by Henry Miller
But to get back to the grand plan.… Since I was convinced that I could write about anything under the sun, and excitingly, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make up a list of themes which I thought of interest and submit them to editors of magazines in order that they might select what appealed to them. This entailed writing dozens and dozens of letters. Long, fatuous letters they were, too. It also meant keeping files as well as observing the idiotic rules and regulations of a hundred and one editorial bodies. It involved altercations and disputes, fruitless errands to editorial offices, vexation, disgruntlement, rage, despair, ennui. And postage stamps! After weeks of turmoil and effervescence there might appear one day a letter from an editor saying that he would condescend to read my article if and if and if and but. Never daunted by the ifs and buts, I would regard such a letter as a bona fide pledge, a commission. Good! So I was at liberty, let us say, to write something about Coney Island in winter. If they liked it it would appear in print, my name would be signed to it, and I could show it to my friends, carry it about with me, put it under my pillow at night, read it surreptitiously, over and over, because the first time you see yourself in print you’re beside yourself, you’ve at last proved to the world that you really are a writer, and you must prove it to the world, at least once in your life, or you will go mad from believing it all by yourself.
And so to Coney Island on a wintry day. Alone, of course. It wouldn’t do to have one’s reflections and observations diverted by a trivial-minded friend. A new pad in my pocket and a sharp pencil.
It’s a long, dreary ride to Coney Island in midwinter. Only convalescents and invalids, or demented ones, seem to be trekking there. I feel as though I were slightly mad myself. Who wants to hear about a Coney Island which is all boarded up? I must have put this theme down in a moment of exaltation, believing that nothing could be more inspiring than a picture of desolation.
Desolation is hardly the word for it. As I walk along the boardwalk, the icy wind whistling through my breeches, everything closed tight, it dawns on me that I couldn’t possibly have chosen a more difficult subject to write about. There is absolutely nothing to take note of, unless it be the silence. I see it better through Ulric’s eyes than my own. An illustrator might have a good time of it here, what with the bleak, crazy, tumbling edifices, the snarling piles and planks, the still, empty Ferris wheel, the noiseless roller coasters, rusting under a feeble sun. Just to assure myself that I am on the job, I make a few notes about the crazy look of the razzle-dazzle, the yawning mouth of George C. Tilyou, and so forth.… A hot frankfurter and a cup of steaming hot coffee would do me good, I think. I find a little booth open on a side street off the boardwalk. There is a shooting gallery open a few doors away. Not a customer in sight: the owner is shooting at the clay pigeons himself, for practice, no doubt. A drunken sailor comes lurching along; a few feet away from me he doubles up and lets go. (No need to take note of this.) I go down to the beach and watch the sea gulls. I’m looking at the sea gulls and thinking about Russia. A picture of Tolstoy seated at a bench mending shoes obsesses me. What was the name of his abode again? Yasna Polyana? No, Yasnaya Polyana. Well, anyway, what the hell am I speculating on this for? Wake up! I shake myself and push forward into the icy gale. Driftwood lying all about. Fantastic forms. (So many stories about bottles with messages inside them.) I wish now I had thought to ask MacGregor to come along. That idiotic, pseudo-serious line of his sometimes stimulated me in a perverse way. How he would laugh to see me pacing the beach in search of material! “Well, you’re working anyhow,” I can hear him chirping. “That’s something. But why in hell did you have to pick this for a subject? You know damned well nobody will be interested in it. You probably just wanted a little outing. Now you’ve got a good excuse, haven’t you? Jesus, Henry, you’re just the same as ever—nuts, completely nuts.”
As I board the train to go home I realize that I have made just three lines of notes. I haven’t the slightest idea what I shall say when I sit down to the machine. My mind is a blank. A frozen blank. I sit staring out the window and not even the tremor of a thought assails me. The landscape itself is a frozen blank. The whole world is locked in snow and ice, mute, helpless. I’ve never known such a bleak, dismal, gruesome, lackluster day.
That night I went to bed rather chastened and humbled. Doubly so, because before retiring I had picked up a volume of Thomas Mann (in which there was the Tonio Krüger story) and had been overwhelmed by the flawless quality of the narrative. To my astonishment, however, I awoke the next day full of piss and vinegar. Instead of going for my usual morning stroll—“to get my blood up”—I sat down at the machine immediately after breakfast. By noon I had finished my article on Coney Island. It had come without effort. Why? Because instead of forcing it out I had gone to sleep—after due surrender of the ego, certes. It was a lesson in the futility of struggle. Do your utmost and let Providence do the rest! A petty victory, perhaps, but most illuminating.
The article, of course, was never accepted. (Nothing was ever accepted.) It went the rounds from one editor to another. Nor did it make the rounds alone. Week after week I was turning them out, sending them forth like carrier pigeons, and week after week they came back, always with the stereotyped rejection slip. Nevertheless, nothing daunted, as they say, “always merry and bright,” I adhered rigidly to my program. There it was, the program, on a huge sheet of wrapping paper, tacked up on the wall. Beside it was another big sheet of paper on which were listed the exotic words I was endeavoring to annex to my vocabulary. The problem was how to hitch these words to my texts without having them stick out like sore thumbs. Often I tried them out beforehand, in letters to my friends, in letters to “all and sundry.” The letter writing was for me what shadow boxing is to a pugilist. But imagine a pugilist spending so much time fighting his shadow that when he hooks up with a sparring partner he has no fight left! I could spend two or three hours writing a story, or article, and another six or seven explaining them to my friends by letter. The real effort was going into the letter writing, and perhaps it was best so, now that I look back on it, because it preserved the speed and naturalness of my true voice. I was far too self-conscious, in the early days, to use my own voice. I was the literary man through and through. I made use of every device I discovered, employed every register, assumed a thousand different stances, always confusing the mastery of technique with creation. Experience and technique, those were the two goads that drove me on. To triumph in the world of experience as I formulated it, I would have to live at least a hundred lives. To acquire the right, or shall I say the complete, technique, I would have to live to be a hundred, not a day less.
Some of my more honest friends, brutally candid as they often were, would occasionally remind me that in talking to them I was always myself but that in writing I was not. “Why don’t you write like you talk?” they would say. At first blush the idea struck me as absurd. In the first place I never considered myself a remarkable talker, though they insisted I was. In the second place, the written word seemed so much more eloquent to me than the spoken one. When you talk you can’t stop to polish a phrase, to search for precisely the right word, nor can you go back and expunge a word, a phrase, a whole paragraph. It seemed like an insult to have them tell me, who was struggling for mastery of the word, that I succeeded better without thought than with thought. Poisonous as the idea was, though, it bore fruit. Now and then, after an exhilarating evening with my friends, after I had spouted my head off, had made them drunk with my speeches, I would sneak home and silently review the performance. The words had tumbled out of my mouth in perfect order and with telling effect; there was not only continuity, form, climax and denouement, but rhythm, volume, sonority, aura and magic in the performance. If I stumbled or faltered I went ahead neverthless, later to double back on my tracks, erase the wrong word, expunge the inept phrase, magnify the sense of a swelling cadence through repetition, innuendo and implication, through detour and parentheses
. It was like juggling: the words were alive like balls, could be recalled, could be made to obey, could be changed for other balls, and so on. Or, it was like writing on an invisible slate. One heard the words instead of seeing them. They did not disappear because they had never truly appeared. Hearing them, one had an even keener sense of appreciation, of participation rather, as if viewing a sleight of hand performance. The memory of the ear was just as reliable as the memory of the eye. One might not be able to reproduce a lengthy harangue, even three minutes afterward, but one could detect a false note, a wrong emphasis.
Often I have wondered, after reading about evenings with Mallarmé, or with Joyce, or with Max Jacob, let us say, how these sessions of ours compared. To be sure, none of my companions of those days ever dreamed of becoming a figure in the world of art. They loved to discuss art, all the arts, but they themselves had no thought of becoming artists. Most of them were engineers, architects, physicians, chemists, teachers, lawyers. But they had intellect and they had enthusiasm, and they were all so sincere, so avid, that sometimes I wonder if the music we made might not have rivaled the chamber music which issued from the sacred quarters of the masters. Certainly there was never anything pompous or ordained about these sessions. One spoke as he pleased, was criticized freely, and never bothered his head to wonder if what he had said would please “the master.”
There was no master among us: we were equals, and we could be sublime or idiotic, as we pleased. What brought us together was a mutual hunger for the things we felt deprived of. We had no burning desire to reform the world. We were seeking to enrich ourselves, that was all. In Europe such gatherings often have a political, cultural, or aesthetic background. The members of the group perform their exercises, so to speak, in order later to spread the leaven among the masses. We never thought of the masses—we were too much a part of them. We talked of music, painting, literature because, if one is at all intelligent and sensitive, one naturally ends up in the world of art. We did not come together expressly to talk about such matters, it simply happened thus.
I was probably the only one in the group who took himself seriously. That is why I became such a cantankerous idiot of a pest at times. Secretly I did hope to reform the world. Secretly I was an agitator. It was just this little difference between myself and the rest which made our evenings so lively. In every sentence I uttered there was always an extra ounce of sincerity, an extra grain of truth. It wasn’t playing cricket. I would stir them up—expressly, it seemed—to draw heaps of coal on my head. No one ever fully agreed with me. No matter how I worded my thought, what I said always struck them as farfetched. They would confess, at moments, that they just loved to hear me talk. “Yes,” I would say, “but you never listen.” This would provoke a titter. Then someone would say: “You mean we don’t always agree with you.” More titters. “Shit!” I would answer, “I don’t expect you to agree with me always.… I want you to think… to think for yourselves.” Hear! Hear! “Look,” I would say, making ready to deliver another long tirade, “look.…” “Go on,” someone would pipe up, “go on, give it to us! Blow your top!” Here I would sit down, sullen, silent, apparently squelched. “Come on now, don’t take it to heart, Henry. Here’s a fresh drink. Come on, get it off your chest!” Knowing what they wanted of me, yet hoping that by some extraordinary effort I might alter their attitude, I would give in, melt, then deliver a veritable fusillade. The more desperate and sincere I grew the more they enjoyed themselves. Realizing that the game was up I would slide off into a burlesque performance. I’d say any bloody thing that came into my head, the more absurd and fantastic, the better. I’d insult them royally—but no one took offense. It was like fighting phantoms. Shadowboxing again.…
(I doubt, of course, that anything like this ever went on in the rue de Rome or the rue Ravignan.)
Following out the plan I had laid down for myself I was busier than the busiest executive in the industrial world. Some of the articles I had elected to write demanded considerable research work, which was never an ordeal for me because I loved going to the library and have them dig up books that were hard to find. How many wonderful days and nights I spent at the 42nd Street library, seated at a long table, one among thousands, it seemed, in that main reading room. The tables themselves excited me. It was always my desire to own a table of extraordinary dimensions, a table so large that I could not only sleep on it but dance on it, even skate on it. (There was a writer, once, who worked on such a table, which he had placed in the center of a huge barren room—my ideal as a work place. His name was Andreyev, and needless to add, he was one of my favorites.)
Yes, it gave one a good feeling to be working amidst so many other industrious students in a room the size of a cathedral, under a lofty ceiling which was an imitation of heaven itself. One left the library slightly dazed, often with a holy feeling. It was always a shock to plunge into the crowd at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street; there was no connection between that busy thoroughfare and the peaceful world of books. Often, while waiting for the books to come up from the mysterious depths of the library, I would stroll along the outer aisles glancing at the titles of the amazing reference books which lined the walls. Thumbing those books was enough to set my mind racing for days. Sometimes I sat and meditated, wondering what question I could put to the genius which presided over the spirit of this vast institution that it could not answer. There was no subject under the sun, I suppose, which had not been written about and filed in those archives. My omnivorous appetite pulled me one way, my fear of becoming a bookworm the other way.
It was also enjoyable to make a trip to Long Island City, that most woebegone hole, to see at first hand how chewing gum was manufactured. Here was a world of sheer lunacy—efficiency, it is usually called. In a room filled with a choking powder of sickening sweet stench, hundreds of moronic girls worked like butterflies packing the slabs of gum in wrappers; their nimble fingers, I was told, worked more accurately and skillfully than any machine yet invented. I went through the plant, a huge one, under an escort, each wing as it opened up to view presenting the aspect of another section of hell. It was only when I threw out a random query about the chicle, which is the base of chewing gum, that I stumbled on to the really interesting phase of my research. The chicleros, as they are called, the men who toil in the depths of the jungles of Yucatan, are a fascinating breed of men. I spent weeks at the library reading about their customs and habits. I got so interested in them, indeed, that I almost forgot about chewing gum. And, of course, from a study of the chicleros I was drawn into the world of the Mayans, thence to those fascinating books about Atlantis and the lost continent of Mu, the canals which ran from one side of South America to another, the cities which were lifted a mile high when the Andes came into being, the sea traffic between Easter Island and the western slope of South America, the analogies and affinities between the Amerindian culture and the culture of the Near East, the mysteries of the Aztec alphabet, and so on and so forth until, by some strange detour I came upon Paul Gauguin in the center of the Polynesian archipelago and went home reeling with Noa Noa under my arm. And from the life and letters of Gauguin, which I had to read at once, to the life and letters of Vincent Van Gogh was but a step.
No doubt it is important to read the classics; it is perhaps even more important to first read the literature of one’s own time, which is enormous in itself. But more valuable than either of these, to a writer at least, is to read whatever comes to hand, to follow his nose, as it were. In the musty tomes of every great library there are buried articles by obscure or unknown individuals on subjects ostensibly of no importance, but saturated with data, ideas, fancies, moods, whims, portents of such a caliber that they can only be likened, in their effect, to rare drugs. The most exciting days often began with the search for the definition of a new word. One little word, which the ordinary reader is content to pass over unperturbed, may prove (for a writer) to be a veritable gold mine. From the dictionary I usually went to the encyclo
pedia, not just one encyclopedia but several; from the encyclopedia, to all manner of reference books; from reference books to handbooks, and thence to a nine-day debauch. A debauch of digging and ferreting, digging and ferreting. In addition to the reams of notes I made I copied out pages and pages of excerpts. Sometimes I simply tore out the pages I needed most. Between times I would make forays on the museums. The officials with whom I dealt never doubted for a moment that I was engaged in writing a book which would be a contribution to the subject. I talked as if I knew vastly more than I cared to reveal. I would make casual, oblique references to books I had never read or hint of encounters with eminent authorities I had never met. It was nothing, in such moods, to give myself scholastic degrees which I had not even dreamed of acquiring. I spoke of distinguished leaders in such fields as anthropology, sociology, physics, astronomy, as though I had been intimately associated with them. When I saw that I was getting in too deep I had always the wit to excuse myself and pretend to go to the toilet, which was my word for “exit.” Once, deeply interested in genealogy, I thought it a good idea to take a job for a space in the genealogy division of the public library. It so happened that they were short a man in this division the day I called to make an application for a job. They needed a man so badly that they put me to work immediately, which was more than I had bargained for. The application blank which I had left with the director of the library was a marvel of falsification. I wondered, as I listened to the poor devil who was breaking me in, how long it would take for them to get on to me. Meanwhile my superior was climbing ladders with me, pointing out this and that, bending over in dark corners to extract documents, files, and such like, calling in other employees to introduce me, explaining hurriedly as best he could (whilst messages came and went as in a Shakespearean play) the most salient features of my supposed routine. Realizing in a short time that I was not in the least interested in all this jabberwocky, and thinking of Mona waiting for me to lunch with her, I suddenly interrupted him in the midst of a lengthy exposition of something or other to ask where the toilet was. He looked at me rather strangely, wondering, no doubt, why I hadn’t the decency to hear him out before running to the lavatory, but with the aid of a few grimaces and gestures, which conveyed most patently that I had been caught short, might do it right there on the floor or in the wastebasket, I managed to get out of his clutches, grab my hat and coat which fortunately were still lying on a chair near the door, and run as fast as I could out of the building.…