Inventing Memory (19 page)

"Isn't it amazing how the
goyim
make everything taste like cardboard?" Robin asked.

"You could never taste like cardboard," I said, "even if you were a
goy
."

"Impossible, isn't it, to imagine me as a
goy
?"

He fed me vanilla ice cream and gooey hot fudge on his sticky spoon.

"When are you going to introduce me to your dad?" he suddenly asked.

"
Which
dad?" I asked absentmindedly. I had forgotten that I'd written to Marco, not Robin, about my two papas. Sometimes I muddle up what I tell Dr. Zuboff with what I tell Marco with what I tell Robin! Watch out! This could be dangerous!

NOTEBOOK

19 May 1952

Hannah was home with Sally yesterday afternoon when workmen came to repair the roof of Papa's Japanese teahouse. It had been damaged by the spring storms.

The long rectangular backyards of New York brownstones (ours is a limestone—but no matter) can be terribly claustrophobic, and Papa had the brainstorm of doing it Japanese style to match the interior of the house. He also had the brilliant idea of putting a Noguchi off center at the lower end of the rectangle, letting waves of raked sand seem to flow from it as if it were a rock in the ocean. The teahouse is authentic, shipped from Kyoto at great expense.

Well, the roofers worked away on the roof, and assuming that the Noguchi was just a bunch of stones, they disassembled them and threw them in the trash. I came home from lunch with Marco, saw what had happened, and screamed:

"
Hannah—what happened to the Noguchi?"

"The
what
, Mrs. Wallinsky?"

"The sculpture in Papa's garden!"

"That was a
what?"

"A Noguchi, Hannah. A very important artist. A very important
Japanese
artist."

"I thought it was just
rocks
too, so help me God."

I ran to the garbage pail to salvage Noguchi's beautiful stones from the debris of fallen tree limbs, bottles, and the other flotsam that falls into New York back gardens.

Thank God the evidence was still there. I had to ask Marco to come and help me haul Noguchi's sensual boulders out of the trash! Looking at photos of the sculpture, we rearranged the stones as best we could. Papa will be furious if he misses anything. And Robin would laugh so hard if he knew. He is so down on nonobjective art!

Reading over this notebook (into which I have pasted carbons of my letters to Marco and Robin), I see I have made Marco seem bland, ethereal, bodiless. I don't mean to
make
him seem that way. Like most spiritual people, his qualities are hard to put on paper.

His beauty melts me, of course. He has those little Greek muscles like Discobolus—you know, the rippled belly and pelvic indentations you see in beautiful marble Grecian boys. His cock is big, but he doesn't quite know how to use it. He either comes too fast or is too distracted with spiritual pursuits to want to focus on sex at all. He always rhapsodizes about retracting his sperm into his brain to conserve spiritual force. I am trying to seduce him with fantasy, but he says he cannot connect with his fantasies. He blocks them out, I think, through fear.

Sometimes I come to his studio and he is playing his strange twelvetone music and I wonder what I am meant to understand. Am I a moron about music? I don't really
like
the discordant kind. Then he relents and plays Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven or Mozart, and I love him again.

He, too, has ties to the Berkshires and wants to invite me up when he plays at the musical festival there—Tanglewood, it's called. But when I think of having him so near Robin, I panic. Surely I will want to run to Windy Perch as often as possible to renew that life-giving contact with Robin—and surely Marco will know. But maybe not. Marco is a creature who knows nothing about sexual obsession. He is too pure. Hannah has this expression: "You can't warm up cold potatoes!" which she uses on every possible occasion. It makes me think of Marco, and
that
makes me feel just awful.

I just got a letter from—of all people—Henry Valentine Miller! He's wound up in California, in a place called Big Sur, after many travels—Greece, Los Angeles, his much-dreamed-of "Air Conditioned Nightmare Trip" around the U.S. with his painter friend Abe Rattner. Everything has happened to him—as usual!
Tropic of Cancer
made him famous as an underground hero.
Black Spring
and
Capricorn
made him even more famous—though they had to be smuggled past the customs agents. He found Enlightenment, with a capital E, in Greece, natch. (He enclosed a signed book, published by a tiny press in San Francisco, which I find glorious—
The Colossus of Maroussi
, it's called.) He has lived in Hollywood, failed utterly as a screenwriter (he cannot write for money, it seems), supported himself by doing these surreal watercolors—which sell when nothing else does! He has tried his hand at paid pornography—thanks to his old houri Anaïs Nin—and found that even for a dollar a page, he just can't write it! The porno collector keeps saying, "Too much poetry!" and sending it back. The real porno aficionado doesn't want his porn spiced with poetry. He wants it straight! Henry has married and divorced a very scholarly and pretty Polish woman called Lepska (this is a change for Val, who usually likes nymphomaniacs or madwomen—or still better, literary nymphomaniacs or theatrical madwomen!), had two children, whom he adores, and is now living in a place called Partington Ridge with a primal woman named Eve, who is, of course, half his age. Conveniently enough, she is an earth mother with the children.

Nevertheless he wants me to visit, encloses stacks of signed books, watercolors, pamphlets—abundance as usual: Val's cornucopia runneth over. I will send him my last novel and (maybe) the erotic fantasy I wrote for Robin, saying it's for
him
. What mischief I could get myself into. I can't wait!

Oh, yes—Val says he is living in a place "remote as the Andes, wrapped in mist," but "the only place in America I can tolerate." He writes of taking a leak into the Pacific from the height of his cliffs, of joining his "strong stream" with the vast Pacific below—oh, Henry is the poet laureate of pissing! But he misses Paris—so do I!—and he misses the light of Greece (which he has described like no one else). Henry is in love with light, in love with Big Sur, but already, he says, his fans have found him out and come to climb his cliffs, and the press writes of his "Big Sur Sex Cult." In fact, what he seems to be looking for is someone to help him raise the
children
! Life is hard at Big Sur, and the women tend to leave. Henry says that he adores the children but they leave no time for writing. As if he were the first man in history to find that out!

He seems to be getting restless even with his "angelic Eve" and his world of empyrean light!

NOTEBOOK

27 May 1952

I sent Val my novel and the fantasy of cock-heeled shoes—as I think of it—and he had plenty to say about both.

[Letter dated 24 May 1952, from Henry Valentine Miller in Big Sur, California, to Salome Levitsky Wallinsky in New York, pasted in here. Ed.]

Salome of the seven veils,

I worry about your adopting the viewpoint of a survivor of Nazi
horrors in
Territory of Memory
and I worry about the bound masochist
of your New York fantasy.

New York may be like that, but the rest of the world is not! To me
New York seems dark, swarming with men who are cockroaches and
cockroaches who impersonate men
. No wonder everyone needs an analyst in New York!
There is no light. In Greece you voyage into the
light. That is analysis enough. In Big Sur you become one with the cliffs
and the sky, the poppies, wild lilac, and lupine, rattlesnakes, gophers,
the mist unending, the primeval paradise of sea, of living rock, and of
the purity of your own nature.

If you come here, I know you will write a book that explodes out of
your heart of light. You have
not
done that yet—excuse me for saying
so. No one has the sheer force of language you have. Even
I
am dazzled
by your immense talent. But you must mine your talent. You must
make peace
with yourself. No one can write otherwise.

As the soothsayer told me in Athens, you are wandering in circles,
looking for the clear open path. You are born to bring that joy and enlightenment to the world, but you must first accept yourself and stop
hiding behind masks invented by others. You have signs of divinity about
you, but your feet are chained to the earth.

In your
Bad Girl in Paris
you let the guts and the bones and the
boners show! You were on your way to freedom then. Now you are
off the track,
trying to please—or mislead—your critics.

I say
fuck 'em!
How can you let critics invade your imagination? I
am resigned to the fact that if I am ever really known, it will only be long
after my death. When people ask me why I don't go to work as a screenwriter for a couple of years and put away some money to
really
write
(instead of eking out just about enough to feed a goat from my watercolors), I reply: "Why don't you send your daughter out on the streets to
pick up a little money and later you can marry her off? Who will know
the difference?"

Just because the world worships whores is no reason we have to
become
whores. We are not required to forget our divinity just because
others have forgotten theirs. People often tell me they envy my free way
of life.

"Don't envy it," I say. "Emulate it!"

"But I can't," they say. "My job, my parents, my children, my wife,
blah, blah, blah."

Mankind is afraid of nothing more than freedom. But I expect more
from womankind—especially you!

If you come to Big Sur, bring your little girl. She and Tony and
Valentine will get along just fine! I expect another letter when next I
trudge down my cliff for the mail. Don't make me wait!

Here the earth will open for you like the Book of Revelation! It has
for me.

Your boon companion and sometime satyr,

Henry

NOTEBOOK—UNDATED

I know exactly what Henry means. If only I had the freedom to go to Greece or Big Sur! But Henry never takes into account that a man's life and a woman's life are different! Motherhood changes everything! Trapped in New York, with Sally at Ethical Culture, my parents returning from time to time to see their little immortality, my analysis with Dr. Zuboff, my crazy husband in the Stockbridge funny farm, my two lovers dividing me, how
could
I go to Big Sur or Greece and open up my heart to light—however much I
knew
I must?

Why had nobody told me that children become a creative mission in themselves for women, a work of art, a cosmic enterprise. I dreamed of taking Sally to Big Sur when school was out, but in truth how
could
I when Aaron demanded her near him in Stockbridge and all my loves were there, not to mention Sim's bones?

Val (he more often referred to himself as Henry now that he had his own little Valentine, his chip of self set out in the world, his female incarnation) was a passionate father in his fifties and sixties. When he had his first child, Barbara, he had hardly noticed her existence. Now, with Tony and Val, he was besotted with fatherhood. But for all the passionate fathering, he had quickly given up on daily child care. It was impossible, he said, to wipe asses, make meals, bathe children, listen to them, talk to them—and also write! If he was Adam at Big Sur, he quickly found an Eve to be his helpmate.

But there
was
no Eve for me. It all fell on my shoulders. And Marco and Robin—not to mention Papa Levitsky when he came home—wanted to be babied too.
Everyone
wanted to be the baby—so I had no choice but to grow up.

But Val was right. My writing persona was somehow buried by my
life
. Somewhere between my
Bad Girl in Paris
and Halina in
Territory of
Memory
, my real writing voice lay waiting to be born. It surfaced in my poems, my fantasies, then went underground again. I needed to hear it, practice it, learn to modulate it. But how could I own it? How could I take the immediacy of my letters and journals and poems and turn them into
books
? They were too honest, too sexual, too unfetteredly
female.
Books were
male—
James Gould Cozzens, Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw.
This
was my dilemma. And my worry was whether anybody would
want
a book that showed the raw feeling of the female heart? All the big bestsellers were about men. Even women writers impersonated men!

Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her time, Sappho's poems were lost, etc. Nor do I find
myself
in the women writers of my own time and place: neither in Mary McCarthy's brittle, cold satire, nor in the draperies, houses, and asterisked love scenes of our popular novelists—Margaret Mitchell being the best but dead.

The book I want to write would be open and immediate as this journal, would show the difference between man's abstraction, his dreadful ability to generalize pain and suffering, and woman's oneness with the womb of creation, her feeling every grief as if she were God.