by Henry Miller
It’s thus I’m standing one afternoon in the broiling sun outside the little station at Louveciennes, a tiny part of me alive and sprouting. The hour when the stock report comes through the air-over the air, as they say. In the bistro across the way from the station is hidden a machine and in the machine is hidden a man and in the man is hidden a voice. And the voice, which is the voice of a full-grown idiot, says-American Can… . American Tel. & Tel… . In French it says it, which is even more idiotic. American Can … American Tel. & Tel… . And then suddenly, like Jacob when he mounted the golden ladder, suddenly all the voices of heaven break loose. Like a geyser spurting forth from the bare earth the whole American scene gushes upAmerican Can, American Tel. & Tel., Atlantic & Pacific, Standard Oil, United Cigars, Father John, Sacco & Vanzetti, Uneeda Biscuit, Seaboard Air Line, Sapolio, Nick Carter, Trixie Friganza, Foxy Grandpa, the Gold Dust Twins, Tom Sharkey, Valeska Suratt, Commodore Schley, Millie de Leon, Theda Bara, Robert E. Lee, Little Nemo, Lydia Pinkham, Jesse James, Annie Oakley, Diamond Jim Brady, Schlitz-Milwaukee, Hemp St. Louis, Daniel Boone, Mark Hanna, Alexander Dowie, Carrie Nation, Mary Baker Eddy, Pocahontas, Fatty Arbuckle, Ruth Snyder, Lillian Russell, Sliding Billy Watson, Olga Nethersole, Billy Sunday, Mark Twain, Freeman & Clarke, Joseph Smith, Battling Nelson, Aimee Semple McPherson, Horace Greeley, Pat Rooney, Peruna, John Philip Sousa, Jack London, Babe Ruth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Al Capone, Abe Lincoln, Brigham Young, Rip Van Winkle, Krazy Kat, Liggett & Meyers, the Hallroom Boys, Horn & Hardart, Fuller Brush, the Katzenjammer Kids, Gloomy Gus, Thomas Edison, Buffalo Bill, the Yellow Kid, Booker T. Washington, Czolgosz, Arthur Brisbane, Henry Ward Beecher, Ernest Seton Thompson, Margie Pennetti, Wrigley’s Spearmint, Uncle Remus, Svoboda, David Harum, John Paul Jones, Grape Nuts, Aguinaldo, Nell Brinkley, Bessie McCoy, Tod Sloan, Fritzi Scheff, Laf-cadio Hearn, Anna Held, Little Eva, Omega Oil, Maxine Elliott, Oscar Hammerstein, Bostock, The Smith Brothers, Zbysko, Clara Kimball Young, Paul Revere, Samuel Gompers, Max Linder, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Corona-Corona, Uncas, Henry Clay, Woolworth, Patrick Henry, Cremo, George C. Tilyou, Long Tom, Christy Matthewson, Adeline Genee, Richard Carle, Sweet Caporals, Park & Tilford’s, Jeanne Eagels, Fanny Hurst, Olga Petrova, Yale & Towne, Terry McGovern, Frisco, Marie Cahill, James J. Jeffries, the Housatonic, the Penobscot, Evangeline, Sears Roebuck, the Salmagundi, Dreamland, P. T. Barnum, Luna Park, Hiawatha, Bill Nye, Pat McCarren, the Rough Riders, Mischa Elman, David Belasco, Farragut, The Hairy Ape, Minnehaha, Arrow Collars, Sunrise, Sun Up, the Shenandoah, Jack Johnson, the Little Church Around the Corner, Cab Calloway, Elaine Hammerstein, Kid McCoy, Ben Ami, Ouida, Peck’s Bad Boy, Patti, Eugene V. Debs, Delaware & Lackawanna, Carlo Tresca, Chuck Connors, George Ade, Emma Goldman, Sitting Bull, Paul Dressler, Child’s, Hubert’s Museum, The Bum, Florence Mills, the Alamo, Peacock Alley, Pomander Walk, The Gold Rush, Sheepshead Bay, Strangler Lewis, Mimi Aguglia, The Barber Shop Chord, Bobby Walthour, Painless Parker, Mrs. Leslie Carter, The Police Gazette, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Bustanoby’s, Paul & Joe’s, William Jennings Bryan, George Al. Cohan, Swami Vivekananda, Sadakichi Hartman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Monitor and the Merrimac, Snuffy the Cabman, Dorothy Dix, Amato, the Great Sylvester, Joe Jackson, Bunny, Elsie Janis, Irene Franklin, The Beale Street Blues, Ted Lewis, Wine, Woman & Song, Blue Label Ketchup, Bill Bailey, Sid Olcott, In the Gloaming Genevieve and the Banks of the Wabash far away….
Everything American coming up in a rush. And with every name a thousand intimate details of my life are connected. What Frenchman passing me in the street suspects that I carry around inside me a dictionary of names? and with each name a life and a death? When I walk down the street with a rapt air does any frog know what street I’m walking down? Does he know that I am walking inside the great Chinese Wall? Nothing is registered in my face-neither suffering, nor joy, nor hope, nor despair. I walk the streets with the face of a coolie. I have seen the land ravaged, homes devastated, families uptorn. Each city I walked through has killed me-so vast the misery, so endless the unremitting toil. From one city to another I walk, leaving behind me a grand procession of dead and clanking selves. But 1 myself go on and on and on. And all the while I hear the musicians tuning up….
Last night I was walking again through the Fourteenth Ward. I came again upon my idol, Eddie Carney, the boy whom I have not seen since I left the old neigh borhood. He was tall and thin, handsome in an Irish way. He took possession of me body and soul. There were three streets-North First, Fillmore Place and Driggs Avenue. These marked the boundaries of the known world. Beyond was Thule, Ultima Thule. It was the period of San Juan Hill, Free Silver, Pinocchio, Uneeda. In the basin, not far from Wallabout Market, lay the warships. A strip of asphalt next to the curb allowed the cyclists to spin to Coney Island and back. In every package of Sweet Caporals there was a photograph, sometimes a soubrette, sometimes a prizefighter, sometimes a flag. Toward evening Paul Sauer would put a tin can through the bars of his window and call for raw sauerkraut. Also toward evening Lester Reardon, proud, princely, golden-haired, would walk from his home past the baker shop-an event of primary importance. On the south side lay the homes of the lawyers and physicians, the politicians, the actors, the firehouse, the funeral parlor, the Protestant churches, the burlesk, the fountain; on the north side lay the tin factory, the iron works, the veterinary’s, the cemetery, the schoolhouse, the police station, the morgue, the slaughterhouse, the gas tanks, the fish market, the Democratic club. There were only three men to fear-old man Ramsay, the gospel-monger, crazy George Denton, the peddler, and Doc Martin, the bug exterminator. Types were already clearly distinguishable: the buffoons, the earth men, the paranoiacs, the volatiles, the mystagogues, the drudges, the nuts, the drunkards, the liars, the hypocrites, the harlots, the sadists, the cringers, the misers, the fanatics, the Urnings, the criminals, the saints, the princes. Jenny Maine was hump for the monkeys. Alfie Betcha was a crook. Joe Goeller was a sissy. Stanley was my first friend. Stanley Borowski. He was the first “other” person I recognized. He was a wildcat. Stanley recognized no law except the strap which his old man kept in the back of the barber shop. When his old man belted him you could hear Stanley screaming blocks away. In this world everything was done openly, in broad daylight. When Silberstein the pants maker went out of his mind they laid him out on the sidewalk in front of his home and put the strait jacket on him. His wife, who was with child, was so terrified that she dropped the brat on the sidewalk right beside him. Professor Martin, the bug exterminator, was just returning home after a long spree. He had two ferrets in his coat pockets and one of them got away on him. Stanley Borowski drove the ferret down the sewer for which he got a black eye then and there from Professor Martin’s son Harry who was a halfwit. On the shed over the paint shop, just across the street, Willie Maine was standing with his pants down, jerking away for dear life. “Bjork” he said. “Bjork! Bjork” The fire engine came and turned the hose on him. His old man, who was a drunkard, called the cops. The cops came and almost beat his old man to death. Meanwhile, a block away, Pat McCarren was standing at the bar treating his cronies to champagne. The matinee was just over and the soubrettes from The Bum were piling into the back room with their sailor friends. Crazy George Denton was driving his wagon up the street, a whip in one hand and a Bible in the other. At the top of his crazy voice he was yelling “Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of my brethren ye do it unto me also,” or some such crap. Mrs. Gorman was standing in the doorway in her dirty wrapper, her boobies half out, and mutter ing “Tch tch tch! ” She was a member of Father Carroll’s church on the north side. “Good marnin’ father, fine marnin’ this marnin’!”
It was this evening, after the dinner, that it all came over me again-I mean about the musicians and the dance they are making ready. We had prepared a humble banquet for ourselves, Carl and I. A meal made entirely of delectables: radishes, black olives, tomatoes, sardines, cheese, Jewish bread, bananas, apple sauce, a couple of liters of Algerian wine, fourteen degrees. It was warm outdoor
s and very still. We sat there after the meal smoking contentedly, almost ready to doze off, so good was the meal and so comfortable the hard chairs with the light fading and that stillness about the rooftops as if the houses themselves were quietly breathing through the fents. And like many another evening, after we had sat in silence for a while and the room almost dark, suddenly he began to talk about himself, about something in the past which in the silence and the gloom of the evening began to take shape, not in words precisely, because it was beyond words what he was conveying to me. I don’t think I caught the words at all, but just the music that was coming from him-a kind of sweet, woody music which came through the Algerian wine and the radishes and the black olives. Talking about his mother he was, about coming out of her womb, and after him his brother and his sister, and then the war came and they told him to shoot and he couldn’t shoot and when the war was over they opened the gates of the prison or the lunatic asylum or whatever it was and he was free as a bird. How it happened to spill out this way I can’t remember any more. We were talking about The Merry Widow and about Max Linder, about the Prater in Vienna-and then suddenly we were in the midst of the Russo-Japanese war and there was that Chinaman whom Claude Farrere mentions in La Bataille. Something that was said about the Chinaman must have sunk to the very bottom of him for when he opened his mouth again and started that speech about his mother, her womb, the war coming on and free as a bird I knew that he had gone far back into the past and I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of bringing him to.
Free as a bird I heard him say, and with that the gates opening and other men running out, all scot-free and a little silly from the confinement and the strain of waiting for the war to end. When the gates opened I was in the street again and my friend Stanley was sitting beside me on the little step in front of the house where we ate sour bread in the evening. Down the street a ways was Father Carroll’s church. And now it’s evening again and the vesper bells are ringing, Carl and I facing each other in the gathering gloom, quiet and at peace with each other. We are sitting in Clichy and it is long after the war. But there’s another war coming and it’s there in the darkness and perhaps it’s the darkness made him think of his mother’s womb and the night coming on, the night when you stand alone out there and no matter how frightful it gets you must stand there alone and take it. “I didn’t want to go to the war,” he was saying. “Shit, I was only eighteen.” Just then a phono began to play and it was The Merry Widow waltz. Outside everything so still and quiet-just like before the war. Stanley is whispering to me on the doorstep -something about God, the Catholic God. There are some radishes in the bowl and Carl is munching them in the dark. “It’s so beautiful to be alive, no matter how poor you are,” he says. I can just barely see him sticking his hand into the bowl and grabbing another radish. So beautiful to be alive! And with that he slips a radish into his mouth as if to convince himself that he is still alive and free as a bird. And now the whole street, free as a bird, is twittering inside me and I see again the boys who are later to have their heads blown off or their guts bayoneted-boys like Alfie Betcha, Tom Fowler, Johnny Dunn, Sylvester Goeller, Harry Martin, Johnny Paul, Eddie Carney, Lester Reardon, Georgie Maine, Stanley Borowski, Louis Pirosso, Robbie Hyslop, Eddie Gorman, Bob Maloney. The boys from the north side and the boys from the south side-all rolled into a muck heap and their guts hanging on the barbed wire. If only one of them had been spared! But no, not one! Not even the great Lester Reardon. The whole past is wiped out.
It’s so beautiful to be alive and free as a bird. The gates are open and I can wander where I please. But where is Eddie Carney? Where is Stanley?
This is the Spring that Jesus sang, the sponge to his lips, the frogs dancing. In every womb the pounding of iron hoofs, in every grave the roar of hollow shells. A vault of obscene anguish saturated with angelworms hanging from the fallen womb of a sky. In this last body of the whale the whole world has become a running sore. When next the trumpet blows it will be like pushing a button: as the first man falls he will push over the next, and the next the next, and so on down the line, round the world, from New York to Nagasaki, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. And when man falls he will push over the elephant and the elephant will push over the cow and the cow will push over the horse and the horse the lamb, and all will go down, one be fore the other, one after the other, like a row of tin soldiers blown down by the wind. The world will go out like a Roman candle. Not even a blade of grass will grow again. A lethal dose from which no awakening. Peace and night, with no moan or whisper stirring. A soft, brooding darkness, an inaudible flapping of wings.
Burlesk
Now works the calmness of Scheveningen like an anesthetic.
Standing at the bar looking at the English cunt with all her front teeth missing it suddenly comes back to me: Don’t Spit On the Floor! It comes back to me like a dream: Don’t Spit On the Floor! It was at Freddie’s Bar on the Rue Pigalle and a man with lacy fingers, a man in a white silk shirt with loose flowing sleeves, had just rippled off “Good Bye Mexico! ” She said she wasn’t doin’ much now, just battin’ around. She was from the Big Broadcast and she had caught the hoof and mouth disease. She kept running back and forth to the toilet through the beaded curtains. The harp was swell, like angels pissing in your beer. She was a little drunk and trying to be a lady at the same time. I had a letter in my pocket from a crazy Dutchman; he had just returned from Sofia. “Saturday night,” it said, “I had only one wish and that was that you could have sitten next to me.” (Where he didn’t say.) “The only thing I can write you now is this-after having left the hustling noisy New York works the calmness of a town like Scheveningen as a anaesteatic.” He had been on a bust in Sofia and he had taken to himself the prima donna of the Royal Opera there. This, as he says, had given him just the right kind of rakish reputation to find grace with the public opinion of Sofia. He says he is going to retreat and start again a sober life-in Scheveningen.
I hadn’t looked at the letter all evening but when the English cunt opened her mouth and I saw all her front teeth missing it came back to me-Don’t Spit On the Floor! We were walking through the ghetto, the crazy Dutchman and I, and he was dressed in his messenger uniform. He had delivered all his messages and he was off duty for the rest of the evening. We were walking toward the Cafe Royal in order to sit down and have a beer or two in peace. I was giving him permission to sit down and have a beer with me because I was his boss and besides he was off duty and he could do as he pleased in his spare time.
We were walking along Second Avenue, heading north, when suddenly I noticed a shop window with an illuminated cross and on it it said: Whosoever Believeth In Me Shall Not Die…. We went inside and a man was standing on a platform saying: “Miss Powell, you make ready a song! Come now, brothers, who’ll testify? Yes, Hymn No. 73. After the meeting we will all go down to call on our bereaved sister, Mrs. Blanchard. Let us stand while we sing Hymn No. 73: Lord plant my feet on the higher ground. As I was saying a moment ago, when I saw the steeplejack painting our new steeple bright and pure for us the words of this dear old hymn rushed to my lips: Lord plant my feet on the higher ground.”
The place was very small and there were signs everywhere-“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,” et cetera. The most prominent sign was the one over the altar: Don’t Spit On the Floor. They were all singing Hymn No. 73 in honor of the new steeple. We were standing on the higher ground and I had a good view of the signs on the wall, especially the one over the pulpit-Don’t Spit On the Floor. Sister Powell was pumping away at the organ: she looked clean and spiritual. The man on the platform was singing louder than the others and though he knew the words by heart he held the hymn book in front of him and sang from the notes. He looked like a blacksmith who was substituting for the regular preacher. He was very loud and very earnest. He was doing his best, between songs, to get people to testify. Every now and then a man with a squeaky voice piped up: “I praise God for his savin’ and keepin’
power!”
Amen! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
“Come now,” roars the blacksmith, “who’ll testify? You, brother Eaton, won’t you testify?”
Brother Eaton rises to his feet and says solemnly: “He purchased me with a price.”
Amen! Amen! Hallelujah!
Sister Powell is wiping her hands with a handkerchief. She does it spiritually. After she has wiped her hands she looks blankly at the wall in front of her. She looks as though the Lord had just anointed her. Very spiritual.