyful times. The continuous succession of economic and political crises which characterized the decade proved nerve-racking to most people. But, as we often used to say: “Bad times are good times for us.” Why that should be so I don’t know, but it was true. Perhaps the artist, in following his own rhythm, is permanently out of step with the world. The threat of war only served to remind us that we had waged war with the world all our lives. “During a war money is plentiful,” Fred used to say with a grin. “It’s only before and after the war that things are bad. War time is a good time for guys like us. You’ll see.”
Fred had spent the closing years of the First World War in an insane asylum. Apparently it hadn’t done him any great injury. He was out of harm’s way, as we say. As soon as they opened the gates he sailed out, free as a bird, his tail set for Paris. He may have lived a while in Berlin and Prague before reaching Paris. I think he had also been in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. By the time we met in Paris his wanderings had become rather dim in his memory. Italy, Yugoslavia, North Africa, even these more recent adventures had lost their edge. What I remember distinctly about all these wanderings is that in every place he was hungry. He never seemed to forget the number of days on end he had gone without food in a certain place. Since my own wanderings had been colored by the same preoccupation, I relished the morbid accounts he gave me now and then. Usually these reminiscences were aroused when we were pulling our belts tight. I remember once at the Villa Seurat, not having had a morsel for forty-eight hours, how I flopped down on the couch, declaring that I would remain there until a miracle happened. “You can’t do that,” he said, a tone of unusual desperation in his voice. “That’s what I did in Rome once. I nearly died. No one came for ten days.�
� That started him off. He talked so much about prolonged and involuntary fasts that it goaded me into action. For some reason we had ceased to think in terms of credit. In the old days it was easy for me, because I was innocent and ignorant of the ways of the French. Somehow, the longer I lived in Paris the less courage I had to ask a restaurant keeper for credit. The war was getting closer and closer; people were getting more and more jittery. Finally, towards the end, knowing the war could not be staved off, they began to splurge. There was that last minute gaiety which means the jig is up.
Our gaiety, which had been constant, was the result of a deep conviction that the world would never be put to rights. Not for us, at least. We were going to live en marge, fattening on the crumbs which were dropped from the rich man’s table. We tried to accommodate ourselves to doing without those essentials which keep the ordinary citizen ensnared. We wanted no possessions, no titles, no promises of better conditions in the future. “Day by day,” that was our motto. To reach bottom we did not have to sink very far. Besides, we were resilient.
Never shall I forget one Christmas day we spent together, Reichel, Fred and myself. It was about noon when they turned up, expecting naturally that I would have food and wine on hand. I had nothing. Nothing but a hard crust of bread which I was too disgusted to bother nibbling. Oh yes, there was a drop of wine—about the fifth of a liter bottle. I remember that distinctly because what fascinated me later, after they had left, was the recollection of how long this meager portion of wine had lasted. I remember too, most distinctly, that for a long time the crust of bread and the almost empty bottle stood untouched in the middle of the table. Perhaps because it was Christmas we all exhibited an unusual restraint about the absence of food. Perhaps too it was because our stomachs were light and the cigarettes short that the conversation proved much more exciting than filling our bellies would. The crust of bread lying there in full view all the time had started Reichel off on a story about his prison experiences. It was a long story about his awkwardness and stupidity, how he had been cuffed and cursed for being a hopeless idiot. There was a great to-do about right hand and left hand, his not remembering which was his right hand and which was his left hand. In telling a story Reichel always acted it out. There he was, walking up and down the studio, rehearsing his stupid past, his gestures so grotesque, so pathetic, that we laughed and cried at the same time. In the act of demonstrating a salute which “they” had finally succeeded in teaching him to do with éclat, he suddenly took notice of the crust of bread. Without interrupting his story he gently broke off a corner of it, poured himself a thimbleful of wine and leisurely dipped the bread in the wine. With this Fred and I automatically did the same. We were standing up, each with a tiny glass in one hand and a morsel of bread in the other. I remember that moment vividly: it was like taking communion, I thought to myself. As a matter of fact, it was really the first communion I ever participated in. I think we were all aware of this, though nothing was said about it. Anyhow, as the story progressed we marched back and forth, crossed and recrossed each other’s path numerous times, sometimes bumping into one another and making quick apologies, but continuing to pace back and forth, to cross and recross one another’s paths.
The Henry Miller Reader Page 35